by Will Dean
‘My collection,’ he says.
I check through the feet on the hanger. One of the cats is bent double at the top of the stairs, coughing up a fur ball. Each pair of feet has a label. A name and a date. They are ordered alphabetically. And then I feel queasy. I glance at the cardboard box with the foam inserts. The cat vomits. I check the feet hanging from the rack like the result of some mass amputation. I go through Kristersson’s feet and Linberg’s feet and then I stop dead.
The label says April 24th 2017.
Two feet and a sticky label.
The label says Moodyson.
40
I approach the labelled feet. My feet.
‘What the hell are you?’ I say under my breath.
‘It’s nothing,’ says Freddy, scratching his ear, his head bowed. ‘Just my collection. It’s private.’
The cat stops its retching and immediately starts to purr.
I reach out and pick the feet up from the rack. I slip the right foot off the hanger and hold it and move it around in my hands. It’s unnervingly familiar. The colouring is perfect. Pale with slightly red areas under the arch, under the heel, on the creases of each toe knuckle. It’s warm like human flesh, like my flesh, but the neat cut-off ankle makes me queasy. It’s like I’m holding my actual right foot about to trim my own toenails. The size. The shape of each toe. Horrifically real. An exact replica.
‘Is this a fetish? What the hell do you use them for?’ I ask, suddenly exhausted, the sleep deprivation making my vision blur. ‘Why, Freddy?’
He shrugs. ‘It’s my thing. Yours is journalism, mine is the science and art of feet. The history. Feet get ignored as dull or they get ridiculed as unclean or ugly but they are miraculous.’ He lights up, his round face breaking into a full smile, his baby blue eyes sparkling. ‘The bone structure, pressure points, what our feet allow us to do, how they vary from person to person. I’m a student, really. A researcher.’
‘When did you take my feet? I mean, how did you?’
His hands are still tied so he gestures with his own foot towards one of the hinged briefcase boxes.
‘These are very inexpensive,’ he says. ‘I ask customers, select customers you understand, not everyone. I asked you, don’t you remember? For a bespoke fitting, I asked you to press down into the memory foam, one foot on each side of the box.’
I do remember. A few years ago. It took maybe ten seconds, him kneeling down at my ankles, me seated on a bench. Him asking me to press down but not too much. I was looking at my phone at the time. Probably replying to an emoji-laden message from Tam. I remember him saying something about insoles.
‘Insoles?’ I say.
‘That’s right. Well remembered. I wanted to ensure everyone had the correct level of support.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘You wanted to make replicas of our feet.’
‘That too,’ he says. ‘Didn’t harm anyone, did I? I’ve never hurt a housefly.’
Lena looks for her silicon feet but finds none.
‘I think we have to call the police now, Freddy,’ she says. ‘You have broken peoples’ trust.’
He swallows. ‘You said we had a deal. There is nothing here, nothing criminal. Please, do not call the police, just leave me. I’ll stop. I’ll work with what I have. The collection is complete now, I promise.’
‘Attic,’ I say.
Freddy bows his head and once again I see a supressed smile.
He shows us to a door. Lena walks through and up a set of steep stairs. The air is hot and musty, it smells of old paper.
‘See,’ he says. ‘Nothing.’
There’s a dull thud. Like a window being slammed shut next door. A cat brushes past me.
The attics are empty. Bare rafters and a large metal water tank at the far end.
‘Empty?’ I say. ‘Nobody has an empty attic. How long have you lived here?’
‘My mamma for forty-three years and me since I was born.’
‘Where is everything?’ asks Lena. ‘Old ice skates and winter ski gear? Broken toys?’
‘I meditate up here,’ he says. ‘It’s been clear since the week after Mamma passed over. I had help to empty it. Nowadays I come up here to think.’
‘Open that,’ says Lena.
We walk over to the water tank, floorboards creaking with each step.
‘I don’t know how to,’ he says. ‘I think it’s welded shut. Mamma asked a local man to weld it after the mice kept getting inside.’ He smiles then rubs his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘We had some sickness, you see. Awful sickness. Mamma especially.’
Lena steps to the tank. It’s the size of a six-person hot tub. Bigger, even. A thick metal lid. She tries to lift it but Freddy’s right, it is welded shut.
‘Don’t call the police,’ he says. There’s another distant thud. A car backfiring? ‘Please untie my hands. I have never hurt a mouse, never once interfered with so much as a dormouse. I beg you.’
We take him downstairs and Lena cuts his ropes with a kitchen knife and she tells him the conditions of this deal one more time. The blade in her hand makes the terms very clear.
The sun is halfway up the sky by the time we emerge from behind Freddy Bom’s overgrown hedge. Lena and I walk back to her place without speaking. We have seen too much strangeness, we have had too little sleep.
A raggare drives by in a beat-up old Chevrolet. The exhaust is held in place with wire but it stills scrapes along the asphalt. It has a red triangle in the back window and on the side of the car the owners have painted ‘This Is Life, Heaven Can Wait’.
We drink strong coffee at Lena’s kitchen table but I want rum. Quarter of a bottle with Coke. Ice, preferably. It was my London drink and it was my Gavrik drink.
Lena makes salted rye porridge. She says it won’t taste good but it’s fuel.
I pour eye drops into both eyes; drops is the wrong word, more like a pouring tap. Waterfalls of saline to rehydrate my tired, bloodshot eyeballs. And then I shower and change and drive into town.
Gavrik is deserted.
The Sunday following Midsommar. Everyone with a place to be is already there and they’ll be staying there till at least tonight. The factory is operational, probably a skeleton staff, but all the shops on Storrgatan are closed. They’re shut three Sundays out of every month. It’s a Gavrik thing. You see, they’ll open next Sunday for the first time since May because next Sunday is the last Sunday of the month. Everyone just got paid. The stores will open for a few hours to extract as much kronor as they can. Like I said, it’s a peculiar Gavrik thing. Add it to the fucking list.
Sebastian Cheekbones texts me to say he’s in Karlstad visiting family but a hack from Dalarna just told him police are heading to the lock-ups out near the hockey rink.
I drive straight there. It’s land hockey this time of year, which means nobody really uses it. This place in winter is the beating heart of the entire town, the floodlit matches, the sponsorship from the SPT Pulp Mill, the way Gavrik High School kids yearn to be picked for the team. When I studied in London I talked about land hockey and my friends said, no, here we just call it hockey. But when I talked about hockey, and the pads and the rink, my friends said, no, we call that ice hockey.
There are two cop cars at the lock-ups. No lights or sirens.
Noora and some out-of-town guy with a shaved head are opening each garage door with a key from a big bunch.
‘You can’t be here,’ says Noora as I walk to her. ‘Let us work.’
‘I can stand on the street,’ I say.
They both scowl at me, even Noora, then go inside the lock-up and pull the door down halfway so I can’t see inside. Five minutes later Noora walks out.
‘Anything?’ I ask.
She shakes her head. ‘We’re making progress. We have decent leads now, but you have to let us do our job, give us some space.’
‘Okay,’ I say.
An ice-cream truck passes by and its music is all wrong. Like an old-fashioned vinyl r
ecord stuck at the wrong speed, or a satanic rock song played backwards. Even Noora covers her ears.
‘Why does he play that?’ she says.
‘Any more Kinder messages from the sewage plant?’ I say.
‘No, and nothing at all from Lisa. Her family are beside themselves. But we’ve searched suspicious caravans up at the reservoir, and we’ve talked to all the registered sex offenders in this part of the Kommun.’
‘Sex offenders?’ I say.
‘Don’t read too much into it. Just a precaution,’ she says. ‘You seen the statement yet?’
‘What statement?’
‘Going out this morning, might already be out now. Statement from the chief asking people to search their outbuildings, cellars, farm structures, silos, boats, that kind of thing. Trying to mobilise the community.’
‘Most people are out at their summer cabins,’ I say.
‘They’ll be coming back.’
‘You searched Snake River Salvage yet?’ I say.
‘It’s been investigated. You know the Chief’s friends with Sally Sandberg, the breeder? Well, not her, but he was good friends with her late husband, Sven Sandberg. Poker buddies. He’s even godfather to their son, Karl-Otto.’
‘The Chief is godfather to Karl-Otto Sandberg?’
‘That’s not a crime, Tuva.’
This town.
‘You need to search Snake River,’ I say. ‘Every single building and car wreck. The boats and the motorhomes. You need to do it, you and Thord.’
‘Chief’s already been down there, already spoken to the residents.’
‘And?’
A sewage truck drives past, then two more. A convoy of sewage suckers. I can’t hear Noora’s words so I read her.
‘Emptying septic tanks from last week’s rota, trying to see if we missed one of the Kinder egg messages, that fifth one.’ She wipes her upper lip on the back of her hand. ‘And about Snake River, Thord was there with the Chief. They talked to the residents together. We’re figuring this thing out, Tuva. I give you my word. Everyone wants Tammy and Lisa back as soon as possible.’
Noora gets called inside the lock-up by the other cop and the door comes down. I head to McDonald’s for a second breakfast. Two more sewage trucks drive past. Or are they the same ones?
I’m eating my drive-thru McMuffin in my Hilux when my phone vibrates with a notification.
Facebook.
It’s a friend request.
It’s from Tammy Yamnim.
41
I stare at my phone.
Tammy doesn’t even use Facebook.
She’s captive. She doesn’t have access to a computer. Or does she?
And then I notice the photo on the Facebook account. It’s the black-and-white photo from her flyer. The photo I took of us both sat on her sofa, her blue blanket over our knees. The photo from February. With me cut out.
Some kind of cruel hoax. A game. A malevolent ratshit troll. I call Noora and she says she’ll tell their tech specialist.
I feel like my skin is slightly too loose on my body, like it’s coming away from my flesh and muscle. Probably just exhaustion. And that ghostly notification.
Outside in the stifling air I can see teenagers flirting and competing. Tanned boys. A beautiful girl in a hijab. A boy wearing green shorts and a clean white T-shirt trying to look like he isn’t infatuated with her. Two other guys eating mid-morning fries by the fistful.
I drive.
Where else can I look? I feel like a new clock is ticking now, since the body in the hollow beech tree, since the messages from Tam. She must be found soon. She’s alive and fighting, trapped in a box, smuggling out what she can to the outside world. If I have to break laws or renege on deals then I will. Do not doubt me.
I head west.
Past the Q8 garage and on through the underpass. Utgard is there in my windscreen like the border of some uncharted territory. The pines are still thick and tall in this part of the forest. The harvesters are doing their thing but this wall of spruce is still as overwhelming as it ever was.
I see the sign for Mossen village. It’s almost completely covered in suffocating tendrils of bindweed.
I turn right and drive through the gap in the trees. The temperature on my dash drops four whole degrees. Four.
The track is dusty and it is littered with the fallen bark of deceased trees. Pines that have been cut and de-branched and sliced and stacked and then removed. Bark on the track like dead skin cells.
Hoarder’s house, then Viggo’s torp cottage, then the hill. At the top is a stack of pines so tall and long it looks like the one by the SPT Pulp Mill. Maybe a thousand trees. Who knows how many tons. Seventy-year-old spruce trunks laying horizontal and naked, stacked like long-forgotten men in some unimaginable mass grave.
Pine in the air. The smell of Christmas – but a black Christmas, not a white one. A Christmas where a lost woman can turn up huddled inside a hollow beech tree, scrunched into a foetal position, her gold wedding ring still rattling around on her eviscerated finger bone. The kind where two other women can be snatched silently in the centre of a small town in June. The kind where bad things happen under the midnight sun and people still celebrate Midsommar.
I drive on.
Are you here somewhere, Tammy? In this excuse for a village? This vast horror of a forest?
I slow at the wood-carving sisters’ place. Smoke is rising from their workshop fire even though it’s twenty-four Celsius outside. I get out and walk over.
‘Oh, it’s you, girl,’ says Cornelia, the talking sister. She’d stood by a lathe smoothing a pine branch into the torso of a future troll, smoothing out the nubs and knots.
‘Hello,’ I say.
‘Girl’s come back,’ says Cornelia to her sister. ‘Didn’t I say she’d be back up here, Alice?’
‘Yep,’ says Alice. I watch her get to work on the feet of a troll. The main body is covered with bandages but Alice is scraping miniscule pine slivers from the ends of the troll’s feet, forming the toes, I suppose, carving gaps and the slightest indentations to make nail beds like she’s a redneck Rodin. And then I see them. The carved troll-size pine clogs. Each one covered masterfully with snakeskin.
‘You looking for your pal?’ says Cornelia, the talking one. ‘We heard she gone missing out here.’
‘Out here?’ I say.
‘Or someplace else,’ says Cornelia. ‘Alice, you seen that food-van girl round these past days?’
Alice looks up and I see that all of her eyelashes are gone. I guess she’s sacrificed her own lashes for some abomination of a troll, some exclusive special order for god knows who, some demonic little pine doll with human lashes now glued to its carved eyelids. ‘Nope,’ says Alice.
There’s a large wooden box under a workbench and I can only imagine the hideous parts it contains. Human armpit hair, scavenged animal bones, transparent packets of clipped fingernails.
I look at those snakeskin troll shoes.
‘Are you friends with Sally, The Breeder, at Snake River?’ I ask.
‘Got enough snakes here in Utgard,’ says Cornelia. ‘You spoke to them two tree-slaying boys up deep in the woods?’
‘I’m going there now.’
Cornelia sucks air through her teeth and slows the rate of her lathe. She points to her rifle leaning by the wall.
‘You got some protection this time, girl?’
I think about the stun gun Benny Björnmossen gave me.
‘I have,’ I say.
‘BANG,’ says Alice.
‘Be lucky, girl,’ says Cornelia. ‘You know where we are.’
I drive further up the track and pass the lumberjacks’ caravan. I need to ask them about the box, about Tam’s messages. Judge their reactions. The track narrows. No passing places. The trees overhang the track up here and my headlights switch themselves on again. David Ghostwriter Holmqvist’s house is all boarded up and the police have already checked it so I drive on. I open my truck
windows and slow down. Chainsaws revving. I drive on and park at the Carlsson’s place right at the bullseye of Utgard forest. By the grey freezer hut. There’s a For Sale sign squeaking in the warm breeze but it doesn’t look like the agent’s having much luck.
The chainsaw screams are coming from the east, I think. Difficult to tell. I take my stun gun and my phone and my knife and my wine gums. I can’t trek through this kind of elk forest in autumn or winter but in summer I can try. I already managed it as part of the organised search. It isn’t night-time, it never gets completely dark this time of year. And the forest is being dismantled one tree at a time. I can do this.
I hike through patches of birch and alder but mostly it’s just pine trees. Vertical trunks each one the same as the last. The ground littered with dry needles and more ants than there are sentient beings in the known universe. I walk and trip and scramble towards the chainsaws. In the back of my head there’s a thought. A black thought. Because of my deafness and because I can’t tell where noises are coming from, I have an image of that harvester tractor felling a pine tree as tall as a town hall and it crashing down on top of me. Or the harvester picking me up in its pincer claw and shaking me violently to remove my limbs and then slicing me above my feet and pushing me to the ground and sawing me into three neat pieces.
I walk by a fresh pile of elk dung and each dropping is the size of a goddam golf ball. Like someone tipped a wheelbarrow full of warm dung balls in a heap and just walked away.
The sun breaks through the canopy from time to time and heats the top of my head so much I want to pour water over myself. There’s a mosquito in my hair, tangled, cooking, sensing my blood right under my skin, making a vain attempt to clamber through my fine blonde excuse for hair. I smack myself and kill it stone dead.
I walk on towards the screeching chainsaws.
Something catches my attention. I stop. A red triangle, an EPA-tractor warning sign, hanging from a snapped branch. Here? I walk closer to it but there’s something by my boots, something directly under the sign. A coiled snake. I leap back. It’s just a Swedish viper, Tuva, nothing deadly, just a viper, must be. Or a grass snake. Nothing like the beasts Sally keeps in her locked rooms. Looks dead. I give it a wide berth and really I should run away but there is something that pulls me closer. Not close, just closer. I see its tail and I step around a young oak tree and there it is. The eyes. I take a stick and throw it down next to the snake. No reaction. It is not a living thing. This dead snake is staring straight at me with its forked tongue stiff out its mouth. Its eyes have been removed and replaced with two tic-tac size glass balls. The marble eyes gleam in the dappled forest light and they reflect green and blue and yellow back at me, the colours swirling around the spheres like they’re liquid.