Stallo

by Stefan Spjut

  Exhausted and confused, but at the same time filled with a paralysing gratitude, I sank to my knees beside her. Her mouth was smeared with dark blood that had coagulated in streaks, and that terrified me until I realised it had come from the bear. She had removed her arm from the bear’s jaws and the hand that was holding the small dripping revolver was lying across her heaving chest. Her Inca hat had slipped off and the back of her head was resting on the ice, with her hair fanned out in the snow. Her eyes were closed but the tension showed in the furrow between her eyebrows.

  ‘Have you seen?’ I said. ‘Have you seen what’s happened to it?’

  With a barely perceptible nod she indicated that she knew what had happened to the troll. It looked as if she was in pain and I asked her if she was hurt, but she shook her head, even though I could tell a mile off she was lying. I looked up at Torbjörn. He had picked up the brown envelope with the newspaper articles and was crouching down, holding one hand on Susso’s heavy boot and rubbing it with his thumb. Not that she would have been able to feel it.

  ‘Oh thank God!’ I panted. ‘And thank you, Sven!’

  Torbjörn nodded.

  ‘And Verner,’ he said quietly, glancing at the bear.

  Susso opened her eyes and squinted at me.

  ‘It’s the squirrel you should be thanking. He saved me.’

  She tried to see what was behind her but only managed a partial turn of her head before grimacing and letting her head fall back on the snow.

  ‘Where is it?’ she asked weakly.

  Torbjörn nodded towards the little island.

  ‘It rushed up there when you fired. I expect it was scared.’

  *

  Mona got away with light concussion. Her partner Klas, on the other hand, was still unconscious when the ambulance arrived. The doctor at Sankt Göran’s hospital said he had been lucky and would probably make a full recovery.

  A couple of police inspectors had come from the Västerort police to talk to us all. They had recovered the bear’s corpse and were going to send it to the National Veterinary Institute. One of the police officers told Susso that if she had not shot the bear in the mouth, she would probably never have stopped it.

  *

  Judging from the animal’s ears, which were pierced in several places where presumably there had once been earrings, it must have been an imported circus bear that had gone crazy, or so one of the police officers said.

  Where it had come from remained to be seen. It was a mystery.

  That’s what we thought too, of course, from our angle.

  How had it found us?

  The preferable choice of doubting the existence of trolls was no longer an option and I have to say I missed that alternative as I sat there in the brightly lit waiting room. It’s not such a bad idea to doubt at times.

  But we had been given an answer to the question of why trolls had never been found.

  They hid themselves.

  They took refuge in the shape of animals.

  You would certainly have to look hard to find a better hiding place.

  My restless fingers played with the glossy magazines on the side table but naturally I couldn’t read them. I couldn’t even look at the pictures. I looked at Mona from time to time. She was sitting with her arms folded, her head leaning against the wall and her eyes pinned to the floor, and I wondered what was going on in her mind.

  What must she be thinking!

  As I understood it, she had turned on the troll when it got hold of Klas, who had slipped on the ice. Was it pent-up rage, years of bottomless grief and all-consuming despair that had made her go on the attack?

  The giant who had taken her child – was this the same one?

  I badly wanted to know but didn’t like to ask her. It didn’t seem proper at a time like this, when I could hardly even bring myself to look at her. And what were we doing there, really? We knew the police would want to talk to us, naturally, but the real reason we had followed the ambulance to the hospital was that we didn’t know where else to go. We were shocked, all three of us. Torbjörn had actually been shaking in the back seat. It was cold in the car because of the missing window but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t only the temperature that was making him shake like that.

  Susso, on the other hand, seemed calm, and for a while I was afraid she was damaged inside, paralysed somehow. But she wasn’t. She drove the whole way to the hospital. I told her that her face was covered in blood, so she spat in her hand and rubbed at it, but that made little difference. Once inside the hospital she walked off briskly to fetch mugs of hot coffee for us and she answered the police officers’ questions clearly and steadily. She was even sarcastic. Why had she had been carrying a revolver in her bag? To hunt bears. Was it her weapon? Yes. Did she have a licence? For hunting bears? No, a licence for the weapon. No. So who did the revolver belong to, then? Verner von Heidenstam. Heidenstam? Yes. The poet Heidenstam? Yes. Isn’t he dead?

  ‘Yes,’ she had sighed, nodding. ‘So now it’s mine.’

  I thought they were going to take the gun from her, but they didn’t. They never mentioned it again and I got the impression those burly police officers thought Susso was a tough customer as she sat there slurping coffee, her face smeared with blood.

  And that’s what I thought too. I was amazed at the incredible strength she was showing and didn’t know whether she had always been like that, or whether something inside her had changed as she lay under that troll, fighting for her life.

  Later a crowd of visitors came into the waiting room – I never worked out who they were – and when they began talking in whispers to Mona I looked around for my bag, thinking it was time we were off.

  Torbjörn was like a robot.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said, and he stood up without a word. He had put in some snus and was standing with his mouth open, very pale and with the hood of his top turned inside out. Susso was sleeping, so I shook her knee.

  ‘We’re going now,’ I said.

  ‘No!’ Mona said. ‘You’re not going anywhere!’

  A man with wide shoulders was standing in front of her and she had to lean to one side to be able to see us.

  ‘I think it’s best …’ I stammered.

  ‘You have to tell me … you’ve got to tell me what happened today.’

  My first thought was that she was suffering from amnesia from the bump on her head, but then I saw it was corroboration she wanted.

  ‘You’re not leaving me here! Not again!’

  Again? We had never met before. But then I understood exactly what she meant.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t know what to say … It wasn’t a bear, I can tell you that. It was …’

  ‘Oh, it was a bear all right,’ Susso said. ‘But not only a bear.’

  What she said was incomprehensible, you could see that written on the faces turned towards her.

  ‘He could mutate,’ she said, waving her hands. ‘Shapeshift.’

  Her explanation did nothing to clarify things for them. Quite the reverse. Shapeshift?

  ‘He was the one who took Magnus,’ Mona said, looking at one of the women standing beside her, who I took to be her sister.

  ‘Was that him?’ I said, stepping forwards, clutching the strap of my bag. ‘Are you sure it was the same one?’

  ‘Do you understand now?’ Mona said. ‘Do you understand that what I saw was real?’

  She looked entreatingly at the woman next to her, who was looking sad. She had spectacles with thick light-blue frames and her cheeks drooped in thick wads.

  The man in the down jacket pointed at me.

  ‘Who are these people, Mona?’ he asked.

  And then he said:

  ‘Leave Mona alone! Do you hear?’

  But Torbjörn had pulled his mobile out of his trouser pocket.

  ‘I filmed him,’ he said.

  ‘Karats is dead,’ Börje said.

  He was sitting at the kitchen table holding the receiver in his ha
nd. The coiled cord ran across the room and was so taut it had straightened out in places. The gravity of the news made him incapable of getting out of the chair and hanging up. Seved took the phone from him and replaced it in its base on the wall.

  ‘Those Myréns have shot him. Down in Stockholm.’

  Seved had nothing to say and clearly that irritated Börje.

  ‘Don’t you understand what that means!’

  Seved continued to say nothing. Ever since Skabram left Hybblet he had felt as if something had come to a standstill inside him. He had no idea what it was, only that suddenly and unexpectedly everything stood still, like the hands of a clock that had stopped working. He swallowed hard.

  ‘What about the one up at the Holmboms’ then? Luttak.’

  ‘I’ve phoned Torsten’s mobile but he’s not answering. But if Skabram has picked up on it, then you can bet he’s taken off as well. And Urtas. Wherever he might be.’

  ‘But where would they go?’

  ‘I don’t expect they even know that themselves. They’ll wander about and, if worst comes to worst, they’ll get shot. Otherwise they’ll make their way back eventually.’

  ‘But Urtas never came back.’

  Börje snorted and said sneeringly:

  ‘Those fellows are ancient. Luttak is almost certainly a thousand. Urtas has been gone twenty-five years but that’s like an afternoon for them. He’ll be back when he feels like it.’

  Now, thought Seved, this is where I ought to tell him, tell him I know I haven’t always been with them. That I know who took me and why – I just don’t know why they chose me. Was it by chance? Who am I – really?

  Then he looked at Börje, sitting at the kitchen table in his worn denim shirt, his hair hanging in greasy strands over his lined forehead and the palm of his hand pressed to his chest where the bear had sunk his claws in. He knew he would never be able to find the words.

  ‘What the hell were you doing in there anyway?’ Börje said, nodding towards the window.

  They had not closed the door to Hybblet and the small shapeshifted creatures were still on the veranda and in the yard, milling about, unconcerned. The dogs had barked themselves hoarse and were too worn out now to make a sound.

  ‘Nothing. I just thought I’d tidy up.’

  It was Börje’s job to draw up the rotas for cleaning and feeding, and to make sure they were followed, but presumably he was too weary to work out whose turn it was because all he said was:

  ‘Tidy up? In the afternoon?’

  ‘So what happened in Stockholm then?’

  The question came fast and brought Börje’s thoughts back to the phone call from Lennart, and that depressed him. All he could do was shake his head.

  ‘She’s nothing but trouble, that girl,’ he said, and his yellow teeth flashed. ‘She took the gun from Jola when we were up in Kiruna. Pulled it right out of his hand. And now this.’

  He leaned heavily across the table, staring vacantly to one side for a few moments, lost in thought, before saying:

  ‘Lennart thinks someone helped her.’

  ‘Who would that be?’

  ‘That’s what we don’t know. She was down in Småland, that’s for sure, and it’s possible she met up with someone who contacted her through that website.’

  ‘Well, what are we going to do now?’

  ‘We’ll have to wait and see. The old-timer will come back tonight, I’m sure.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘They always come back. Sooner or later.’

  *

  Compact flurries of snow swept in columns across the yard and were illuminated in the lamplight as Seved hurried back to the house. He had been in the barn looking for the foxshifter but there was no sign of him. Maybe he had taken the opportunity to slip away now that the hide was empty?

  Börje had said it might get a bit out of hand while Skabram was gone, and it turned out he was right. After shapeshifting into animals the majority of the woodland beings naturally shied away from daylight, or were reticent to say the least, but in the absence of the old-timers many of them appeared to have forgotten that.

  When he had entered the barn he had noticed a pair of squirrels perched on the antlers decorating the wall, and a pine marten had been stretched out on the netting of the dog compound for hours. The dogs were disturbed by those black eyes staring down at them but had made only a half-hearted attempt to bark at the inaccessible spectator. Seved had told Börje about the pine marten because he was surprised there had been one in Hybblet, but Börje told him it usually stayed in the fir trees behind the house, and so did the squirrels. They wanted to be close to the bearshifters but not too close, and now that the big old-timers were gone, they were worried.

  Amina and Mattias were playing Connect Four on the floor when Seved barged in through the cellar door. They were still extremely frightened, especially the boy, and jumped when the door flew open. When Seved had gone down to them after Skabram’s attack of rage he had found them curled up and terrified at the top of the bed, and Amina said they thought he had been bitten and killed. Now Mattias did not want to go out, and that was a problem. Seved could always carry the boy out to the car at night but he was afraid he would call out, and Börje woke at the slightest sound. He had slept half-awake all his life and could only get a good night’s sleep when he was drunk, but he would not be drinking that night.

  This was one of the reasons Seved had been looking for the foxshifter. A mouseshifter would probably have been able to calm the boy down, at least enough to keep him from getting hysterical. He had gone into Hybblet to try and catch one but had failed. They would not come out, let alone allow themselves to be caught. They were always much more fearful when they were camouflaged in fur.

  Some of them even forgot they could be anything other than mice.

  Now he crouched down and watched Mattias and Amina playing. Amina sat cross-legged and hunched, and Mattias was kneeling. He had filled his hand with discs and picked one out each time it was his turn. The red discs, which were Amina’s, had already made one vertical and one horizontal row, but they carried on playing anyway.

  Seved waited for Amina to look at him, and when she did he said:

  ‘I can’t find him, so it’s best we wait.’

  Torbjörn turned on his phone and held the screen towards them. Everyone in the waiting room, apart from Mona and Gudrun, pressed forwards to see.

  The picture was poor quality and shaky, but there was the troll, standing stock still far away on the ice beside Susso. The squirrel could not be seen, naturally, and from a distance the troll looked a lot like a bear. The man in the grey jacket was quick to point that out. He sighed and pulled a face to show he had seen enough but still he could not tear himself away from the film.

  Suddenly the camera zoomed in, precisely when the troll threw itself at Susso. The picture had stabilised and Gudrun came running into it, shrieking. The man in the grey jacket – Göran, Mona had called him – frowned.

  All of a sudden he said:

  ‘There was a letter, Mona.’

  He seemed as if he wanted to avoid eye contact with the others while he was speaking. This was clearly difficult for him, something he had been carrying for a long time.

  ‘A letter came and I never told you about it. It was four, five years after Magnus disappeared, and you were starting to feel better. I didn’t want to make it worse by dragging up the past …’

  There was silence in the room. Everyone was waiting for him to continue, which he did after twisting the rod of the venetian blind a couple of times. A flap of checked shirt was sticking out from below his jumper.

  ‘The letter came from a woman in Kramfors who had read about you in the paper, read what you had said about the giant and all that. She said there was a giant living at her neighbour’s, and that she had seen it. With her own eyes. It was living in their guest cabin. There was a rumour that the couple’s son had died, and when the woman saw the giant she remembered wh
at she’d read in the paper. She thought they might be the ones who had taken Magnus, to replace the child they had lost.

  ‘So she looked in the cabin window. The curtains were drawn so she couldn’t see anything, but the neighbours must have seen her because a couple of weeks later they moved. I thought it was nonsense and I wanted to protect you from it. So I didn’t say anything.’

  Mona sat staring at his back. Her fingers were resting in her lap, not moving. It was impossible to tell if she had understood what he had told her. She looked completely blank.

  ‘What was her name?’ Gudrun asked. ‘Have you still got the letter?

  He shook his head, his gaze directed at the windowsill.

  ‘But I remember what the family was called,’ he said. ‘The name has stayed with me for some reason, I don’t know why. It was a fairly unusual name, so perhaps that’s why …’

  He turned round.

  ‘Skarf,’ he said. ‘Skarf was the name.’

  *

  There was no reason for Mona to sit and wait. Klas would not be coming round for a long time and his condition was stable, so she ought to go home and get some sleep. But she just shook her head, and when Göran said naturally he would go with her, she shouted that she did not want to go home.

  That she never wanted to go home again. That she did not dare!

  Susso stood with a plastic mug of water raised to her mouth and looked at Mona.

  ‘If it’s a troll you’re afraid of, then it’s more dangerous sitting here in the waiting room,’ she said. ‘It was me it was looking for, not you.’

  Torbjörn had done a search on his mobile for Skarf. There were about thirty people with that name in the whole country, but none of them lived north of Stockholm, oddly enough. It seemed to be a family name in Småland, in the south.

  ‘We’ll have to phone round and ask if any of them have ever lived in Kramfors,’ he said. ‘I’m sure it’s possible to find out, if we do it carefully.’

  He went out to phone straight away.

  ‘They live in Boden now,’ he said, when he returned. ‘Inger Skarf has remarried someone called Yngve Fredén. I spoke to one of Inger’s cousins, but he didn’t have an address or telephone number. I searched but I couldn’t find anything, but I’m sure we can find out somehow.’