Trolls

by Stefan Spjut

  ‘You bastards,’ she said. ‘You bastards.’

  Lennart lay in bed with both shoes and clothes on, staring up at the hotel room ceiling. The curtains, which ran all the way from the ceiling to the floor, were closed. There was a clock on the TV, but he couldn’t see what the red digits said. He could hear where the little boy was at all times because he breathed loudly through his mouth as he crawled across the carpet like a snuffling little pig. From time to time, he stood up, but never for long. It might have been a game Lennart didn’t understand.

  He heaved himself off the bed, stepped over the bananas he’d placed on the floor and went into the bathroom. The ceiling light turned on automatically. It was a big, fully tiled bathroom with underfloor heating. The counter with the sink in it was so long a grown man could stretch out on it. There were individually wrapped soaps and tiny bottles of shampoo and other muck. Even toothbrushes. But no razors.

  He plugged the bathtub drain and turned the tap on and then sat down on the toilet seat, contemplating the water as it rose. The little boy probably wondered what the rushing sound was, because he appeared outside the door and stood there on all fours, staring. Lennart signalled with a nod that he was welcome to come in, but he didn’t seem to understand. He just stared at the tap and the water rushing out of it.

  When the water was four inches from the edge, Lennart turned it off. For a long while he sat motionless, looking at the tub.

  The little boy stood up, leaning on the bed with his chubby arms. His knees buckled. He opened his mouth wide and the unhealed wound on his cheek gaped like an extra mouth, deformed and ugly. Lennart picked him up and carried him into the harsh light of the bathroom. The sight of the bath seemed to make the little boy happy, because he gurgled out sounds that were probably meant to approximate words.

  He lowered the boy into the water and watched his eyes grow wide under the surface. His arms and legs flailed. Lennart’s big, aged hand spread out across the child’s ribcage like a murderous starfish.

  ‘It’s better this way,’ he mumbled, ‘drowning’s not so bad.’

  A stream of pearls rushed out of his open mouth. The little boy’s scrotum was big and blueish and his penis, which was waggling up and down, looked like some kind of caterpillar with an exotic way of moving.

  ‘Soon you’ll sleep. It’s almost over.’

  At that point, he realised the sock with its duct-tape cuff had come off. It bobbed around the choppy water like a little boat. Lennart stared at the hand the sock had concealed. One second passed. Two seconds. Then he grabbed hold of the boy’s arm and pulled him up.

  The child lay on the tiles, coughing and gagging with his eyes squeezed shut. His face was darker than the rest of his plump body, which glistened with water. Lennart backed up against the door without taking his eyes off the hand that had been hidden.

  It looked like the other hand. Pink and soft and perfectly formed like a doll’s. The nails were longer, but there was nothing wrong with them, they just hadn’t been trimmed.

  Here it came. The little boy had rolled over on his side and he was crying. Not with terrible force like a baby, but quietly and inwardly.

  Lennart had continued to move backward out of the room. He held his soaked arm helplessly pressed against his stomach as though it had been maimed. He looked around. His glasses were on the table. He put them on, grabbed the carrier bag with his wallet and car keys and strode toward the door. Then he turned around and switched the TV on. He turned the sound up as far as it would go; it was a newscast. He lumbered out into the hallway and left the door wide open behind him; when he reached the lift, he could still hear the sound of the TV. A young man and a young woman were found dead in a hotel room in Luleå on Thursday. The police suspect they had been using one or several new internet drugs, often a lethal combination.

  He stepped into the lift and rode it down to the lobby. Passed the reception desk with his eyes rigidly fixed on the glass doors of the exit. He climbed into the sauna-like heat of the car and looked through the windscreen, which was stippled with crushed insects. Then he looked at the empty car seat. There were French fries on it, dried-up yellow sticks on the greasy cover. He picked one of the sticks up, put it in his mouth and chewed. Then he picked up another. Then he started the car and drove away.

  Diana saw her through the window. She came striding up the street at a brisk pace. The neighbour’s golden retriever, which lay slumped on their lawn, raised its head. Then it got up. But it didn’t bark. Instead it bolted, around the corner. In that moment, when she saw Susso approaching their house with the squirrel like some kind of Japanese pocket monster on her shoulder, she was overcome with conflicting emotions. No one else in the entire world could help and that made her want to hug Susso, hard, as though she’d been lost in the wilderness and against all odds had run into her best friend in a four-by-four with GPS. But she also wanted to yell at her. Hit her, actually. Not least for what she had told her about Håkan. The way she had told her. Like she was talking about some randomer. Like she didn’t get or care that it was Diana’s husband. And she was afraid in a way she hadn’t been before. Not of Susso, exactly, but of the warped reality and the dark context she was a part of. When she hurried to the door, she didn’t know if it was to open it or lock it.

  She opened it, of course.

  Susso stood there looking at her with her one dark eye, and the animal on her shoulder looked at her too. Its long, needle-like whiskers were pointing every which way like beams from a light source.

  ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with her.’

  Susso stepped into the hallway. With a supporting hand on the trellis, she took off her shoes.

  ‘I can tell you there’s no one here, at least,’ she said.

  She went upstairs and Diana followed.

  The door was open. After Diana established that Kiruna was not in her room, she yanked open the bathroom door. She wasn’t in there either. Nor in the bedroom, nor in the study.

  ‘Dana.’

  Susso was squatting on the floor in the little girl’s room. Diana got down on all fours and looked under the bed. And there she was, on her back. Diana buried her face in her hands. The relief at the little girl not being missing lasted for no more than a second.

  ‘Why are you under your bed?’ Susso asked.

  ‘Because I want to,’ the little girl replied.

  ‘And why do you want to?’

  ‘Because Mummy’s mean.’

  ‘In what way is she mean?’

  ‘I don’t want to be here.’

  ‘Then come out.’

  ‘I mean at home.’

  ‘Then where do you want to be?’

  ‘In the cabin. Where we were.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Because it’s fun there.’

  ‘What’s so fun there?’

  The girl said nothing.

  ‘What’s so fun there?’

  ‘We were going to play.’

  ‘You were going to play?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who were you going to play with?’

  Instead of replying, she started fiddling with the underside of the bed. Ran her fingers along the slats and pressed her hand in between them, pushing the mattress up.

  ‘Who were you going to play with?’

  ‘I don’t know their names.’

  ‘But they’re little, aren’t they?’

  Susso leaned closer and looked at the little girl, who had turned her face to her and nodded.

  ‘Then I know exactly who you mean. And I can tell you right now that they’re not good friends to have.’

  ‘Yes, they are. They’re fun.’

  ‘Do you want to know what they did to another girl who thought they were fun? They ate her.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘They’re too small to do that.’

  ‘Well, they ate part of her. They started with the eyes, because they’re the tastiest. T
hen the lips, because they’re soft and very delicious too. Then they munched through her cheeks, but from the inside out, and then it looked like the little girl had three mouths that were always screaming.’

  ‘Is that true?’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘Mummy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is that true?’

  ‘It’s true.’

  I counted the days, every single one, and when I had reached a number I felt was improbably high, I started hoping that what had happened in Rumajärvi would never be discovered. I prayed to the ravens and the carrion beetle. The devouring bacteria of decay and the white shroud of winter. They were, in fact, not hopes, but fantasies, which I allowed myself to be seduced by, and on occasion I took them so far I briefly doubted there even was a village by the name of Rumajärvi. The path to that kind of doubt was well trodden, of course. Having spent countless sleepless nights pondering the line between reality and what lay beyond it and how reliable my senses and the memories built on what they perceived could possibly be, I had dismantled the partitions in my brain to the point where doubt had free rein. When this happens, madness is not far behind, and there’s only one thing to do: you have to put yourself in a state of denial.

  During the day, I manned the shop, as ever, serving customers, as ever, and at night I watched TV, as ever.

  Is it called the calm before the storm or the calm after the storm? I always forget. Maybe it’s calm both before and after. It has to be, really, relatively speaking. Either way, it was calm. Roland and I talked exclusively about practical matters and barely about that either, and I felt like someone else.

  The days were hot. Unnecessarily, miserably hot. The sun beat down on the town square like on a Mediterranean piazza and people came into the shop to cool down. Stood there half naked, reviving. A lot of tourists were surprised at the heat that refused to subside. How did the sun do it? Both day and night. Not just tourists, for that matter. Sixten Kalla was sitting on the bench out in the foyer, saying they were having record lows in Abisko.

  ‘Record lows?’ I said.

  ‘No, I meant the opposite, obviously.’

  ‘Yes, I figured.’

  ‘It’s hot like a desert up there.’

  ‘Have you been up?’

  ‘No, but I’ve been to the Kalahari,’ he said and grinned at me from under his baseball cap, and I didn’t get the joke until afterwards, I was so dazed and confused.

  ‘Just look at what happened up in Karesuando,’ he continued. ‘There was one of those bloodbaths up there, you must’ve heard?’

  The news hit me like a cudgel and I was completely stunned and could only manage to shake my head.

  ‘They slaughtered a whole village. It was on the news this morning.’

  *

  I closed the shop, even though it was just two. Then I sat behind the counter, reading on my phone, which was shaking in my hand. Seven dead. Shot. A mass murderer matching Mattias Flink’s record from 1994. It said nothing about Lennart Brösth. Granted, Harr had told me he hadn’t been there, but I’d had hopes.

  It was for the little girl, I told myself. Sooner or later, they would have taken the little girl. And they would never have left Susso alone. This was the only way.

  I went home and called Roland but then I changed my mind and texted him instead. Have you seen the news? I wrote. The reply was instantaneous. An angry smiley. Not the yellow little man with the sullen mouth, the red, angry one, like a furious tomato. What was I supposed to make of that? I wanted to talk about what had happened, but he went out to his cabin in Holmajärvi to make himself unreachable. It made me red and angry.

  I sat there alone in the kitchen, utterly convinced the police had already figured out that the person behind the Rumajärvi bloodbath was a sixty-nine-year-old woman in Kiruna. When the doorbell rang, I jumped, because I was so certain it was the police that when I opened the door, I was already holding my handbag ready to go with them.

  But it wasn’t the police, it was Susso.

  She was wearing shorts and a tank top so it was obvious the squirrel wasn’t with her. That was actually even more surprising than her visit.

  ‘Come in,’ I said and we went into the kitchen.

  She sat down at the table.

  ‘You’ve caught the sun,’ I said.

  She gave her upper arm an uninterested look and put her fingertips against her skin to see if they left marks. Then she looked at me.

  ‘Håkan’s back,’ she said.

  ‘Would you like coffee?’ I said.

  I had already got the tin out.

  ‘Where has he been?’

  ‘He doesn’t know.’

  I filled the pot with water and poured it into the tank. Then I put the pot on the warming plate and pushed the button.

  ‘He doesn’t know?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘And you’re sure of that?’

  ‘We’re sure of that.’

  ‘How does he seem, does he seem stable?’

  ‘What’s the opposite of stable? Labile? He’s crying and so on. And he doesn’t understand jokes. He doesn’t understand much of anything, it seems. It’s like he’s not there.’

  ‘So a bit like Cecilia?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Has he said anything? About what happened?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know what I mean. About what happened at your house. When you and Diana were missing.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘And the little girl?’ I said and set cups out on the table.

  ‘She seems better. But I have a hunch she’s play-acting.’

  ‘That’s nice to hear,’ I said and poured coffee into the cups. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have any cream. And no milk either.’

  ‘So I figured I might stay here for a while.’

  ‘Here?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Where, in the small room?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All right. Well, I guess I’ll have to run it by Roland.’

  ‘Where is he anyway?’

  ‘He’s in his cabin. He took my car and went to his cabin and he’s out there navel-gazing. Eh? What a gem I found.’

  ‘Seems to me he has his qualities.’

  ‘It’s so typically male to just take off.’

  ‘Well, then you’ll be happy to have me moving in instead.’

  ‘Of course, but don’t you think it’s going to be a bit cramped?’

  ‘Mum. I’m kidding.’

  ‘You are?’

  She nodded and I put a hand on my chest and laughed, and then she smiled.

  *

  We sat there chatting and it was more or less like it used to be, back when Susso lived in the flat below mine. I asked her how her eye felt and she said it felt like nothing.

  Eventually, I asked her if she’d seen the news, and she had but it was clear she didn’t want to talk about it, which we weren’t supposed to, according to our agreement. But I couldn’t help myself.

  ‘Have the police been in touch with you?’

  ‘With me? How would they get in touch with me? I haven’t been home.’

  ‘Diana then. Sooner or later, you will be brought in for questioning. You have to be prepared.’

  ‘No one’s going to bring me in,’ she said and lifted her eyebrow up with the tip of her middle finger to adjust her prosthesis. Then she looked out the window and smiled like she was planning a crime.

  ‘Where is he?’ I said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Him,’ I said and showed how tall he was with my hand.

  ‘You can’t talk about him either?’

  ‘I don’t know about can. There’s resistance. Did you have a name for him?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Sure you did. You told me his name was Skrotta.’

  ‘Come on. That’s a lie.’

  I studied her and suddenly slipped into a memory.

  ‘I
remember when you were little,’ I said. ‘You might have been eight, nine years old, and you told me you skipped the word beer when you sang Christmas songs in school, do you remember? There’s a line in “Here We Come A-wassailing” or whatever. But when it was time for that word, you were silent. Because you hated alcohol and drinking so much you couldn’t let the word pass your little lips. That’s kind of how it feels, I reckon. It’s like your mouth is blocked.’

  ‘How do you remember something like that?’ she said softly.

  ‘How do I remember? How could I forget? It’s just so you.’

  She was holding her cup but hadn’t so much as sipped her coffee yet; it was probably ice cold by now.

  ‘He’s with Diana’s parents.’

  ‘Is he going to stay there?’

  ‘No. I think we’ll be heading home in a few days.’

  We sat in silence for a while. Then I said:

  ‘How are Kent and Eva anyway?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘But surely Diana’s been over?’

  ‘She’s been busy with her own things. So I don’t think so.’

  ‘Maybe I should talk to them.’

  Susso got to her feet and stood there looking at me with her living eye and her dead eye and I didn’t know which one to focus on. It looked like she was about to say something mean but chose to bite her tongue.

  Then she left. The front door slammed shut and I sat at the table with my hands on the table top, gazing out the window. As usual, my eyes were drawn to the mine. Sometimes I think it looks like one of those Mesopotamian ziggurats and sometimes the kind of flat-topped mountains you see in westerns. Now I fancied I could see the mountain itself, with its levelled summit. Like some kind of melancholy mirage from days long gone. I could glimpse the city hall steeple with its blue bandage between the downy birch trees in Ferrum Park. They were finally renovating the clock, which had stood still for an eternity. The wind turbines on Viscaria were standing still too. A sparse sprinkling of small, deathly pale flowers that no one wanted to pick. In the distant wilderness. Outside my window.