The Shapeshifters

by Stefan Spjut

  ‘But what happened to the boat?’ asked Susso, replacing the plastic bag in the case. ‘Why did it sink?’

  ‘It was overloaded and Vättern was in a bad mood,’ Barbro said, placing the tray on the table.

  ‘So the stallo people had nothing to do with it?’

  ‘That we will never know,’ said Barbro, pouring the coffee.

  ‘But what do you think then? About what he told you? About Bauer and the stallo people?’

  ‘I don’t think anything,’ Barbro said, putting down the coffee pot. ‘I am convinced it is all true.’

  They waited for her to continue.

  ‘You know I told you that the squirrel disappeared the day I left the window open?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, it came back. That same evening. I had hung Sven’s bedding to air on the balcony and there it was, sitting on the railing, staring at me. My first impulse was to rush inside and close the balcony door, but before I could reach the door, he had already slipped in.’

  Barbro gestured towards the balcony door.

  ‘I hunted around desperately looking for him, but it was pointless. You can’t catch a squirrel with your bare hands. So there was nothing else I could do but let him into Sven’s room again, and he hopped in there. It was our deal, if you can put it like that. And he knew it. He wanted nothing more than to be allowed to live in there. And now,’ she said, staring blankly ahead, ‘now, after twenty-five years, I can say with certainty that Sven was right.’

  ‘Right in what way?’ Susso asked.

  Barbro gave her a blank look.

  ‘That it was John Bauer’s squirrel he brought back from Björkudden.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Susso, and when she did not get an answer straight away she cast an enquiring look at her mother, who was bending forwards with her elbows on her knees, rubbing her forehead and making her skin wrinkle.

  ‘She means,’ said Gudrun, ‘that the squirrel is still alive.’

  ‘You’re joking!’ Susso said.

  Barbro nodded.

  ‘Not at all. He’s in Sven’s room.’

  Seved was aware that the old-timers could know things, that they could infiltrate people’s heads. At least Skabram could, if you got close. Ejvor had told him once that he should watch out for Skabram especially, that he should take care not to make eye contact with him. Things Skabram picked apart with his probing old troll fingers could never be repaired, and he did not care. Quite the reverse. The destruction amused him.

  Funnily enough, it did not strike him that the old-timers would know what had happened to the lemmingshifter until after he had pulled off the road to get rid of the sleeping bag and its contents. He had not wanted to look inside the bag. He had simply hurled it out among the birches. But then he had changed his mind, waded through the snow and tipped out the little body. Not to see it, but so that the ravens would get to it as quickly as possible. He could not bear the thought of it shrivelling up inside the sleeping bag. He wanted it to disappear. Totally.

  It had lain there in the snow, a mottled yellowish-brown. A little scrap.

  What if it wasn’t dead? What if it was only unconscious?

  He had to be sure.

  A lorry thundered past, followed by a cloud of snow, and Seved waited until it had settled and no other cars were in sight before striding out towards a broken roadside snow pole. In the fold where it had broken in two the orange plastic had faded. Holding the pole, he reached out and prodded the creature.

  No blood, as far as he could see. But one eye had popped out and was hanging like a white marble on a thread against the swollen cheek. If it was pretending to be dead, then it was doing a bloody good job. It’s not certain I’ll get away with this, he thought.

  Would even Lennart be able to defend him if the old-timers caught wind of what he had done? And what would Lennart even say? Not to mention Torsten Holmbom—it was his shapeshifter after all, and Seved knew how attached he was to his small friends.

  Yet he did not regret it. Not for a moment. Trampling the little thing to death had felt right at the time and it felt right now.

  It was nasty. It was evil.

  An evil being.

  It had harmed Cecilia Myrén. He wondered what had happened to her, whether she had recovered, but most of all whether she remembered what had happened. Whether she remembered him. Most likely she did, but only hazily. Like a memory after being drunk. She would never recognise him, and if she did, she would not remember where she had seen him before.

  But was that why he had killed it? No. It was something more primitive. Instinct. He disliked it—he had never liked the little creatures. You never knew what they were up to.

  He had done it simply because he could.

  And because no one would ever find out.

  He hoped.

  And perhaps it was not so bad. He had seen Ejvor beat a shrewshifter to death with a log once, and her only explanation had been that the animal was ill. And there hadn’t been any great fuss when Börje shot the hareshifter. Well, it had been an accident. He hadn’t realised it was a shifter.

  What Seved had done, on the other hand, was no accident.

  He had not only done it deliberately. He had done it gladly.

  It was that name.

  At first he had dismissed it as imagination.

  But he knew what he had heard.

  The one the foxshifter had made him hear.

  Signe and the boy were outside when he pulled into the yard, and he stiffened behind the wheel when he saw Skabram standing on Hyblett’s veranda, motionless and wrapped in a grey-green tarpaulin with only his eyes and his hairy legs showing. But the covering did not help: the boy was scared anyway. He was sitting on a pile of snow, facing the opposite way and hacking at the snow with a tomato-red flat plastic sledge between his legs. And Signe looked cold. She was bobbing up and down on her toes.

  Seved drew up, parking as far from Hybblet as he possibly could, and went straight into the toilet. He sat there, burying his head in his hands. Usually he could feel it if they got right inside his head, but he was so tired and tense he doubted he would notice. As long as Skabram was down in the hide there was no danger, but how long was he going to stand on the veranda, watching? If he could get Signe and the boy to come in, Skabram would probably go back down.

  He pulled off his jeans and put them in the washing machine.

  Hanging on a hook was a pair of grey tracksuit bottoms, and he took them out into the hall. As he was pulling them on he opened the door and called for the others to come in.

  The boy instantly slid down and ran to the veranda, and Signe followed him. She asked him where he had been.

  ‘Away,’ he said, and opened the fridge.

  Fortunately the window in Sven Jerring’s old bedroom was slightly open. Susso could only imagine what it would have been like in there otherwise. The pungent smell of urine struck her nostrils immediately. This was something other than patches of dried piss and she could not help pulling a face.

  Even Gudrun reacted strongly.

  ‘Good grief!’ she said, stopping in the doorway, her hand over her nose and mouth like a lid. Her face was contorted and the skin fell in folds below her chin. She rolled her eyes as she looked at the others. Wasn’t the stench awful? It looked at first as if she was going to stay outside, but when Susso and Torbjörn entered the room she followed, her hand in nervous readiness in front of her face. Barbro said nothing. She waited until they had all stepped in through the door, then closed it gently behind her.

  There were rings hanging from the curtain pole but no curtains, and no rugs on the floor. The light filtered in through the angled slats of the venetian blind, casting a striped pattern on the bed. A few pictures in glossy, dark-brown wooden frames hung above the bed. They were photographs of people, darkly dressed shapes. The gilded swirls of the wallpaper’s medallion pattern shone faintly in the gloom. On the bedside table stood a portable radio with its telescopic
antenna retracted.

  There was a crunch under Susso’s heel and she stopped to see what she had trodden on.

  ‘It’s a nutshell,’ Barbro said, kicking the sole of her shoe over the vinyl flooring. ‘And cornflakes. I haven’t cleaned in here for years.’

  She looked at the floor, annoyed.

  ‘There’s no point.’

  They stood still, waiting. Torbjörn had folded his arms across his chest and cupped his hand under his chin. His eyes searched the walls inquisitively, examining every corner. While they had been listening to Barbro’s story, he had sat without saying a word, looking down at his feet and not touching either his snus tin or his mobile. It seemed as if his disbelief was beginning to fray at the edges. As for Susso, she did not know what to think. She felt ill. It came and went but would not let go of her. And now she felt it drilling deeper and deeper inside.

  She wanted to discuss everything that had come up during the day but there had been no suitable moment. They had only had time to glance briefly and enquiringly at each other when Barbro went to make the coffee. She could no longer judge what was realistic and what wasn’t, and it was making her giddy.

  ‘Hello,’ said Barbro, in a soft sing-song tone. ‘Is anyone home?’

  Shards of nutshell were crushed under the heels of the old woman’s flat shoes as she slowly walked towards the window, looking around falteringly. Bending her stiff legs she leaned down and checked under the bed, and also glanced up at the wardrobe.

  ‘He stays out most of the day,’ she said, loosening the latch that held the window in place. ‘Luckily he sees to his bodily functions in the park. The smell in here is due to some kind of territorial behaviour, I think. I’ve found it is especially strong at this time of year. As if he becomes anxious or something, but I scarcely think about it now. At the beginning I put down newspaper, but he only tore it to shreds. He also went for the curtains, so I had to take them down. But otherwise you wouldn’t know he was here. I hardly notice him.’

  She opened the window wide.

  ‘Hello!’ she called out.

  Susso walked up to the window and looked at the chestnut tree outside before scanning the park.

  A car was driving slowly along the road below, and from the other direction a cyclist came down the pavement, which was dotted with partially melted patches of ice. The pedals squeaked.

  ‘He sleeps in here every night, at least at this time of year. He lies here on the bed with his tail round his body looking like a small fur hat.’

  ‘So you’ve had him in here ever since Sven died?’ Susso said, looking at the messy floor.

  Barbro nodded.

  ‘But why haven’t you shown him to anyone? Surely you must have? To someone who could examine him, I mean. A vet or someone.’

  ‘What is there to show?’ said Barbro, straightening up. ‘That I have a squirrel, a tame squirrel? If the landlord found out, he would have me evicted, Sven Jerring’s widow or not. You can’t see from the outside how old he is. You can’t see what . . . he is.’

  ‘And what is he then?’

  ‘A troll, I would think.’

  ‘That looks like a squirrel?’

  Barbro brushed her hair back with her hand and patted it down before answering.

  ‘He has another side to him too. It’s as if his fur covering shrinks back and you can see a tiny face. He looks like a sad old man. The first time I saw that side of him I screamed, and I think that upset him because it was several years before I saw his face again.’

  ‘You mean he can change shape?’ asked Gudrun, who had walked up to the window.

  ‘“Shapeshifting” is the correct term. I have managed to find out that much at least. When he gets frightened or does not want to be seen he takes refuge in the form of a squirrel. It happens in a second. It takes considerably longer the other way round. I think he feels better as a squirrel. He seems so unhappy when he isn’t one. But of course, he might always be unhappy. It’s just that I can’t see it.’

  ‘But how often is he like that?’ asked Susso. ‘Not a squirrel, I mean?’

  ‘In recent years it has happened less frequently. It’s as if he hasn’t got the strength. I’ve wondered if it is to do with his age. He is over a hundred, you know.’

  ‘But are you sure this is the same squirrel? The one John Bauer brought back from his Lapland journey? Humpe?’

  ‘He has lived in this room for twenty-five years. And if he can live to twenty-five, then he could just as easily live to a hundred, don’t you think?’

  Susso nodded. In some weird kind of way it seemed perfectly logical.

  ‘If only you knew how many times I have come into this room and thought he had finally left,’ Barbro said, ‘and that it was all an awful dream. But he is never far away. All of a sudden there he is, sitting on the balcony railing, looking at me through the window. And so of course I have to let him in.’

  ‘That’s what I can’t quite understand,’ said Gudrun. ‘If you don’t open the window, well, he can’t come in, can he?’

  Smiling, Barbro brushed the windowsill with her fingertips, as if to feel whether the smooth surface had any uneven patches.

  ‘I used to reason like that too,’ she said. ‘Many times I thought I let him live here because I promised Sven that he could, but that isn’t what I cared about really. It was only an excuse. It’s more that I don’t dare to shut him out, because if I do he sits out there staring at me. From morning to night. Either on the balcony rail or in one of the chestnut trees. It is extremely stressful, I can tell you. Having those eyes following me the whole time. I can’t bear it. He . . . he gets to you.’

  ‘Why haven’t you moved then?’ Susso asked her.

  ‘Move?’ said Barbro, wearily. ‘Where should I move to?’

  ‘I don’t know. Anywhere.’

  ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘It’s . . . I can’t.’

  ‘Why?’

  The old woman’s eyes narrowed and it looked as if she was going back in her mind, recalling all those times she had asked herself the same question.

  ‘Because I can’t. Because I have . . . responsibilities.’

  ‘But you said just now that you didn’t. That really you don’t care about your promise.’

  ‘Not to Sven. I mean to him.’

  ‘To the squirrel?’ Susso said.

  ‘You haven’t met him,’ Barbro said, and looked down at her hands, which were clasped together and resting on her stomach. ‘You don’t understand.’

  Torbjörn had left the room; Susso could hear his voice mumbling in the apartment, and when she went into the sitting room she found him sitting on the sofa with his mobile pressed to his ear, holding the tin of snus in his other hand and tapping it against his thigh. He was embarrassed and looked at her questioningly, and when he had ended the conversation he sat for a long time looking at Susso, who had seated herself in the wicker chair opposite him. His upper lip bulged from the snus pouch and there were dark circles under his eyes.

  ‘I just can’t stand the stink in there,’ he said.

  Susso held out her palm and caught the snus tin as it came flying through the air. She inserted a pouch under her lip, pressed the lid back on and threw the tin back to him.

  ‘You get used to it,’ she said. ‘Our sense of smell is adaptable.’

  ‘Not mine,’ he answered, tapping the keys on his mobile. ‘Obviously.’

  ‘So, what do you think then?’ Susso continued. ‘About the squirrel?’

  Torbjörn grinned and imperceptibly shook his head.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, rolling the snus tin up and down his leg. ‘I mean, I was there when we saw the film at that guy Mats’s place, and I’ve seen the photo from your wildlife camera, but this, this is like . . . I just want to get out. That’s how it feels.’

  ‘We’ve got to stay a bit longer, until it comes back. If it comes back.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Then we’ll see,’ Susso added
.

  Torbjörn continued:

  ‘I’m okay with the fact that the dwarf snatched Mattias, or that he’s mixed up in it. I accept that. And I’ve never suggested your granddad’s picture is a fake. But a squirrel that isn’t a squirrel?’

  He shook his head.

  Susso did not answer. In speechless confusion she had asked herself the same question, but she could not take it in and was probably too scared to follow that train of thought to its logical conclusion. She waited for Torbjörn to say something else but he had picked up his mobile, so she walked off.

  Barbro and Gudrun stayed where they were by the window when Susso walked in.

  The chestnut tree swayed and from time to time the wind took hold of the open window so that Barbro had to hold onto it. Susso crossed her arms and was about to sit on the edge of the bed when she changed her mind, twisted her body and ran her hand over the bedspread. There was a thin carpet of hair covering the rough weave, bunches of soft greyish-brown strands between three and four centimetres long. Susso picked up a tuft and rubbed it between her finger and thumb.

  ‘How long is he usually gone for?’ she asked, flicking the hair away and rubbing the palms of her hands together.

  ‘Not long,’ replied Barbro, stretching to look at the top of the tree outside the window. ‘He’ll be back soon.’

  ‘Can’t you entice him in somehow?’

  ‘There’s no need. He knows you are here.’

  ‘Does he?’ Susso said.

  ‘He’s never gone for long,’ Barbro repeated. ‘He usually stays in one of the trees outside here. Or somewhere in the park where there happens to be a lot of people. People interest him tremendously. Especially children. There is a little pond and a playground with swings over there,’ she said, pointing. ‘He usually hops around and lets the children chase him. He finds that funny. But of course now, in the winter, when the park is practically deserted, I suppose you could say he gets depressed, because he sits in the chestnut tree staring at nothing all day. He can sit motionless for hours, waiting.’

  ‘So he knows we’re here?’ Susso said, walking up to the window and looking out over the park, away to the playground that could be seen through the trees.