Harbor

by John Ajvide Lindqvist

  Because the story is about a ship. Or rather the wreckage of a ship. It might have been a small cog, that is of no importance. The ship had been transporting salt, presumably between Estonia and Sweden, following some route or other.

  The crew could have been Swedish or Estonian, but in any case we have only one survivor to take into account. We will assume he is Swedish, and we will call him Magnus.

  We find him on the Åland Sea. His ship has drifted off course and has foundered in an unusually thick October fog. Terrified and frozen to the marrow, Magnus has managed to scramble up on to part of the stern, which has broken away. He calls to his shipmates, but there is no reply. The fog lies like a blanket around him, preventing him from even seeing the size of the piece of wreckage that is carrying him.

  But he is floating. He has been lucky in the midst of the disaster. The piece of the ship on which he finds himself is shaped in such a way that no part of his body is in the water. He has been lucky. If only he were not so dreadfully cold!

  We do not know how long Magnus drifts in this way. It could be days, but it is probably only hours, since the fog does not lift. He is floating through a milk-white world and he cannot hear anything, apart from the sounds he himself makes when he changes position or cries for help out into the emptiness.

  The first thing he becomes aware of is not a visual impression or a sound. It is a smell. And the smell alone, the aroma is enough for him to feel that warmth is beginning to seep into his body. It is the smell of animals.

  Once before he got lost in the fog at sea. On that occasion they reefed the sails and waited for the mists to disperse. But before that happened they made contact with the land through that smell. Manure, animals’ bodies, land! Animals mean people, and rescue. They rowed in the direction of the smell and found their way into the harbour.

  Hence the spark of hope in Magnus’s terrified guts. He grabs hold of a loose plank of wood and paddles in the direction he thinks the smell is coming from. He must be heading in the right direction, because the smell grows stronger.

  He can hear a cow lowing. The fog begins to dissolve into veils and separate sections. The cold diminishes, and the light breeze carrying the smell is warm, a summer breeze, no less.

  Presumably Magnus is a believer. Presumably Magnus is praising God as the fog lifts and he can see land at last. But he can hardly believe what his eyes are seeing.

  Paradise.

  It is the only possible explanation. That he has drifted so far off course that he has ended up in paradise. He has heard that the Garden of Eden could well have been on an island. It seems as if he has found that island.

  A few more strokes with his improvised paddle bring him to a beach with fine, pale sand. Where the beach ends, a meadow of lush grass takes over. A number of well-fed cows are grazing there. On a slope he sees sturdily built houses, surrounded by fruit trees in blossom.

  And it is warm, pleasantly warm. For a long time Magnus does nothing but sit on his piece of wreckage, staring open-mouthed. He hardly dare step ashore, he is afraid that this paradise will melt away like the fog if he touches it with his feet.

  There is a freshness about everything. Everything is sparkling and gleaming as if it were new, created just for him. Yes, that is exactly how it feels. There is a film of moisture over everything and water drips from the leaves of the trees, as if this island has risen from the sea just to meet him.

  Tentatively he lowers his foot into the water and discovers that the sandy seabed is firm. He wades ashore, he walks across the beach, up towards the meadow and the houses. He disappears from history, never to be heard of again.

  Time to start a fight

  When morning came, Anders no longer had a body. He had a wound. All his limbs were aching after a night on the hard floor, his head hurt, and his throat was pulling and throbbing. His fingers were stiff and his bladder made its presence felt, joining in the chorus of pain.

  When he opened his eyes, which had managed to gum themselves shut during the night, he felt the pain deep inside the pupil itself as the daylight stabbed its way in. He lay still, looking over towards the toilet door and trying to find one part of him that wasn’t hurting. He flicked his tongue around inside his mouth and discovered that his tongue was uninjured, that neither the inside of his mouth nor his teeth had been damaged over the past few days. It felt sticky in there, and it tasted disgusting. But it didn’t hurt.

  He rubbed his eyes and bits of dried blood came away, colouring the tips of his fingers pale red. He had lost all feeling in the ear that had been pressed against the rag rug during the hours of the night. He sneezed, and snot mixed with blood shot out of his nose.

  Today is the first day of the rest of your life.

  He managed to sit up, and grabbed hold of the door handle. Using the handle for support, he got to his feet and staggered to the toilet, where he drank from the tap until he could drink no more. White spots were dancing in front of his eyes, and he had to sit down to pee. He sat there for a long time with his head in his hands.

  When the worst of the dizziness had passed, he stood up and pulled out Maja’s snowsuit. It was no longer wet, but it was blotchy with patches of dark, dried-in blood. He threw it out on to the hall floor and got undressed.

  The Helly Hansen top was stiff, and his jeans and T-shirt were stuck fast to his skin. He pulled them off and felt a searing pain as the cut on his right thigh opened up again and began to bleed. A smell of putrefaction rose from his body, and he didn’t dare look at himself in the mirror.

  The boiler wasn’t much good, and he turned up the heat on the shower to maximum. Then he stood beneath the running, lukewarm water with his face upturned. From time to time he drank a couple of gulps. The blood that had flowed out of his body must be replaced. When the water began to cool he soaped himself and carefully cleaned the gash in his thigh.

  He closed his eyes and moved his soapy fingers to the wound in his throat. The skin was split in a gash half a centimetre wide, and the flesh was sore when he touched it. He could feel his pulse beneath his fingertips. The artery had repaired itself during the night, but was almost exposed in the absence of protective skin. He cleaned the area carefully and rinsed it with clean water, which was now almost cold.

  He stood there until the water was ice cold, letting it sluice over his face, and drank and drank. He turned off the shower and when he had rubbed and patted himself dry with a hand towel, he found that the white spots had disappeared, that he could see clearly.

  The bathroom mirror had steamed up; he cleared a patch with his hand and inspected the wound in his throat. It didn’t look too bad, but he could see the artery moving beneath the connective tissue like a small fish in a net. He found a couple of pressure bandages and some surgical tape, and dressed his wounds as well as he could. His throat really needed stitches, but to go all the way to Norrtälje, wait in the Emergency Department, try to explain to a doctor…it just wasn’t going to happen.

  And besides…

  When he was fighting with Henrik and Björn, and afterwards when he was wading through the water to get into the boat, he had acquired a kind of knowledge. It could be down to his own traumatised state, but he didn’t think so, and Simon had said something along the same lines: it was weakened.

  There was a weakness in the sea. That was why Sigrid had floated ashore, and that was why some element of the people who had disappeared had managed to escape and penetrate the wells. There was a tiredness, a lack of attention, and he intended to make the most of it. If he could. If it was there at all.

  He walked through the hallway naked, picked the snowsuit up off the floor and continued into the bedroom. The cold was giving him goose bumps, and he put on some clean clothes out of the suitcase he had brought from the city. Underwear, a pair of black corduroy trousers and a blue and white checked shirt. In the wardrobe he found his father’s thick green woolly jumper, and pulled it carefully over his head. The polo neck made his throat itch, but it was
good because it held the dressing in place.

  He felt as if he were getting dressed up, smartening himself up for his own execution, and it was a good feeling. That was the point he had reached. He ought to have cleaned the house as well, left it tidy, but he had neither the time nor the energy.

  He examined Maja’s snowsuit and decided that the stains wouldn’t come off without washing it, and he had no time for that either. He wound it around his stomach and managed to knot the sleeves and tuck in the legs so that it ended up like a very large waist bag.

  He went into the hallway and picked up Simon’s jacket. His fingers found the matchbox, half hidden in the torn lining of the pocket. He took it into the kitchen, sat down at the table and looked out of the window.

  Evidently he had made the boat fast after all, at least at the stern end. The prow was facing away from the jetty at a right angle and the engine was scraping against the stonework, but the sea was almost dead calm, and there was nothing to worry about. Beyond the jetty, out in the bay he could see the lighthouse on Gåvasten, a white dot in the morning light. A reflector suddenly glinted like a beckoning flash.

  Don’t you worry. I’m coming.

  Spiritus was moving slowly around the sides of the box when Anders opened it and let a gob of saliva fall. When he tried to push the box shut, the skin wrinkled, because the insect had grown so fat there wasn’t really enough room any more.

  He could poke it with his finger and push it in, but it was too much. After all, it had saved his life the previous night. In the junk drawer he found a box of matches for lighting the fire, which was slightly bigger. He tipped the matches out and moved Spiritus into the bigger box.

  Anders couldn’t tell whether the insect was happier in its new prison, but at least he could close the box without resistance. He stood up and put the new box in his trouser pocket.

  He should have been hungry, but he wasn’t. It was as if his stomach had solidified around its own emptiness, and was unwilling to let in any food. And that was fine. In any case, he couldn’t begin to imagine what he might eat.

  He filled a glass with water from the kitchen tap and drank it, cheers, sweetheart, filled it up again. And again. His stomach, already stiff, contracted around the cold liquid.

  On the worktop stood the bottle of wormwood. Without weighing up the pros and cons, Anders raised it to his lips and took a couple of deep swigs. His mouth tasted like shit and the dizziness went straight to his head, making him sway where he was standing.

  With his back to the sink, he slid giggling to the floor. When his bottom hit the linoleum with a hard thud, the giggling turned into gasps of laughter. He slapped the palm of his hand on the floor but couldn’t stop laughing, he just had to get it out, so he sang in a loud voice:

  ‘Thunder honey, Grandma’s thunder honey, that’s what he eats when it’s time to start a fight.’

  Still giggling, he staggered into the bedroom and found Bamse. He pushed the bear underneath the knotted sleeve of the snowsuit so that Bamse’s head was sticking up above his hip and the short legs were dangling down his left thigh. He patted Bamse’s hat, said, ‘How lucky I am to have such a friend!’, and by leaning on the walls and the furniture, he managed to make his way through the house and on to the porch.

  His head cleared slightly once he got out into the fresh air. He rubbed his eyes hard with his knuckles and stopped giggling, blinking in the sunlight. It was a beautiful, calm day, a wonderful autumn day not unlike the winter’s day almost two years ago that had brought him to this point.

  His legs carried him steadily down towards the jetty. He could see the natural world around him with exaggerated clarity, he could feel the water inside, beneath and in front of him. He was an oversensitive consciousness transported in a fragile body, an infinitely complex organic computer inside a shell of rusty metal.

  And the strongest bear in the world!

  He loosened the mooring rope and clambered down into the boat, sat down and picked up the fuel can, gave it a shake. The liquid splashed to and fro ominously. He looked up and gazed over towards Gåvasten.

  Well, I’m only going in one direction, aren’t I? I’m hardly likely to be coming back.

  He looked at the bubble of air that marked the level of the fuel. It sank to the bottom when he put the can down, and at the same time something sank inside him. The fatalistic calm that had filled his spirit since he got dressed faded in the face of this practical fact: there was no need for him to fill up with fuel, because he wouldn’t be coming home.

  Slowly, slowly the boat drifted south, while he sat with his arms resting on his knees, staring towards Gåvasten. Then he nodded briefly, pumped up the petrol, pulled out the choke and yanked on the starter.

  As long as the little boat can sail…

  The engine started and he shut down his mind against any questions, engaged the clutch and set off as slowly as possible. Gåvasten was gliding towards him across the sea and he was thinking about nothing at all, he just kept his eyes firmly fixed on the lighthouse and watched the distance diminish. When he was about halfway he could see that the birds were still out there. Hundreds or perhaps thousands of little white dots swarmed around the glowing white walls of the lighthouse like moths around a bright light.

  With only a few hundred metres to go, the engine coughed. He was running out of fuel, but the strange thing was that the boat seemed to be moving even more slowly. When he had travelled another hundred metres or so, he heard a cracking noise.

  Terrified, Anders looked along the sides of the boat, because it sounded as if the old fibreglass were splitting. There was no sign of anything, but the noise grew louder and the boat began to vibrate.

  What the fuck…

  The engine coughed again and when it got going once more it felt as if it were struggling into a headwind. It was roaring for all it was worth, but the boat was barely moving forward. The vibrations became jolts and jerks and the engine began to cough.

  ‘Come on! Come on!’

  Anders turned around and slapped the engine as if to stop it from falling asleep. When his hand flew back from the cowling, he saw something that made him realise his efforts were pointless. He could whip the engine until it bled, he still wouldn’t get anywhere.

  The whole bay had frozen. He was surrounded by ice in all directions. The engine gave a couple of final coughs, then died.

  No lapping of the waves, no wind, no engine humming. The only sound was the screaming of the gulls as they moved around the prayer wheel of the lighthouse like white-clad pilgrims. Anders tilted his head to one side and looked at them. They were moving in a clockwise direction.

  The central axis.

  It wasn’t difficult to see, alone in the stillness on the desolate sea, where the only sound and the only movement was coming from the gulls. They were the ones keeping the world in motion by circling around the central axis.

  His thoughts were about to fly away, but were interrupted by a fresh cracking sound. This time it was not the boat’s progress through the freezing water that was creating the noise. This time it was what he had first thought. The fibreglass hull of the boat was cracking as the ice grabbed hold of it and squeezed. Anders shook his head.

  Sorry. It’s not going to be that easy.

  If there was some form of thinking entity behind what was happening, it wasn’t particularly intelligent. It had certainly managed to bring the boat to a standstill. But it wasn’t so easy to bring him to a standstill. Anders patted Bamse tenderly and clambered over the rail.

  The ice bore his weight. He left the boat and set off across the water towards the lighthouse.

  The honeymoon

  The ferry was a floating microcosm of pleasures. You walked a few steps to eat, a few more to enjoy duty-free shopping. You went around the corner to dance and up or down a flight of stairs when it was time for bed. Simon usually thought this was a pleasant change from all the difficulties caused by the distances on Domarö, but on this voyage the
ship was inducing a feeling of claustrophobia rather than freedom.

  And yet he and Anna-Greta had a bigger and better cabin than on previous trips. It wasn’t exactly a suite, but it was above deck and had windows. Simon was usually quite happy in a cabin below deck as the throbbing of the engines lulled him to sleep, but the previous night he had lain awake with Anna-Greta beside him and a lump in his chest.

  Did I do the right thing?

  That was the question that was tormenting him. He had given Spiritus to Anders, and had done it in a way that could only be interpreted as encouragement to tackle things as he saw fit. Had it been the right thing to do?

  Simon lay awake in his bunk, listening to the sea surging along the sides of the ship and feeling weightless with doubt and anxiety. He had committed himself to following his fate, together with Spiritus, to whatever the bitter end might be. He had not been particularly afraid.

  Or had he?

  Had he in fact been afraid, and made use of Anders to get rid of his fear? He could no longer say for sure. He had lost his foundation and his ballast when he gave away Spiritus, and it was not relief he felt now, but an unpleasant weightlessness.

  Thus Simon’s night passed as the ferry ploughed through the darkness, reaching the outer rocky islets of the Roslagen archipelago towards morning. When Anna-Greta woke up, they got dressed and went down to breakfast.

  When they had helped themselves to rolls, various spreads and coffee, and settled down at a window table, Anna-Greta looked searchingly at Simon and asked, ‘Did you sleep last night…’ she smiled, ‘…husband?’

  Simon smiled. ‘No…wife…it was a bad night.’

  ‘Why?’

  Simon rubbed the palm of his hand with his forefinger and stared at the scrambled egg quivering on his plate with the vibrations of the ship. It looked like his brain felt, and he couldn’t come up with a good answer. After he had remained silent for a while, Anna-Great asked, ‘Isn’t there something you have to…do?’