It’s a challenge to reason clearly when someone has just killed your father. Quite a challenge.
Disgusting bloody white disgusting…
She continued into the grass, unable to find any nice words. Everything was being taken from her, bit by bit, person by person. She saw the creature stand up, go down into the reeds and cross the sand toward the boat, toward her.
Her gaze flitted over the ground, looking for a strong tree branch, something to use as a weapon. The branches lying on the ground were all clearly rotten, otherwise they would not have fallen. The creature’s feet sloshed through wet seaweed and Anna suddenly spotted the drying rack where Elias’ socks still hung. She could break it off, she could use it as…
The creature was level with the boat now and Anna was moving parallel to the shore higher up. If she managed to break off the rack, if she could—Elias squirmed restlessly in her arms, the blanket dragging by her feet—if she could…
What? What? You can’t kill someone who’s already dead.
But nonetheless she persevered along the hill, laid Elias down on the rocky ground and pulled on the pole, forcing it back and forth. The elements had weathered the wood, but her terror made her strong and the rack broke off at its foot with a creak. Elias’ socks were still dangling on their hooks and even as the creature was coming up through the grass, only five metres away, she dashed the rack against the rockface to break off the cross board, make a clean weapon.
Mother’s little Olle, walking in the woods…
Elias’ little voice penetrated the shell of her terror and she understood. As the creature reached the foot of the boulder right under her and the cadaver stench reached her nostrils she disconnected every other thought and filled her head with:
Roses on his cheek and sunshine in his eyes lips so small, of blueberries so blue
She could not think nice, but she could sing in her mind. The creature stopped. Its legs froze, its arms went limp. A machine suddenly run out of fuel.
If only I did not have to walk here quite so alone.
The tears ran silently down Anna’s cheeks as she saw a black substance smeared around the creature’s mouth, but she would not think about Daddy’s blood, nor anything that could lead her thoughts to anger and hatred. Instead she went on reciting:
Brummelibrum, Hark! Who goes there?
The bushes are shaking, it must be a dog.
The irony of the lyrics made her body tremble, but she was no longer in her body. She was standing beside it. Noting its changes, seeing what it saw, but directing: directing the body’s brain to keep singing.
The creature turned and walked back the way it had come: toward the inlet, toward the jutting rocks, toward her father’s body. She did not reflect on this, simply noted that it was happening.
She waited half a minute until she reached the end of the song, then wrapped Elias in the blanket and walked down to the boat. The yellow moon was reflected in a little pool on the rock face and as the grass whispered over her legs she saw—
Yellow?
—that yellow glow was all wrong. She looked again. The light was coming from the cell phone. She had dropped it. Still singing the same song—she dared not change in case she broke her concentration—she fished up the phone and laid it on Elias’ stomach, walked down to the boat.
Teddy he eats almost all that there is…
She settled Elias on the bottom and avoided looking toward the inlet as she pushed the boat out from the edge of the shore, took a couple of steps into the water and crawled in. The boat floated well and they glided out onto the faintly ruffled water. Anna sat in the middle seat, and saw the bags of food, the water. In the silence she heard the moist crunching sounds from the inlet, the sound of a fish being gutted. Her lower jaw started to quiver, she hugged herself.
He tried to…he meant well…he just wanted to…filthy disgusting…Holds out his basket with chubby little hands…
She had to keep singing. The creature could swim.
She unshipped the oars with shaking hands and rowed out into the inlet on the other side. She knew it was in the wrong direction, but she could not stand to get closer, perhaps see…
When she had rowed about fifty strokes and there was only the blue expanse of the Sea of Åland behind her back she let the oars go, let them hang freely from the rowlocks and crept down next to Elias, curled up on the bottom next to him and let everything come. Stopped fleeing, stopped singing, simply stopped.
The southerly breeze was slowly moving them farther and farther out. Gåskobb Island floated past and soon Söderarm’s lone blinking eye was the only thing that could be seen between space and the sea.
The Heath 22.00
Flora stood there gazing at the mass of tangled bodies.
That evening in Elvy’s garden she had wished—she had known—that something was going to happen. Something that would change Sweden forever. Now it had happened, and what was the change?
Nothing.
Terror gave birth to terror, hatred begat hate and all that was left in the end was a pile of burnt bodies. As everywhere; as always.
Something was moving among the bodies.
At first she thought it was fingers that had managed to survive the blaze somehow and were now struggling to make their way out. Then she saw it was caterpillars. White caterpillars burrowing their way out of some of the bodies. The stench from the bonfire was unbearable despite her face mask and she shuffled back a couple of metres.
Only seven caterpillars had emerged, even though there had been around fifteen people to start.
She took the others.
She knew the caterpillars were people…no, the caterpillars were the human element in the people, given a visible form it was possible to comprehend in this world. Not even her twin was really her twin—she wasn’t anything that could be understood in human terms. Flora had known that in the second they had stared into each other’s eyes.
The other Flora, the one wearing her best sneakers, was only a force: one that manifested itself in a way that made sense to each individual. The only constant was the hooks, since the task of the power was to catch, to collect. And not even the hooks were anything real, simply an image people could understand.
The caterpillars that had emerged from the black mass wriggled, nowhere to go now that their host had been destroyed.
Lost, Flora thought. Lost.
There was nothing she could do. They had turned away in fear and were now lost. As she watched they swelled up, becoming first pink, then red.
Faintly, faintly, Flora could hear screams of anguish as the caterpillar-people realised what she already knew: they were now being pulled inexorably to the other place. The place of which nothing can be said. Nothing.
The caterpillars swelled even more, the thin membrane stretching, and the screams grew stronger. Flora’s head spun because she knew that none of this was really happening. Only the fact that she was watching made it visible, it was an invisible drama that was enacted before her eyes, as old as the human race.
With a plop—audible yet inaudible—the caterpillars burst one by one and a viscous, translucent fluid ran out, evaporating in the heat of the scorched bones as the screams faded away.
Lost.
She backed away from the bonfire, sitting down on the bench a couple of metres away, trying to think. She knew too much, much too much. The knowledge that had flooded into her head during that second of eye contact had been too much, she was not able to bear it.
Why? Why has this happened?
She knew. She knew everything. It could not be put into words, but something had happened in the greater order of things. And one of the minor effects, here on our little planet, was that within a certain circumscribed area, the dead had awakened. A hurricane had led to the beating of a butterfly’s wings. In the greater scheme it was nothing, one of those things that happens from time to time. A footnote, at most, in the book of the gods.
Suddenly she sat up st
raight on the bench. She remembered something Elvy had said outside the gates earlier…was it today? Was it still the same day she had gone for a walk with Maja and…yes, the same day.
She took out her phone and dialled Elvy’s number. By some miracle it was not any of the ladies or that repulsive guy who answered, but Elvy herself. She sounded tired.
‘Nana, it’s me. How’s it going?’
‘Not so good. Things are…not so good.’
Flora could hear raised voices in the background, people quarrelling. The events of the day had caused ructions in the group.
‘Nana, listen to me. Do you remember what you told me today?’
Elvy sighed. ‘No, I don’t know…’
‘The woman in the TV, you showed her to me…’
‘Yes, yes. All that, it…’
‘Wait. She said to you that they must come unto me, isn’t that right?’
‘We are trying,’ Elvy said. ‘But…’
‘Nana, she didn’t mean the living. She meant the dead.’
Flora told her what had happened in the courtyard. The gang of young men, the fire, her twin, the caterpillars.
As she was talking, she could feel in another part of her mind that people were approaching the area. These ones were not of a friendly mind-set either. Rage and hatred were approaching. Perhaps the guys had fetched some of their buddies, or there were others with the same idea.
‘Nana, you’ve seen her too. You have to come here. Right now. They…they’ll disappear otherwise.’
The other end went quiet for a while, and then Elvy said with an entirely new strength in her voice, ‘I’ll take a taxi.’
As Flora hung up she realised that they had not arranged a meeting place. Still, that would take care of itself. Their minds were so in tune that it was like having walkie-talkies, at least while they were in this area. More problematic was the question of how Elvy would get in. But that was something they could deal with later.
Flora stood up. Hard people with minds bent on evil were coming.
What do I say, what do I do?
She ran out of the courtyard. She knew that somewhere in this complex there was a reliving whose thinking approximated her own, who thought in the same images. She was looking for 17C.
While she ran, dead people were coming out of the buildings and gathering outside. No dancing now. There were still faces that simply watched from the windows above, but with each passing minute they were getting fewer. The whining, piercing sound of the dentist’s drill was growing. In the distance she felt more living people approaching—the gates must have been opened.
She ran with panic in her chest, an approaching catastrophe, a river of terror that she was not capable of damming. She found number 17 and ran in, then paused.
A dead person was on his way down the steps. An old man whose legs had been amputated was dragging himself down, down on his stomach. On each step his chin smacked into the concrete with a thud that hurt Flora’s mouth. He was near the surface, she could hear him:
Home…home…home…
When Flora passed him, he reached for her but she twisted herself free and continued up to apartment C, flinging the door open.
Eva was standing in the hallway, on her way out. Her face was simply a pale blotch in the weak light from the stairwell that filtered through the door and illuminated the bandage over half her face.
Without thinking, Flora stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. At the moment the link between them was established Flora knew what to say. She closed her mind to everything going on outside and thought:
Come out. Listen to me.
The body struggled in her grip. What was still Eva in Eva answered:
No. I want to live.
You are not going to live. That door is closed. There are two ways out.
Flora transmitted the two images of souls leaving their fleshly bonds. The ones who were collected, and those that disappeared. The words were not her own, they were simply voiced through her.
Allow it to happen. Give yourself up.
Eva’s soul neared the surface; the whining intensified somewhere behind Flora’s back. Like a sea swallow that has been searching across the ocean for a long time, the Fisher now let itself swoop down to the glinting flash of silver, toward its catch.
I just want to…say goodbye.
Do it. You are strong.
Before the Fisher had time to take its shape, before Eva’s soul had time to take the shape of the Fisher’s catch, Eva leaped out of her chest and flew with the speed only disembodied spirit can command. A whisper brushed Flora’s skin as a life flitted past her, the flame of a consciousness flickered in her head, and was gone. Eva’s body collapsed at Flora’s feet.
Good luck.
The whining grew more distant. The Fisher took up the chase.
Svarvagatan 22.30
David slept, and was dreaming. He was locked in a labyrinth, running along corridors. Sometimes he reached a door, but the door always turned out to be closed. Something was chasing him. Something that was always following, just behind a corner somewhere. He knew it was Eva’s face, but it wasn’t Eva. It was something that had assumed her form the better to get at him.
He tugged at door handles, screaming, feeling all the while the encroachment of something wholly the opposite of love. The worst thing was that he felt he had left Magnus behind; he was back in some room in the dark where the terrible thing could get him.
He ran along an endless corridor, towards a door he knew would be closed. As he ran he noticed something happening to the light in the corridor. All the passages he’d been running through had been lit by cold neon, but now there was another light. Daylight, sunlight. He looked up as he ran. The ceiling of the corridor was gone and he saw a summer sky.
As he laid his hand on the door handle he knew this door would open, and it did. It opened, all the walls dissolved and he was standing on a lawn by Kungsholm shore. Eva was there.
He knew what day it was, felt the moment. A big orange motorboat was approaching along the canal. Yes. He had looked at it, there was an orange spot on his retina, and then he turned to Eva and asked, ‘Do you want to marry me?’
And she said yes.
‘Yes! Yes!’
And they tumbled onto the blanket and embraced and they made plans and promised For Ever and For Ever and the man in the orange boat wolf-whistled at them and it was that day now and the boat was approaching and in a moment he would ask his question but right before the words left his lips Eva took his face between her hands and said: ‘Yes. Yes. But I have to go now.’
David shook his head. His head turned back and forth on the pillow and he said, ‘You can’t go.’
Eva’s mouth smiled, but her eyes were sad.
‘We’ll see each other again,’ she said. ‘It will take a few years, that’s all. Don’t be afraid.’
He shook off his blankets, held his arms out to the bedroom ceiling, he reached out his arms for her on the lawn and a piercing cry came between them.
The lawn, the canal, the boat, the light and Eva were sucked up, shrinking to a single point and he opened his eyes. He was lying in Magnus’ bed with his arms outstretched. From his right he heard a whining sound almost loud enough to deafen him; he was not permitted to look in that direction. A white caterpillar lay curled up on his stomach.
The scent of cheap perfume filled the room and he knew it, he recognised it. He saw a hint of pink out of the corner of his eye. His head was locked, he could not turn it to see his own image of Death, the woman in the grocery store. A hand reached into his field of vision. Colourful bracelets hung from the wrist and at the tips of the fingers there were hooks.
No! No!
His hands flew out, cupped over the caterpillar. The hooks halted, some ten centimetres from his hand. They were not permitted to touch him, he was a living. The caterpillar wriggled, tickling the palm of his hand and through the skin of his hand, in through the flesh and into his bone
s, there came a plea:
Let me go.
David shook his head, he tried to shake his head. He wanted to jump out of his bed with the caterpillar cupped in his hands, escape the house, get away from the Earth, the very world where things must be this way. But he was paralysed with fear as Death stood by his bedside. And he refused to let go.
The caterpillar swelled under his hand. The hooks slowly pulled back out of sight. The plea grew weaker, Eva’s voice faded away, layer upon layer of darkness was coming between her and the part of him that could hear her. Only a whisper:
If you love me…let me go…
David let out a sob and lifted his hands.
‘I love you.’
The caterpillar on his stomach was swollen now, pink. It looked sick. Dying.
What have I done, what have I…
The hooks were there again, the hook on the index finger drilled into the caterpillar, lifted it up and David’s mouth shaped around a scream but before it came something happened.
Where the hook had entered the caterpillar, a crack opened. The hand lingered before his eyes, as if to show him what was happening now. The crack widened and he saw that the caterpillar was not a caterpillar but a pupa. A head was emerging from the crack, no bigger than the head of a pin.
The butterfly made its way out of the pupa and the dry shell fell away, dissolving. It sat motionless on the hook for a moment, as if to dry its wings or display itself, then it lifted, flying upward. David followed it with his eyes and saw it disappear through the ceiling.
When he looked down again the hand with the hooks was gone and the whining noise had abated. He stared up at the ceiling, toward the point where the butterfly had disappeared.
Disappeared.
Magnus moved next to him. In his sleep he said, ‘Mummy…’
David got up out of bed, careful not to wake Magnus. He closed the door behind him so he wouldn’t hear. Then he lay down on the kitchen floor and cried until the tears dried up and he was empty. The world was empty again.
I believe.
There is a place where happiness exists. A place, and a time.
Handling the Undead Page 31
