The Forbidden Place

by Susanne Jansson

  “Maybe,” Göran said, raising his eyebrows and taking a sip of coffee.

  “In any case,” Maya said. “Go on. How did you come to quit physics?”

  “We moved here. And my focus… how should I put it?… shifted. This was in the late eighties. God, how time flies. That was almost thirty years ago.”

  “What happened?”

  “What happened? Well, what can I say? After living here for a while I noticed… well, that something wasn’t quite right.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “At first I suppose it was just a feeling. But then things started happening. More concrete things.”

  “Such as?”

  Göran threw up his hands. “The disappearances.” He glanced at her. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Isn’t that what you really want to talk about?”

  Maya stirred her mug and nodded slowly.

  “I’ve suspected for a long time that all the disappearances that have happened in this area of the country have something to do with Mossmarken,” Göran said.

  “Yes, I heard you had such suspicions.”

  “I’ve called the police countless times. But they won’t listen. I suppose I’m on some list of crazies. A red light probably starts blinking when my number pops up. Or it has until now, because as it happens I tipped off the police some time ago that they should check for Stefan Wiik here.”

  “Who else do you claim vanished here, and how did you come to believe they vanished in this particular place?”

  He stood up, left the room, and soon returned with a thick envelope.

  “Look at this,” he said, spreading a couple of dozen sheets of paper across the table.

  Each page contained a name, age and date of disappearance, neatly listed, as well as a photograph and newspaper clippings. Maya bent forward and let her eyes wander across the table. They were captured by one of the images.

  Stefan Wiik.

  Several years in the ground, but he was still recognizable.

  “I’m sure you’ve heard of this boy,” Göran said, picking up a piece of paper with a picture of a little boy with a big smile. “He disappeared on a field trip to the area ten or eleven years ago and has never been found. Several years before that, a middle-aged German woman went missing; she was believed to have visited Mossmarken just before she vanished, but after a while the search was called off and it was decided that she probably went back home. And it just keeps on like this. Mossmarken has been on the fringes of an interminable number of cases, but no one has bothered to pay attention to the pattern.”

  He paused for a moment and went on in a low voice.

  “But for me, the pattern has only become more obvious. I’ve studied it, growing more and more interested in… what can I say? Old superstitions. Stories of the apparently unexplainable. I’ve read up on theories about evil spirits, ghouls—ghosts, if you prefer. If you just believe in a tiny little snippet of all this, maybe these disappearances are no longer as inexplicable. But of course, I made trouble for myself. This interest stands in direct opposition to my academic position, and I haven’t set foot at my institution for many years. My reputation is probably considered quite low.”

  Maya bent forward. Among all the papers and documents in the envelope was a thick folder he hadn’t touched.

  “What’s this?” she asked, indicating the folder.

  “That’s… research I’ve conducted about… my wife. She disappeared too. Right after Nathalie and her family moved here.”

  “Oh yes, I heard about that.”

  “I’m not so eager to talk about that, if it’s okay. Many people believe she just took off.”

  “So she didn’t?”

  Göran looked at her. “Like I said, I’d prefer not to talk about it.”

  Maya straightened up. “Okay, I understand. But if you’re not at the university any more, how do you support yourself? Surely this can’t be a very lucrative trade, the ghost business?”

  He smiled. “You have no idea. There are tons of publications all over the world that deal with supernatural phenomena in various ways. I’ve probably written for half of them. In different languages. Lucrative might not be the right word, but I get by.”

  “So you’re saying that you, how should I put it?…believe in ghosts?”

  Göran laughed aloud and tossed his head. “Nathalie used to ask the same thing. Back then I was extremely uninformed in the subject and I never knew what to say.”

  “But you do now?”

  “Oh, I’ve been doing this for almost three decades now, and when you’ve studied something that intensely, with any luck you eventually gain a certain amount of knowledge. And what’s more, I’ve more or less developed a relationship with the spirits in this particular place. They’re my neighbors. I’ve gone long periods in which they’re the only ones I meet.”

  Maya felt herself becoming a little tense. She found his madness amusing, to be sure, but at the same time there was something about his manner that made her ill at ease; something that made him seem not quite harmless.

  The intelligent fools are also the most dangerous.

  She couldn’t remember where she’d heard that. Was it Leif?

  “So what have you settled on?” she asked.

  He cocked his head and gave her a long look. Then he stood up, fetched the coffee pot, refilled their mugs, and sat back down.

  “If we humans are different from each other when we’re alive, that’s nothing compared to what happens to us when we die. What we call ghosts can be wildly varied phenomena. I think the place and its history guide the form its eventual spirits take on.”

  “How about this place?” Maya asked. “How would you describe the ghosts you believe haunt Mossmarken?”

  “I’ve got to know them as… how can I explain it? Loosely connected human trash.”

  Maya leaned back. “Okay?”

  “Imagine a person when their body and soul are gone. What’s left over. The trash.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Thoughts drained of contents that can’t find their way home. Eternal torment without pain. Erased memories that get stuck. That sort of thing.”

  “But,” Maya said, “isn’t what you’re describing… nothing?”

  Göran looked pleased. “Exactly. That’s precisely why I say it’s a contradiction to say that ghosts exist. Because a ghost is a negation, an emptiness. But this emptiness, this lacking thing, it can possess enormous power. A sort of… hunger. I believe that was what I felt when I moved here, what interested me from the start.”

  “And how do you claim that these undead spirits, which don’t exist, are connected with the disappearances?” Maya asked.

  He squinted. “What do you think?”

  Neither of them spoke for a moment. Maya was feeling distinctly uncomfortable. She needed to get out of there.

  “I don’t quite understand, but you claim… they hunger for… living people?”

  “Yes, for the body and soul they lack.”

  Göran leaned toward her and looked into her eyes. His pupils dilated as he blocked the light.

  “The problem is, since these spirits also lack a brain, they have no idea that once their victim is dead they can’t make use of the body or the soul. It’s completely illogical. But when it comes to ghosts, you can’t expect logic. That’s about all I can say with certainty.”

  Maya closed her eyes and tried to bring his lines of reasoning together. “So you’re saying that of everyone who might be buried out there, some are like the Lingonberry Girl and were sacrificed to appease the gods, and some have been more like swallowed by the ground, called there by those who are already dead?”

  “Yes. Although in modern times I expect it’s only the latter. It’s not as if we sacrifice humans any more.”

  Maya stiffened. The muscles in her face pulled tight. She had forgotten that the general public didn’t know all the details surrounding Johannes Ayeb and Stefan Wiik.
r />   “Okay?” said Göran, who seemed to have noticed the change in her. He observed her for a moment and ran his thumb over his lips. “Human sacrifices?” he whispered. “You think Stefan Wiik was sacrificed?”

  “I can’t get into any…” She threw up her hands. “Sorry!”

  “You don’t have to say anything; I can see it on your face. What did you find in his grave? Tools? Jewelry? Other valuables? Money?”

  She looked at him beseechingly, but it seemed he had come to his own conclusions.

  “It’s like I’ve always said, as long as they’re being sacrificed you might as well send as much as you can along with them.”

  “Who have you talked to about this?” she asked.

  “Who have I talked about this with? I’ve been working on this for almost thirty years; who haven’t I talked to?”

  He appeared to gather himself.

  “May I ask one more thing?” he asked, his voice eager. “If you were at the museum in Karlstad maybe you know that people sometimes used poles to keep the bodies in place, and maybe also to keep them from rising as the undead. It’s true that there’s only anecdotal evidence that poling truly stops the undead, but I have to ask—this man you found, from Brålanda, is there any chance he was… you know, run through by a pole?”

  Maya could tell that their roles were reversed. Now he wanted something from her.

  “I’m sure it won’t be long before that sort of information gets out to the newspapers, in that event,” she said. “But until then, you’ll have to be patient.”

  He shrugged.

  “Listen,” she went on, “these undead… how would you expect them to look? In a physical sense?”

  “Well, not like you would picture a ghost, if that’s what you’re thinking. No transparent old folks—although I have heard that images of the dead can emerge in water. The only physical form I myself have potentially seen them take on is… smoke or mist. It sort of slithers up. Surrounds its victim.”

  “You’ve seen this?”

  “It was a long time ago. I suppose it’s what made me start taking this seriously. As a physicist, I had a hard time imagining how something without a body could materialize in the first place.”

  “What did you see?”

  “A black grouse. It was early morning. I saw it before it saw me and I was trying to sneak up so I could keep watching it. It was puffing itself up, the way grouse do. Then it started flapping its wings in a panic. It was like it got sucked right down. And that was when I saw those coils of smoke. The whole grouse was gone in a matter of seconds. Literally swallowed by the ground. It was shocking.”

  “But couldn’t it have been a very marshy area? Maybe it just got stuck,” Maya tried.

  “You would have thought so, but no. I couldn’t help checking afterward. The ground was quite firm.”

  “This goes against your theory though, in a way—you say the ghosts hunger for people with a body and soul because they don’t have any.”

  “Sure, what do I know? Maybe it doesn’t have to be a person. I suppose a grouse isn’t so bad. Like I said, don’t expect logic when it comes to ghosts.”

  He stood up. “Should we take a walk? There’s something I’d like to show you.”

  Maya felt an internal wavering. “Out there? On the mire?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  There was a knock on the door. Two hard raps. Nathalie had just sat down at the table in the cottage and opened her laptop.

  She opened the door cautiously and found Alex, the caretaker, with a toolbox in one hand.

  “The door,” he said, pointing. “The lock.”

  “Right,” said Nathalie. “It sticks; sometimes it won’t open, like I’m using the wrong key.”

  Alex didn’t respond, just set the toolbox in the hall and got to work.

  Nathalie watched him for a moment, then walked slowly back into the room and lay down on the bed. She listened to the buzzing of the drill, the rattle of the metal plate, muffled strikes against the sill and the door. There was something relaxing about the noise; it was almost hypnotic.

  After a while, her phone rang. The lab. It had to be about the samples she’d sent in the other day.

  “Yes, this is Nathalie Ström,” she said, realizing immediately that something wasn’t right. The woman on the other end fumbled for words as she tried to convey her message.

  “We were a little… confused about the results of the analysis. So I wanted to let you know before I sent them back.”

  “Okay,” Nathalie said in surprise. “What’s going on?”

  “There must be something wrong with the samples. We can’t find any evidence of the components you’re looking for: nitrogen, nitrous oxide or methane.”

  Nathalie nearly had a fit. “What do you mean? I took them just like I always do. That’s impossible.”

  “I’m sorry, but it didn’t register at all.”

  “Not a single one of them?” Nathalie asked.

  “Not a single one.”

  She felt her mouth go bone dry. Dark thoughts rose to the surface.

  They did it wrong, she thought. The lab did something wrong. Or maybe it was Johannes, when he took the samples. Then she remembered she’d done the most recent batch by herself.

  No, it’s the spirits. That’s what they do. They crowd out everything else.

  “I’m sorry?” said the woman.

  “I didn’t say anything,” Nathalie rushed to say.

  “Crowd out?” the woman said down the phone. “I don’t understand.”

  “I said I’ll take a look. I’ll have to send new samples a little later. Or I’ll just have to deal without them; it’ll be fine. Good-bye.”

  She hung up before the woman could respond. Tears began to burn behind her eyelids and exhaustion overtook her. She leaned back and closed her eyes. She might have dozed off.

  When she opened her eyes, a figure was standing right next to her, towering over her like a building.

  “Oh my goodness,” she said when she realized who it was. “Alex. You scared me… I forgot you were here.”

  “I’m finished now,” he said.

  She sat up. “Okay, great. Thanks for your help.”

  He didn’t move. The light fell on him from behind, making him look like a big shadow with two white eyes.

  “Thanks so much for your help,” she tried again.

  Then something happened. It was as if his whole being transformed. As if his absent gaze became perfectly clear for a brief moment.

  She shuddered. Was he…normal?

  But he just looked at her; he might have smiled a tiny bit. Then he turned around and left.

  Maya and Göran were following a narrow path with sparse forest on either side. They ran across two other parties in their first half-hour: first a group of five teenagers and, later on, two women and a man in their thirties. They had to turn sideways to pass each other on the walkway.

  “It’s usually deserted out here,” Göran muttered. “Funny what a corpse will do.”

  Maya wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with the attraction of a crime scene. Many people wanted to experience the horror, see the site with their own eyes. She suspected that the old rumors and stories about the mire weren’t helping.

  They stopped now and again so Maya could take photographs.

  The pictures were no good. She felt forced, tense. She also wasn’t comfortable working in the company of Göran. She didn’t know why; other people were seldom a hindrance, but there was something about the atmosphere around him. In addition, she was wearing the wrong kind of shoes and her feet were already soaked and cold.

  “It’s exciting to see how you work,” he said. “I think I’ve become blinded to all this.”

  “Sure,” Maya said. “That happens.”

  They walked in silence for a while.

  “May I ask you something?” she inquired. “What do you know about what happened to the Larssons’ older daughter?”

  “Tracy
? Not much. No one wants to talk about it. But I know that people half-joke that the spirits took her.” He shook his head. “People are idiots. Joking about that kind of thing.”

  “But you actually believe that the spirits took her?”

  “It’s possible. Although I have no idea what the weather was like that day.”

  “The weather?” Maya asked, stopping short.

  “There’s a theory that ghosts identify their victims during sudden shifts in the weather,” Göran said. “Or it’s the other way around—the victim-choosing process influences the weather. Typically, a sudden storm blows in. Once the victim has been selected, it quickly calms down again.”

  “I don’t get it—what does the weather have to do with anything?”

  Göran sighed. “You’re focusing on the wrong thing. Or rather, asking the wrong questions.”

  She shuddered. He was so convincing. As if he really, truly was 100 percent certain of his own ideas. So certain that he didn’t even consider how it sounded to others’ ears.

  “What about you?” she said. “And the Larssons? And the people at the manor? Shouldn’t those of you who live here be at greatest risk of being chosen some day?”

  “Sure, and that’s probably what happened to Tracy. Maybe the rest of us have just been lucky. Although you can see for yourself, all the abandoned houses out here. Who knows what happened to the people who lived in them? Not me. I have no idea. And I haven’t got any good answers, either.”

  He stopped and gazed out at the quiet scenery.

  “Didn’t they just move and abandon their cottages? It shouldn’t be that hard to find out,” Maya said. “I think Yvonne Larsson said something about barely getting any money for their place.”

  “No, that’s just it—who would want to move out here? This last incident isn’t exactly a boon to our reputation. There are few things people find as tempting as an unsolved mystery, but they want to keep them at arm’s length.”

  “Aren’t you frightened sometimes?” she asked.

  “Frightened? Not a bit. It would probably be the high point of my career to be swallowed up by ghosts.”

  “So you’re a little disappointed that you haven’t been?”