God, this is hard.
When he’d started to dig, he’d imagined that although it would surely take a superhuman feat of strength to reach the coffin, all he would have to do after that would be to pull it up, open it and… be reunited.
But only the dirt they’d taken out to lower the casket had been loose. That was the earth he had managed to remove. To bring up the casket from this same hole was another matter. They didn’t dig graves with that in mind.
He slipped his hands behind his head, resting on his feet. A mild breeze drifted over the cemetery, rustling in the aspen leaves and cooling his overheated body. In the stillness it suddenly occurred to him that perhaps he had imagined the whole thing. His desire so intense that he had willed the sound into being. Or perhaps an animal, perhaps a…
rat.
He screwed up his eyes. A new breeze caressed his brow. He was absolutely exhausted, could feel the over-exerted muscles in his arms and legs contracting, tensing up as he stood. He did not think he would even be able to get himself up out of the grave without help.
Things are as they are.
The furrows in his brows smoothed, and he felt a strange kind of peace. Images danced faintly before his eyes. He was moving through
a field of reeds. Green, rustling stalks surrounded him, breaking under his advance. Through the curtain of reeds he glimpsed naked bodies; women playing peekaboo like Bollywood sirens.
He too was naked and the reeds scraped his body, cutting deep into his skin. It stung everywhere and a film of blood covered his body as he moved on, dizzy and goaded by the mild pain, the desire for the teasing bodies. An arm here, a breast there, a fluttering strand of brown hair. He stretched out his arms, grabbed only reeds, and more reeds.
There was a crackling and crunching under his feet, the women’s laughter rose above the rustling of the reeds and he was a bull, a lumbering fleshly beast trampling the delicate vegetation to satisfy his lust…
He opened his eyes, suddenly alert.
That scraping again.
And he didn’t just hear it. He felt it. The vibrations, under his feet, of nails scraping against wood. He raised his head, looked down at the coffin.
Krrrr…
Half a centimetre of wood between the fingers and his foot.
‘Elias?’
No reply.
He made his way up, one vertebra at a time.
Among the trees in the memorial grove, he found a long, thick stick that he carried back to the grave. When he surveyed all the dirt that lay scattered around the gaping hole, it didn’t seem possible that he could have summoned the strength.
But he kept going.
He pushed the stick down between the head of the coffin and the packed wall of earth, pressed down. The coffin tipped slightly and it felt as if his tongue was swelling in his mouth as he heard something glide, changing position inside.
How does he look, how does he look…
But not just that. There was a clatter as well. As if there were pebbles in there.
Finally he managed to raise the coffin enough so that he could get down on his stomach, grip it with both hands and pull it up.
It did not weigh much. Not much at all.
He stood there with the little box in front of his feet. It was not disfigured by rot, it looked the same as it had done in the chapel. But Mahler knew that what altered a corpse did not come from the outside, but from within.
He rubbed a hand over his face. He was scared.
Sure, he had heard fantastical stories about dead bodies, especially of dead children, exhumed many years after the funeral, which had not changed at all. Simply looked as if they were sleeping. But that was fairy tales, legends of the saints; extraordinary circumstances. He had to be prepared for the worst.
The coffin was rocked by a soft blow from inside, there was a rustling sound, and for the first time since he arrived, Mahler felt a strong urge to run away. The Beckomberga mental hospital was only a kilometre away. Run there. With his hands over his ears, screaming. But…
The Lego fort.
The Lego fort was still in his apartment. The tiny figures left in the same place as the last time they had played. Mahler could see Elias’ hands manipulate the knights, the swords.
‘Were there really dragons back then, Grandad?’
He bent over the coffin.
The lid was only fastened with two screws, one at the top and one at the bottom end. He managed to remove the top one with his apartment key, took a deep breath and twisted the lid to the side.
Held his breath.
That isn’t Elias.
He took a step back from the body that lay nestled in the plush upholstery. It was a dwarf. An ancient dwarf-man who had been buried in Elias’ place.
He involuntarily gulped for air through his mouth, his nose, and the pungent smell of over-aged cheese prompted a retching that he was able-with some difficulty-to prevent from becoming full blown vomiting.
That isn’t Elias.
The moonlight was strong enough so he could see what had happened to the body. The tiny hands that were now fumbling in the air were desiccated, blackened, and the face… the face. Mahler closed his eyes, clapped his hands over them, whimpered.
He realised now how much he had still believed, against all odds, that Elias would look the same as in life. Why not, given that all of this was impossible anyway?
But he didn’t.
Mahler clenched his lips, sucked them into his mouth, and removed his hands from his eyes. He had seen so many terrible things in his work, he knew the trick of making himself blank, empty, not present. He did this now as he went up to the casket and lifted Elias in his arms.
The penguin pyjamas were silky to the touch. Underneath he could feel hardened skin, stiff as dried leather. The entire abdomen was swollen from gases that had formed in the intestines and the smell of rotting protein was worse than he could have imagined.
But Mahler was not here. The person here was a man carrying a child. A very light child. He cast a last glance into the coffin to see if he forgotten anything. Yes, he had. The Legos.
That was what had made the clattering sound. Elias had opened the box of Legos that had been placed with him, and the plastic pieces were now lying in a pile at one end, together with the ripped cardboard.
Mahler stopped short, seeing it in his mind. Elias had lain there and…
He screwed his eyes shut. Erased. Stood there one crazy moment and hesitated, wondered if he should put Elias down and put the Lego pieces in his pocket.
No, no, I’ll buy new ones, I’ll buy the whole store… I…
With short strides and ragged breaths that did not seem to be enough to oxygenate his blood, he started to walk towards the exit, whispering, ‘Elias… Elias… everything will be fine. We’re going home… to the Lego fort. All this is over. Now we’re… going home… ‘
Elias twisted slowly in his arms, as if sleepy, and Mahler sawall the times he had carried the sleeping little body from the car or from the couch to the bed. In the same pyjamas.
But this body was not soft, nor warm. It was cold and unyielding, stiff like a reptile. Halfway to the exit he dared to peek at the face again.
The skin was orange-brown, drawn taut so the cheekbones were sharply outlined. The eyes were just a couple of slits and the whole face looked vaguely… Egyptian. The nose and lips were black, shrunken. There wasn’t much that resembled Elias except for the brown curly hair tumbling down over the wide forehead.
And yet, it was a stroke of luck.
Elias had started to mummify. If it had been damp in that earth he would most likely have rotted away.
‘You were lucky, my boy. That it’s been such a warm summer. Yes, you wouldn’t know, but it has been…lovely and warm every day. Like the time we went fishing for perch… do you remember? When you felt so sorry for the worm and we fished with gummy worms instead…’
Mahler kept on talking the whole way until he was back a
t the gates again. They were still locked. He had forgotten about that.
Exhausted, unable to take another step, he sank into a heap next to the wall by the gates with Elias in his arms. He couldn’t smell him anymore. The world smelled like this.
He held Elias pressed against his chest, looked up at the moon.
It looked back down at him, kind and yellow, approving. Mahler nodded, allowed his eyes to shut, stroked Elias’ hair.
His soft hair.
Danderyd Hospital 00.34
‘How are you feeling now?’
A microphone was stretched in toward his chin and David almost
grabbed hold of it out of habit.
‘How I… feel?’
‘Yes. How do you feel right now?’
He did not understand how the Channel-s reporter had tracked him down. After having been turned out of Eva’s room he had gone and sat down in the waiting room and fifteen minutes later this reporter had turned up, wondering if he could ask some questions. The man, who was close to his own age, had a shiny look about his eyes that was either due to sleep-deprivation or makeup. Or excitement.
David pulled up the corners of his mouth into a grin that looked horrible on camera, answered, ‘It feels good. I’m already looking forward to the semis.’
‘Pardon?’
‘The semi-finals. Against Brazil.’
The reporter glanced at the cameraman and they exchanged a silent code: re-take. The reporter changed his tone, as if he was saying his line for the first time.
‘David, you are the only person who was actually present at an awakening. Can you describe what happened?’
‘Yes,’ David said. ‘After we nailed that first penalty I just felt the game swung our way…’
The reporter frowned and put the microphone down, waved the cameraman over and leaned close to David.
‘Forgive me, I know this must be hard for you, but you have been through something that the public…I mean, you must understand. Lots of people are interested in hearing this.’
‘Go away.’
The reporter threw his arms out wide. ‘I get it. Sure. Here I am attaching myself to your pain like a kind of parasite, in order to make entertainment out of it, I know it feels that way to you, but… ‘
David looked the reporter straight in the eye and babbled mechanically, ‘I think a lot of it’s due to the fact that we’ve shaken loose a bunch of people who don’t ordinarily come home to Sweden for these events I’m not saying we don’t normally have a strong team but it’s true that when you’ve got Mjallby covering you from behind and Zlatan in the kind of form he showed today… ‘
He grabbed his head in his hands, fell and curled up on the couch, closing his eyes as he went on, ‘… well you know it’s almost impossible to win no sorry I mean not to win of course I felt it from the moment we ran onto the pitch… ‘
The reporter stood up, signalling to the cameraman to film David as the latter continued his recitation in the empty room, curled up in a ball.
‘… and I said to Kimpa Now let’s take them and he just nodded like this and I thought about that how he’d nodded when he passed me that long ball and I sent it on to Henke… ‘
They drew back, zooming out. It was a good shot.
David stopped at the moment he heard the door glide shut, but remained in the same position. He was never going to be human again. This is what the darkness looked like from the inside. The famines, torture victims, massacres. The other half of the world, the one the comfortable people sighed over, racked their conscience over and had no way into. The darkness that he flirted with in his routines sometimes. Hypothetically, with no knowledge.
The reporter was living in the sunlit world, and speech with him was meaningless. There were no words. David pressed his palms against his eyes until red flowers bloomed. The worst thing was that Magnus was still there. He was sleeping at his grandmother’s and knew nothing. In a couple of hours David would have to go there and let in the darkness.
Eva, what should I do?
If he could only ask her advice about this one thing: how he should tell Magnus.
But there were other people asking her questions right now. About other things.
After the initial burst of chaos waned, the doctors had become extremely interested in the fact that Eva could talk. Apparently she was one of the few who could. Perhaps it was due to the fact that she had died so close to the awakening, perhaps it was something else. No one knew.
David had not been particularly surprised to hear about what was happening in the morgue. It seemed to him as abhorrent, implausible-and as logical-as everything else. The world had been thrown into darkness tonight: why shouldn’t the dead come back to life as well?
He got up after an immeasurable length of time, walked out into
the corridor and turned the corner on his way to Eva’s room. He stopped. A throng of people had gathered outside the closed door, he spotted a couple of television cameras, microphones.
My only love…
Each time he saw a shooting star, every time he played a game where he got a silent wish, he had wished this:
Let me always love Eva, let my love for her never fade.
For him, she was the one who dominated the heavens and made the world a place it was possible to live in. For the people in the corridor she was an object, a novelty, a source of information. But they were the ones who owned her now. If he approached them, they would throw themselves upon him.
He found a waiting room further down the corridor where he sat down and stared at a Mira poster until the figures in the artwork started to crawl, move along the edges of the frame. At that point he approached a doctor who knew nothing, could give no news but the word itself: no. No visitors allowed.
He walked back to Mira. The longer he stared at the figures, the more evil they looked. He stared at the wall instead.
Taby Municipality 00.52
When Flora got off the telephone she looked, for the second time this night, as if she had seen a ghost. She walked over to the bedroom door, listening for something from inside.
‘How did it go?’ Elvy asked. ‘Did they believe you?’
‘Yes,’ Flora said. ‘They did.’.1
‘Are they sending an ambulance?’
‘Yes, but… ‘ Flora sat down next to Elvy on the couch, knocking her teaspoon against her cup, ‘it may take a while. They have a lot to do… right now.’
Elvy gently took hold of her hand to make her stop clinking.
‘Why is that? What did they say?’
Flora shook her head, turning the spoon in her fingers.
‘It’s happening all over. There’s several hundred that have woken up. Maybe thousands.’
‘No.’
‘Yes. She said that every ambulance is out at the moment… picking them up. And that we shouldn’t try to do anything, that we shouldn’t… touch him or anything.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because there could be a danger of contagion or something. They don’t know.’
‘What kind of contagion?’
‘I haven’t the faintest. That’s just what she said.’
Elvy sank back on the couch, staring at the crystal vase on the coffee table that she and Tore had been given by Margareta and Goran on their fortieth wedding anniversary. Orrefors, Heinous; probably very expensive. A couple of withered condolence-roses hanging from it doubled-over.
It started with a twitch at the corners of her mouth, a trembling in the lips. Then she felt her mouth tugged back, irresistibly back and up, until a grin wide enough to strain her cheeks covered Elvy’s face.
‘Nana? What is it?’
Elvy wanted to laugh. No. More than that. She wanted to jump out of her seat, do a few dance steps and laugh. But Flora’s head drew back ten centimetres, as you might draw away from an uncertain phenomenon, and Elvy used her right hand to wipe the smile mechanically from her face. The corners of her mouth wanted to turn up again, but s
he kept them in place by sheer force of will. She didn’t want to cause alarm.
‘It’s the Resurrection,’ she said with suppressed glee. ‘Don’t you see? It is the Resurrection. The raising of the dead. What else could it be?’
Flora tilted her head. ‘You think?’
There weren’t words for it. Elvy could not explain. Her joy and anticipation were too great to be contained in mere language, so she said, ‘Flora, 1 don’t want to talk about this right now. 1 don’t want to discuss it. I just want to sit undisturbed for a little while.’
‘Why? What for?’
‘I just want to be alone. A little while. Can you do that for me?’
‘Yes. Sure.’
Flora walked to the window, stood looking out either at the faint outline of the fruit trees outside, or at Elvy’s reflection in the glass.
Elvy savoured her bliss in silence. After a while Flora smacked the metal wind chimes hanging in the window, opened the french doors and walked out. The sound of her steps mingled with the clanging of the chimes, but after several seconds both had died away.
The heavenly kingdom. And on the last day ye shall all…
Euphoria. There was no other word to describe what was bubbling in Elvy’s breast.
As if it were the last evening before a long, long trip. You’ve got a ticket in your pocket and at last everything is packed. And you can simply sit and feel the nearness of distant lands…
Yes. Like that. Elvy tried to visualise the distant land she would soon be travelling to, that everyone would soon be travelling to, but here there were no travel brochures to pore over, everything was up to her and she couldn’t see. It slipped away, defied description.
But she sat there and felt that … soon… soon…
A couple of minutes went by in this way, and then some drops of guilt began to drip into her goblet of joy. Flora was with her. Here. Now. Where had the girl got to? As she stood up out of the couch in order to go and look, she caught sight of the armchair pushed up against the bedroom door and had time to think why is that there? before she remembered why. Because Tore was sitting in there. At his desk. Shuffling papers. As in life. Elvy stopped in the middle of the floor and a dark suspicion trickled in.
Handling The Undead Page 8
