The Shapeshifters: A Novel

by Stefan Spjut

  Far, far inside the forest a bird flies soundlessly from one tree to the next, as if drawing a line between the trunks. The boy can see it out of the corner of his eye. He stands up and walks on, singing a little and talking to himself in a soft, jokey voice. His mother has told him there is nothing to fear in the forest, so he is not particularly afraid. No wolves, no bears, nothing that wants to eat him. Apart from the mosquitoes.

  Still, when the roots of an overturned tree loom above him his stomach lurches because he almost imagines it is an old man standing there waiting for him. A man who will not move out of the way.

  After a while he plucks up enough courage to approach the fallen tree. The underside is a mass of twisted roots, and on the ground is a gaping void, covered in bracken. It is black between the fronds, unpredictable and very deep. Someone lives down there, he is sure. A badger, perhaps. Badgers are underground creatures, piggy-eyed and bad-tempered. They only come out at night to nose around and whisper.

  As he stands there, peering down into the bowl below the roots, he hears a crack.

  Small furtive footsteps, very close.

  Quickly he tugs at his hat so that he can see properly.

  His eyes wander between the columns of pines. Someone was there, he is convinced of that.

  He takes a little step sideways, at the same time craning his neck to see what is behind the upturned roots. He hardly dares to look.

  A movement. A streak of grey fur.

  That is what he sees.

  And then he runs.

  Runs away towards the light where the forest thins out.

  Undergrowth and branches whip against his boots.

  He follows the forest edge, tripping and stumbling his way forwards.

  Not until he has staggered out onto the trail does he dare to stop and look around. He beats at the mosquitoes circling his face. His fear seems to have made them even more excited.

  His mother is sitting curled up on the sofa with her book, and when he comes in through the doorway she looks up at him with a sharp little crease between her eyes. She has folded the book so that she can hold it in one hand. Around the fingers of the other she is twisting her chain. It digs into the skin of her neck.

  She asks where he has been, and when she notices how wet he is she puts the book aside and helps him take off his jacket. His hair is standing on end in damp little tufts and his jumper has ridden up over his stomach in wrinkles, but he hurries to pull it down as he tells her. That he has seen an animal.

  ‘What kind of animal?’

  ‘An animal!’

  She twists off his boots roughly and finds his socks squashed up, the toes wringing wet. His feet have turned red. ‘Oh, Magnus,’ she sighs.

  To get his jeans off he has to lie down while she pulls and tugs at the legs because the wet fabric has glued itself to him. The boy thumps his head against the floor, and that makes them laugh.

  ‘Let go!’ she shouts.

  ‘I can’t,’ he giggles.

  Finally he has to stand up and stamp the trousers off instead. She picks up the jeans and asks him if he has been swimming. He didn’t go near the pool, did he?

  In the bag, which is open on the floor, he finds a pair of dry underpants patterned with roaring hot rods and motorbikes, and after he has put them on he climbs up onto the sofa and buries himself under the sleeping bag. The zipper is a track of cold steel teeth against his thigh and he changes position to avoid the feel of it on his skin. The knobbly sofa fabric is rough against his legs and it is warm where his mother has been sitting.

  He hears his mother rustling behind the log basket, stuffing wads of newspaper into his boots and hanging up his clothes on the chairs around the table.

  He wants to tell her about the animal. That it was grey.

  ‘But what kind of animal was it?’

  He sits with his mouth open for a while as he thinks.

  ‘I think it could have been a lynx.’

  His mother shakes her head. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘A wolf then?’

  ‘It was probably a bird. It generally is a bird.’

  ‘No. It wasn’t a bird. Birds don’t have fur.’

  She has come to sit beside him. With her index finger she lifts a thick lock of hair from his forehead. He stares out through the window and is still in the forest.

  ‘It was an animal, Mum.’

  She nods.

  It has started to rain again, and soon it is thundering on the roof.

  The fox’s-brush flowers down by the path are lying on the ground after the downpour. Everything is flattened and changed and glistening moistly. It is still raining slightly and now a wind has started to blow. It can be seen in the swaying pines and the other trees that flicker and reflect the light, and every so often small gusts of wind hurl handfuls of raindrops at the windowpanes.

  Groups of dead insects have collected on the windowsill. They have crawled close together to die—flies, mostly, but also wasps grown brittle. A butterfly with closed wings. It has shut itself up like a book. It would not look dead otherwise because it has kept all its colours. He asks his mother what the butterfly is called, but she does not know.

  ‘A peacock butterfly, perhaps. Or a small tortoiseshell. I don’t know . . .’

  He reaches for the little box made of bark that is standing on the table. He knows it is empty but looks inside anyway. Something ought to be kept in it, but he does not know what.

  Then he has an idea. He picks up the folded butterfly and lays it in the box. He takes great care, and when he has replaced the lid he shakes the little box to hear the butterfly inside.

  Darkness has deepened in the forest, and around the glass lamp beside the door moths are flitting about. They rustle against the illuminated globe, entranced. It looks as if they want to get inside. His mother reads to him from one of his comics. In the middle of a speech bubble she stops because the boy has lifted his head from her arm and is looking open-mouthed at the window.

  ‘I heard something!’

  His mother raises herself up on one elbow and also listens. The grasshoppers are making their rasping sound, and the shadows under the bunk bed make her face pale and turn her eyes into dark pockets. A gap has opened between her lips.

  Then she sinks down again.

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  The boy does not want to believe her. He jumps down to the floor and pulls aside the towel hanging as a curtain at the window. He rests his hand on the mosquito mesh and cranes his neck, looking down the path.

  ‘It sounded like something was walking out there. Something big.’

  His mother has laid her head on the pillow.

  ‘It was nothing,’ she says.

  So he wriggles down under the quilt again.

  Lies there alert.

  Listening.

  ‘Shall I carry on reading?’

  He sniffs and nods.

  Afterwards, when they have turned off the light, they hear a faint rustling on the roof.

  The rain is falling softly. As if practising.

  He can hear a mosquito moving about the room, but it seems unable to find its way to the bed. It goes quiet from time to time. He thinks it is waiting.

  ‘Mum,’ he says, but he can hear from her breathing that she is already asleep.

  After flicking through the comics and looking at the pictures on the last page that show what the next comic will be about, he wanders into the main room.

  Outside the window he sees a movement. His mother is standing out there, her hair a shining curtain in the morning light. She is bending over something.

  When he pushes open the door she instantly straightens up. ‘What are you doing?’ he asks.

  She is wearing a thick jacket. One of her hands is stuffed inside a large gardening glove.

  ‘I think there might be a bat around here somewhere,’ she says. ‘A dead one.’

  ‘Is there really?’ he asks, and moves closer.

  They help e
ach other to look, and he is the one who finds it.

  The little animal is suspended in the grass. It does not have the weight to slide down so it stays there, trapped, like a brown leaf. He has never seen a bat before. To think they could be so small. A long and oddly curved claw is sticking out from the wing, and his mother pinches hold of it. The skin opens out, a net of folds and wrinkles, criss-crossed by fine veins. The abnormally large eyelids are covered with the same sheer, ancient-looking skin.

  ‘It’s got a ring,’ he says.

  She holds up the bat and the thin wing turns pink as it is hit by the sunlight. A tiny silver ring shines in one ear.

  She touches it gently with her index finger.

  ‘Why has it got a ring?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says, reflectively.

  She has taken hold of the ring and is studying it closely.

  ‘It must be marked in some way . . .’

  ‘Why is the bat dead?’

  His mother does not reply, so he asks again.

  ‘Why is it dead, Mum?’

  ‘It collided with me in the night,’ she says, letting go of the ring. ‘I went out to pee and it flew at me. Here.’

  She puts her fingers on her temple.

  ‘I expect it got confused by my nightdress,’ she says. ‘They’re attracted by light colours. It fastened in my hair and I snatched it out and threw it away from me. Right against that wall. That killed it. It’s so tiny. I didn’t mean it to die, I just wanted to get it away from me.’

  She twitches her hand and the bat bobs up and down.

  ‘Do you want us to bury it?’

  The boy leans up close to the ugly little snout. Deeply set in the crumpled face are black eyes like beads. The teeth sticking out of its mouth are like shards of glass.

  He shakes his head.

  ‘Sure?’

  He nods.

  His mother walks over the grass and throws the bat into the nettles growing like a green sea on the other side of the wooden fence. Then she cranks water out of the pump and rinses her hands, and as she walks towards the boy she smiles, drying her hands on her nightdress, which is hanging down below the old jacket.

  They eat breakfast outside, in sunshine that makes them squint their eyes. They have to make the most of it, says his mother, laying out a bedspread. The grass is so stiff that it makes the bedspread stand up in peaks, and together they stamp them down to make it flat and comfortable to sit on. The mosquitoes that are flying around in the morning sun are no bother. There are so few and they do not seem to know what they want.

  They have a loaf of white bread and a tube of cod roe spread. They munch, looking at each other. He is crouching and she is sitting cross-legged with the sun falling like a banner across her legs. Between bites she tells him that his grandmother was not affected by the mosquitoes because one day when she was out picking blueberries she was bitten so terribly that she lost her way and went down with a fever. Ever since that day she had been immune and was never bothered by mosquitoes in the slightest.

  ‘But what about bats?’ he wants to know. ‘Can you be immune to them too?’

  She explains that bats do not suck blood.

  ‘It’s only in stories,’ says the boy. ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. And not in Sweden.’

  She wipes away a blob of the cod roe spread from her upper lip with a fingertip.

  ‘Bats here only eat old butterflies and things like that,’ she says.

  That information disappoints the boy. He has seen for himself that bats have sharp teeth. Like needles. He thinks it is likely they can drink blood, if they want to.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘If they are really hungry.’

  ‘Then perhaps you are immune now, Mummy.’

  ‘Except it didn’t bite me.’

  ‘But think if it had!’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, nodding with her mouth full of bread. ‘Well then, maybe I am.’

  There is a beach on the nearby lake, and now that the sun is motionless in the sky and beating down they decide to go swimming and then do some shopping. They pack their swimming things and a mask in a canvas bag and hurry down the path. The boy carries his bathrobe and flaps it about. He allows the mosquitoes to get up close before he hits them.

  The sun has been baking the car for hours and a strong smell of upholstery and overheated rubber hits him as he climbs into the back seat. It is so burning hot that he has to sit on his bathrobe, crouching like a monkey.

  It is not far to the beach and he is surprised when after only a short while they pull up in a gravel car park. Pine cones crunch under their feet as they follow the path down towards the water.

  Alders with large shiny leaves hang down over the jetty and entangle themselves in the reeds. The boy and his mother are alone, but someone has been there recently because in the grass on the lakeside is a glittering pile of shells. All the shells are tiny and fragile. The boy does not dare to touch them. He does not want to spoil anything.

  The water has a strange red colour which he tries to collect in his cupped hands, but the red does not come up with the water. It is only in the lake, which is not actually a lake but part of the Dal River, his mother tells him, as she sits on the jetty with a towel draped around her shoulders and her hand like a sun visor above her glasses.

  Using a stick he dredges up dripping seaweed, which he collects in a pile. It is a silent game. The only sound is the water trickling back into the lake. From time to time the sun shines through patches of wispy cloud. Later he tries the swimming mask, seeing the undulating gravel on the lake bed. Something is swimming there, a tiny fish. He tries to catch it in his mask but it darts away.

  The shop is located in an old wooden building with empty advertisement boards on the walls and sun-bleached awnings. It looks shut but his mother says it is not. There are steps up to the door and the metal railing is encrusted with rust. His mother is walking quickly. She is in a hurry all of a sudden.

  They both fill the basket, the boy putting in a Falu sausage which he thinks they should have for dinner. He goes to fetch milk cartons too, but they are difficult to find because they do not look like the ones at home.

  In the queue for the checkout they stand behind an old woman who is buying a bottle of elderflower cordial, and his mother lays her hand on his head, feeling how his hair has begun to dry and stand up from his scalp.

  ‘Was it nice to go swimming?’ she asks, but he does not answer. He is engrossed in the comic he has been allowed to buy, guessing what it says in the speech bubbles.

  With both hands he hauls the heavy paper carrier bag up the veranda steps and in through the door, which he quickly closes behind him. The air has turned warm in the cabin and he can hear an insect buzzing against one of the windows. He puts the bag down by the fridge, takes out a carton of milk and opens the door. And recoils.

  It is lying there on the rack, next to the tube of cod roe spread.

  Small, shaggy and greyish-brown, with crumpled wings drawn up tight to its body, its head like a shrunken dog. Strange cupped ears.

  He races out so fast the hood of his bathrobe falls down.

  His mother is on her way back from the outside toilet. She is carrying a folded newspaper and looks at him in surprise.

  Panting and shrieking, he tells her what is in the fridge. But she refuses to believe him. Without a word she walks ahead of him into the cabin.

  She stares at the bat and is suddenly angry. She says, ‘What the hell . . . ?’ and blames him. He is the one who has put it there.

  Then he bursts into tears, and when she realises that he is distraught and the crying stems from anger, she crouches down in front of him. She asks him if he is sure it was not him.

  ‘Yes, honest!’

  He rubs his tear-filled eyes with the palms of his hands and sniffs.

  ‘Well then,’ she says, ‘someone’s playing a joke on us, that’s all.’

  She tears off a sheet of kitchen roll and uses it to
pick up the bat, then walks outside and throws it from the same place, this time hurling it far in among the trees. The paper falls away and floats like a leaf to the ground.

  Then she goes in and gets the fridge rack and stands with it under the pump, scrubbing it with a washing-up brush. The boy asks if there is blood on the rack, but she does not answer.

  The pine needles which have collected in the folds of the tarpaulin fall off in huge slabs as they uncover the lawnmower. Spread over the hood is a layer of flattened cardboard boxes. When the boy lifts them off, the earwigs race around like brown sparks.

  ‘What are they doing? What are they doing?’ he shouts, excited and alarmed at the same time.

  His mother shakes the handle, and when she hears the splashing in the petrol tank she pulls the starter cord. After a couple of attempts she straightens up, grimacing at the sun.

  The boy scratches his cheek where he has a row of mosquito bites.

  When the motor finally starts with a rattle he runs out of the way and sits on the veranda. He covers his ears with his hands and watches as she forces the machine through the overgrown grass. It is a struggle. The motor keeps stopping. It growls and then falls silent. He squints. The sun has wedged itself between the tree trunks and is shining directly at him now. She crouches down to clear out the clippings from under the hood. He studies his kneecaps and the downy hairs shining on them. Where there was once a scab the skin has turned light red and is slightly raised and there might be a scar, so his mother has said. He presses his thumb against the redness and then immediately starts scratching his calves until he breaks the skin. He has been careful to shut the door of the cabin, but the mosquitoes come in anyway. It is worst on his calves and ankles—they really feast there while he is asleep. After that they go and sit on the wallpaper and the ceiling and no one knows they are there until night comes. Then they let go and drop down.