Harbor

by John Ajvide Lindqvist

  No doubt that was true. But presumably those parents were able to arrive eventually at the conclusion that it wasn’t their fault their child had been run over, developed cancer or got lost in the woods. At least they hadn’t wished for it to happen. And if they had wished for it to happen, then at least their child had disappeared in a natural way, insofar as such a thing exists.

  Maja had ceased to exist as if she had never been there, as if she had been…wished away. That couldn’t happen, and therefore the explanation that Anders had wished her away was just as reasonable as any other, and that was the one he was sticking to. Whichever way he looked at it, he always came to the same conclusion: he had killed his own child.

  It was only when Cecilia had left him and he had drunk himself into oblivion that a last glimmer of hope had appeared in the darkness: he began reshaping his memories. Through drunken days and nights he crafted a new past. One where Maja had been wonderful all the time and he had just loved her, pure and simple.

  He had never had a bad thought about her, and therefore her disappearance was incomprehensible. It was a great tragedy that had nothing to do with him, he who had loved his daughter more than anything else in the world.

  That’s how his past had looked. Until now.

  Anders gave a start as the telephone rang. He couldn’t cope with answering it, and after six signals it fell silent once more. He couldn’t talk to anyone. He didn’t exist, he was nothing.

  He rested his head in his hands again and listed to the emptiness. A new thought occurred to him.

  So if I wanted to get rid of her…why was it so terrible when she disappeared? I mean, I should have been…pleased. In the end. What I wished for happened.

  He got up from his chair. His stiff, frozen knees creaked as he took a turn around the floor.

  The answer was obvious: deep down, right down inside he had never wanted that to happen. However difficult she was there were better times, good times. And they had started to become more frequent, last for longer. The change they had hoped for was on the way. That last day, the trip to Gåvasten was an example. She had almost behaved like a normal child for several hours.

  And he had loved that child, that questioning, intense, living child, he had been prepared to wait for her through the hysterical outbursts and the smashed possessions. Things had been heading in the right direction. Then she disappeared, and he could remember only his bad thoughts, until it tipped over in the opposite direction.

  I never knew her.

  No. As he stood here now in the middle of the kitchen floor with the blanket around him, he realised the heart of the matter could be expressed in those terms: he had never known who Maja was. There had been too much wheeling and dealing. If children can be horrible, was Maja horrible, really? He had no idea. He didn’t know her.

  And now she had left him.

  Heaven

  ‘Daddy? What happens when you’re dead?’

  ‘Well, there’s…’

  ‘I think you go to heaven, don’t you think so?’

  ‘…well yes.’

  ‘So what’s it like there? Are there angels and clouds and so on?’

  ‘Is that what’d you’d like?’

  ‘No. I hate angels. They’re horrible and ugly and they look stupid. I don’t want to be with them.’

  ‘So where do you want to be?’

  ‘Here. But in heaven.’

  ‘Then I expect that’s what will happen.’

  ‘No it won’t! It’s God who decides what happens!’

  ‘In that case I expect God can decide that everybody can have things the way they want them to be.’

  ‘But that’s impossible.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because then everybody would have their own heaven, and God wouldn’t like that.’

  ‘Don’t you think so?’

  ‘No. Because God is an idiot. He’s made everything bad.’

  Home visit

  It was getting towards eight o’clock and Anders was still sitting at the kitchen table with the fragments of his former life spread out before him, trying to piece together something that might help him to get up, when he heard the moped.

  They’re coming.

  He had almost managed to forget Henrik and Björn. After his long sleep they had been reduced to a distant dream, something that had happened long ago and had nothing to do with him. But here they were. The saddest boys in the world who had decided to carry out the bidding of the sea. Now they were coming to get him.

  Come on then.

  The moped’s engine was racing, as if it were stuck in first gear. Perhaps he’d managed to damage it with the fire. The roaring engine drew closer to the house, and he waited for it to be switched off and the outside door to be opened. He was resigned, and placed one hand on top of the other on the table, waiting for whatever was going to happen.

  The engine didn’t stop when it reached the house, but carried on along the outside wall and across the rocks until the revs slowed and it stopped outside the kitchen window, rumbling to itself. They were waiting for him. He leaned on the table and pushed himself up, with the blanket around his shoulders like a coat, and walked over to the window.

  He could see them down on the rocks like dark shapes. Henrik was in the saddle and Björn on the platform. Anders undid the window latch and pushed it open. Henrik cut the engine, down to a muted chugging.

  ‘What do you want?’ asked Anders.

  ‘We may be dead,’ said Henrik. ‘But we will be right by—’

  ‘Stuff all that. What do you want?’

  ‘We’d like to smash some teeth—every single one in your head actually—because you’re bothering us. You have to stop bothering us. If I were you I wouldn’t bother. Really.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because something bad could happen to someone you care about. Or put it this way…’ Henrik went on with his manic paraphrasing, but Anders was no longer listening.

  He had turned away from the window and was looking for the torch. Björn had something in his arms, and it if was what Anders thought it was…

  The torch was in the drawer where all the rubbish was kept. He grabbed it and switched it on, hurled himself at the window and directed the beam at Björn as Henrik droned on with esoteric references to ‘Girlfriend in a Coma’ and how there were times when he could have murdered, on and on.

  The light fell on Björn. He was sitting cross-legged on the platform, and in his arms he was holding the body of a child dressed in a red snowsuit. The reflector strip along the side glowed white and it was Maja’s snowsuit, the one she had been wearing that last day.

  Anders may have spent hours doing nothing but thinking, but now every thought was swept away in a second, and there was only action. He ran through the kitchen into the living room as the moped engine behind him began to race once again.

  The door to the veranda was stuck and he lost a couple of valuable seconds when it refused to open. He hurled himself at it shoulder first and stumbled out on to the veranda just as he saw the lights of the moped bouncing across the rocks, on its way down to the sea.

  Now I’ve got you, you bastards. You’ve got nowhere to go.

  If he had stopped to reflect for a moment he might perhaps have realised that Henrik and Björn weren’t stupid enough to think that he would simply stand and watch as they rode off with his daughter. That the fact they were heading for the sea was rather strange.

  But he didn’t stop to reflect. He had seen that Björn had Maja in his arms, he had heard Henrik threaten to harm her and he was acting in accordance with those two facts. With only his socks on his feet he took the veranda steps in two leaps and saw that Henrik and Björn were down by the shoreline.

  Anders’ lips curled up in a predatory grin. They had nowhere else to go. Even if they were ghosts, the moped was an ordinary moped and a moped cannot travel across water. It didn’t occur to him that he had met them before, that he had no weapons to use against them now e
ither. The only thought in his head was: I’ve got you now, and the knowledge in his body, the wormwood’s knowledge, that they couldn’t harm him either.

  He was only five metres behind them when they rode out on to the water. Anders’ body continued moving forward of its own volition until he fell over on the shoreline. The moped moved across the surface of the water past the jetty, and Henrik waved goodbye to him. Anders was left standing on the shore with clenched fists and the blood rushing through his head.

  That’s impossible! They can’t do that!

  ‘Stop, you bastards! Stop!’

  Henrik waved his fingers over his shoulder again, and in a blind fury Anders raced out into the water. Which was not water. He had travelled a couple of metres before he realised he was standing on ice. For a moment he stopped dead in sheer physical amazement. He was still holding the torch, and shone it around him, ahead of him.

  The sea had not frozen yet, but behind Henrik and Björn stretched a causeway of ice just wide enough for the moped to run along, a bridge of frozen water extending from the point where they had ridden into the water and set off.

  Anders ran.

  Under different circumstances he would have been astonished at the fact that he was running past his jetty with little waves lapping on either side of him, but the only thing he could see was the straight line between his body and Maja’s, the distance he had to cover before he had her in his arms.

  He ran with long strides and with every step his wet socks froze on to the ice a fraction before they were pulled free, which give him an excellent grip, and he was gaining on them, he was gaining on them. Before he set off on the water they had been twenty metres ahead of him. Now the distance was shrinking a little with every step he took. The moped was not travelling fast, and he would be able to catch up with it.

  And then?

  He wasn’t even thinking about that.

  The moon was high in the sky, creating a silvery path that fell diagonally across the causeway of ice. The beam of the lighthouse on Gåvasten was flashing directly towards him. That was where they were heading, but they weren’t going to get there. He would take them. Somehow he would take them.

  He had run approximately three hundred metres from the shore. He could no longer feel his feet, they were nothing but a pair of frozen lumps moving him forward. He was so close to the moped that he could see individual strands of Henrik’s hair in the moonlight, and he was trying to urge his body to make one final spurt when something fell from the platform.

  Anders slipped, stumbled, fell to his knees on the ice and shone the beam of his torch on the bundle in front of him as the moped continued on its way, out to sea.

  Maja, Maja, Maja…

  It was her, there was no doubt. When he shone the torch he could see the patch on the chest of her snowsuit. Maja had stuck a knife in it when she was having difficulty putting it on, and Cecilia had mended it with a patch with a picture of Bamse on it.

  ‘Sweetheart? Poppet?’

  He crawled over to her and pulled her close. When he had the snowsuit in his arms he screamed.

  She had no head.

  What have they done, what have they done, what have they…

  Everything went black and he collapsed on top of the little body that was beyond all help. He fell right on top of her, and it didn’t matter. She had no head, no hands, no feet.

  As the darkness tied a knot around his head he heard the gulls in the distance. Gulls that were flying at night. Maja’s body crunched beneath his, was squeezed together.

  He curled up on the ice and raised his head slightly, shone the beam of the torch on the neck of the snowsuit. There was no body inside. He reached out weakly and touched what was there instead. Seaweed. It was filled with wet bladder wrack.

  He lay completely still for a moment digesting this fact as the screams of the gulls drew closer. He felt something cold trickle over his ear and raised his head, drew his legs up under him and managed to get to his feet with the snowsuit in his arms.

  A hundred metres out to sea he saw the moped swing around. The headlight was facing him like an evil eye, and it was getting closer.

  A trap. It was a trap.

  He turned and staggered a few steps towards the shore. The surface beneath his feet squelched and splashed. The ice he had run along earlier had begun to melt. He covered perhaps another ten metres, and then his feet were under water and the ice bridge was swaying beneath him.

  He clutched the snowsuit tightly and kept going. After a few metres more the ice broke beneath him and he sank down into the water. He had no weapons, and only the moon could see him. He lay in the cold sea and the headlight kept on coming closer.

  Clever. Clever of them.

  One tiny, tiny detail they had overlooked. The bladder wrack they had used to fill the snowsuit was acting as a kind of a float. He didn’t sink immediately. He gained another minute’s respite before the cold and the water took him.

  Movement was almost impossible. His body had been frozen already, now it felt as if his skeleton itself was clinking with splintering ice as he began paddling towards the shore out of a pure and meaningless instinct for self-preservation.

  The moped passed him and Henrik and Björn braked, blocking his way. He saw them only vaguely, as if a film of ice had formed over his eyes. Behind them hundreds of thin silhouettes moved against the starlit sky.

  The gulls want to join in, too.

  A kind of peace sank into his body, a hint of warmth. It was over now. His efforts had been in vain, but it didn’t matter any more. It had given him something. He had at least got to see her snowsuit once again. That was something. He would have it with him in his watery grave. The only sad thing was that the gulls would tear at him too, perhaps even peck out his eyes before he…

  ‘Come out,’ screamed Henrik as a cloud of birds enveloped him, ‘find the one that…’ The high-pitched screams of the gulls filled the night as they dived on the boys on the moped and ripped at their hair, pecked at their faces.

  Björn stood up on the platform, hitting out at the savagely flapping birds, but for every bird he managed to chase away, there were five more who settled on him, stabbing at his clothes, driving their beaks into his inhuman flesh.

  Anders’ eyelids twitched and all he wanted to do was sleep, sink down. It was warm now, and a beautiful spectacle to watch. The white wings of the gulls shimmering in the moonlight, their ferocious defence of him, one small human being.

  Thank you, beautiful birds.

  His left hand was clutching Maja’s snowsuit tightly and the movements of his legs stopped as Henrik and Björn shot away on the moped, disappearing in the direction of Gåvasten with the flock of seagulls after them. Anders paddled feebly with his right hand, just to stay afloat long enough to enjoy the beautiful sight for a little while.

  Good night, little lapping waves. Good night little lapping waves…

  He thought it was Henrik and Björn coming back, having shaken off the gulls. But the sound of the engine that was getting louder was different, somehow. His frozen thoughts moved slowly around in his head as he began to sink. The water had just begun to cover his eyes and run into his mouth when he worked out that it was probably Simon’s engine.

  The engine slowed and switched to neutral, and Anders just had time to take in a mouthful of cold water before a hand grabbed his hair and pulled him upwards.

  Then he was lifted into the boat in a way that was impossible to understand. It was as if the water threw him upwards, away from itself, and he tumbled on to the deck.

  He lay on his back looking up at the stars and Simon’s face. A clenched fist was laid on Anders’ brow and before he fainted he thought he could see the water lifting from his body in clouds of steam, could feel a wave of real heat sweeping through his blood. Then he saw and felt nothing more.

  Strange Ways

  So carry me. Carry me all the way home.

  Carry me up the path,

  round the si
de of the house, over the threshold, into the house.

  Lift me inside in your hands

  opened gently like eyelids.

  MIA AJVIDE—IF A GIRL WANTS TO DISAPPEAR

  Another one to the sea

  The boat was lying by the jetty and Anders was lying on the deck. With the help of Spiritus, Simon carried on drying his clothes and warming his body. He had asked the water to cast Anders away from itself, but there was no help to be had in getting him ashore.

  During the afternoon Simon and Anna-Greta had kept an eye on Anders’ house to see if the light came on, if Anders came home. They had taken a walk around the village to look for him, they had phoned but got no reply. When the evening came they had begun to think he had caught the tender and left Domarö. Hopefully.

  But Simon had a bad feeling as he went down to his house to try on his clothes for the following day.

  Since Anders came back to the island, Simon had never questioned his readjusted picture of Maja, had never seen any reason to do so. This was Anders’ way of dealing with his grief, and as long as it worked for him he was welcome to carry on living under his illusions, as far as Simon was concerned.

  But the situation had changed.

  It had changed when Elin Grönwall started burning houses on Kattudden, when Karl-Erik and Lasse Bergwall ran amok with their chainsaws and Sofia Bergwall pushed the other children off the jetty. When the horrible people returned to Domarö.

  Simon didn’t know if you could actually call Maja horrible. He too had had his tussles with her, and she was definitely not a ‘good’ child. She was moody, hyperactive and quick to anger. Yes, she laughed if someone fell over and hurt themselves. Yes, she enjoyed crushing butterflies to dust between her hands. But horrible? Simon had also seen a fierce appetite for life and a vivid imagination which, in a best-case scenario, would stand her in good stead in the years to come.

  But even so. Even so.

  If Anders really was carrying Maja or a part of Maja inside him, it was not a good thing if he regarded himself as being pregnant with an angel. There was no guarantee that Maja wished him well, and he ought to be aware of that.