The Circle (Hammer)

by Elfgren, Sara B. ,Strandberg, Mats

  They stop at the front door and Minoo pulls on a thin pair of latex gloves she stole from her mother’s office. ‘Do you think she’s got an alarm?’ she whispers, as she pulls out her torch.

  ‘I reckon we’re about to find out.’ Linnéa smirks and takes out the key.

  Minoo has to admire Anna-Karin’s courage. She stole the principal’s key, ran to the locksmith a few blocks from the school, made a copy and managed to return the original without anyone noticing.

  Linnéa turns the key and the lock opens easily. She presses down the handle and makes an ironically inviting gesture.

  ‘Welcome to the House of Horrors,’ she says. ‘I’ll stay here and keep watch,’ she adds in a more serious tone, when she meets Minoo’s gaze.

  Vanessa fades into view on the other side of Minoo and gives her an encouraging nod. Then she vanishes again as she slips inside the darkened house.

  Minoo thinks of Rebecka and follows her.

  Minoo switches on her torch and aims it at the floor to minimise the chance of anyone seeing the light through the window. A row of coats hangs in a large alcove in the hall. They sneak across the creaking floorboards – Minoo hopes they’re not leaving footprints.

  ‘Does she actually live here?’ Vanessa murmurs, as they enter the living room.

  Minoo knows exactly what she means. The place looks too perfect. The furniture is heavy and dark, and looks as if it belongs in a castle. Old portraits and landscape paintings in sombre colours hang on the walls. The open fireplace seems never to have been used, despite the basket of neatly stacked uniform-sized logs. There are no books lying around. No magazines. It smells spotlessly clean. Too clean. As if the air has never been sullied by human presence.

  They walk along a corridor and look into the kitchen, a bathroom and a guestroom. Everything is furnished in the same manner. Opposite the stairway leading to the second floor there is a little room used as an office. A shelf is filled with ordinary books – literature, biographies and poetry. No old parchments or Latin manuscripts.

  ‘Let’s go upstairs,’ Minoo whispers.

  No one answers.

  ‘Vanessa?’ she whispers, louder, panicked at the idea of being alone in this big, dark house.

  ‘Sorry. I forgot you can’t see me. I nodded,’ Vanessa says, beside her.

  They sneak up the stairs, which creak beneath their feet. Minoo realises that if the principal were to come home now they would be trapped upstairs. Unlike Vanessa, she would never get outside unseen.

  The landing is bathed in moonlight pouring through a skylight so Minoo switches off her torch. Shadows lurk in every corner.

  ‘Shall we start with the rooms on the right?’ she whispers.

  Silence.

  ‘Vanessa?’

  ‘Sorry. Yes.’

  A long carpet deadens their footsteps. Minoo opens the door at the far end of the corridor, where the shadows are at their thickest. She steps into the room and switches on her torch again. At the far end, there is a neatly made bed and a simple floor lamp. Fitted cupboards line one wall. But there’s no indication that anyone sleeps here.

  ‘She must be a psychopath,’ Vanessa whispers.

  One of the cupboard doors opens. Something black and shapeless flies out, like a desperate bird released from its cage. Minoo lets out a muffled cry. When the black shape stops moving she sees an elegant evening dress floating in the air.

  ‘A rich psychopath,’ Vanessa whispers, and hangs the dress back in the cupboard. ‘This is Prada.’

  Minoo opens the door to the adjoining bathroom. Thick towels hang over a bar of brushed steel. The shelves and cabinets are filled with an immaculate array of exclusive cosmetics and skincare products, all with the labels facing forwards.

  ‘Wow! What a lot of makeup. D’you think she’d notice if something went missing?’ Vanessa asks.

  There’s an unmistakable eagerness in her voice that causes Minoo to shake her head in terror.

  ‘Just kidding,’ Vanessa says.

  Yet Minoo doesn’t dare move away from the front of the cabinet until Vanessa has left the bathroom.

  The next door leads into an empty room.

  As does the next.

  The third is locked.

  Minoo pulls at the handle. If there’s anything of interest in this house, you can bet it’ll be in the locked room. ‘What do we do now?’ Minoo asks.

  She hears a strange noise, a faint metallic scraping coming from the door. Like little claws scratching. Minoo takes a step back. If the principal is some kind of evil queen, maybe she has nasty little minions hidden about her palace, silent sentinels ready to defend her secrets.

  The handle presses down and the door opens a crack.

  Something materialises in the corner of her eye, and Minoo whirls around.

  Vanessa grins at her.

  ‘Did you hear that …’ Minoo begins, then notices the hairpin Vanessa is holding. And she understands that the door wasn’t opened by someone inside the room. Vanessa, wonderful Vanessa, had picked the lock. She could have hugged her, but Vanessa has vanished again.

  They enter the room. Minoo hardly dares to breathe. The moonlight filters in through the stained-glass windows, creating a dreamy effect. The coloured panes project irregular shapes across the floor. Unlike the rest of the house, there is a faint smell of life in here, of dusty paper and old leather. There is also a hint of burned wood and a pungent smell that Minoo can’t identify.

  The room is the biggest one upstairs. There is a fireplace in here, too, but it appears to have been used frequently, judging from the blackened brickwork. A bookcase runs the full length of the opposite wall, with three stuffed birds perched on top – two different owls and a pitch-black raven with a razor-sharp beak. The contents of the shelves are protected by glass doors secured with big padlocks.

  Most of the spines of the books are so worn that the titles are unreadable, but Minoo’s gaze lands on one – Unaussprechlichen Kulten – and she shudders, as if she had touched something ancient and thoroughly evil.

  ‘Where are you?’ she whispers.

  ‘By the desk. Look,’ Vanessa whispers, and a hand appears out of thin air to point at something.

  Underneath a stack of books, in various stages of disintegration, lies an old map of Engelsfors. Next to it there is a strange iron object with a big screw in the middle. And two photographs, blown up from last year’s school photo. One of Elias. And one of Rebecka.

  ‘I’m going to take a picture of this so we can show the others,’ Vanessa whispers. She sounds tense.

  Minoo goes to the shelf next to the fireplace. It’s stacked with brown glass jars, each labelled with a roman numeral. She picks one up at random, with the number XI, and unscrews the lid.

  At first she can’t tell what the small desiccated spheres are.

  Eyes.

  She screws the lid back on tightly and puts the jar back where she’d taken it from.

  Small flashes light up the room when Vanessa photographs the desk with her phone camera.

  Suddenly Minoo glimpses movement near the ceiling. Her gaze falls on the birds. She stands motionless, waiting for a beak to open, a wing to flap. But they don’t budge. Of course not.

  She forces herself to focus on the task at hand. Find clues. Evidence. She mustn’t let fear get the better of her. She has to think of Rebecka and Elias. She’s here for their sake.

  She walks up to a little wooden table standing next to a well-worn leather armchair. A circular, dark red wooden box is lying on the table. Minoo shines her torch on it. The lid is divided into two halves by a vertical line. Depicted on one half is an ingeniously carved city with strange architecture that looks like nothing Minoo has ever seen before, and on the other, swirling galaxies and unidentifiable slithering shapes. In the middle a man holds his hands straight out at his sides as if he were forming a bridge between the two halves. The line cuts his body in two. His eyes are closed.

  ‘Minoo …’
r />   Vanessa’s voice comes from just behind her. Minoo turns. Vanessa is visible again.

  ‘Look down,’ she says.

  How had she missed those lines when she entered the room? Or have they appeared while she and Vanessa have been in there?

  A big white circle is drawn on the floor. In the middle of it there is a smaller circle, approximately half a metre in diameter. Inside the smaller circle, there is a strange symbol. Minoo and Vanessa are standing inside the bigger circle.

  Minoo bends down and runs her finger across the outer line. It feels greasy and warm. She snatches her hand away.

  ‘We have to get out of here,’ Vanessa mutters.

  The air above the smaller circle starts to shimmer, as it does over tarmac on a hot summer day. Minoo tries to run, but she can’t move. She hears a dull pulsating sound in the ceiling above them.

  A wave of hot air shoots through the room. The heat makes it difficult to breathe. The muffled pounding grows louder, causing a vibration in their chests like a heavy bass line.

  ‘I can’t move,’ Vanessa squeals.

  Minoo struggles, but it’s as if her feet are glued to the floor. The heat causes sweat to trickle from her hairline over her forehead. Vanessa stretches out her hand. ‘I can’t fucking move!’ she shouts, over the din.

  The moment they touch the pressure pinning their feet to the floor eases – enough for them to move.

  ‘Run!’ Vanessa yells.

  As they race out of the room Minoo glances back and sees something unbelievable before she flees towards the stairs.

  The muffled pounding grows in intensity as they race along the corridor, down the stairs and through the lower rooms. The windowpanes are rattling and a painting crashes to the floor in the living room. Vanessa throws open the front door and they burst out into the night air. Minoo tears after her towards the open gate.

  Out of the corner of her eye she spots Linnéa, who doesn’t ask questions, just joins them.

  The three girls stumble into each other as they throw themselves into Nicolaus’s car.

  ‘Did you see it, too? In the light?’ Vanessa says to Minoo, when they’re sitting in the back seat.

  Minoo nods. She knows what Vanessa saw: a human form taking the shape of a pillar of light.

  23

  WHEN MINOO AND Vanessa tell the others what they saw at the principal’s house, Anna-Karin feels unexpectedly closed off. It’s as if she had to see it to believe in it. She should be the last person who needs convincing that the supernatural exists. But their account of what happened sounds like an old ghost story she’s heard a million times.

  She’s sitting on the stage, looking out across the dance floor. Her parents had met here many years ago. She doesn’t know much more than that. Her mother usually describes her father as a handsome man and a good dancer. But she ends the story with a bitter laugh, saying, ‘If I had known how bad he was at everything else, I would have run away as fast as my legs could carry me.’ It sounds as though her mother wishes she had run away, even though that would have meant Anna-Karin had never been born.

  A mild rain has started to fall and is thrumming gently against the dance pavilion’s roof. It’s leaking and little pools are forming on the wooden floor. The one-eyed black cat has puffed itself up at Nicolaus’s feet. He seems to have grown used to it and has even given it the imaginative name of Cat.

  ‘So now we know that the principal is the killer,’ Vanessa says.

  ‘Not quite,’ Minoo adds.

  ‘How much proof do you need?’ Linnéa asks.

  ‘Excuse me,’ says Ida, ‘but you three are, like, missing the point here.’

  ‘Which is what exactly?’ Linnéa snaps.

  ‘Well,’ says Ida, her voice dripping with sweetness and venom, ‘the point isn’t that we know it’s her. It’s that she knows we’ve been there.’

  ‘We don’t know if she saw us,’ says Vanessa. ‘Even if it was her.’

  Ida rolls her eyes.

  ‘We’re not completely helpless,’ says Minoo, sounding unconvinced.

  ‘Against her you might very well be, I’m afraid,’ says Nicolaus.

  He’d been flipping silently through the photos on Vanessa’s mobile. Now he was staring vacantly into space. ‘I suspect that the principal is in league with the demons.’

  Minoo takes out a little notepad and starts scribbling feverishly.

  ‘Demons? Where the hell did that come from? Do you, like, know something all of a sudden?’ Vanessa says.

  ‘God have mercy on your souls,’ Nicolaus mumbles, and staggers.

  Minoo lowers her notepad. ‘Are you all right?’

  The confusion is back in Nicolaus’s eyes. ‘What was it we were talking about?’

  ‘The principal,’ Anna-Karin answers. ‘And something about demons.’

  ‘Ah, yes! Demons. The principal.’ His gaze moves back to the photos. ‘I’ve seen this device before. God help us.’

  ‘Okay …’ says Vanessa.

  Anna-Karin gets up and walks closer to him when he holds up the mobile to display one of the photos: the one of the iron object with the big screw in the middle.

  ‘I thought I recognised it. It’s a tongue tearer,’ Nicolaus continues.

  ‘A what?’ Ida asks shrilly.

  ‘You force the victim’s tongue through this opening, screw it fast, then pull out the tongue like this …’ He demonstrates by sticking out his tongue as far as it will go. ‘Then you turn a crank so that the tongue is pulled out further and further. You continue until the root splits and the tongue comes off. The human tongue is surprisingly long.’

  Anna-Karin looks at the image, unconsciously pulling her tongue as far back in her mouth as she can, as if to protect it. Now she has no trouble in believing the ghost story.

  ‘She saw us,’ Minoo says faintly. ‘I’m pretty sure of it. Do you think she’ll do something at school?’

  ‘That was where Elias and Rebecka died,’ says Linnéa.

  ‘I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see which of us it is on Monday,’ Vanessa says.

  Perhaps it was an attempt at a joke, but nobody laughs.

  24

  ON MONDAY MORNING, Vanessa briefly considers not going to school. The events of Saturday scared her, but the prospect of sitting alone at home and waiting for something terrible to happen seems far worse.

  She hasn’t heard Nicke mention any break-ins at Lilla Lugnet. If the police had been called out for something that exciting he would definitely have talked about it at the dinner table. Of course, that doesn’t mean they’re in the clear. Vanessa can’t imagine that a person who’s in league with demons would bother calling the police if someone broke into her secret torture chamber.

  Her mother is reading a thick book about how to cast your horoscope. It’s her day off and she’s humming as she sits there, taking notes while flipping through the book. Her face is calm, which makes her look younger. She was only seventeen when she had Vanessa, and thirty-three is still pretty young. Sometimes Vanessa thinks her mother has thrown away her life. She wears herself out, and for what? Mother of two and a care assistant at an old people’s home. Is that all she’s going to do with her life? Doesn’t she have any ambition? Vanessa isn’t going to make the same mistake. She’s going to be young for as long as possible. She wants to savour life. Real life. The one that exists away from Engelsfors. If she survives long enough.

  ‘I’m going now,’ she says.

  Her mother smiles. For someone who’s thrown away her life, she looks very content. ‘Hey, I almost forgot,’ she said. ‘How did it go at Mona’s?’

  Why does her mother have such a knack for bringing up the very thing Vanessa doesn’t want to talk about? ‘Good,’ she mumbles.

  ‘I was really impressed,’ her mother says. ‘What did she say to you?’

  ‘It’s private.’

  ‘That’s okay, Nessa. I understand if you don’t want to tell me everything. Maybe I don’t want to kn
ow.’

  She says it with a knowing smile, as if she knows what Vanessa’s going through, that she understands what it’s like to be a teenager. But her mother has no idea what Vanessa is going through. And Vanessa can never tell her.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ she says quietly, and gives her mother a quick hug.

  The first thing Vanessa sees when she arrives at school is Jari. He’s standing with Anna-Karin, who is tossing her hair and laughing exaggeratedly.

  ‘You’re mad.’ Anna-Karin giggles at something Jari has said, and Vanessa quickens her pace so she doesn’t have to hear any more.

  She sits through her morning classes on tenterhooks, flinching at every movement in the classroom. Evelina and Michelle look at her as if she should be strapped into a straitjacket and pumped full of tranquillisers. They’re probably right.

  When she comes down to the cafeteria she sees the principal at the salad bar. Adriana Lopez is piling a mountain of grated carrot on to her plate. All of a sudden everything seems silly and unreal.

  Maybe the principal is a demon. But an entire morning marks the upper limit of how long Vanessa can feel afraid – especially of a demon who loves carrots.

  Monday drags on into Tuesday, then Wednesday, Thursday and finally Friday. Nothing happens. They meet at the fairground once to decide on a strategy. Linnéa wants them to use Anna-Karin’s powers to get the principal to expose herself. Minoo objects: Rebecka had some pretty potent powers, which didn’t save her.

  Vanessa wants to scream with frustration. There’s nobody they can ask for help or advice. Now they’re just waiting their turn to die, like animals to the slaughter, without even trying to fight back. One afternoon when she watched the principal getting into her car, she felt like running up, yanking open the door and shouting, ‘Go on, do it! What are you waiting for?’

  She had intended to spend the weekend with Wille, to try to forget everything, but he’d said he had to help Jonte with ‘this thing’. Michelle and Evelina are in Köping for a concert, and Vanessa can’t afford to go too.