It didn't take many minutes of keeping his eyes screwed tightly shut to realise that he was wide awake. There was absolutely no chance of falling asleep, however much he wanted to. He sat up and leaned back against the wall.
What shall I do? What can I do?
The paper on the chair glowed white, and his eyes were drawn towards it. The clarity of his vision shifted. He was seeing in a different way. For a fraction of a second he managed to think: I am seeing through my eyes, and then he was no longer a part of himself.
A creaking sound brought him back to his body. He didn't know how much time had passed, but he found himself sitting on the floor with the Bamse comic in front of him and the pen in his hand. The quilt was in a heap on the bed.
The comic was open at a short story, just two pages, which was called 'Brumma's Secret Friends'. Brumma hid in the cupboard under the sink and made friends with the brush and shovel. When Mummy shouted for Brumma, the brush was terrified; it said, 'We are secret, secret', and turned back into an ordinary brush.
There were drawings on the pages. Lines and shapes on every available surface. No letters. The only thing Anders could in any way interpret as meaningful was a zigzag line across several frames, which looked more like a temple than anything else.
Was there a reason why this particular story had been chosen, or was it just a coincidence, like the story of the haunted hotel? Had Maja just been reading and drawing, as she used to do sometimes?
The creaking sound came again, this time just outside the door. Anders gave a start and pulled the quilt towards him, threw it over his head and curled up, lay as still as still could be. The handle was pushed down tentatively and the door opened. Anders stuck his thumb in his mouth.
Anders?' Simon's voice was no more than a whisper. The door closed behind him. 'What are you doing?'
Simon was standing in front of him in his dressing gown as Anders crawled out from under the quilt. 'I was scared.'
'Can I come in?'
Anders waved in the direction of the bed, but stayed where he was on the floor with the quilt round his shoulders. Simon sat down on the bed and looked at the comic. 'Have you been drawing?'
'I don't know anything,' said Anders. 'I don't know anything about anything.'
Simon linked his hands together and leaned forward. He took a deep breath. 'It's like this,' he said. 'I've been thinking things over. There's a lot to say, but I'll start with a question. Would you like Spiritus?'
'The insect? In the matchbox?'
'Yes. I thought it might protect you. The thing is, Anna-Greta and I are going away tomorrow. I don't like the idea of you being... unprotected.'
'Didn't you say it involved some kind of pact?'
Simon took the matchbox out of his dressing-gown pocket. 'Yes. And I don't know what that really means. But I think something pretty awful happens when you die.'
'And you want to give it to me.'
Simon turned the box over in his hands. A faint sound of scraping and ticking could be heard from inside as the larva shifted its position.
'I have been afraid. You enter into some form of pact with what is deep and dark in the world. I have regretted doing so. But I couldn't help myself. I was stupid, to put it mildly.'
Simon fingered the unfamiliar wedding ring and went on, 'But I wouldn't suggest this if I didn't believe it could help you. Whatever is after you has something to do with water, and this...can tame water.'
Anders looked at the box in Simon's hand; his eyes moved up over the green towelling of the dressing gown and stopped at Simon's face, which suddenly looked immensely old and tired. The hand holding the box was almost touching the floor, as if the insect weighed a hundred times more than its appearance suggested.
'What shall I do?' asked Anders.
Simon drew the hand holding the box towards him and shook his head. 'Do you know what you're getting into?'
'No,' said Anders. 'But it doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. At all.'
Now Simon had got what he wanted, he seemed to be struck by remorse. Perhaps he didn't want to expose Anders to the risks involved after all. Perhaps he didn't want to be parted from his magical Spiritus. He ran his thumb distractedly over the boy on the box.
'You have to spit,' he said eventually. 'Into the box. You have to give it saliva. And you have to keep on doing that every single day for as long as you live. Or until you.. .pass it on.'
Anders gathered saliva in his mouth. After a while he nodded to Simon and took the box from him, pushed it open. Anders allowed the gob of saliva to emerge from his lips, to drip down...
'No, wait!' said Simon. 'Let's not—'
But it was too late. The tear-shaped, bubbling gob had already left Anders' mouth and fell straight on to the insect's leathery skin just as Simon's hand reached out.
Anders had thought nothing could taste more disgusting than the wormwood concentrate. He was wrong. Whatever penetrated his mouth now and spread throughout his body had a non-physical dimension that a taste could never match. As if he had bitten into a piece of rotten meat and at the same moment become the meat.
He opened and closed his mouth in a series of dry retches and his body shook in small convulsions, causing the box to fall from his grasp. Simon sat on the bed with his hands covering his face as Anders slumped sideways, clutching his stomach. He vomited and vomited without anything coming out of him.
The box was lying roughly twenty centimetres in front of him. A round black shape appeared over the edge, and the next moment the whole insect was out of the box. It had grown. Its skin was shiny and its body was moving smoothly across the floor, heading for Anders' lips. It wanted more of this manna, directly from the source.
Even though he felt so ill, Anders managed to sit up so that the insect couldn't find its way into his mouth. With trembling hands he placed the box over it and slid it shut without harming the insect.
There was a great deal of activity inside the box, and it moved across the floor in jerks and thrusts. Anders swallowed a bubble of vileness and asked, 'Is it angry?'
'No,' said Simon. 'Just the opposite, I should think.'
He looked into Anders' eyes. For a long time. Something happened between them, and Anders nodded.
Before Simon left the room he said, 'Take care of yourself.' He pointed at Anders, at the matchbox. 'That only happens the first time. The taste.'
Anders sat on the floor watching Spiritus bounce around in his little prison like some kind of morbid toy.
He still didn't know what he was going to do or how he was going to do it, but one thing he did know: during that long look, Simon had given his approval. Do what you have to do.
Anders conquered his revulsion and cupped his hand over the box. The insect calmed down as it felt the warmth of his body, his presence, and he became aware of everything that flowed.
His body was an immense system of larger and smaller channels, where water ran in the form of plasma. He had learned about this in school: the plasma carried corpuscles, thrombocytes, but he could neither see nor feel those, he could see only cloudy water being pumped around by the heart, out into his arteries, and he saw and knew that he was a tree, all the way out to the most fragile twigs. A tree made of water.
He was also able to feel very clearly all the water flowing or standing still in the house, although this feeling did not have the same intensity of revelation. The network of water pipes was visible through the walls, just like an X-ray, and the bottles of water he had brought with him...
Now... now...
He curled his hand around one of the bottles on the floor as he held his other hand over the matchbox. Yes, he could feel the water in the bottle. But nothing else. It was just the same as with his blood: he could feel only the water, but he felt that all the more strongly.
He looked at the hand cupped over the box and a couple of lines by the poet Tomas Tranströmer came into his mind. He didn't really read much poetry, but he had made a start on Tranströme
r's collected poems so many times that he knew the first one by heart.
In day's first hours consciousness can grasp the world
As the hand grips a sun-warmed stone.
That was exactly how it was, with the reservation that the world his consciousness grasped was the part that consisted of water. He could follow it through the cold-water pipes, feel the drips from the leaking kitchen tap where he lost contact with it for half a second until it joined the thin film of water finding its way into the waste pipe and continuing downwards, out and eventually into a larger body of water that lay outside his range.
He let go of the box and the perception faded as he moved his hand away, centimetre by centimetre. When the hand reached his face and moved across it, the feeling was gone. He was a person, not a tree.
It would take less than this to make you lose your mind.
Once when he was about twenty he had been at a party and had ended up next to a guy who had just swallowed a blue pill. They were sitting at a glass table, and the guy had stared at that table. After a couple of minutes he had started to cry. Anders had asked him why he was crying.
'Because it's so beautiful,' he had replied, his voice thick with emotion. 'The glass. I can see it, do you understand? What it's made of, what it really is. All the crystals, the strands, the tiny, tiny bubbles of air. Glass, you know? Do you understand how beautiful it is?'
Anders had looked at the table and had been unable to discover anything special about it, apart from the fact that it was an unusually ugly and clumsy glass table, but he had decided not to mention this. The guy might well have taken something else, because he was found later in a snowdrift into which he had dug his way. The reason he gave was that his blood had begun to boil.
You could lose your mind.
Perhaps a human being has the ability to see through glass, as it were, to experience water if we have a tool to help us use our brains and sensory perceptions to the full. But we don't do it, because of the toll it takes. We refrain, so that we may live.
Anders took a couple of swigs of water and got back into bed. The powerful experience of becoming aware of the water's secret life had made him feel exhausted but not sleepy, and for several hours he lay curled up, staring at the wall opposite where the pattern on the wallpaper formed itself into the molecular structures of unknown elements.
Only when the first light of dawn began to seep in through the window, painting the wallpaper grey, did he begin to drop off. As if from far away he heard the alarm clock ring in Simon and Anna-
Greta's room, and he could see them in his mind's eye, getting up and dressing for their short honeymoon. Enjoy yourselves, my darlings. There was a faint smile on his lips as he fell asleep.
Those Who Have Turned Away
Staircases that go upwards although in fact they’re going downwards…
Kalle Sandare
Maja
'Let go of me! Let go of me!'
I don't like him. He looks horrible. I scream. The other one comes and puts his hand over my mouth. I bite him. It tastes of water. Wh
y don't Mummy and Daddy come?
They're carrying me somewhere. I don't want to go. I want to go in Mummy and Daddy. I'm too hot. My snowsuit is too hot. We're going down some steps. I scream again. Nobody can hear me. That '.s when I start crying. There are a lot of steps.
I try to look so that I can remember the way back. There is no way back. There are only steps. And they don't work.
I'm crying. I'm not as frightened anymore. I don't want to scream any more. Just cry.
Then it gets warmer and something smells nice. They're not holding me as tightly any more. I'm not struggling. I stop crying.
The moped
Anders was already sitting up in bed when he discovered that he was awake. His body was drenched in sweat and his heart contracted; he thought for a moment that he was in a cell. Then he recognised the walls, the pattern on the wallpaper, and realised he was still in the guest room at his grandmother's house.
But he had been there, inside Maja's memory.
He had felt the fear, the heat, and screamed from the depths of own lungs. He had seen the incomprehensible flight of steps and he had seen Henrik and Björn. Henrik had carried him and Björn had put a hand over his mouth when he screamed.
A dream. It was a dream.
No. Elin too had been tormented by memories that were not her own. Pictures she could not possibly have known about. The memories of others. This was the same thing.
Henrik and Björn. Hubba and Bubba.
He knew what he had to do. The clothes he had worn to the wedding were hanging on the bedpost, but he rejected those and picked up his own clothes, which lay in a heap in the corner. Despite the fact that they had been accidentally rinsed by the sea, the fluffy Helly Hansen top and the scruffy jeans still smelled unpleasant. They were impregnated with the smell of smoke, spilt wine and the sweat of fear, and it would take a proper wash to get rid of all that.
But still. This was his uniform. He pulled it on with the intention of wearing it until the whole thing was over. He gathered up his bottles and comics from the floor. When he looked at the lines on the Bamse cartoon, he could see that the zigzag line he had taken for a temple could just as easily be a flight of steps.
He took a few gulps of water. The perception of Maja's presence in his body was once again so familiar that he didn't even feel it, he simply knew that it was there. When he had swallowed the water, he opened the matchbox.
The insect had grown, and was now so fat that it only just fitted in the box. When Anders let a heavy gob of saliva fall on to it, it came to life and began to writhe in its narrow confines. Anders pushed the box shut and closed his hand around it, once again feeling that all-encompassing awareness of the water around him, within him.
He could feel the movements of the larva through the thin cardboard and felt a little sorry for it. But this was not the right moment to reflect on cruelty to animals and the rights of insects. In any case, Simon had said at the kitchen table that it wasn't an insect. It had no will of its own, no purpose other than to be a source of power for its bearer. A kind of battery. Spiritus.
Anders tucked Maja's snowsuit under his arm and went down to the kitchen. It was just after eleven o'clock. There was a note in Anna- Greta's handwriting on the table. He was to take care of himself, and everything he needed was there in the house, there was absolutely no need for him to go out.
There was coffee in the machine, and Anders poured himself a cup. As he drank it he could feel every tiny movement of the liquid passing through his body. When he had finished he fetched a plastic bucket from the cleaning cupboard and half-filled it with water from the tap. He sat down on a chair with the bucket between his thighs, held the matchbox firmly in one hand and dipped the fingertips of his other hand in the water.
He simply knew.
As if the hand in the water were holding a remote control, or rather had become a remote control with which he was so familiar that he no longer needed to look at the buttons, he was now able to direct the water. His hand did not exist, the signals went directly from his brain to the contact surface.
He asked the water to move clockwise, anti-clockwise. He asked it to climb up and run over the top of the bucket so that his legs were soaked. Then he put down the bucket, placed his hand on the wet fabric and asked the water to leave it. A burst of steam rose up towards his face.
I can do it.
When he had emptied the bucket and put the matchbox in his pocket, he went and fetched the shotgun. He stood for a while weighing it in his hands, wondering whether it might be of any help to him. Its metallic weight was reassuring, its polished wood; a weapon.
But it wasn't a weapon he needed, at least not one like this. He removed the cartridge, replaced it in the drawer where he had found it and rubbed his hands. He was clean.
A pair of Simon's well-worn boots from the army surplus store stood in the hallway. They were only s
lightly too big for Anders. He pulled them on, fetched Maja's snowsuit from the kitchen and went out.
Regardless of what kind of creatures Henrik and Björn might be these days, whatever they were composed of, however they lived, one thing was clear: the moped was an ordinary moped. It had weight and solidity, it could be damaged or destroyed. And it had to be somewhere.
When Anders reached the village road he could feel how cold it was. The air was raw, the temperature around freezing. He wrapped Maja's snowsuit around his neck and tucked the ends down inside his top to keep himself warm.
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