The Savage Altar

by Unknown

  “I know,” she says quietly. “You don’t think I’m even capable of looking after myself and Sara.”

  Sanna buries her head in her hands and begins to weep inconsolably.

  Rebecka leaves the flat. Rage is pounding through her body. Her fists are clenched inside her gloves. It feels as if she could kill someone. Anyone.

  When Rebecka has gone, Sanna picks up the telephone and dials. It is Thomas Söderberg’s wife, Maja, who answers.

  Patrik Mattsson was woken at quarter past eleven in the morning by the sound of a key being turned in the outside door of his flat. Then his mother’s voice. Fragile as ice in the autumn. Full of anxiety. She called his name, and he heard her go through the hall and past the bathroom where he was lying. She stopped at the door of the living room and called again. After a while she knocked on the bathroom door.

  “Hello! Patrik!”

  I ought to answer, he thought.

  He moved slightly, and the tiles on the floor laid their coolness against his face. He must have fallen asleep in the end. On the bathroom floor. Curled up like a fetus. He still had his clothes on.

  His mother’s voice again. Determined hammering on the door.

  “Hello, Patrik, open the door, there’s a good boy. Are you all right?”

  No, I’m not all right, he thought. I’ll never be all right again.

  His lips formed the name. But no sound was allowed to pass his lips.

  Viktor. Viktor. Viktor.

  Now she was rattling the door handle.

  “Patrik, either you open this door right now or I’m ringing the police and they can kick it in.”

  Oh, God. He managed to get to his knees. His head was pounding like a pneumatic drill. The hip that had been resting on the hard tiled floor was aching.

  “I’m coming,” he croaked. “I’ve… not been too well. Hang on.”

  She backed away as he opened the door.

  “You look terrible,” she burst out. “Are you ill?”

  “Yes,” he replied.

  “Shall I ring up and say you’re not coming in?”

  “No, I’ve got to go now.”

  He looked at the clock.

  She followed him into the lounge. Flowerpots lay smashed on the floor. The rug had ended up in one corner. One of the armchairs had been tipped upside down.

  “What’s been going on here?” she asked weakly.

  He turned and put his arm around her shoulders.

  “I did it myself, Mum. But it’s nothing for you to worry about. I’m feeling better now.”

  She nodded in reply, but he could see that tears weren’t far away. He turned away from her.

  “I must get off to the mushroom farm,” he said.

  “I’ll stay here and clean up for you,” his mother said from behind him, bending down to pick up a glass from the floor.

  Patrik Mattsson defended himself against her submissive concern.

  “No, honestly, Mum, you don’t need to do that,” he said.

  “For my sake,” she whispered, trying to catch his eye.

  She bit her lower lip in an attempt to keep the tears at bay.

  “I know you don’t want to confide in me,” she went on. “But if you’d just let me tidy up, then…”

  She swallowed once.

  “… then at least I’ll have done something for you,” she finished.

  He dropped his shoulders and forced himself to give her a quick hug.

  “Okay,” he said. “That would be really kind.”

  Then he shot out through the door.

  He got into his Golf and turned the key in the ignition. Let the engine race with the clutch down to drown out his thoughts.

  No crying now, he told himself sternly.

  He twisted the rearview mirror and looked at his face. His eyes were swollen. His lank hair was plastered to his head. He gave a short, joyless bark of laughter. It sounded more like a cough. Then he turned the mirror back sharply.

  I’m never going to think about him again, he thought. Never again.

  He screeched out onto Gruvvägen and accelerated down the hill toward Lappgatan. He was almost driving from memory, couldn’t see a thing through the falling snow. The snowplow had been along the road in the morning, but since then more snow had fallen, and the fresh snow gave way treacherously beneath his tires. He increased the pressure on the accelerator. From time to time one of the wheels went into a spin and the car slid over to the opposite side of the road. It didn’t matter.

  At the crossroads with Lappgatan he didn’t stand a chance, the car skidded helplessly straight across the road. Out of the corner of his eye he could see a woman with a kick sledge and a small child. She pushed the sledge over the mound of snow left by the plow, and raised her arm at him. Presumably she was giving him the finger. As he drove past the Laestadian chapel, the road surface altered. The snow had become packed together under the weight of the cars, but it was rutted, and the Golf wanted to go its own way. Afterward he couldn’t remember how he’d got over the crossroads at Gruvvägen and Hjalmar Lundbohmsvägen. Had he stopped at the traffic lights?

  Down by the mine he drove past the sentry box with a wave. The guard was buried in his newspaper and didn’t even look up. He stopped by the barrier in front of the tunnel opening that led down into the mine. His whole body was shaking. His fingers wouldn’t cooperate when he fumbled for a cigarette in his jacket pocket. He felt empty inside. That was good. For the last five minutes he hadn’t thought about Viktor Strandgård once. He took a long pull on the cigarette and inhaled deeply.

  Keep calm, he whispered reassuringly, just keep calm.

  Maybe he should have stayed at home. But shut in the flat all day, he’d have jumped off the balcony, for sure.

  Oh, who are you kidding, he sneered at himself. As if you’d dare. Smashing teacups and chucking flowerpots on the floor, that’s all you can manage.

  He wound down the window and stretched out his hand to insert his pass card into the machine.

  A hand grabbed his wrist and he jumped, the hot ash from the cigarette falling on his knee. At first he couldn’t see who it was, and his stomach cramped with fear. Then a familiar face appeared.

  “Rebecka Martinsson,” he said.

  The snow was falling on her dark hair, the flakes melting against her nose.

  “I want to talk to you,” she said.

  He nodded toward the passenger seat. “Hop in, then.”

  Rebecka hesitated. She was thinking about the message someone had left on her car. “You will surely die,” “You have been warned.”

  “It’s now or never, as The King says,” said Patrik Mattsson, leaning over the seat and opening the car door.

  Rebecka looked at the mine entrance in front of her. A black hole, down into the underworld.

  “Okay, but I’ve got the dog in the car, I’ll have to be back in an hour.”

  She walked around the car, got in and shut the door.

  Nobody knows where I am, she thought as Patrik Mattsson stuck his card into the machine and the barrier that barred the way down into the mine slowly lifted.

  He slipped the car into gear and they drove down into the mine.

  Ahead of them they could see the reflectors shining on the walls; behind them a dense darkness descended like a black velvet curtain.

  Rebecka tried to talk. It was like dragging a reluctant dog along on its lead.

  “My ears are popping, why does that happen?”

  “The difference in altitude.”

  “How far down are we going?”

  “Five hundred forty meters.”

  “So you’ve started growing mushrooms, then?”

  No reply.

  “Shiitake, I’ve never actually tried those. Is it just you?”

  “No.”

  “So there are a few of you, then? Anybody else there at the moment?”

  No answer, driving fast, downward.

  Patrik Mattsson parked the car in front of an under
ground workshop. There was no door, just a large opening in the side of the mine. Inside Rebecka could see men in overalls and helmets. They were holding tools. Huge drills from Atlas Copco were lined up ready for repair.

  “This way,” said Patrik Mattsson, and set off.

  Rebecka followed him, looking at the men in the workshop and wishing one of them would turn around and see her.

  Black primitive rock rose up on both sides of them. Here and there water was running out of the rocks and turning the walls green.

  “It’s the copper, the water turns it green,” explained Patrik when she asked.

  He stubbed out his cigarette under his foot and unlocked a heavy steel door in the wall.

  “I thought you weren’t allowed to smoke down here,” said Rebecka.

  “Why not?” asked Patrik. “There aren’t any explosive gases or anything like that.”

  She laughed out loud.

  “Brilliant. You can hide away down here, five hundred meters under the surface, and have a secret smoke!”

  He held open the heavy door and held out his other hand, palm upward, indicating that she should go in ahead of him.

  “I’ve never understood the list of commandments in the free church,” she said, turning toward him so that she wouldn’t have her back to him as they went in. “Thou shalt not smoke. Thou shalt not drink alcohol. Thou shalt not go to the disco. Where did they get it from? Gluttony, and not sharing what you have with those in need, sins that are actually mentioned in the Bible, they haven’t got a word to say about those.”

  The door closed behind them. Patrick switched on the light. The room looked like a huge bunker. Steel shelves hung from the ceiling on bars. Something that looked like great big vacuum-packed sausages, or round logs, was lying on the shelves.

  Rebecka asked, and Patrik Mattsson explained.

  “Blocks of alder packed in plastic. They’ve been injected with spores. When they’ve been there for a certain amount of time, you can take off the plastic and just tap the wood with your hand. Then they start to grow, and after five days you harvest them.”

  He disappeared behind a large plastic curtain at the far end of the room. After a while he came back with several blocks of wood full of shiitake mushrooms. He placed the blocks on a table and began to pick the mushrooms with a practiced hand. As he picked, he dropped them into a box. The smell of mushrooms and damp wood permeated the room.

  “It’s the right climate for them down here,” he said. “And the lights change automatically to give them very short nights and days. Enough of the small talk, Rebecka—what do you want?”

  “I wanted to talk about Viktor.”

  He looked at her expressionlessly. Rebecka had the feeling that she should have dressed more simply. They were standing here on different planets, trying to talk. She had that damned coat on, and her fine, expensive gloves.

  “When I used to live here, you were very close,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “How was he? After I left, I mean.”

  Behind the curtain the watering system sprang to life with a muted hiss. Moisture sprayed from the roof and trickled down the stiff, transparent plastic.

  “He was perfect. Handsome. Devoted. A gifted speaker. But he had a tough God. If he’d lived in the Middle Ages he’d have whipped himself with a scourge and walked to holy places in his bare, wounded feet.”

  He picked the mushrooms from the last block of wood and spread them evenly in the box.

  "In what way did he punish himself?" she asked.

  Patrik Mattsson carried on rearranging the mushrooms; it was as if he was talking to them rather than to her.

  “You know. Strip away anything that doesn’t come from God. No listening to anything other than Christian music, because then you’d expose yourself to the influence of evil spirits. He was really keen to get a dog once, but a dog takes up time, and that time belongs to God, so nothing came of it.”

  He shook his head.

  “He should have got that dog,” he said.

  “But how was he?” asked Rebecka.

  “I told you. Perfect. Everybody loved him.”

  “And you?”

  Patrik Mattsson didn’t answer her.

  I didn’t come here to learn about growing mushrooms, thought Rebecka.

  “I think you loved him too,” she said.

  Patrik breathed in sharply through his nose, clamped his lips tightly together and gazed up at the ceiling.

  “He was just a sham,” he said violently. “Nothing matters anymore. And I’m glad he’s dead.”

  “What do you mean? What sort of sham?”

  “Leave it,” he said. “Just leave it, Rebecka.”

  “Did you write him a card telling him you loved him, and that what you were doing wasn’t wrong?”

  Patrik Mattsson buried his face in his hands and shook his head.

  “Did you have a relationship, or not?”

  He started to cry.

  “Ask Vesa Larsson,” he sniveled. “Ask him about Viktor’s sex life.”

  He broke off and fumbled in his pocket for a handkerchief. When he didn’t find one, he wiped his nose on the sleeve of his sweater. Rebecka took a step toward him.

  “Don’t touch me!” he snapped.

  She froze on the spot.

  "Do you know what you’re asking? You, who just ran away when things got difficult."

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  He lifted his hands.

  “Do you understand, I can raze the whole temple to the ground! There will be nothing but ash left of The Source of All Our Strength and the movement and the school and—all of it! The town will be able to turn the Crystal Church into an ice hockey rink.”

  “ ‘The truth shall set you free,’ it says.”

  He fell silent.

  “Free!” he spat. “Is that what you are?”

  He looked around, seemed to be looking for something.

  A knife—the thought went through Rebecka’s head.

  He made a gesture with his hand, the fingers together, palm facing her, which seemed to indicate that he wanted her to wait. Then he disappeared through a door farther down the room. There was a heavy click as it closed behind him, then silence. Just the sound of dripping from behind the plastic curtain. The electricity humming through the light cables.

  A minute passed. She thought about the man who had disappeared in the mine in the 1960s. He’d gone down, but never came up again. His car was in the parking lot, but he was gone. Without a trace. No body. Nothing. Never found.

  And Virku in the car in the big parking lot, how long would she cope if Rebecka didn’t come back? Would she start barking, and be found by somebody passing by? Or just lie down and go to sleep in the snow-covered car?

  She went to the door that led out to the road into the mine, and pushed it. To her relief, it wasn’t locked. She had to control herself to stop herself from running toward the workshop. As soon as she saw the people inside and heard the noise of their tools and the sound of steel being bent and shaped, her fear started to ebb away.

  A man came out of the workshop. He took off his helmet and went over to one of the cars parked outside.

  “Are you going up?” asked Rebecka.

  “Why?” He smiled. “Want a lift?”

  She drove back up with the lad from the workshop. She could feel him looking at her from the side, amused and curious. Although of course he couldn’t see much in the darkness.

  “So,” he said, “do you come here often?”

  Virku was full of reproaches when Rebecka got back to the car in the parking lot at the mine.

  “Sorry, sweetheart,” said Rebecka, with a pang of guilt. “We’re going to pick up Sara and Lova soon, then we’ll play outside for a long time, I promise. We’re just going to pop into the tax office first and check something on their computers, okay?”

  She drove through the falling snow to the local tax office.

  “I hope this is
over soon,” she said to Virku. “Although it’s not looking too good. I can’t make any sense of it.”

  Virku sat beside her on the front seat, listening carefully. She tilted her head anxiously to one side, and looked as if she understood every single word Rebecka said.

  She’s like Jussi, Grandmother’s dog, thought Rebecka. The same clever expression.

  She remembered how the men in the village used to sit and talk to Jussi, who was allowed to come and go as he pleased. “The only thing he can’t do is talk,” they used to sigh.

  “Your mistress didn’t feel too good during the interrogation today,” Rebecka went on. “She sort of curls up and disappears through the window when they push her. Sounds far away, as if she doesn’t care. She drives the prosecutor mad.”

  The tax office was in the same building as the police station. Rebecka looked around as she parked outside. The bad feeling from the previous day when she’d found the note on the car just wouldn’t go away.

  “Five minutes,” she said to Virku, locking the car door behind her.

  Ten minutes later she was back. She placed four computer printouts in the glove compartment and scratched the top of Virku’s head.

  “Right, that’s it,” she said triumphantly. “This time they’d better answer me when I start asking questions. We can fit in one more thing before we pick up the girls.”

  She drove up to the Crystal Church on Sandstensberget and let Virku jump out of the car in front of her.

  I might need somebody who’s on my side, she thought.

  Her heart was pounding as she walked up the hill toward the café and the bookshop. The risk of bumping into somebody she knew was relatively high. Just as long as it wasn’t one of the pastors or the elders.

  It doesn’t matter, she told herself. It might as well happen now as later.

  Virku raced from one lamppost to the next, reading and replying to messages. A lot of male dogs had been along here, ones Virku didn’t already know.

  There wasn’t a soul inside the bookshop, apart from the girl behind the counter. Rebecka had never met her before. She had short curly hair and a large cross covered in glass beads on a short chain around her neck. She smiled at Rebecka.

  “Just let me know if you need any help,” she trilled.