The Darkest Room

by Johan Theorin

  A brown parcel containing Katrine Westin’s clothes was lying on his knee. Tilda glanced at it.

  “What was all that business with the clothes? Why did you want to borrow them?”

  Gerlof looked down at his knee. “It was just something that occurred to me when we were standing out there by the bog. About how the sacrifices were carried out there.”

  “What do you mean? That Katrine Westin was some kind of sacrifice?”

  Gerlof looked out through the windshield, over toward the bog. “I’ll tell you more very soon, when I’ve looked at the clothes.”

  Tilda pulled out onto the main road.

  “This visit worried me a little,” she said.

  “Worried?”

  “I’m worried about Joakim Westin, and about his children…

  It felt as if you were sitting there in the kitchen talking about folktales, while Westin regarded them as reality.”

  “Yes,” said Gerlof, “but I think it was good for him to talk a little. He’s still grieving for his wife, which is not so strange after all.”

  “No,” said Tilda. “But I thought he talked about her as if she were still alive… as if he were expecting to see her again.”

  20

  After the break-in at Hagelby vicarage and the flight through the forest, it was two weeks before the Serelius brothers came back to Borgholm. But suddenly there they were at Henrik’s door one evening, at the worst possible moment.

  Because by that time the quiet but rhythmic knocking in his apartment had started to become intolerable, like a dripping faucet that couldn’t be turned off.

  At first Henrik was convinced that it was coming from the old stable lantern, and after three difficult nights with the constant sound of tapping, he put it in the car. The following morning he drove over to the east coast and put the lantern in the boathouse.

  But the knocking continued the next night, and now it was coming from inside the wall in the hallway. But not always the same wall-the sound seemed to move slowly behind the wallpaper.

  If it wasn’t the lantern, then it must be something else he had brought with him from the forest, or from that fucking death chamber he’d been crawling around in.

  Unless of course it was something that had sneaked into his apartment through the brothers’ Ouija board. Those nights when they had sat around the kitchen table staring at the glass as it moved beneath Tommy’s finger, it had definitely felt as if something invisible was in the room.

  Whatever it was, it was getting on Henrik’s nerves. Every night he wandered back and forth between the bedroom and the kitchen, terrified of going to bed and turning off the light.

  In sheer desperation he had called Camilla, his ex-girlfriend. They hadn’t been in touch for several months, but she sounded pleased to hear from him. They had talked for almost an hour.

  Henrik’s nerves were at the breaking point when his doorbell rang three days later, and the sight of Tommy and Freddy at the door didn’t exactly make him feel any better.

  Tommy was wearing sunglasses and his hands were twitching. He wasn’t smiling.

  “Let us in.”

  It wasn’t a friendly reunion. Henrik wanted money from the Serelius brothers, but they had none-they hadn’t sold any of the stolen goods yet. He knew they wanted to do one more trip to the north of the island, but Henrik didn’t want to.

  And he didn’t want to discuss any of it with them tonight, because he had a visitor.

  “We can’t talk now,” he said.

  “Sure we can,” said Tommy.

  “No.”

  “Who is it?” asked Camilla from the sofa in front of the TV.

  The brothers craned their necks curiously to see who the female voice belonged to.

  “It’s just… two friends,” said Henrik over his shoulder. “From Kalmar. But they’re not staying.”

  Tommy lowered his sunglasses and gave Henrik a long look. It made him step outside and pull the door closed behind him.

  “Congratulations,” said Tommy. “Is this a new find, or an old one you’ve dug up?”

  “It’s the girl I used to live with,” said Henrik quietly. “Camilla.”

  “Fuck me… she took you back?”

  “I called her,” said Henrik. “But she was the one who wanted to meet up.”

  “Nice,” said Tommy without a smile. “But what shall we do now, then?”

  “About what?”

  “Our joint project.”

  “It’s over,” said Henrik. “Apart from the money.”

  “Oh no.”

  “It’s over.”

  They stared at one another, Henrik and the brothers. Then he sighed.

  “We can’t talk out here on the stairs,” he said. “One of you can come in.”

  In the end Freddy lumbered back out to the van. Henrik led Tommy into the kitchen and closed the door behind them. He lowered his voice:

  “We’re going to sort this out right now, then you can go.”

  But Tommy was still more interested in Camilla, and asked loudly and clearly, “So has she moved back in? Is that why you look so fucking tired?”

  Henrik shook his head. “That’s something else,” he said. “I’m not sleeping well.”

  “I expect that’ll be your conscience,” said Tommy. “But the old guy will be okay, they’ll patch him up.”

  “Who the fuck knocked him down?” hissed Henrik. “Don’t you remember?”

  “It was you,” said Tommy. “You kicked him.”

  “Me? But I was behind you in the hallway!”

  “You stood on the old guy’s hand and broke it, Henrik. If they find us, you’re going down.”

  “For fuck’s sake, we’re all going down!” Henrik glanced toward the door and lowered his voice again. “I can’t talk any more now.”

  “You want money,” said Tommy. “Don’t you?”

  “I’ve got money,” said Henrik. “I’ve got a job during the day, for fuck’s sake!”

  “But you need more,” said Tommy, nodding toward the other room. “They’re expensive to run.”

  Henrik sighed. “It’s not the fucking money that’s the problem, it’s all the stolen stuff in the boathouse. We need to get it sold.”

  “We’ll sell it,” said Tommy. “But first we’re going to do one more trip… the last trip to the north. To the manor house.”

  “What manor house?”

  “The one with all the paintings… the one Aleister told us about.”

  “Eel Point,” said Henrik quietly.

  “That’s the one. When shall we go?”

  “Wait a minute…I was there last summer. I went just about everywhere, but I didn’t see any fucking paintings. And besides…”

  “What?”

  Henrik didn’t say any more. He remembered the echoing rooms and corridors at Eel Point. He had enjoyed working for Katrine Westin, the woman who lived there with her two small children. But the place itself had felt forbidding even in August, despite the fact that the Westin family had given it a thorough cleaning and started a massive renovation project. What would it be like there now, in December?

  “Nothing,” he said. “But I didn’t see any paintings at Eel Point.”

  “They’re probably hidden, then,” said Tommy.

  There was a faint knocking sound.

  Henrik jumped, then realized it was just an ordinary knock at the kitchen door. He went over and opened it.

  Camilla was standing outside. She didn’t look pleased.

  “Will you be done soon? Otherwise I’m going home, Henrik.”

  “We’re done,” he said.

  Camilla was small and slender, much shorter than the men. Tommy smiled sweetly down at her and held out his hand.

  “Hi there… Tommy,” he said, in a quiet, polite voice Henrik had never heard before.

  “Camilla.”

  They shook hands so vigorously, the buckles on Tommy’s jacket jingled. Then he nodded at Henrik and moved toward the door
.

  “Okay, so that’s agreed then,” he said to Henrik. “I’ll call you.”

  Henrik locked the front door behind Tommy, then went and joined Camilla on the sofa. They sat in silence and finished watching the film they’d started before the brothers turned up.

  “Do you think I should stay, Henrik?” she asked half an hour later, when it was almost eleven o’clock.

  “If you want to,” he said. “That would be good.”

  After midnight they were lying next to each other in the little bedroom, and for Henrik it was like being taken six months back in time. As if everything was as it should be. It was just fantastic that Camilla had come back, and the only thing that was bothering him now was the persistent Serelius brothers.

  And the knocking.

  Henrik was listening for it, but all he could hear was the sound of Camilla’s soft breathing. She had fallen asleep with no problem.

  Silence. No noises inside the walls.

  He didn’t want to think about the knocking now. Or about the visit from the Serelius brothers. Or about the manor house at Eel Point.

  Camilla had come back, but Henrik didn’t dare to discuss with her exactly what their relationship was. They weren’t living together, anyway. Early the next morning he got up and went off to work in Marnäs.

  She was still in the apartment then, but when he got home it was empty. There was no reply when he rang her.

  That night he lay alone in his bed again, and when he had turned out the light the noises started in the hallway. There was a knocking sound inside the walls, quiet but persistent.

  Henrik raised his head from the pillow.

  “Shut the fuck up!” he yelled out into the room.

  The knocking paused briefly, then resumed.

  The last year of the fifties-that’s when my own story begins. The story of Mirja at the manor house at Eel Point, and of Torun and her paintings of the blizzard.

  I was sixteen years old and fatherless when I arrived at the lighthouse station. But I had Torun. She had taught me something all girls ought to learn: never to be dependent on men.

  – MIRJA RAMBE

  WINTER 1959

  The two men my artistic mother, Torun, hated most were Stalin and Hitler. She was born a couple of years before the First World War and grew up on Bondegatan in Stockholm, but she was restless and wanted to venture out into the world. She loved painting, and at the beginning of the 1930s she went to art school in Gothenburg first of all, and then on to Paris, where, according to Torun, people constantly mistook her for Greta Garbo. Her paintings attracted a certain amount of attention, but she wanted to get back to Sweden when the war broke out, and traveled back via Copenhagen. There she met a Danish artist and managed to fit in a quick romance before Hitler’s soldiers suddenly appeared on the streets.

  When she got home to Sweden, Torun discovered that she was pregnant. According to her, she wrote several letters to the father-to-be, my Danish daddy. It might be true. However, he never got in touch.

  I was born in the winter of 1941, when fear covered the world. At that time Torun was living in Stockholm, where all the lights had been turned off and everything was rationed. She kept on moving to different rooms for unmarried mothers, poky little holes rented out by disapproving old ladies, and supported herself by cleaning for the rich folk of Östermalm.

  She had neither the time nor the money to be able to paint.

  It can’t have been easy. I know it wasn’t easy.

  When I first heard the dead whispering in the barn at Eel Point, I wasn’t afraid. I’d experienced far worse in Stockholm.

  One summer after the war, when I am seven or eight years old, I start to have problems peeing. It’s terribly painful. Torun says I’ve been swimming too much, and takes me to a doctor with a beard on one of Stockholm’s widest streets. He’s nice, my mother says. He charges next to nothing to see children.

  The doctor is very friendly when he says hello. He is old, he must be at least fifty, and his coat is all creased. He smells of booze.

  I have to go in and lie down on my back in a special room in his surgery, which also stinks of booze, and the doctor closes the door behind us.

  “Unbutton your skirt,” he says. “Pull it up and just relax.”

  I am alone with the doctor, and he is very thorough. But at last he is satisfied.

  “If you tell anyone about this, they’ll put you away in an institution,” he says, patting me on the head.

  He buttons up his coat. Then he gives me a shiny one-krona coin and we go back to Torun in the waiting room-I stagger along, my legs trembling, and I feel even more ill than I did before, but the doctor says there isn’t anything serious wrong with me. I am a good girl, and he will prescribe some suitable medicine.

  My mother is furious when I refuse to take the doctor’s tablets.

  At the beginning of the 1950s, Torun takes me to Öland. It is one of her ideas. I don’t think she had any connection

  with the island, but just as when she traveled to Paris, she longs for an artistic environment. And of course Öland is famous for its light and for the artists who have succeeded in capturing it. My mother babbles about Nils Kreuger, Gottfrid Kallstenius, and Per Ekström.

  I am just happy to be leaving the city where that old doctor lives.

  We arrive in Borgholm on the ferry. We have all our possessions with us in three suitcases, plus Torun’s package of canvases and oils. Borgholm is a neat little town, but my mother is unhappy there. She thinks the people are stiff and haughty. Besides, it’s much cheaper to live out in the country, so after a year or so we move again, to a red outbuilding in the village of Rörby. We have to sleep under three blankets, because it is always so cold and drafty.

  I start at the local school. All the children there think I speak a kind of affected big-city talk. I don’t say what I think of their dialect, but I still don’t make any friends.

  Soon after we end up out in the country, I start to draw in earnest; I draw white figures with red mouths and Torun thinks they’re angels, but it is the doctor and his slashed mouth that I am drawing.

  When I was born, Hitler was the big bad wolf, but I grow up filled with the fear of Stalin and the Soviet Union. If the Russians want to, they can conquer Sweden in four hours with their airplanes, according to my mother. First they will occupy Gotland and Öland, then they will take the rest of the country.

  But for me, as a child, four hours is quite a long time, and I give a great deal of thought to what I would do during this last period of freedom. If the news comes that the Soviet planes are on their way, I will run off to the store in Rörby and stuff myself with as much chocolate as I can, I’ll eat all they’ve got, then I’ll grab some crayons and paper and watercolors and rush back home. Then I’ll be able to cope with

  living the rest of my life as a communist, just as long as I can carry on painting.

  We move around as lodgers from one place to another, and every room we rent stinks of oils and turpentine. Torun makes enough money to live on by cleaning, but paints in her spare time-she goes out with her easel and paints and paints.

  In the last fall of the 1950s we move again, to an even cheaper room. It is in an old building at the manor house at Eel Point. An outbuilding, built of limestone, with whitewashed walls. Cool and pleasant to live in during the hot summer days, but freezing cold the rest of the year.

  When I find out that we are going to live near lighthouses, of course I get a whole lot of magical pictures in my head. Dark, stormy nights, ships in trouble out at sea, and heroic lighthouse keepers.

  Torun and I move in one October day, and I immediately feel unwelcome there. Eel Point is a cold and windy place. Walking between the big wooden buildings feels like sneaking around some desolate castle courtyard.

  The pictures in my imagination turn out to be entirely false. The lighthouse keepers have left Eel Point, and only come to visit a few times a year-the lighthouses were converted to electricity a
year or so after the war, and ten years later everything was automated. There’s an old watchman; his name is Ragnar Davidsson and he lumbers around at Eel Point as if he owned the place.

  A couple of months after we move in, I experience my first blizzard-and almost end up an orphan at the same time. It is the middle of December, and when I get home from school, Torun isn’t there. One of her easels and the bag with her oils in it is also missing. Twilight falls and it begins to snow; the wind from the sea grows stronger.

  Torun doesn’t come back. At first I am angry with her, then I start to feel afraid. I have never seen so much snow whirling past the windows. The flakes are not falling, they are slicing through the air. The wind shakes the windowpanes.

  Half an hour or so after the storm begins, a small figure finally appears, plowing through the snowdrifts in the inner courtyard.

  I hurry outside, grab hold of Torun before she collapses, and help her inside, to the fire.

  The bag is still hanging over her shoulder, but the easel has been swept away in the storm. Her eyes are swollen shut; grains of ice mixed with sand have blown into them, and she can hardly see. When I take off her clothes, they are soaked; she is frozen stiff.

  She had been sitting painting on the far side of the peat bog, Offermossen, when the clouds gathered and the storm came. She tried to take a shortcut through the tussocks of grass and the thin ice of the bog, but fell into the water and had to fight her way onto firmer ground. She whispers:

  “The dead came up out of the bog… lots of them, clawing at me, ripping and tearing… they were cold, so cold. They wanted my warmth.”

  Torun is rambling. I get her to drink some hot tea and put her to bed.

  She sleeps peacefully for more than twelve hours, and I keep watch by the window as the snowfall gradually diminishes during the night.

  When Torun wakes up, she is still talking about the dead who walked in the blizzard.

  Her eyes are scratched and bloodshot, but the very next evening she sits down at a canvas and begins to paint.

  21

  Just when Tilda had stopped thinking about Martin Ahlquist every morning and night, the telephone rang in her little kitchen. She thought it was Gerlof, and picked up the receiver without any misgivings.