Harbor

by John Ajvide Lindqvist

  Elin sucked up more wine and grimaced with pain. Perhaps one of her cuts was pulling.

  ‘That image is there, all the time. And I think I ought to get used to it, but every time it comes…I’m just as frightened every time, in the dream. I approach the boat and I see that man lying there dead among the fish and then it’s as if I fall apart, I’m so frightened.’

  The last drop of wine was sucked into Elin’s mouth. It went down the wrong way and she started coughing. She coughed and coughed, pausing only to whimper with pain, then coughed again until Anders was afraid she was going to throw up. But eventually the coughing subsided and Elin sat there panting for a while, gasping for air. Tears poured down the gashes in her cheeks.

  Anders wasn’t particularly interested in Elin’s dreams. He took a swig of wine and closed his eyes, saw before him the unclear image of Henrik and Björn’s bodies in the moonlight, the ugly smile that had played around Elin’s full lips.

  It doesn’t go away. Nothing goes away.

  He opened his eyes and looked at Elin, who was hunched over, staring at the floor.

  ‘You said they disappeared. That they didn’t drown, Henrik and Björn. What did you mean?’

  ‘They didn’t find them.’

  ‘But they went through a hole in the ice.’

  Elin shook her head. ‘That’s not what I heard.’

  ‘So what did you hear?’

  Elin now had the same expression in her eyes as when they arrived at the Shack twenty minutes earlier, when she caught sight of the GB-man wrapped in the plastic sack. She had wanted to run away, but Anders had stopped her. The same expression now. Like an animal surrounded on all sides, with nowhere to run. The only solution was to implode, to disappear into herself.

  ‘It was them, Anders. They had that fucking plastic man on the platform and they were…no older, do you understand? They were just like they were when…when all that happened. They haven’t got any older.’

  Anders leaned back in his chair. ‘What did actually happen? Back then?’

  Elin clamped her lips together, blew out her cheeks and looked at him with a pleading expression that might once have worked, but now just looked revolting. She wound the rubber tube around her index finger, let her shoulders drop and said, ‘Joel’s in prison, did you know that?’ Anders didn’t reply, and she went on, ‘It was some woman…he nearly beat her to death. I don’t know why. I don’t suppose she’d done anything.’

  She snivelled and pulled the tube tighter around her finger. The top of the finger turned dark red like the skin on her face, and she said to the surface of the table, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I suppose I was evil. Can a person be evil?’

  Anders shrugged his shoulders, took a deep breath and exhaled. A fraction of the weight that had been lying in his stomach lifted. He got up and fetched a new carton of wine. ‘Would you like some more?’

  She nodded and unwound the tube. They drank, or sucked, respectively, in silence. After a while Anders asked, ‘What did you hear? About them?’

  A trickle of wine ran from the corner of Elin’s mouth, and she carefully wiped it away, then said, ‘Just that they rode out on to the ice on their moped. And then they were gone.’

  ‘You mean they didn’t fall through the ice?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No hole, no…it hadn’t cracked, they…?’

  ‘No. They just disappeared.’

  Anders pressed his fist against his lips so hard that there was a taste of metal in his mouth, then he got up and staggered around the kitchen. Elin followed him with her eyes, sucked up some more wine and asked, ‘What’s the matter?’

  Anders shook his head to indicate that he didn’t want to talk, grabbed his cigarette packet and frantically smoked a cigarette as he paced back and forth, out into the hallway, into the living room.

  What can I do? What shall I do?

  There was no guarantee that the same thing that had happened to Henrik and Björn had happened to Maja. Perhaps they just…took off. Went somewhere else and started a new life.

  And now they’ve come back without having aged?

  Anders stopped by the window in the living room and looked towards Gåvasten’s flashing lighthouse far away in the distance. Tears welled up in his eyes.

  Without having aged…

  He saw Maja’s little hands reaching for the baby’s bottle with her juice in it, her thin fingers curling around the edges of a Bamse comic as she lay on her back in her bed, reading. Her feet sticking out from under the covers. Six years old.

  Anders stared out into the vast darkness with its single, flashing point of light. The wine had gone to his head and the light was swaying, sliding across the sea, and he could see Maja in her red snowsuit. She was glowing in the darkness, and she was walking across the water. The little body, the soft skin, the muscles tucked into her warm suit. A patch of red that was moving closer, but which dissolved when he tried to focus his gaze on it.

  He whispered, ‘Where are you? Where are you?’

  No reply. Just the lapping of the sea against the rocks and the single constantly repeated message from Gåvasten, the message of every lighthouse: Here I am, here I am. Be careful, be careful.

  Anders stood by the window staring out into the darkness until the draught through the frame made him shiver, and he went back into the kitchen.

  Elin was lying across the table, her head resting on her arms. He shook her shoulder and she looked up in confusion. ‘You’d better go to bed.’ He gestured towards the bedroom. ‘Take the big bed.’

  Elin disappeared into the bedroom and Anders stayed at the kitchen table, drank more wine and smoked several cigarettes. He stared at the words scratched into the surface of the table.

  Carry me.

  Anders nodded drunkenly and clasped his hands as if in prayer, whispering, ‘I will. I will. But where will I find you? Where are you?’

  Perhaps half an hour had passed when Elin came out of the bedroom with the quilt wrapped around her. Her fingers scrabbled nervously at the fabric of the cover. Anders closed one eye so that he could see her more clearly. She looked as wretched as it is physically possible to look.

  ‘Can’t you come to bed as well?’ she asked. ‘I’m so bloody scared.’

  Anders went into the bedroom with her and lay down beside her on top of the quilt. One hand came creeping out and found his.

  What does it matter? What does it fucking matter?

  He took her hand and squeezed it as if to say that everything was OK, that there was nothing to worry about. When he tried to let go, her grip tightened and he didn’t pull away. The beam of the lighthouse at North Point swept through the room, flashing across the wall opposite and making the profile of Elin’s flattened nose stand out. He lay there looking at it, and when the beam had swept past perhaps ten times, he asked again, ‘Why are you doing this? Having all this surgery?’

  ‘I have to.’

  Anders blinked and realised he was feeling sleepy. His thoughts were far from lucid, but the suspicion of a theory came into his head, and he asked, ‘Is it…a punishment?’

  Elin was silent for a long time, and he thought she wasn’t going to answer. The lighthouse beam had swept past many times before she finally said, ‘I suppose it is,’ let go of his hand and rolled over on to her side.

  Anders lay there thinking about crime and punishment, the balance that is perhaps built into the world and into the souls of men. He didn’t come up with anything, and his reasoning had begun to dissolve into disjointed images when he came to his senses, and heard from Elin’s breathing that she was asleep. He got up, undressed and climbed into Maja’s bed.

  Sleep refused to come. He had probably nodded off for a few minutes in the big bed, and now he was wide-awake. He counted the flashes of the lighthouse and had reached two hundred and twenty; he was just considering switching on the bedside light and reading a Bamse comic when he saw Elin getting out of bed.

  He thought
she was going to the toilet. But there was something wrong with her movements. She walked towards his bed without seeing him. In only her bra and pants her body was shapeless, swollen, and when the light illuminated her face he was suddenly scared, and cowered as if expecting a blow.

  The monster is coming for me.

  But she passed him, oblivious, and the fear died away. Elin opened the door with the movements of a sleepwalker and went out of the room. Anders hesitated for a few seconds, then got up, pulled on his shirt and followed her.

  She went through the kitchen and into the hallway, but instead of turning off towards the toilet, she carried on towards the front door. When she started fiddling with the catch to open the door, he went up to her.

  ‘Elin, what are you doing?’ he said to her back, without getting any reaction. ‘You can’t go outside like that.’

  The lock clicked and she pushed down the handle. He grabbed her shoulder. ‘Where are you going?’ She stiffened in his grip and answered without turning around, ‘Home. I’m going home.’

  When the door opened and cold air swept in over his bare feet, he gripped her shoulder more firmly and turned her to face him. ‘You can’t. You have no house to go to.’ He grabbed her other shoulder too and shook her. Her expression was absent.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘You’re not going anywhere.’

  Elin looked vacantly at him. Her lips were moving jerkily, as if she were saying what, what, what, what, without being able to produce any sound. Then she shook her head slowly and repeated, ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘No. Come on.’

  He drew her back into the hallway, closed and locked the door. She allowed herself to be led back to bed, where she fell asleep immediately. Anders had no key to the bedroom door, so he jammed a chair under the handle and hoped he would hear if she tried to get out again.

  What if she does? It’s not my responsibility.

  He slid into Maja’s bed again and noticed to his surprise that his body had now decided he could sleep, if he wanted to. He did want to. He closed his eyes and soon slipped down into rest on a gently sloping plane. His last thought before he fell asleep was: As if I didn’t have enough.

  After the fire

  Only blackened beams and grey sludge remained after the fire service had done their work. Hundreds of cubic metres of sea water had been pumped over and around the burning house, and despite the fact that odd curls of smoke were still rising from the devastation, there was no risk that the fire would catch hold again; the whole area was too wet.

  Many people had gone home, but Simon was still standing in the sour-smelling ashes, contemplating the ruins and meditating on the transience of all things.

  You have a house. Then you don’t have a house.

  Just one little match or a spark in the wrong place. That’s all it took for everything you had walked around in for so many years, everything you had made beautiful and kept secure, to go up in smoke. A careless word or a glimpse of something you shouldn’t have seen, and the web of life you had taken for granted was ripped up and scattered in pieces before your eyes.

  The rug is pulled from under your feet.

  You really can see it: the oblong rag rug you are walking on, but what’s that figure down there at the end? Is it a devil or an angel? Or just a little old man in a grey suit, a tiresome individual who has been waiting for his chance? At any rate, he’s holding the end of the rug in his hands. And he is patient, very patient. He can wait.

  But if you lose your balance, if for some reason you are found wanting, then he gives the rug a quick tug. It’s pure magic as your feet leave the ground and for a brief moment you hover, horizontal, the tips of your toes in line with your nose. Then the ground comes up to meet you with a crash and it hurts.

  Simon pushed his hands deep in his trouser pockets and walked over to the remains of the house. There was a squelching sound from underfoot, and the smell of ash was suffocating. He had no particular relationship with the house that had burnt down, had never even been inside it. And yet it was as if it meant something.

  He had had a confusing day and perhaps he was feeling oversensitive, but he had definitely had enough of looking at things that happened on Domarö as isolated incidents with no internal connection, he’d been deceived—

  Yes. Deceived.

  —for long enough. The sooty sludge beneath his feet squelched and slurped around his feet as he waded through. The firemen had said that the way the fire had started definitely sounded suspicious, but it wasn’t their job to investigate. The police would take over when it was daylight.

  Despite the risk that he might be destroying important clues, Simon carried on ploughing through the mess until it thinned out and stopped a couple of metres before he reached the well. That was where he’d been heading, although he hadn’t been aware of it.

  It was an old well. A circular wall a metre high, made of stones cemented together, with the well itself covered by a wooden lid. The older construction with its winding mechanism, chain and bucket was still there for decoration. A thick plastic hose emerged from a hole in the lid, and presumably had been attached to a pump inside the house. Now the hose was burnt off a few metres from the well.

  Simon moved the lid slightly and looked down into the darkness.

  What am I doing?

  He didn’t know. Just as he didn’t know why he’d come here at all. There was just something…drawing him. He closed one hand around the matchbox and waited.

  Nothing. It’s nothing.

  He felt something, but he couldn’t put his finger on what it was. It was just a feeling, a breath of something vanished, the ripples on the water after a fish has surfaced, but the fish itself is already far away.

  But still he unhooked the bucket and used the chain to lower it into the well. After perhaps five metres it reached the surface down below. When he hauled it up it was half full of clear water. He cupped his hands and drank a mouthful, first cleaning the cut on his hand which had already begun to heal.

  Salt.

  It wasn’t unusual for a certain amount of salt to find its way into wells so close to the sea. If they’d asked him he wouldn’t have advised them to dig just here, but there was nothing to be done about that now. He hung the bucket back in its place. The feeling grew neither stronger nor weaker, it was simply there like a faint aroma, and he didn’t know what it was.

  He took a step back and looked at the well.

  What a pity.

  What a pity that such a fine old well would no longer have a house to belong to. He turned to look at the devastation once again and caught sight of a person standing where he had been standing a little while ago. The starlight was not bright enough to see who it was, so he raised an arm in greeting. The greeting was returned.

  When he got closer he could see that it was Anna-Greta, standing waiting for him. His body stiffened, he replaced his apologetic expression with one of rebuff, and squelched with the greatest possible dignity the last few metres through the ash porridge.

  Anna-Greta looked amused. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Nothing. I was just thirsty, that’s all.’

  Anna-Greta pointed to the public tap at the crossroads a dozen metres away. ‘Wouldn’t it have been easier to…?’

  ‘Never thought about it,’ said Simon, walking past her. He carried on towards home as quickly as he could, but Anna-Greta’s legs were considerably more sprightly and she had no difficulty in catching up with him. She appeared by his side and switched on her torch to light the way for them both.

  ‘Are you angry?’ she asked.

  ‘No. Disappointed, mostly.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why do you think?’

  They reached the track between the fir trees and Simon was forced to slow down. His heart didn’t want to run away from Anna-Greta. His physical heart, for heaven’s sake. He didn’t know where he was with the other one. But it was certainly an insight worth acquiring at death’s door: h
e couldn’t run away from Anna-Greta even if he wanted to. She was simply too fast.

  A hundred metres inside the forest he stopped to catch his breath. Anna-Greta stood calmly beside him, shining her torch along the track. There was no one else around.

  ‘Let me put it this way,’ said Anna-Greta. ‘It was for your own good that I didn’t tell you anything.’

  Simon snorted. ‘How long have we been together? Almost fifty years? How could you…Are there more things you haven’t told me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The admission should have surprised him, but Simon knew Anna-Greta. She told it like it was, even if it was inappropriate. That was precisely what made all this so difficult to swallow: the idea that perhaps he hadn’t known her at all, not really.

  ‘Well, let me tell you something,’ said Simon. ‘I was married once, and do you know what Marita said about the fact that she was on drugs? That she hadn’t told me about it for my own good. So you could probably say I’m allergic to that particular argument.’

  ‘It’s not the same thing.’

  ‘But I think it is, you see. And I find it incredibly difficult to accept it. I’m not sure I want to be with you anymore, Anna-Greta. I don’t think I do.’

  Simon had been bending over, his hands resting on his thighs. He pushed himself upright and set off into the darkness. Anna-Greta’s torch was not following him. He had a lump in his stomach and wasn’t looking where he was going, but at least it had been said. Now he must take the consequences, whatever that involved. He couldn’t live with someone who lied like that.

  The forest was pitch dark and he had to go carefully to avoid falling in the ditch again. The circle of light from the torch was still fixed on his retina, and he stopped and waited for it to disappear. He looked back along the track and saw that the real torch was lying on the ground, illuminating Anna-Greta’s legs; she was lying next to it.