The Shapeshifters

by Stefan Spjut

  ‘We’ll just have to wait,’ she said, unperturbed.

  They sat down on the stairs, Susso and Gudrun on the bottom step, the soles of their shoes resting on the floor of shiny marble slabs with their scattering of fossils, and behind them in the darkness Torbjörn, his eyes narrowed and alert.

  In the car on the way into the city Gudrun had told them all about Sven Jerring and his radio programme Children’s Letterbox, how it had broken the record for the world’s longest series with the same presenter. There was probably no one of her generation who had not at some point fantasised about walking into Sven Jerring’s studio to sing or play an instrument.

  Gudrun explained that the people of Sweden had taken Uncle Sven closer to their hearts than any public figure who had come before him, and it seemed unlikely he would ever be replaced. He was the first man on the radio and his voice had reached out to the entire country. It was almost impossible to describe how loved he was by the population, how familiar he seemed to them. It was as if everyone thought of him as a dear old friend.

  This was precisely what made Susso suspicious.

  She found it hard to understand how such a person—in his time the most famous and perhaps most popular in Sweden—could be involved in the mystery surrounding the disappearance of Mattias Mickelsson. It was implausible, quite simply, that the trail should lead to him, of all people.

  Somewhere along the line there had to be a misunderstanding.

  Or a lie.

  She just could not work out where.

  They had been waiting for about half an hour when there was a clanking in the lift shaft and the cables started to move. Then the lift cage slowed down and shuddered to a halt, the gates slid apart with a rattle, the doors opened and an elderly woman wearing a beret and a mushroom-coloured poplin raincoat stepped out.

  Gudrun immediately stood up.

  ‘Barbro?’

  Her voice echoed out harshly but the woman did not appear to be disturbed by it. She looked at Gudrun, taking stock of her with her clear light-blue eyes, which were tucked into the pockets of wrinkles covering her face. When she registered that two other people were sitting on the stairs, her face took on a more quizzical expression.

  ‘We spoke earlier on the phone,’ Gudrun said softly.

  From her coat pocket the old woman drew out a bunch of keys and studied them intently. It looked as if she had forgotten what to do with them.

  ‘You had better come in,’ she said.

  Radio personality Sven Jerring had been dead for a quarter of a century, but the strong smell of his tobacco smoke still lingered in the apartment. It was not particularly clean or tidy, either. The grey layer of dust on top of the television, the coffee cup on the windowsill and another perched precariously on the edge of the table, the trail of potting compost below the radiator, the shapeless pile of newspapers. Susso felt sorry for the old woman. Why was there no one to help her? Did she not have any children?

  While Torbjörn and Gudrun stood at the windows looking out over the park, Susso examined a disorderly pile of carved wooden figures. She was standing looking at these when Barbro came out of the kitchen. In one hand she held a pair of reading glasses and in the other a black leather briefcase.

  ‘Sven was an incorrigible collector,’ she said, smiling at Susso.

  Susso nodded. She carefully picked up one of the figures. It was wearing glasses.

  ‘It’s him, right?’ she asked, and Barbro smiled.

  She stood the briefcase on the floor beside an armchair and sat with her hands in her lap.

  Susso, Torbjörn and Gudrun sat in a row on the sofa, and the old woman regarded her guests steadily, which soon made them feel uncomfortable. Susso grinned slightly as her eyes wandered around the room, looking for something to fix on. She settled for the decorative roller blind pulled down over one of the windows.

  On the greyish-blue fabric was a painting of a castle with towers and spires and a drawbridge. The moat’s wavy outline blended with the sea beyond, and the castle appeared to be floating, rather like a mirage.

  ‘That’s Vadstena Castle,’ Barbro said.

  ‘Oh yes!’ exclaimed Gudrun, taking a look at the blind. ‘I’ve been there, I think.’

  Barbro twisted her head to look at the castle.

  ‘That is not a particularly realistic impression,’ she said, adding: ‘My cousin painted it.’

  ‘Oh, was he an artist?’ Gudrun asked.

  ‘I don’t know if you could call him an artist,’ Barbro replied. ‘But he painted. And he painted that for Sven. Vadstena was where Sven grew up, of course. Erik thought he could look at the roller blind and take himself back in time, or something like that.’

  Then she fell silent. Judging from the small movements of her thin lips she did not know how to continue.

  ‘I have carried this story for such a long time,’ she said. ‘Now that I have the opportunity to unburden myself I hardly know where to start. It is all so incomprehensible and awful. And you will never believe me.’

  ‘We’ll believe you,’ Susso said, nodding.

  Gudrun agreed immediately and said:

  ‘When it comes to the Myrén family, our belief is limitless. That goes for Torbjörn too.’

  Barbro was wearing a gold bracelet around her right wrist which she twisted and turned and pushed up and down her arm. It was as if she could not decide where it fitted best.

  ‘Limitless enough to believe in trolls?’ she said.

  Torbjörn gave a laugh, a snort of air through his nostrils, and when Susso heard the word it was as if a leak had sprung open inside her and was beginning to seep out. She pressed her upper lip between her teeth, tearing off a shred of skin, and glanced sideways at her mother’s face, which had frozen in a serious expression. The corners of Gudrun’s mouth drooped and lines ran down from them to her chin.

  ‘Haven’t you told her anything, Mum?’

  ‘No. I didn’t know quite how to put it . . .’

  ‘My mother’s father saw a troll,’ said Susso. ‘And he took a photo of it. That was in 1987, in Rapadalen. Up in Sarek.’

  Barbro changed position in her chair, listening attentively as Susso went on:

  ‘The troll, or whatever it was he saw, was riding on the back of a bear that was running across the marshland. So trolls are nothing to scoff at in our family. In fact, I have a website where I collect evidence and pictures people send me of trolls and shapeshifters or other things.’

  ‘The troll was riding on a bear?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you have a photograph of it?’

  ‘An aerial shot, so it’s not very detailed. Have you got a computer?’

  Barbro shook her head.

  ‘You can see it isn’t an animal, anyway,’ Susso said, ‘although I don’t know what kind of animal would ride on a bear. So we call it a troll for lack of a better name.’

  ‘And how much do you know about the stallo people?’ Barbro asked. ‘Since you come from up there.’

  ‘Stallo?’ answered Susso, hesitantly. ‘It’s . . . well, what can I say? In Sami mythology they are giants, a kind of troll. But people think there is some truth in the tales, or rather to the creatures in the tales, and that they were a kind of foreign tribe the Sami people often clashed with. There are various cultural relics—graves and dwelling sites and so on—that are known as stallo graves and stallo land. But no one really knows.’

  ‘And they took Sami children too, didn’t they?’ said Barbro.

  Susso nodded.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s the kind of thing trolls do, generally.’

  It looked as if Barbro had drifted far away in her thoughts, but then suddenly she took a deep breath and rested her hand on her pearls.

  ‘I think you know about Magnus Brodin? The boy who disappeared? Well, I would understand if you don’t,’ she said, turning to Susso and Torbjörn. ‘You weren’t even born then. Anyway, he was abducted. It happened when he was in a cabin w
ith his mother, somewhere near Färnebofjärden, if you know where that is. It is a national park now.’

  ‘I remember,’ Gudrun said. ‘It was frightening that a child could disappear like that in this country. Every time I saw a person in a trench coat I thought it was a kidnapper.’

  Barbro reached for her glasses, but as soon as she had fitted them over the bridge of her nose she took them off again. Instead she picked up the black briefcase and rested it on her knees. The initials ‘SJ’ were engraved in the shiny leather.

  ‘In this briefcase,’ she said, ‘I keep everything relating to Magnus Brodin. You could say I have pushed him down inside here to allow myself to shut it all away.’

  Her stick-thin fingers rested on the briefcase but she could not bring herself to open it. Instead she began to toy with the handle and the lock.

  ‘Sven was given this briefcase by Nordenskiöld,’ she said absently. ‘His boss at the radio station. It comes from the railway, Statens Järnvägar, of course, but Nordenskiöld insisted the initials stood for Sven Jerring. It was impossible to prove otherwise, he said. He thought that in a metaphorical sense Sven was a lot like the railway. You know, in the way he brought the country together.’

  She unclipped both fastenings, lifted the lid, reached inside and pulled out a thick wad of newspaper articles that rippled as she placed them on the table. Susso leaned forwards to see. She carefully moved a strip of paper and carried on looking through the pile until she came to a black and white photograph of a boy’s face. Magnus’s face.

  ‘The police spent the entire summer searching for him,’ Barbro said. ‘With helicopters and orienteers and defence volunteers and goodness knows what else. They used all available resources. Sven and I watched it on the television news, and at first he didn’t seem to react in any particular way. He read the daily papers and asked me to buy the evening papers as well, so naturally I realised he was interested in the story. But later, when he made his own enquiries, talking on the phone to journalists who had been there and so on, I started to think he was going too far. It was an unhealthy interest. I noticed that it affected him very deeply, that it was taking over. And it was actually here, in front of this roller blind, that I suddenly became aware just how deeply it touched him. How it was based on more than compassion.’

  She sighed and rearranged her collar.

  ‘He was ill. He’d been having problems with the circulation in his left foot for years. He had recorded his final episode of Children’s Letterbox, and having to end the programme that he had devoted so much of his life to, well, that marked the end of more than just his career, of course. And when the autumn came and the papers had stopped writing about Magnus Brodin, he was in such a low frame of mind that all he wanted to do was sit by the window and look out at the park. When I asked him what was wrong, or what he was thinking about, he wouldn’t even answer. He just sat here, staring out into the darkness. He was being tormented by something inside him, something I knew nothing about, and it was only when I parked his wheelchair in front of the roller blind one day that I realised it was connected to something that had happened a long time ago. When he woke up he was facing the image of Vadstena Castle. He flew into a rage, and it was especially awful because he so rarely got angry. Prickly, at the very most. But on this occasion he was irate. I asked him if he wanted to talk about what was upsetting him, but he absolutely refused. After that I left him in peace.

  ‘It was the beginning of March when he said he wanted to go to Gränna. Not to Vadstena? No, Gränna. So we took the car. And as we drew closer to his old home he became dizzy and started complaining, saying he had to rest for a few minutes. We stopped at Brahehus Castle. For a good hour he sat in the ruins with his spiked walking stick between his legs and his fur hat on his head, looking out over the ice down below while I tried to protect him from tourists who recognised Uncle Sven and wanted to say hello. It was quite cold and there were strong gusts of wind blowing up from the lake. I was afraid he would catch a chill.’

  Barbro smiled at the memory and sat quietly for a moment. Through the open balcony door came the sound of traffic on Valhallavögen, rushing faintly like rapids in the distance. The wind had picked up and the chestnut trees were moving restlessly.

  ‘When Sven saw Vättern again,’ Barbro continued, ‘the lake of his childhood, the vast lake of his youth, it was as if something opened up inside him, because once we were back in the car and on our way towards Gränna he began to talk. He asked me what I knew about Per Brahe, and I answered that I knew a little, that Per Brahe was a nobleman who built Brahehus . . . but then he interrupted me. “Not that Per Brahe,” he said, “I mean the steamer, the one that sank.” “Oh yes,” I said. “I know John Bauer drowned.” Then he nodded and looked out of the window with a sorrowful expression on his face. “His wife drowned too,” he said. “And his son, who was only three years old.” “Yes, it was awful,” I said. “You know,” he said, “it was all my fault. Not that the ship sank, but that the Bauer family were on board at the time.”

  ‘I found that difficult to believe but I did not interrupt him because I wanted to know what had caused his depression all winter. I wanted to hear what he had to say.’

  Barbro smoothed her blouse before she continued:

  ‘In the autumn of 1918 Sven was working at the Vadstena Läns newspaper. He was twenty-three and had recently returned from Petrograd, where he had a post with the Swedish consulate. He had watched as the Bolsheviks seized control of the city with extreme brutality. He began to work for the Vadstena Läns by writing stories about his experiences in Russia. Those articles were highly regarded and soon his pen name, Crayon, was appearing more and more often in the paper.

  ‘One day he had an unexpected visitor. It was none other than Esther Bauer, the wife of John Bauer, the dearly loved illustrator of folk tales. She walked into the editorial offices holding her son’s hand and asked to speak to Crayon in private. She had something dreadful that she wanted him to put in the newspaper. Naturally, Sven was curious.

  ‘Her story began in the summer of 1904, when John was working on illustrations for a book called Lapland—the Great Swedish Land of the Future. He was living with the Sami people and was allowed to travel with them as if he were one of their own. One day, when they were on their way to a fell lake to fish, they saw a group of timber huts in the distance which attracted John’s interest. He wanted to take a closer look, but the Laps refused, so John had to go alone. The people living there were walking around in strange fur clothes—wolf pelts and bear skins with the animals’ heads still attached. Some of them were enormous and others were more like dwarves, you could say. They had a tame bear which walked among the huts like a dog. John had never seen anything like it and was absolutely mesmerised.’

  Susso, who had been leafing through the newspaper cuttings on the table, looked up and caught her mother’s eye, and she heard the sofa creak as Torbjörn shifted position and leaned forwards.

  ‘There was a squirrel,’ Barbro continued. ‘They kept it as a pet and John took a liking to it because it was unusually sociable, and when one of the giants said he could have it, he took it gladly. When he returned to the Sami the first thing he did was show them the squirrel, but they did not share his delight and one of them, an old woman, even tried to beat it to death. They told John he had been among the stallo people and that the little animal was one of them and not to be trusted. They said that if John wanted to stay with them, he would have to get rid of the squirrel, but he was not prepared to do that so he left for home the following day.’

  ‘Are you saying there were stallo around as late as the beginning of the twentieth century?’ Susso said. ‘It must have just been something they said, something the Sami people told him to scare him. Or maybe they were joking.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Barbro, ‘that could have been the case. But he could find no other name for them. And fourteen years later, in the autumn of 1918, they came to his home on Björkudden.’ />
  ‘Who did?’ Susso asked. ‘The stallo?’

  Barbro nodded slowly.

  ‘They turned up late one evening,’ she said. ‘And they were really very strange. One of them was gigantic. His head hit the ceiling, so he had to stoop, and the ceiling of the ground floor was two metres and seventy-five centimetres high. The second was a dwarf, hardly a metre tall. The third man was normal height, which, under the circumstances, looked quite amusing. He did all the talking while the other two, who were wearing floor-length capes with hoods to hide their hideous faces, stood quietly in the background. Esther assumed they belonged to a theatre where John had worked as a set designer, but when she asked if they were actors, they did not answer. They just stared at her in silence. John told her to take Bengt up to the studio, which she did, and when she came back down a moment later, John was sitting on a chair, his face completely ashen, with Humpe the squirrel on his lap. That was the name he had given it. He wouldn’t say anything at first, but eventually he told her that the men had come to settle a debt. Esther and John had been in financial difficulty for some time, so she received that news with a sigh and asked how much money they wanted. And then John said it wasn’t money they were interested in, but the boy. He told her about his meeting with the stallo and how they had given him the squirrel. In exchange they now demanded to adopt John’s child. Naturally Esther was beside herself and asked John if they couldn’t just give back the squirrel, but John only shook his head and said that was completely out of the question as far as the stallo were concerned. They wanted the boy, and if he was not given to them, they would take him.’

  Barbro sighed deeply before she went on:

  ‘John contacted the police but they practically laughed in his face, and so Esther had come to Sven, hoping he would be able to help them by writing something in the newspaper. She thought if it was brought into the open, if everyone knew that there was an isolated group of people in the Lapland wilderness who were about to kidnap the son of the famous artist John Bauer, then the police would take the family seriously and the stallo would not dare to carry out their threat. But of course Sven did not write a word about it. He was convinced that John Bauer had corrupted his wife, poisoned her with his fantasies about trolls, and that she, a woman of taste and considerable artistic talent herself, had more or less lost her mind in that isolated house on Björkudden.’