Stallo

by Stefan Spjut

  Torbjörn also got out but he left the squirrel in the car. He zipped up his hooded sweatshirt and looked at her, his eyes narrowed in the wind.

  ‘Not feeling so good?’ he asked.

  Susso shook her head and stepped aside to avoid being splashed by a large white car that roared past them.

  ‘I don’t know what it is.’

  ‘Do you think it’s the squirrel? Because I don’t feel too good either.’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  He shook his head as he swallowed. Then he leaned forwards and spat on the tarmac. Susso opened the car door and bent in to ask her mother if she was also feeling ill, but Gudrun was talking on the phone, and judging from her sharp, animated voice it was not a good time to interrupt her. No doubt she had got hold of Cecilia and had one or two things to tell her.

  ‘I felt like this the night I was followed in the park, and when we were out with the snowmobile at Holmajärvi, right before those guys leapt on us. I thought it was a migraine or something.’

  ‘You never told me.’

  ‘I didn’t know what it was, did I?’

  Torbjörn took out his snus tin. He twisted off the lid, took out a pouch and lifted his upper lip in preparation, but then he stopped. A thought had occurred to him and he stood for a moment, holding the snus before finally inserting it in his mouth.

  ‘The bat,’ he said.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Susso said. ‘That makes sense. But where did it come from?’

  Torbjörn looked at her.

  ‘Have you still got the film you took?’

  He started hunting for his phone as the car door slammed. Gudrun came running round the bonnet of the car. She was holding the collar of her down jacket together to keep out the cold wind.

  ‘The shop has been closed all day and Ella hasn’t been to nursery! And Tommy hasn’t been able to get hold of Cecilia either.’

  ‘Do you feel ill?’ asked Susso.

  ‘Tommy’s going round to her place now,’ Gudrun said, and held up the phone as if to double check it was not ringing. ‘Oh God, think if something’s happened? And what about Ella!’

  Susso folded her arms.

  ‘She’s probably just not well.’

  ‘But why isn’t she answering her phone!’

  ‘What about you? How are you feeling?’

  ‘Well, I’m worried of course!’

  ‘Yes, but how are you? Have you got a headache? Do you feel sick? Because both me and Torbjörn feel ill, and we think it’s because of the squirrel.’

  ‘Oh yes, blame the squirrel. You’ve both just got hangovers.’

  ‘Do you remember I asked you if you had ever had a migraine?’ Susso said. ‘After I had been followed in the park? This is something similar, and Torbjörn feels it too.’

  ‘That’s not so strange,’ said Gudrun, ‘if it’s true what Torbjörn says about the squirrel talking inside his head.’

  ‘He doesn’t talk exactly …’

  ‘Communicate then.’

  ‘But haven’t you noticed anything?’ asked Susso. ‘That it hurts?’

  Gudrun shook her head.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said, turning out of the wind. ‘Maybe a little. It’s hard to say what’s causing it, after everything that has happened. It gives me a headache just thinking of everything Barbro told us, and that the squirrel, that squirrel in our car, is supposed to be the same one John Bauer brought back with him from Lapland a hundred years ago.’

  She took out her lip balm and rubbed it over her lips.

  ‘It’s not easy to take it all in. So of course my head aches.’

  At first Seved thought it was the boy standing at the top of the steps, short and with narrow, sloping shoulders, legs pressed tight together. Then he saw the ancient face like a pale speck in the hood’s opening. The sharp yellow eyes.

  Seved stopped momentarily and then backed up and almost tripped over the threshold. He knew only too well what was being held in the hand hidden in the sleeve of the anorak and pressed up against the old man’s chest. Now he was in trouble.

  The old man stared at him. His grey lips were parted and the canine teeth of his lower jaw pointed upwards like two spikes. They looked worn. Between them protruded the tip of his tongue. He was wearing canvas shoes and he placed the old battered soles carefully in the snow that lay thick on the flight of steps.

  ‘What do you want?’ asked Seved from inside the gloom of the boiler room, where he had taken refuge. He tried to sound harsh but his fear of the foxshifter had a stranglehold on his vocal cords.

  ‘Flee. You must flee.’

  The cracked voice sounded so strange that it was impossible to tell if this was an accusation or an order. He had heard the forest folk talk, listened to their squeaky chattering, but it was only a lot of nonsense. Bits of words he hardly understood. But this was directed at him.

  ‘You flee. And then he will destroy. He will tear down.’

  The words had been spoken inside Seved’s head and nowhere else, and that frightened him. He had never experienced forest folk talking like this before. The old man drilled deeper and deeper inside him, and he had nowhere to run.

  ‘Kills. He kills.’

  Seved backed up until his shoulder came up against the enamelled curve of the hot-water tank. He could go no further in the cluttered cellar.

  The old foxshifter had come to a halt. He was standing motionless in the doorway, watching him. His tail had found its way out of the long jacket and was moving freely and furtively behind his legs. It was not red exactly, more a grey colour, but the tip was as white as if he had dipped it in a pot of paint.

  ‘But we’re not running away.’

  ‘You flee. And he kills.’

  Not until then did it occur to Seved that the old man might not have come to hurt him, or even rebuke him. If that was the case, he would have done it already. Instead it seemed as if he was trying to help. But it could be some kind of mischief. Skabram could have sent him.

  ‘Then what shall we do?’ he mumbled.

  There was no answer. The old man had shuffled up to the boiler. He tilted his head to one side and knocked on the green-painted casing as if to test it, whispering something only the forest mouse could hear. It had dug its claws into the old man’s shoulder and was hanging on, its tail dangling like a hook, and it was also looking at the boiler.

  ‘There’s burning.’

  Seved took a step sideways. He was not thinking of escaping exactly but he wanted to be in a position to do so if the old foxshifter turned nasty. He knew how cunning they could be.

  ‘See how it burns. When it burns.’

  What did he mean?

  ‘See how the fire bites at your fur. Biting, biting.’

  I was scared to death of meeting Mona Brodin. I imagined a wreck, a person eaten up with guilt and suppressed grief. She must have had to distance herself from all her memories to be able to go on – buried them, more or less like Jerring had done. In one way it was surprising she was still alive. If it was true she had been abusing prescription drugs at the time of her son’s disappearance, then it was not difficult to work out how she would have chosen to deal with his loss and the doubt in her own mind about what she had experienced.

  What happens to you if you can no longer trust your own eyes? Dad had asked that question often, but at least he had his camera with him. What had Mona Brodin had? What proof did she have to challenge the disbelief she faced? The suspicions directed at her? With a burden like that there was only one thing to do, and that was to betray herself and try to create someone new.

  How would she react when we appeared and raked it all up again?

  However, my fear of meeting Mona Brodin was put aside when I found out the shop had been closed all day. Instead I sat there trying to work out what could have happened to Cecilia. What if the people who had attacked Susso were not driven by a hatred for her but for our whole family? Maybe they thought we were all involved in the website – which in a
way we were. I was on the point of calling the police in Kiruna to make them aware of that when I heard my mobile’s ring tone. It was Tommy, saying that Cecilia was at home watching a video with Ella and wanted to be left alone. She’d had all her hair cut off and Tommy thought she was unhappy about it and didn’t want to show herself in public. My relief was so great that I wasn’t at all nervous by the time we pulled up outside Mona Brodin’s house.

  It looked neat and very ordinary: painted red wood panelling, black concrete roofing tiles and house plants on the windowsills. Behind a fence were apple trees with bird feeders, a small greenhouse and a vegetable garden. There were two cars, one big and one small, a guest cottage, a flagpole with a faded pennant catching the wind, and a couple of bird boxes on an oak tree on the slope leading to the edge of the pine woods.

  A man wearing blue overalls came out of the cellar door and stared at us.

  Torbjörn wondered if he should bring the squirrel.

  ‘I think we’ll save that for later,’ I said, and opened the door.

  He greeted them by imperceptibly lifting his chin, and when Gudrun asked if Mona was home he walked slowly towards them on the gravel, wanting to know what it was about. He was in his fifties and had light-grey hair combed in a centre parting. He seemed more suspicious than hostile. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his fleece.

  ‘We need to speak to her,’ Susso said. ‘About her son.’

  The man stopped walking. His eyes moved between Gudrun and Susso.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘We would really rather tell Mona,’ Susso said. ‘Is she at home?’

  ‘She’s down by the lake.’

  ‘Is it far?’

  ‘Just follow the road and then turn left. She’s burning reeds,’ he added, and it took a second or two for Susso to realise that he was telling them to keep a lookout for the flames.

  They got into the car again and Gudrun reversed out of the drive and narrowly avoided a collision.

  From behind a straggly hedge that edged the plot of land and hid the gravel road from view appeared the bonnet of a large motorhome, with six eyes and a Mercedes emblem in the middle. Gudrun braked so hard that the back of Susso’s head was thrown against the headrest.

  The motorhome rolled slowly past, and as they followed it on its way towards the ice-covered lake that soon came into view Gudrun became irritated that it was driving so slowly.

  ‘Something’s up with the squirrel,’ Torbjörn said. ‘There’s some kind of danger. It’s like it’s warning me about something.’

  The little animal was sitting on Torbjörn’s chest, holding up its paws as if to show them it had no need to hold on. When Torbjörn tried to remove the squirrel his top went with it in four extended cones as the animal’s claws dug into the material. He had to pull hard to loosen its grip, which the squirrel did not like. It struggled in Torbjörn’s hands and made an angry chattering sound.

  Torbjörn dropped the squirrel onto the seat, but it did not want to be there and instantly returned to his chest, resuming its strident chatter directly in his face.

  ‘What do you want?’ he said, concerned. ‘What’s so dangerous?’

  *

  ‘There she is,’ said Gudrun.

  Some distance along a small track a woman was standing looking at a pile of reeds. She was wearing a hat and a dark-blue padded waistcoat. In her hand she held a stick, pointed towards the ground. A white fog of smoke rising from the pile was the only sign that the reeds were burning, and every so often it hid the woman from view.

  They drove up into the snow at the roadside and left the car there. Then they walked along the track. One side was lined with bushy spruces, their bark grey, and towards the water the ground was marshy, with alders and leaning willows in a tangle of undergrowth.

  Susso had brought the briefcase with her but they had left the squirrel in the car. It might be too much all at once, especially given the way it was behaving: Torbjörn practically had to throw it down on the seat. He trudged along behind Gudrun and Susso, pulling at the neck of his sweatshirt and looking down at his chest to see if there were any scratch marks from the claws.

  A floating jetty extended into the water. Under the elder trees were a couple of wooden trestles supporting a surf board. It was patchy with green algae, and a thermos flask was balanced on the top. Mona looked at them searchingly. Her hair was tucked under her knitted hat, her complexion was tanned and downy, and her jaw line was slack. Small feathers protruded through her waistcoat and long, wavy strands of hair had attached themselves to her fleece-lined collar.

  ‘We’ve come about …’ Susso began, but she fell silent as Mona’s gaze moved over her shoulder, and when she swung round she saw that the man they had been speaking to up at the house was walking along the track towards them. He had pulled on a woollen hat and clearly wanted to know what was going on.

  ‘We would like to talk to you about what happened in 1978,’ Gudrun said. ‘When your son disappeared.’

  Mona did not appear to be surprised. She did not even look at them. She was quiet for a long time, poking at the ground with her stick, which was scorched at the tip and left small grey holes in the snow.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Have you read in the paper about the Vaikijaur man?’

  She said she had.

  ‘The person who took Mattias … we think …’

  ‘We think he belongs to the stallo folk,’ Gudrun interrupted. ‘They are a kind of troll, you might say. Lapland trolls, which really do exist. And we think whoever took Magnus also belonged to the stallo folk. And that’s what we want to talk to you about, Mona, because if they did take Magnus, then perhaps he is still alive.’

  They had not expected Mona to be overjoyed by the news, but they had expected her to be astonished at the very least. Instead she continued prodding with the stick as if she were writing in the snow.

  ‘Did you ever find out anything about the giant?’ Gudrun continued. ‘Anything at all? Whether anyone has seen him somewhere else?’

  ‘I haven’t wanted to talk about it,’ Mona answered. ‘Or rather, I haven’t had anyone I wanted to talk about it with.’

  ‘You can talk to us about it, if you like,’ said Gudrun.

  Suddenly Torbjörn leapt over the planks leading onto the jetty. Susso looked at him in surprise, but she had no time to wonder what had got into him because at the same time she heard a sound of smashing and crunching, followed immediately by a noisy crash.

  It was a car window giving way.

  Through the haze of smoke she saw someone standing over by the Passat.

  Quite rationally she thought someone was trying to break into the car, but why the hell were they doing that in broad daylight? It had to be some druggie. It was not until she stepped to one side and had a clear view that she saw what it was, and the fear sliced open a freezing cold chasm in her chest.

  In among the fir trees a stone’s throw behind Hybblet there was a hatch cover in the ground. It was made of steel and hidden by a piece of carpet with a pattern that looked like moss. Now, however, the snow lay in such deep drifts between the tree trunks that Seved had to stamp around scraping it away for a good half-hour before the shovel uncovered the frozen remnant.

  Twilight was starting to fall in the forest. The trees gradually melted together forming black shapes, and the snow became a grey mass. A raven cawed somewhere and away on the main road a lorry drove past.

  When he saw the rusty-brown shades of the carpet below the layer of snow he stopped to think. There was so much that could go wrong and he had no idea where it would end. That was probably the worst thing. Where was he to go? He tried not to think about it. He would think about Mattias and Signe. Amina.

  He had to do it now. There would never be a better opportunity. Both Karats and Lennart were far away, and so was Börje, in a sense. He was not himself, anyway, and he had been like that ever since he had returned from Kiruna.

  He cleared the s
now slowly, trying not to make a noise. If the shovel hit the hatch cover, the sound would be carried through the tunnel and into the hide. That was just over fifty metres away and the carpet would absorb the clang of metal, but there was no doubt it would be heard. Skabram was probably asleep but the little creatures never slept, at least not all at the same time, and not very deeply. If they heard an unfamiliar noise, they would wake the others immediately.

  The only thing he knew about the tunnel was that Börje’s father had made it with the intention of creating a rear exit for the hide. He had seen the hatch once, when he was about ten years old. Naturally, the hairy old-timers had not bothered to disguise it. Börje and Ejvor had gone to the trouble of doing so, but on that occasion they seemed not to notice that the carpet had been pushed aside. Or had the hatch not been hidden then? Seved could only remember the rectangular plate of steel in the moss and how it had alarmed him. Because of course he understood who would be coming in and out.

  He did not uncover the carpet completely. Instead he cleared away enough to be able to cut it open and get at the handles, which he clearly recalled. Two lengths of reinforced steel that had been bent and welded in place on each of the double doors.

  He dropped to his knees and removed his gloves. After thrusting them into his pockets he took out the Mora knife. His nose had started running and he wiped it on the back of his hand. He could feel the two raised handles below the frozen pile of the carpet. The blade was blunt and he had to saw hard to cut through the nylon backing. It was not easy to do and he had to take care in case the knife scraped against the metal below.

  Once he had slashed open a hole big enough for him to insert his fingers, he tried to widen it by pulling the carpet apart, but it was tougher than he had expected. He had to make a few more cuts with the knife. Now at least he could get his hand inside and reach the handles. He tugged them. They seemed to be attached firmly enough.