Stallo

by Stefan Spjut

  ‘So he didn’t write anything about it?’ Gudrun asked.

  ‘Not a word,’ answered Barbro. ‘He buried it under a layer of concrete inside him. But that summer, when he heard a little boy had been abducted in Dalarna, a crack appeared in the concrete, and the crack widened when he spoke about it to someone he worked with at the radio station. Earlier that day the colleague had discovered that the missing boy’s mother had said that a giant had taken her child. Her account of what had happened was dismissed out of hand as a fantasy brought about by shock and triggered by medication abuse, but the circumstances were made more complicated by the fact that the police found huge footprints in the vicinity. There was no doubt that a larger than average man had been outside the cabin, but they could not establish the extent of his involvement in the kidnapping.

  ‘Sven phoned Magnus’s mother, Mona Brodin. She reluctantly agreed to talk about the giant. It had happened in the evening, so she had not been able to see him clearly. She estimated the giant to be between two and a half to three metres tall. He had not spoken. All he did was pick up the boy and disappear into the darkness of the forest. She had followed, but of course she had not been able to catch up with him.

  ‘Between two and a half to three metres! That was the exact height of the kitchen ceiling in John Bauer’s house in Småland. This indicated to Sven that there could be a connection between the mysterious disappearance of Magnus Brodin and Esther Bauer’s harrowing story. After he had spoken with Mona Brodin and thought about everything she had said, he realised that he had the chance to do something about his betrayal of the Bauer family – because to him it did feel like a betrayal. Bengt Bauer was gone for ever but he might be able to help Magnus Brodin – save him, in fact. Except he did not know how.

  ‘If Magnus Brodin had been carried off by the stallo people, then Sven was obliged to discreetly point the police in the right direction. But Lapland is a vast region and Esther had never told him precisely where John had been when he found the stallo. And even if she had, it was doubtful it would have been of any help after so much time had passed. He made a few tentative phone calls to a couple of police officers he knew personally but they led nowhere, and eventually he began to doubt that there was anything he could do, and perhaps because it was a way of helping him endure this feeling of powerlessness he started questioning the truth of Esther Bauer’s story again, and whether it was so far removed from reality that any further investigation was futile.

  ‘But then there was the squirrel. The squirrel’s eyes had begun to shine inside him. Two small black lamps that came on when he lay in bed at night. They would not leave him in peace. That is why we travelled down to Gränna.

  ‘Of course, it was difficult for me to believe what he told me in the car that day, but I knew we did not have much time left together. I could hardly turn the car around and have his head examined. I didn’t have the heart for it.

  ‘We arrived at the place where Sven said he had seen the squirrel in 1922 and stood there for a while, but no squirrel appeared. Large areas of Björkudden were surprisingly unchanged, Sven said. The facade of the beautiful house was the same shade of red. We met the present owner of Björkudden, Fredrik Dahllöf, who you spoke to, and his daughter, a girl of about six or seven. Naturally Dahllöf was astonished when Uncle Sven stepped into his kitchen out of the blue, and he was no less bewildered when Sven asked about a special squirrel that had belonged to John Bauer. He thought it was some kind of joke. But Sven repeated his question and emphasised how vitally important it was that he told him everything he knew. To underline the gravity Sven explained that the squirrel was connected to the kidnapping of Magnus Brodin. Dahllöf knew about Magnus Brodin, he had read about him in the papers, but he had never heard anything about a squirrel. And what a squirrel from the turn of the century had to do with the kidnapped boy he really could not fathom. That was obvious from his expression.

  ‘Sven started to walk around the room, scanning the walls, and it wasn’t long before Dahllöf became curious and wanted to know what he was looking for. So Sven told him everything. He pointed his stick at the ceiling, and when he asked if it was two metres and seventy-five centimetres high, Dahllöf nodded in confirmation. Sven explained his suspicion: that Magnus Brodin had been stolen by the same person who in 1918 had come to Björkudden to take the three-year-old Bengt Bauer.’

  Barbro placed her hands together and studied them. The nails were cut short and coated with clear varnish.

  ‘We went back out to the car,’ she continued, ‘and I was about to turn the key in the ignition when we heard a small thud on the roof. I jumped and leaned forwards, wondering what could have landed so heavily. A bird? A pine cone? But then something started moving above us, tiny footsteps on the metal. I opened the door and got out. And there was the squirrel, right under my very nose. It was sitting on the roof, watching me, and I saw straight away that something was wrong with it. It looked ill. It was so thin and its fur was patchy and matted.

  ‘Sven was sure this was the same squirrel that he had seen in 1922. It hadn’t aged a day, he said. And when he reached out his hand and rested it on the car roof, his palm cupped like a bowl, the squirrel approached him. With a gentle movement he picked up the little animal in his large hand and pressed it to his chest, and after sitting down in the back seat he said it was Humpe, Bauer’s squirrel, although I thought surely he knew it couldn’t be. “What do you know about it?” he said, stroking the little animal’s coat. “Squirrels don’t live that long,” I answered. “They live for fifteen years at the most. You know that’s what your father said.” “But between you and me,” Sven said, “this is no squirrel. At least, not only a squirrel.” “If you say so,” I said. And then we drove home.’

  ‘So he took it home with him?’ Susso asked.

  Barbro nodded.

  ‘He kept it in his room.’

  ‘Here?’ Susso asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Barbro replied. ‘At first I was against it, naturally, because in all honesty there is not much difference between a squirrel and a rat, but when I noticed how happy the squirrel made him, I relented. He often called me to come and look when it was doing something amusing or unexpected. It was as if it had breathed new life into Sven, and he seemed to have forgotten all about Magnus Brodin, which was just as well, I thought. But then one day Sven was suddenly taken ill. When the ambulance arrived and they put him on the stretcher, he clung onto my hand and made me promise to look after the squirrel.’

  Barbro looked down at the swirling pattern on the Persian rug. It was so big that the parquet flooring was visible only as a thin frieze bordering the skirting boards.

  ‘He was dead by the time we reached the hospital,’ she said. ‘I had to come home, to this empty flat. Which was not entirely empty. It was several days before I gathered enough strength to open the door to his room. In some way I hoped it had all been imagination, that the animal would not be there. But there it sat, of course, right in the middle of the bed, looking at me. I closed the door but I remembered my promise, so I put a bowl of water and some seeds in the room. And I thought: it can’t be happy in there, surely it will die soon. Every time I opened the door, I hoped it would be lying dead in a corner.’

  There was a creak as Barbro moved in the chair.

  ‘After a few months had passed and it had still not died I went into the room and opened the window. I didn’t think that was breaking my promise to Sven. If the squirrel wanted to go willingly, then I thought it should be allowed to do so. Later that day, when I looked into the room, it had gone. There are large trees outside, so I expect it jumped onto one of them.’

  Quickly she stroked a curl of hair from her forehead.

  ‘It was an enormous relief, I can tell you.’

  Barbro stood up and looked at Gudrun.

  ‘Shall we have that coffee now?’

  *

  While Barbro was in the kitchen, Susso and Gudrun sat looking through the cuttings. Torbjörn
had got up from the sofa to take a closer look at the roller blind. He ran his fingers over the surface. Then he sank back down onto the sofa again, watching Susso, who had lifted the briefcase onto her lap so she could look at it more closely. She slid open the locks one at a time and lifted the lid.

  She found a crumpled plastic bag with a small grey revolver inside it. It looked like a piece of scrap metal. The handle was made of dark wood, almost black with a greasy shine. Scattered around the gun in the bag’s many creases were cartridges, ten at least. She held up the bag so that first Torbjörn and then Gudrun could see what it contained.

  ‘That’s Sven’s pistol,’ Barbro said, walking in carrying a silver tray that rattled with small white porcelain cups. ‘You see, when he was in Petrograd, which was practically a war zone, he asked his father to send him a gun so he would be able to protect himself. His father sent that little pistol by courier. And do you know who gave it to him? The author Verner von Heidenstam. Sven’s father looked after Heidenstam’s horses out at Naddö, so they were as good as friends.’

  ‘But what happened to the boat?’ asked Susso, replacing the plastic bag in the case. ‘Why did it sink?’

  ‘It was overloaded and Vättern was in a bad mood,’ Barbro said, placing the tray on the table.

  ‘So the stallo people had nothing to do with it?’

  ‘That we will never know,’ said Barbro, pouring the coffee.

  ‘But what do you think then? About what he told you? About Bauer and the stallo people?’

  ‘I don’t think anything,’ Barbro said, putting down the coffee pot. ‘I am convinced it is all true.’

  They waited for her to continue.

  ‘You know I told you that the squirrel disappeared the day I left the window open?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, it came back. That same evening. I had hung Sven’s bedding to air on the balcony and there it was, sitting on the railing, staring at me. My first impulse was to rush inside and close the balcony door, but before I could reach the door, he had already slipped in.’

  Barbro gestured towards the balcony door.

  ‘I hunted around desperately looking for him, but it was pointless. You can’t catch a squirrel with your bare hands. So there was nothing else I could do but let him into Sven’s room again, and he hopped in there. It was our deal, if you can put it like that. And he knew it. He wanted nothing more than to be allowed to live in there. And now,’ she said, staring blankly ahead, ‘now, after twenty-five years, I can say with certainty that Sven was right.’

  ‘Right in what way?’ Susso asked.

  Barbro gave her a blank look.

  ‘That it was John Bauer’s squirrel he brought back from Björkudden.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Susso, and when she did not get an answer straight away she cast an enquiring look at her mother, who was bending forwards with her elbows on her knees, rubbing her forehead and making her skin wrinkle.

  ‘She means’, said Gudrun, ‘that the squirrel is still alive.’

  ‘You’re joking!’ Susso said.

  Barbro nodded.

  ‘Not at all. He’s in Sven’s room.’

  Seved was aware that the old-timers could know things, that they could infiltrate people’s heads. At least Skabram could, if you got close. Ejvor had told him once that he should watch out for Skabram especially, that he should take care not to make eye contact with him. Things Skabram picked apart with his probing old troll fingers could never be repaired, and he did not care. Quite the reverse. The destruction amused him.

  Funnily enough, it did not strike him that the old-timers would know what had happened to the lemmingshifter until after he had pulled off the road to get rid of the sleeping bag and its contents. He had not wanted to look inside the bag. He had simply hurled it out among the birches. But then he had changed his mind, waded through the snow and tipped out the little body. Not to see it, but so that the ravens would get to it as quickly as possible. He could not bear the thought of it shrivelling up inside the sleeping bag. He wanted it to disappear. Totally.

  It had lain there in the snow, a mottled yellowish-brown. A little scrap.

  What if it wasn’t dead? What if it was only unconscious?

  He had to be sure.

  A lorry thundered past, followed by a cloud of snow, and Seved waited until it had settled and no other cars were in sight before striding out towards a broken roadside snow pole. In the fold where it had broken in two the orange plastic had faded. Holding the pole, he reached out and prodded the creature.

  No blood, as far as he could see. But one eye had popped out and was hanging like a white marble on a thread against the swollen cheek. If it was pretending to be dead, then it was doing a bloody good job. It’s not certain I’ll get away with this, he thought.

  Would even Lennart be able to defend him if the old-timers caught wind of what he had done? And what would Lennart even say? Not to mention Torsten Holmbom – it was his shapeshifter after all, and Seved knew how attached he was to his small friends.

  Yet he did not regret it. Not for a moment. Trampling the little thing to death had felt right at the time and it felt right now.

  It was nasty. It was evil.

  An evil being.

  It had harmed Cecilia Myrén. He wondered what had happened to her, whether she had recovered, but most of all whether she remembered what had happened. Whether she remembered him. Most likely she did, but only hazily. Like a memory after being drunk. She would never recognise him, and if she did, she would not remember where she had seen him before.

  But was that why he had killed it? No. It was something more primitive. Instinct. He disliked it – he had never liked the little creatures. You never knew what they were up to.

  He had done it simply because he could.

  And because no one would ever find out.

  He hoped.

  And perhaps it was not so bad. He had seen Ejvor beat a shrewshifter to death with a log once, and her only explanation had been that the animal was ill. And there hadn’t been any great fuss when Börje shot the hareshifter. Well, it had been an accident. He hadn’t realised it was a shifter.

  What Seved had done, on the other hand, was no accident.

  He had not only done it deliberately. He had done it gladly.

  It was that name.

  At first he had dismissed it as imagination.

  But he knew what he had heard.

  The one the foxshifter had made him hear.

  *

  Signe and the boy were outside when he pulled into the yard, and he stiffened behind the wheel when he saw Skabram standing on Hyblett’s veranda, motionless and wrapped in a grey-green tarpaulin with only his eyes and his hairy legs showing. But the covering did not help: the boy was scared anyway. He was sitting on a pile of snow, facing the opposite way and hacking at the snow with a tomato-red flat plastic sledge between his legs. And Signe looked cold. She was bobbing up and down on her toes.

  Seved drew up, parking as far from Hybblet as he possibly could, and went straight into the toilet. He sat there, burying his head in his hands. Usually he could feel it if they got right inside his head, but he was so tired and tense he doubted he would notice. As long as Skabram was down in the hide there was no danger, but how long was he going to stand on the veranda, watching? If he could get Signe and the boy to come in, Skabram would probably go back down.

  He pulled off his jeans and put them in the washing machine.

  Hanging on a hook was a pair of grey tracksuit bottoms, and he took them out into the hall. As he was pulling them on he opened the door and called for the others to come in.

  The boy instantly slid down and ran to the veranda, and Signe followed him. She asked him where he had been.

  ‘Away,’ he said, and opened the fridge.

  Fortunately the window in Sven Jerring’s old bedroom was slightly open. Susso could only imagine what it would have been like in there otherwise. The pungent smell of ur
ine struck her nostrils immediately. This was something other than patches of dried piss and she could not help pulling a face.

  Even Gudrun reacted strongly.

  ‘Good grief!’ she said, stopping in the doorway, her hand over her nose and mouth like a lid. Her face was contorted and the skin fell in folds below her chin. She rolled her eyes as she looked at the others. Wasn’t the stench awful? It looked at first as if she was going to stay outside, but when Susso and Torbjörn entered the room she followed, her hand in nervous readiness in front of her face. Barbro said nothing. She waited until they had all stepped in through the door, then closed it gently behind her.

  There were rings hanging from the curtain pole but no curtains, and no rugs on the floor. The light filtered in through the angled slats of the venetian blind, casting a striped pattern on the bed. A few pictures in glossy, dark-brown wooden frames hung above the bed. They were photographs of people, darkly dressed shapes. The gilded swirls of the wallpaper’s medallion pattern shone faintly in the gloom. On the bedside table stood a portable radio with its telescopic antenna retracted.

  There was a crunch under Susso’s heel and she stopped to see what she had trodden on.

  ‘It’s a nutshell,’ Barbro said, kicking the sole of her shoe over the vinyl flooring. ‘And cornflakes. I haven’t cleaned in here for years.’

  She looked at the floor, annoyed.

  ‘There’s no point.’

  They stood still, waiting. Torbjörn had folded his arms across his chest and cupped his hand under his chin. His eyes searched the walls inquisitively, examining every corner. While they had been listening to Barbro’s story, he had sat without saying a word, looking down at his feet and not touching either his snus tin or his mobile. It seemed as if his disbelief was beginning to fray at the edges. As for Susso, she did not know what to think. She felt ill. It came and went but would not let go of her. And now she felt it drilling deeper and deeper inside.