‘So that they have to manage on their own. Balthazar was lucky he could come to you instead.’
David did not know if this was true, but it soothed Magnus a bit. He pressed Balthazar harder against his chest and spoke as if he were talking to a baby, ‘Poor little Balthazar. I will be your mother.’
Incredibly, it seemed that this declaration soothed even Balthazar. He stopped struggling and rested calmly in Magnus’ hands. Sture looked around. ‘Probably best if I take him anyway.’
Balthazar was put back in Sture’s pocket and they continued their search. They caught sight of the number they were looking for in a courtyard, quite by chance. A sign above a door: 17 A-F.
Some minutes had passed as they sat in the passageway. The atmosphere in the area had changed, and as they walked toward the entrance they could hear glass shattering, a door slamming somewhere, isolated cries. People around them were moving more rapidly, looking over their shoulders, and a sound like a swarm of gnats somewhere nearby was growing.
‘What is it?’ Sture asked, staring up at the sky.
‘I don’t know,’ David said.
Magnus tilted his head, said, ‘It’s a big machine.’
They could not place the sound, what it was or where it was coming from but, as Magnus had said, it sounded as if a large machine had been turned on. Perhaps a computer, the high-frequency whirring of enormous fans.
They walked through the entrance.
Instead of the usual smells of cooking, sweat and dust there was only a sterile combination of hospital and disinfectant. Everything had been wiped down until it shone and there were letters pasted on the worn doors. A and B on the ground floor. They continued up stairs slick with cleaning fluids.
Magnus moved like a sleepwalker, putting both feet on each step. David felt his fear and adjusted his own steps to match. On the landing between the two floors Magnus stopped and said, ‘I want Balthazar.’
Balthazar was handed over and Magnus held him tightly to his chest so that only his little nose was visible, sniffing. The last few steps up to apartment C he walked as if under water.
The doorbell did not work, but before David knocked he tried the handle and found the door was unlocked. He stepped into an empty hallway with Sture and Magnus following behind.
‘Hello?’
After a couple of seconds an elderly man appeared, carrying the evening paper. He looked like a caricature of an absentminded professor: short and thin, with tufts of grey hair sticking out above his ears, glasses perched on his nose. David liked him immediately.
‘Well, well,’ the man said. ‘Are you…’ He removed his glasses and slipped them into his chest pocket as he stepped forward, his hand outstretched. ‘I’m Roy Bodström. We were the ones who…’ he held up his index and pinky finger to his ear to indicate a telephone.
They shook hands. Magnus drew back toward the door and tried to hide Balthazar with his arms.
‘Hello,’ Roy said. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Magnus,’ Magnus whispered.
‘Magnus, I see. What do you have there?’
Magnus shook his head and David stepped in.
‘It’s his birthday today and he got a rabbit that he wanted to bring along and show…Eva. She is here, isn’t she?’
‘Of course,’ Roy said and turned back to Magnus. ‘A rabbit? Yes, well then I certainly understand if you want…I would also want to. Come.’
Without further ceremony he waved for them to follow him and led them into the room from which he had appeared. David took a deep breath, put his hand on Magnus’ shoulder and followed.
The room echoed with quiet and the scattering of hospital equipment highlighted the emptiness. There was only a bed with a nightstand on which there was a machine, and next to the bed a simple armchair. On the floor next to the armchair there were a couple of issues of Journal of American Medicine. Sitting on the bed, Eva.
The bandage that had earlier covered half of her face had been replaced with a stocking of thick gauze that emphasised the damage beneath. The blue hospital gown curved in on one side of her chest. A number of cables ran from her head to the machine on the nightstand. The bed was raised in a sitting position and both of Eva’s hands rested on the institutional blanket, her one eye directed at the door through which they came.
David and Magnus slowly approached the bed. David felt Magnus’ body tense: watchful. Eva’s eye did not look anything like it had in the hospital—the grey membrane had just about dissolved and the eye looked almost healthy. Almost. On the other hand she looked as if she had lost quite a few kilos in the past few days; the healthy cheek had lost its curve and collapsed toward the oral cavity. When the corners of her mouth pulled up into a smile it looked more like a grimace.
‘David,’ she said. ‘Magnus. My boy.’
The voice still had something of its hoarseness but David would have recognised it anywhere as Eva’s. Magnus stopped, David let go of his shoulder and walked up to the bed. He didn’t dare hug Eva for fear that her body would break, so he just sat on the edge of the bed, putting his hands on her shoulders.
‘Hello, my darling,’ he said. ‘We’re here now.’
He pressed his lips to keep from crying, and waved to Magnus to come forward to the bed, which he did, hesitantly. Even Sture walked up, a step behind Magnus. Eva’s eye travelled between them.
‘My dearest,’ she said. ‘My family.’
There was silence for a moment. There was so much to say that they could say nothing. Roy came up with his hands clasped on his stomach as if to show that he was not going to do anything and he nodded at the machine.
‘So I’m just measuring EEG,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing dangerous. Just so you…’ He backed away again, with yet another unfinished sentence hanging in the air. David looked at the machine, where a number of almost-straight lines floated through blacked space, only interrupted by occasional blips, bumps.
Should it look like that?
He looked at Eva again. Her eye was appraising, calm and not at all frightening. And it sent a shiver through him. It took him a couple of seconds to realise what it was: inside his head he felt Magnus, Sture, Balthazar and Roy all in a messy jumble, but of Eva he felt nothing.
He looked straight into her eye and thought: Darling, my darling, where are you? but received no answer. When he really tried he could conjure up a faint image, a contour of what Eva was to him, but it was completely drawn from memory and had nothing to do with the person in front of him. He carefully took her hand. It felt cold even though it was surely the same temperature as the room.
‘It is Magnus’ birthday today,’ he said. ‘There was no pancake cake. I didn’t know how to make one so I bought a cake instead.’
‘Happy birthday, my dear Magnus,’ Eva said.
David saw that Magnus made a decision, overcoming what he actually felt, and he stepped up to the bed, displaying Balthazar.
‘I got a rabbit. His name is Balthazar.’
‘It is very nice,’ Eva said.
Magnus put Balthazar down on the bed and he took a couple of tentative hops, sitting between Eva’s emaciated thighs and nibbling on the tufts on the blanket. Eva did not appear to take any notice of him.
‘His name is Balthazar,’ Magnus said.
‘Balthazar is a nice name.’
‘He’s not allowed to sleep in my bed, is he?’
David opened his mouth to reply but realised that the question was directed to Eva and kept quiet. As if stating a fact, Eva said, ‘He is not allowed to sleep in your bed.’
‘Why not?’
‘Magnus…’ David put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Please stop.’
‘So is he?’
‘We’ll talk about it later.’
Magnus frowned and looked at Eva. Roy cleared his throat, took a step forward.
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘there was a little thing I was wondering about.’
David stroked the back of Eva’s hand with his finger, stood up and fo
llowed Roy a couple of steps from the bed, making space for Sture. Before he stood up he glanced at the EEG screen and saw that the bubbles on the lines had become slightly larger, spaced slightly closer together.
When they had moved away from the bed David asked, ‘Was that what you meant? That she is sort of like a…’ David could not bring himself to say ‘machine’, but that was how he felt. Eva answered all their questions, said completely reasonable things but she did it mechanically, like a rote behaviour.
Roy nodded.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It will probably get better. Like I said, there has been great progress and…’ He did not complete the sentence, but started a new one. ‘What I’m wondering about is: the Fisher. Does that mean anything to you?’
‘The Fisher?’
‘Yes. If I ask her about herself then…we always end up back at the Fisher. There’s something that frightens her.’
Sture got up from the bed and came over.
‘What are you talking about?’ he asked.
‘The Fisher,’ David said. ‘It’s something Eva says, but we don’t know what it is.’
Sture turned to the bed, where Magnus was saying something to Eva as he pointed to Balthazar, who had just crawled up on her belly. ‘I know what it is,’ he said and sighed. ‘Does she talk about it?’ Roy nodded and Sture said, ‘I see. Yes. That was something that happened when she was little, you see. She was seven and…well, I guess you could say it was my fault for not keeping a good enough eye on her. She came very close to drowning. Very close. It was right on the edge. If my wife hadn’t known exactly what to do, then…’ Sture shook his head at the memory. ‘Anyway. Once we had…brought her back to life, then…’
‘Daddy, Daddy!’
David heard Magnus’ shriek inside his head one second before it reached his ears. No, the scream inside his head came from Balthazar and just as Magnus’ voiced scream died against the walls there was another, a sound more like a bird cry, then a light cracking.
David lunged for the bed, but it was too late.
Balthazar’s body was still lying in Eva’s lap but she had his head in one hand, moving it up to her eye in order to examine it. She twisted and turned the little rabbit head where the nose still twitched and the eyes stared in terror. In her lap the legs on the headless body were still kicking and a trickle of blood found its way along a fold in the blanket, dropping to the floor.
Balthazar’s legs jerked one last time and froze. Eva’s eye looked closely at the rabbit’s eye; two black pools reflecting in each other.
Magnus screamed, ‘I hate you I hate you!’ and hit Eva across her arm, her shoulder, his arms flailing, tearing loose the cables attached to her head. David managed to get a last glimpse of the EEG peaks before they went out: tightly clustered spikes. He took hold of Magnus from behind, locked his arms in a tight hug and carried him out of the apartment, whispering words of comfort to no effect.
‘I don’t understand…she has never…’ Roy was twisting his hands and swaying on his feet, hesitant to approach the bed where Eva was examining Balthazar’s head and sticking her finger into the bloody, mucus-filled throat, its lining of tendons and ligaments hanging down in threads.
Sture walked up and gently extracted the head from Eva’s dark red hands, placing it on the night stand. He closed his eyes against Magnus’ inner screams, took out the two wooden dolls and placed these in her hands instead.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Your dolls. Eva and David.’
Eva took the dolls, holding them in her hands and looking at them.
‘Eva and David,’ she said. ‘My dolls.’
‘Yes.’
‘They are very nice.’
The tone of her voice frightened Sture more than what she had done to Balthazar. It sounded like his daughter, and not like her. It sounded like someone imitating her voice. He could not bear to listen to it and he left Eva sitting there with the dolls in her lap.
David was carrying Magnus, Sture what was left of Balthazar. Some tufts of blotchy fur that no longer dreamed of hay. Outside the front door they were confronted by a policeman waving his arms in the direction of the exit.
‘I have to ask you to leave the area immediately.’
‘What is it?’ Sture asked.
The policeman shook his head. ‘Figure it out for yourself,’ he said and ducked in through the door to continue the evacuation.
They had been so preoccupied by what had happened with Eva that they had ignored the warning cries from the field. David’s mind was filled with Magnus’ despair, but when Sture turned his attention to the outside he heard—thought—the sound of a large tree just before it falls to the axe. Sharp cracks, the trunk swaying—which way will it fall?
Thousands of consciousnesses in such panic that no thoughts could be distinguished, an ant-war going on at full volume and through it all that whining, piercing sound. Sture made a face and grabbed David’s shoulder.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘We have to get out of here. Now.’
They walked as fast as they could to the gates. Any thoughts of their own were sucked up by the field. More people were pouring out of doors and running toward the exit like they were fleeing from a fire, a war, an approaching army.
The Heath would never again be open to the public.
The Heath 13.15
Flora lay on the bench, curled up like a foetus. She hugged her backpack. Inside the world was coming to an end. Everything was exploding in demented fireworks. She shut her eyes as tightly as she could, as if to prevent her eyeballs from popping out. She couldn’t move, she could only wait for it to end, to be over.
Large numbers of dead people were having an effect on the minds of the living, but the large numbers of the living were also affecting the dead. As if through a system of prisms, emotions were being enlarged, reflected in each other, reinforced, and this went on until the force field was unbearable.
After five minutes it started to abate. The horrible thoughts dissipated and ebbed away. After ten minutes she dared to open her eyes, and realised that she had been overlooked. A couple of police officers were just leaving the courtyard. A man was sitting outside a door, weeping. He had scratches in his face and splotches of blood on his shirt collar. As Flora watched, an emergency worker came over to attend to the man’s cuts.
Flora lay absolutely still. In her black clothes she was a shadow on the bench. If she moved she would become a human, and humans had to leave.
Once the wounds had been dressed, the paramedic supported the man under an arm and led him away. The man walked as if there was a yoke across his shoulders and he was thinking of his mother, her love, and her nails—polished and painted a cherry red. She had always been particular about her nails, even during her years of illness. When all other dignity was taken from her bit by bit she still insisted that her nails be groomed and painted cherry red. These nails. One of them had been broken off when she scratched him.
Flora waited until they had left the courtyard and then peeked out. The Power told her there was no living being close by, but everything was so strange here she could not be sure.
No person in sight. She crawled out and ran through the passageway to the next courtyard. She had to wait a couple of minutes there for a few more people to leave. One of them was a psychologist or something like that, and she was seriously considering suicide when she got home. Inject herself with an overdose of morphine. She had no family. Neither here nor anywhere else.
It was a quarter to two when Flora gently knocked on Peter’s window and was let in. By that time there was not a single living consciousness left in the area.
* * *
[Daily Echo 14.00]
…have no explanation for the events at the Heath. Police and medical personnel were forced to evacuate the area shortly after one o’clock. Twelve people sustained injuries—three seriously—after having been attacked by the reliving. The Heath will remain closed to the public for the time being…
> Summary [Dept. Soc. Affairs; CLASSIFIED]
…in short, it is our conviction that the reliving are using up their intracellular resources at a rapid pace. If the present rate is taken as a guide line, it can be predicted that the resources will be exhausted in at most a week, in certain cases significantly earlier.
That is to say, if nothing is done, the reliving will be burned out in one week—for want of a better terminology.
At present we have no solution.
It may be added that we wonder if such a solution is to be wished for.
[Daily Echo, 16.00]
…have placed the Heath under a similar quarantine. A few medical personnel will remain in the area, but at present there are no plans for continued rehabilitation.
17 August II
The Fisher
Labbskär Island 16.45
The shadows had grown long by the time Mahler rose from his bolt-hole and walked back to the cottage. His body ached from the extended period of sitting on rock. He had stayed away longer than it took him to calm down. He had wanted to make a protest, to give Anna a taste of how it would be if he, superfluous as he was, were gone.
On the rocks outside the house there was an old drying rack for nets, three large T-shapes with hooks. Anna was standing under one of them, humming and hanging up Elias’ clothes, which she had washed with soap and salt water. She looked thoroughly content, not anxious as Mahler had hoped.
She heard his footsteps on the rock and turned around.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Where have you been?’
Mahler waved vaguely with his hand and Anna tilted her head, taking stock of him.
As if I were a child, Mahler thought and Anna chuckled, nodding. The low sun gleamed momentarily in her eye.
‘Have you found any water?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘And that doesn’t worry you?’
‘Yes, of course, but…’ she shrugged and hung up two tiny socks on the same hook.
‘But what?’
‘I thought you’d go and get some.’
Handling the Undead Page 26
