The Darkest Room

by Johan Theorin

  It was a windy but sunny November day, and they had pastries and hot chocolate with them. Joakim’s rucksack had a built-in child’s carrying seat where Gabriel could sit when

  he was tired, but most of the time he was running across the meadows with Livia.

  When they reached the main highway, Joakim shouted to them to stop, and they all crossed over together after looking in both directions, as Livia and Gabriel had learned.

  Livia had slept more peacefully for the last few nights and didn’t seem the least bit tired, but Joakim could feel the constant lack of sleep like a swollen weight behind his eyes. He felt slightly better during the day now he had set to work on the house again, but the nights were still difficult. Even when Livia was fast asleep, he lay there awake in the darkness, waiting. Listening.

  Talking in her sleep didn’t seem to have any negative effects on Livia-almost the reverse.

  But she had started bringing home drawings she’d done at preschool. Many of them showed a woman with yellow hair, sometimes standing in front of a blue sea, sometimes in front of a big red house. Above the picture she had written mommy in sprawling letters.

  Livia still asked almost every morning and evening when Katrine was coming home, and Joakim always gave the same answer: “I don’t know.”

  An old stone wall ran along the other side of the road, and when they had climbed over it they found themselves at the edge of a flat, gray landscape with open water between patches of reeds and clumps of pale yellow grass. The water was black and still; it was impossible to tell how deep it was.

  “This is called a peat bog,” said Joakim.

  “Can you drown here?” asked Livia.

  She tried pushing a stick down into a muddy puddle, and didn’t notice that the question had made Joakim tense up.

  “No… only if you can’t swim.”

  “I can swim!” shouted Livia.

  She had been to four swimming lessons in Stockholm during the summer.

  Gabriel suddenly screamed and started to cry-he had

  sunk down and got his galoshes stuck in the grass by the water. The muddy ground let him go with a disappointed slurp when Joakim pulled him out. He put Gabriel down on firm ground, looked out over the black water, and suddenly remembered something the agent who showed them around the house at Eel Point had told them as they were driving past the peat bog.

  “Do you know what they used to do out here in the Iron Age?” he asked. “Hundreds and hundreds of years ago?”

  “What?” said Livia.

  “I’ve heard that they used to sacrifice things to the gods.”

  “Sacrifice-what does that mean?”

  “It means that you give away things you like,” said Joakim. “In order to get even more back.”

  “So what did they give away, then?” asked Livia.

  “Silver and gold and swords and that kind of thing. They threw them into the water as a gift to the gods.”

  According to the agent, animals and human beings had also been sacrificed sometimes-but stories like that were definitely not for the ears of the children.

  “Why?” said Livia.

  “I don’t know… but I suppose they believed it would make the gods happy, and they would make life easier.”

  “What kind of gods were they?” said Livia.

  “Pagan gods.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, it means they were… a bit nasty sometimes,” said Joakim, who wasn’t too good on the history of religion. “Norse gods like Odin and Freya. And nature gods in the earth and the trees. But they don’t exist any longer.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because people stopped believing in them,” said Joakim, setting off again. “Let’s go. Do you want to sit in the rucksack seat, Gabriel?”

  His son shook his head cheerfully and scampered off after Livia again. A narrow path ran along the side of the bog, and

  they followed it northward. At the end of the bog lay fields, and beyond them was Rörby with its white church rising up on the horizon.

  Joakim would have liked to walk much further, but by the time they got to the fields the children had slowed down considerably. He took off his rucksack.

  “Time for a snack.”

  It took them a quarter of an hour to empty the flask of hot chocolate and eat up all the pastries. They found dry rocks to sit on, and everything was silent all around them. Joakim knew that the peat bog was a bird sanctuary, but they didn’t see a single bird all day.

  After they had eaten, they crossed back over the main road. Joakim chose a path alongside the little wood that grew northwest of Eel Point. The wood was low growing and bushy, like all the woods he had seen on the island. It consisted of pine trees, all leaning slightly inland, away from the harsh winds coming off the sea. Among them grew thickets of hazel and hawthorn.

  They continued on down to the sea, where the wind grew stronger and colder. The sun was starting to set, and the sky had lost its blue glow.

  “There’s the wreck!” shouted Livia when they had almost reached the shore.

  “The wreck!” echoed Gabriel.

  “Can we go out there, Daddy?”

  From a distance it still bore some resemblance to the hull of a ship, but as they got closer it looked more like a pile of broken old planks of wood. The only thing that hadn’t been smashed to pieces was the keel: a warped wooden beam half buried in the sand.

  Livia and Gabriel walked all the way around the wreck, but came back disappointed.

  “It can’t be fixed, Daddy,” said Livia.

  “No,” said Joakim, “I think it’s had it.”

  “Did everybody on the boat drown?”

  She was always talking about people drowning, thought Joakim.

  “No, they survived,” he said. “I’m sure the lighthouse keepers helped them get ashore.”

  They walked southward along the damp sandy shore. The waves swirled up onto the sand, and Livia and Gabriel tried to walk as close to them as possible without getting soaked. When a big wave came rushing toward them, they jumped out of the way, screaming and laughing.

  After a quarter of an hour they had reached the stone jetty that sheltered the lighthouses. Livia ran over to it across the sand and clambered up onto the first block of stone.

  This was where Katrine had gone just three weeks ago. Straight along the jetty and down into the water.

  “Don’t go up there, Livia,” called Joakim.

  She turned and looked down at him. “Why not?”

  “You might slip.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You might. Come down, please!”

  In the end she climbed down again, silent and sullen. Gabriel looked at his sister and his father, unsure which of them was right.

  They walked past the stone pathway out to the lighthouses, and Joakim had an idea that might put Livia back in a good mood.

  “Maybe we could go and look inside one of the lighthouses,” he said.

  Livia turned her head quickly. “Can we?”

  “Sure we can,” said Joakim, “as long as we can unlock the door. But I know where there’s a bunch of keys.”

  He led the way back up to the house, unlocked the kitchen door, and as usual quelled the impulse to call out to Katrine as he walked in.

  In one of the kitchen cupboards was a metal box that the agent had passed on, containing documents relating to the history of the house. The old bunch of keys was also in

  the box-an iron ring with a dozen or so keys, some of them larger and heavier than any he had seen before.

  Gabriel wanted to stay indoors where it was warm; he wanted to watch a video of Pingu the penguin. Joakim inserted it into the machine.

  “We won’t be long,” he said.

  Gabriel just nodded, already caught up in the film.

  Joakim picked up the clanking bunch of keys and went out into the cold again, with Livia beside him.

  “So, which one shall we choose?”
>
  Livia thought it over and pointed. “That one,” she said. “Mommy’s lighthouse.”

  Joakim looked at the north tower. That was the one that no longer flashed-even though he did think he had seen a light there just once, at dawn on the day Katrine had walked out along the stone jetty.

  “Okay,” he said. “We’ll try that one.”

  So they walked out into the sea along the stone pathway and took the left fork where it split.

  They reached the little island. In front of the metal door of the lighthouse stood a polished slab of limestone, big enough for both father and daughter to stand on.

  “Okay, let’s see if we can get in, Livia…”

  Joakim looked at the padlock and chose a key that looked as if it might fit, but it was too big for the keyhole. The second key he chose fit into the hole, but wouldn’t turn.

  The third key fit too, and when Joakim got a firm grip he was actually able to turn it, although it took some effort.

  He pulled on the handle as hard as he could.

  The door opened slowly on stiff hinges, but stopped after six or seven inches.

  It was because of the big limestone slab. The winter waves and ice-or perhaps the grass growing around it-had pushed it upward over the years, and the bottom of the door was catching on it.

  When Joakim grabbed hold of the upper part of the steel

  door, it bent outward an inch or two more, but refused to open.

  He peered inside, with the sense that he was looking into a black mountain crevice.

  “What’s inside?” asked Livia behind him.

  “Wow,” he said, “there’s a skeleton on the floor.”

  “What?”

  He turned and smiled at her wide-eyed expression.

  “I’m only joking. I can’t see much… it’s almost pitch black.”

  He stepped back onto the stone slab and let Livia take a look.

  “I can see some stairs,” she said.

  “Yes, that’s the staircase leading up into the tower.”

  “It’s curved,” said Livia. “It goes round… and up.”

  “Right up to the top,” said Joakim, and added, “Wait here.”

  He had spotted a rectangular piece of rock down by the water, and went down and fetched it. This gave him a good threshold to stand on.

  “Can you move back a bit, Livia?” he said. “I’m going to try and climb in and push the door open from the inside.”

  “I want to come in as well!”

  “After me, maybe,” said Joakim.

  He stood on top of the piece of rock, bent the upper part of the door outward as far as he could, and squeezed in through the opening. He just managed it-he was glad he didn’t have a beer gut.

  The daylight disappeared once he was inside the lighthouse, and he could no longer hear the wind from the sea. He stepped down onto a flat cement floor, and felt thick, curved stone walls around him.

  Slowly he got used to the darkness and looked around. How long was it since anyone had been inside the lighthouse? Several decades, perhaps. The air was dry, as in all buildings made of limestone, and every surface was covered with a powder of gray dust.

  The stone staircase Livia had seen started almost at his feet and spiraled up along the walls, around a thick pillar in the center of the tower. It disappeared up into the darkness, but somewhere up there he had the impression of a faint light, presumably from the narrow windows in the tower.

  Someone had left things on the floor. A couple of empty beer bottles, a pile of newspapers, a red and white metal can with the word CALTEX on it.

  Next to the stone staircase was a low wooden door, and when Joakim pushed it open a little way he saw even more trash: old wooden boxes piled on top of one another, empty bottles, and dark green fishing nets on the walls. There was even something that looked like an old mangle in there.

  Someone had been using the lighthouse as a dumping ground.

  “Daddy?”

  Livia was calling him.

  “Yes?” he replied, and heard the echo of his voice bouncing up the spiral staircase.

  Her face peered in through the doorway. “Can I come in too?”

  “We can try… Can you climb up onto the rock, then I can try and pull you in?”

  As soon as she began to squeeze herself through the opening, he realized he wouldn’t be able to bend the door outward and pull her inside at the same time. She could easily get stuck.

  “I don’t think this is going to work, Livia.”

  “But I want to come inside!”

  “We can go over to the southern lighthouse,” he said, “and maybe we can-”

  Suddenly Joakim heard scraping noises from above. He turned his head and listened.

  Footsteps. It sounded like echoing footsteps high up on the spiral staircase.

  The noise was coming from the tower. It was his imagination,

  but it sounded like heavy footsteps-and it sounded as if they were slowly but surely coming down the stairs.

  This wasn’t Katrine, this was someone else.

  Heavy footsteps…It sounded like a man.

  “Livia?” called Joakim.

  “Yes?”

  She was still outside, and Joakim thought about how close she was to the water; if she took a couple of steps back and happened to fall…And Gabriel, Gabriel was alone up in the house. How could he have left him?

  “Livia?” he called again. “Stay where you are, I’m coming out.”

  He grabbed the doorframe and heaved himself up. The steel door seemed to want to keep him there, but he forced his way out through the opening. It might have looked quite funny, like a parody of a birth, but his heart was pounding and Livia was standing there looking at him with fear in her eyes.

  Joakim climbed down onto the stone outside and breathed in the fresh, cold sea air.

  “There we are,” he said, and quickly pushed the steel door shut behind him. “Let’s get back to Gabriel. We can look inside the other lighthouse another day.”

  As he quickly replaced the padlock and locked the door, he was expecting protests, but Livia said nothing. She took his hand in silence and they walked back along the jetty and up onto the shore. It was almost twilight.

  Joakim thought about the noises in the lighthouse.

  It must have been the wind from the sea blowing around the tower, or the beak of a gull scraping against the glass. Not footsteps.

  The dead are trying to reach us, Katrine. They want to talk to us, they want us to listen.

  What do they want to say to us? Perhaps that we should not seek death too early.

  In the loft above the barn there is a date from the time of the First World War carved into the wall: December 7, 1916. After that there is a cross, and the beginning of a name: † GEOR-

  – MIRJA RAMBE

  WINTER 1916

  Alma Ljunggren, the wife of the master lighthouse keeper, is sitting at her loom in the room at the back of the house. A wall clock is ticking behind her. Alma cannot see the sea from here, and that suits her very well. She doesn’t want to see what her husband, Georg, and the other lighthouse keepers are doing down by the shore.

  There are no voices to be heard in the house; all the other women are down on the shore. Alma knows that she too should be there to support the men, but she dare not go. She hasn’t the strength to be any kind of support; she barely has the courage to breathe.

  The wall clock continues to tick.

  A sea monster has drifted ashore at Eel Point this winter morning, in the third year of the Great War. The monster was discovered after last night’s fierce snowstorm: a black monster with pointed steel spikes all over its round body.

  Sweden is a neutral country as far as the Great War on the Continent is concerned, but is still affected by it.

  The monster on the shore is a mine. Presumably Russian, dropped the previous year in order to stop the Germans from transporting ore across the Baltic. But of course it doesn’t

 
; matter what country it comes from, it is just as dangerous anyway.

  The ticking in the room suddenly stops.

  Alma turns her head.

  The wall clock behind her has stopped. The pendulum is hanging straight down.

  Alma picks up a pair of black sheep shears from a basket beside her loom, gets up, and goes out of the room. She throws a shawl around her shoulders and walks out onto the veranda, at the front of the manor house. She still refuses to look down toward the shore.

  The waves must have torn the mine free of its mooring out at sea during the blizzard over the past few days, and slowly washed it toward the land. Now it is stuck fast in the sandy seabed and the slushy ice only fifty yards or so from the southern lighthouse.

  The year before, a German torpedo drifted ashore just north of Marnäs. It was shot to pieces, and the naval authorities now insist that mines be dealt with in the same way. The Russian mine must be destroyed, but it is not possible to blow it up so close to the lighthouses. It must be towed away. The lighthouse keepers are going to place a rope around the mine and then carefully tow it away from the lighthouses.

  Master lighthouse keeper Georg Ljunggren is leading the work at sea. He is standing in the prow of an open motorboat, and up on the veranda Alma can hear her husband’s booming orders echoing out across the shore, all the way up to the house.

  When she opens the door, she can hear him very clearly.

  Alma goes out into the cold and walks across the courtyard, recently cleared of snow, toward the barn, without looking down toward the shore.

  There is no one in the barn, but when she opens the heavy door and walks in, the cows and horses start to move in the darkness. The storm makes them uneasy.

  Alma slowly walks up the steps to the hayloft. There is no one here either.

  The hay reaches almost to the roof, but there is a small passageway along the wall so that she can make her way across the wooden floor.

  She walks over to the far wall and stops. She has stood here several times over the past few years, but now she reads the names once again.