The Shapeshifters

by Stefan Spjut

His mother is half standing and pointing to the edge of the forest diagonally behind the cabin, where the brush-like branches of the trees weave together and make everything dark. What is she pointing at?

  At first he can see nothing, but then he notices that something is moving, and the next second a grey head sticks out. Knobbly ears, pointing backwards, and whiskers hanging straight down from its mouth like long strings of saliva. A matted, flattened forehead turned towards them.

  ‘Can you see?’ she shouts. ‘Can you see the hare?’

  It feels exciting having a forest animal on the doorstep, exciting that it wants to be with them, and because they do not want to frighten it they go indoors. Cutting the grass can wait. There is no rush, and perhaps it has its young in the grass? Baby hares so small that they are rabbits?

  His mother opens a can of vegetable soup and heats it up on the stove, while the boy sits glued to the window, giving reports about where the hare is and what it is doing. Not that there is much to report. Its jaws move from time to time but mostly it sits looking straight ahead.

  When they are sitting with the soup bowls in front of them, blowing on their soup, he asks her who put the bat in the fridge.

  She does not know.

  Is it the man they borrowed the cabin from?

  ‘It was just someone,’ she says quietly, moving her spoon among the steaming pieces of vegetable. ‘Someone who walked past in the forest and saw us throw away the bat. There are lots of people here, fishing and camping. It’s just someone having a joke.’

  Does she think it is a good joke?

  ‘No,’ she replies. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ he says to his plate.

  They play cards.

  ‘Snap!’ he yells, and shuffles the cards with the blue chequered pattern on the back. His mother rests her elbows on the table and pretends to be annoyed. He likes that.

  She is wearing a strappy top with horizontal stripes. The skin shines on her jutting collarbones, and the outside of her upper arms are sunburned. You can see where the towel covered her. It has left a line.

  When she wants to stop playing he becomes sulky and tries to play cards on his own, but it is not the same. He finds a fountain pen and scribbles in some of the comics, on the white spaces between the squares. Then he draws on his knuckles, mainly to see if it works, but the ink rubs off.

  It is only when he looks to see if the hare is still there that he catches sight of the fox. It is standing at the bottom of the path, staring with round, shiny yellow eyes at the window.

  The boy leaps up and shouts out loud.

  ‘Come here! Quick!’

  His mother puts down her book and walks to the window.

  ‘Well, look at that,’ she says, leaning forwards and resting her cheek against the boy’s.

  In silence they study the fox for a few moments, until she says:

  ‘It knows there has been a hare around here. The smell stays in the grass for a long time. It thinks the hare is here somewhere.’

  ‘It is,’ he says. ‘It’s there!’

  He points and she cranes her neck, seeing that the boy is right. The hare is like a dark-grey patch behind the tufts of grass beside the woodshed.

  ‘I’m sure it’s all right,’ she says. ‘It’ll get away, you’ll see.’

  The fox has opened his ears so they stand like two scoops on top of his head. He directs his black nose towards the hare.

  ‘Now he can sense it,’ she says. ‘The trail.’

  Behind the dipped back and skinny dog’s body, with ribs defined like bars, the fox’s tail projects like a grey and bushy burden. The corners of its mouth point downwards. The animal starts to creep closer, edging forwards with its head to the ground. The quick, slender legs are dark at the front, as if it has stepped in a forest pool.

  The boy feels a whispering breath against his hair.

  ‘It smells very strange because we’ve been out there too, so he can’t find the hare.’

  But he can.

  The fox walks in a straight line to the pair of long ears that are sticking up out of the grass. The two animals regard each other for an instant and then the fox sits down, immediately next to the hare. And there they sit, beside each other in the grass, their eyes directed at the cabin.

  ‘It looks like they’re friends!’

  The idea of the hare and the fox being friends makes the boy’s mother crane her head forwards. Her eyes are staring behind the lenses of her glasses.

  Finally it becomes too much for her and she slaps the palm of her hand against the pane of glass. The boy, who has climbed onto the table, jumps at the sound. She slaps the window again and then thumps it with her fist, making the glass rattle.

  ‘Don’t do that!’ he wails.

  But the animals are not scared by the sound.

  They merely sit there.

  His mother fetches a couple of saucepans from the kitchen, but on her way to the door she exchanges one of them for the axe.

  The animals jerk when the door flies open and the woman comes out onto the step. They move apart slightly but they do not run away. She calls to the boy to stay inside, but he disobeys her. He pads out behind her. He also wants to see.

  There is a clang, cling, clang! as the axe hits the saucepan.

  Stamping her feet, she strides forwards.

  The fox stands up and runs a short distance away, looking at her over its shoulder. Its legs are bent and its chest is down in the grass. Its ears fold back, its nose wrinkles and its lips curl. The sight of the yellow teeth dripping with saliva brings his mother to a halt, but only for an instant, because she then rushes towards them waving the axe. The fox slinks away between the fence posts and disappears.

  But the hare sits as if nailed to the spot. It looks as if it is forcing its skinny shanks to be still. It is shuddering and gaping, and yellow shards of teeth are visible in its sloping lower jaw. Its ears are black-tipped and ragged.

  Not until she is standing directly over it does the hare leap aside, remarkably elongated. It runs in a loop around them, coming so close to the boy that he cries out. After that it rushes off, like a shudder in the grass.

  His mother is breathing heavily through her nose. Her forehead and cheekbones are oily with sweat and her nostrils are shiny. Her lips are pressed tightly together.

  The boy inundates her with questions. What he wants to know most of all is why she chased the animals away. Instead of answering she shoves him ahead of her into the cabin, and when they are inside she locks the door.

  ‘There was something wrong with them,’ she says, cutting up his sausage. It surprises him that she is cutting up his food because she is always nagging him to do it himself. ‘They were sick. Do you understand?’

  Her voice sounds tense and her gaze keeps wandering to the window. She has not put any food on her plate yet. It is shiny, and empty apart from some scratches. There are still flickers of sunlight in the grass down at the bottom of the path, but below the trees everything has become black and intertwined.

  After a moment she leans forwards, staring at him.

  ‘Do you want to go home?’

  The boy has stuffed his mouth full of macaroni.

  He eats and looks at her.

  ‘Do you?’ he asks, reaching for his glass of milk.

  Then she snorts and small wrinkly lines form round her eyes.

  He should have gone to bed ages ago, but it seems she has forgotten all about him as he sits by the wood burner. The cork flooring where he is sitting is scattered with splinters of wood and small strips torn from a newspaper. He has pulled up one leg and is resting his chin on his kneecap. The little figures are lined up. He is planning some kind of competition.

  His mother has remained at the table, looking out through the window. She has turned to stone over there, her back hunched and her elbows resting on the tabletop, which is why he jumps when she suddenly stands up. The chair scrapes the floor, almost toppling over behind her.<
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  The boy stares.

  ‘What is it?’ he asks.

  But she does not reply. She just continues staring out of the window.

  He walks up to her.

  ‘Is it the fox?’ he asks.

  She has cupped her hands against the glass and is breathing hard.

  ‘Mummy!’

  He tries to climb up on the table, but she pushes him back down. She does it so roughly that he almost falls backwards.

  ‘No!’ she says.

  He is not sad. But he is angry.

  All he wants is to see what she is seeing.

  He makes another attempt to get to the window, and when she stands in his way he runs towards the door.

  ‘Magnus!’

  She screams at the top of her lungs, a pleading howl that makes her voice crack. She tries to grab hold of him and knocks the kitchen table with her hip.

  But he has already run outside.

  He is already gone.

  Because the first news picture of Magnus Brodin, carried in the Gefle Dagblad on 24 July 1978, takes up over four columns, there is no need to read the headline to realise that something bad has happened to the boy. That’s always the case when a large face appears in the paper.

  This picture was the only one to be published. A black and white passport photo, probably taken in one of those little booths you have to feed with coins. His hair is unusually thick and cut bluntly across his forehead. He isn’t looking at the camera but down to the side, and he looks a little uncertain, almost afraid, I think. You’d like to imagine that a sliver of fate would show in his eyes. A dark glimmer.

  Another news photo shows two men in grass up to their waists. They are wearing white short-sleeved shirts with epaulettes. Pilot sunglasses, bushy sideburns. One of them is carrying a black briefcase, and it looks odd, a case like that out in the forest.

  The caption tells us they are inspectors in the forensics division of the Falun police force. They look puzzled.

  You could say it’s a photo that speaks volumes.

  At first the newspapers said Magnus had been kidnapped, but a couple of days later they weren’t so sure.

  Magnus’s mother, Mona Brodin, insisted that a giant had come out of the forest and taken her child, and despite the fact that the Falun police inspectors found proof that oddly enough appeared to support her statements—footprints of an unprecedented size and depth had been found in the vicinity of the cabin—no particular importance was attached to the unlikely details of her testimony. People preferred to think that the boy had been kidnapped by a taller-than-average man who, in the eyes of the terrified mother, had grown to incredible proportions. A man who had then melted back into the pitch-black fir trees from which he had so threateningly materialised that July evening.

  Or had the trail come from someone not connected with the case? And if so, what had happened to the boy?

  Mona Brodin’s credibility was reduced to practically zero as a result of two things: the prescription for Librium in her handbag and the fact that she continually spoke about the forest animals. She insisted she had seen a hare and a fox showing no indication of their natural enmity on the same day the boy disappeared. It was as demented as it was irrelevant. It didn’t appear in the newspaper.

  Could medication have caused a hallucination? Was there no kidnapper? Could she have taken the boy’s life herself? These questions, especially the latter, lay like a repulsive slime over the story. The dreadful event became merely a tragedy, and when the newspapers ceased to write about Magnus it was almost as if he had disappeared for a second time.

  The newspaper clippings have been cut out neatly, if not to say obsessively so. It could have been Sven holding the scissors, but I think it was Barbro. After sitting hunched over the newspaper cuttings for goodness knows how many hours I hardly dare say anything about my recollection of Magnus Brodin’s disappearance, which, in the beginning at least, caused such a sensation in the press and on radio and TV. The media, as we call it now. A jigsaw puzzle of yellowing strips of paper with columns of text and grainy photographs of helicopters, policemen and desolate forest roads has eclipsed the almost transparently vague memories I once had.

  Going back step by step in my mind just won’t work. It’s like trying to scrape one layer of paint off another. His face is there like a blurred stain. I know I thought the whole story was particularly nasty. First, that a kid could be abducted like that by an unknown person in Sweden, and then it didn’t make it any less nasty when it appeared his mother might have killed him.

  There is no end to the times I have dug for premonitions.

  Premonitions of evil.

  That summer I was carrying Susso, and even if I have no particular memory of it, I’m sure that on occasions I must have cupped my hands over my stomach when I saw Magnus’s face in the newspaper. Shouldn’t I have felt then that my unborn child’s destiny was linked to that boy’s? Shouldn’t I have felt a shudder go through my body?

  SUNDAY 12 DECEMBER 2004

  She drove through intervals of snow, particles streaming fast in the beams of the headlights, sputtering against the windscreen in waves. At times they came in such a mass that she had to lean over the steering wheel, wrinkling her eyebrows. The wipers squealed at full speed but made little difference.

  Even when there was a break in the snow showers Susso could not relax. Billows of snow whipped across the road, whirling ceaselessly from one side to the other, and threatened to swirl up and blind her at any moment. If she met an oncoming truck or was overtaken, she became enclosed in a white chamber for one, two, possibly three seconds at the worst. In those moments she held her breath, clenched her hands on the steering wheel and exhaled abrupt obscenities from between her clenched teeth.

  But at least it was still light.

  She picked up her mobile from the seat and checked the time.

  Surely she would be there soon? She tried to think when she had last seen a road sign.

  Just before Jokkmokk she turned off to the right and onto a road that wound alongside the lakes which led away towards Kvikkjokk and the horizon with its undulating fells. Under its streaks of frost a brown sign indicated that this was the way to Sarek National Park. The only way. An ancient route, she knew that. Linnaeus had walked it once. Or had he ridden along it?

  She soon saw the name, surrounded by a tangle of birch branches. White lettering on a blue background: VAIKIJAUR. On top of the sign an undulating ridge of snow. Between the trees she saw the white sphere of the lake.

  She slowed down, put the car into second gear and leaned over the wheel, letting her gaze wander between the houses scattered on either side of the road.

  Advent stars in the windows, light strings spiralling around naked branches. Council rubbish bins of green plastic frozen solid in snow drifts. Grey satellite dishes on gable walls. Snow-clearing tools lined up on porches: scrapers, shovels, long-handled brushes. Every household had the same collection.

  Someone had hung out a claret-red blouse on a coat hanger that moved in the wind. That was the closest thing to a human being she saw.

  She zigzagged slowly down the road so that she could read what was written on the letter boxes. Åke and Maud Kvickström. Thomas . . .

  She drove on like that, squinting her eyes to read. Many boxes were covered in snow, but she thought she might strike lucky, and fairly soon she spotted the name, written by hand on an old metal lid. Mickelsson.

  The house looked weighed down by the snow clinging to the roof in bulging drifts. The land around it sloped down towards a lake, and on the far side it was just possible to discern spinneys of stunted birches in a grainy mist. Was it snowing over there?

  She pulled up behind the car that was parked in the driveway and switched off the engine, but sat where she was for a while, looking at the house. She felt paralysed by sudden doubt brought on by the silence.

  On the kitchen windowsill, seven glowing lights of an Advent candleholder, shining in a point
ed arch. A ladder of flimsy metal leaning against the roof, on every rung a lip of snow.

  To announce her arrival she slammed the car door shut. With her eyes on her mobile she walked towards the house up the narrow pathway cleared of snow. A wreath decorated with bows hung on the door, which opened before she had time to knock. Raising her eyebrows in surprise she took a step backwards, grabbing hold of the handrail.

  In the hall stood a thin woman. Her light-grey hair was abruptly cut just below her ears. Underneath her long knitted waistcoat she wore a blouse with meandering embroidery around the neck. She was pressing her left hand to her chest. It looked as if she was in pain.

  ‘Are you Edit?’

  The old woman nodded.

  ‘Susso Myrén,’ said Susso, reaching out her hand.

  After they had greeted each other Edit backed into the hall. Susso took off her boots but kept her jacket on. She might be leaving very soon. That usually became obvious pretty quickly. The only lighting in the kitchen came from the electric Advent candles, so it was quite dark, and chilly as well. The refrigerator hummed loudly, on its last legs by the sound of it. Stuck on the door were vouchers, a handwritten receipt and a lottery scratch card. On the wall a collection of trays hung in a wide embroidered band. There were crocheted Christmas decorations, small paintings in various shapes and sizes, a calendar with notes written in neat lettering. Standing in the sink was a fuchsia in its plastic flowerpot and on the table was a newspaper, Norrbottens-Kuriren.

  ‘Do you live here alone?’ asked Susso, pulling up her belt and straightening her jeans.

  Edit had clamped her mouth together so tightly that her pink lips had disappeared.

  ‘It’s lovely here,’ said Susso, pulling aside the cotton curtain and looking up the road. ‘In the village.’

  A sharp, vertical line appeared between Edit’s eyes, as if someone had struck her with a chisel. She was troubled and had no time for small talk. That was perfectly obvious.

  ‘How . . .’ she said in a thin voice that faded away. She placed her hand on one of the copper discs covering the hotplates on the stove. It slipped sideways and she moved it back into place.