‘What is it now?’
‘I’m here to talk to Meja.’
He heard the static in the silence and then the gate swung open. On the other side the drive had been ploughed and the snow lay hard-packed and glistening. Smoke rose from the chimney of Birger’s house and the red walls stood proudly among all the white. Like a Christmas card, if you were that way inclined. He peered up at the first-floor windows, but was met by closed curtains.
Birger waited for him in the hall.
‘A hell of a lot of visits you’re making all of a sudden.’
‘I’ve only come to collect Meja.’
In the kitchen Anita was surrounded by steam and the smell of blood. A bowl of glutinous, blood-coloured batter stood before her on the work surface and her hand was dripping as she raised it in a greeting.
‘We’re rather busy here, as you can see,’ Birger said.
‘I won’t stay, I’ll just wait for Meja.’
‘There must have been some misunderstanding. Meja isn’t here.’
Lelle stopped in the doorway, trying unsuccessfully to breathe through his mouth and avoid the stench of pig’s blood. He felt under his belt with one hand, where the holster usually sat. But he had given the gun to Hassan and now all he had was Lina’s warning cry in his ears: Leave, Dad. Turn around and go.
‘You said she was sick, that she was sleeping.’
‘Ah, well, she left this morning.’
‘Do you know where?’
Birger shook his head.
‘She went through the gate at the crack of dawn,’ he said. ‘Maybe her mother was going to pick her up by the road. She wouldn’t say anything to us. I think she and Carl-Johan have had a tiff, you know what youngsters are like.’
It sounded so normal. Birger’s unperturbed expression made his flesh creep.
‘And you let her go in this weather? Couldn’t you have given her a lift?’
‘She wanted to walk. Meja isn’t a child, Lennart. We don’t have any control over her.’ Birger pulled out a chair, but Lelle remained standing. Anita’s neck was very red as she bent over the blood pudding. He could see the pulse beating under her delicate skin, and her fear triggered his. The sweat streamed under his jacket. He began moving towards the door, but Birger followed him, grinning and baring his gappy teeth.
‘Come in and sit down, Lennart. It looks like you need it.’
‘No, I won’t bother you any more. You must excuse me bursting in like this. I don’t know what got into me.’
He opened the front door and stepped out into the cold air. Barking echoed across the driveway and over by the barn he saw a movement, as if someone had ducked behind a corner. He got in the car and it swerved in the snow as he drove away.
He had to sit and wait for the gate to open and his fingers ached as he gripped the steering wheel. When nothing happened, he drove so close he was practically touching the metal. Suddenly it felt absolutely essential to leave, to get as far away as possible from these people.
But the gate remained closed. Furious, he got out of the car and began waving his arms and shouting for them to open up. Back at the house Birger appeared. He straddled a snowmobile and set off with a screech that sent the birds flying up from the trees. A tail of powdery snow followed him as he drove towards the gate. Lelle felt himself tense up as Birger skidded to a halt in front of him.
‘The frost has got to the mechanism,’ Birger said. ‘But I can open it manually.’
He climbed off the snowmobile and took hold of something that looked like an iron bar.
Lelle stepped aside to let him pass.
‘Can you push on it?’ Birger said.
Lelle walked over, put both hands against the cold metal and pushed as hard as he could. Beside him Birger stood with the iron bar, prodding the gate where it should be opening. Clouds of cold air came from their mouths as they strained, but nothing happened. The gate was unyielding. Lelle felt the panic rise at the thought of being trapped at Svartliden. He stood back and tried again, pushing with every muscle. His eyes closed with the effort and he didn’t see Birger raising the iron bar, ready to bring it down on his head. Flashing white pain shot up and down his backbone and then the darkness came.
Meja recognized Anita’s food. The home-made bread and the blood pudding. Butter she had churned herself, that tasted of cream and salt and melted on the tongue. The lingonberry jam was on the runny side and the coffee left a heap of grounds at the bottom of the mug. All of it was Anita’s work.
Anita, with her silver hair and her nightdress dancing over the frost. Meja recalled her dark expression when she discovered her with Göran in the glade. The sharpness in her voice as she sent him away. Her wiry arm around Meja’s waist. If my boys give you any trouble, let me know.
When she saw the food she knew they had betrayed her, all of them. Göran, Birger, Anita – possibly even Carl-Johan. He did everything Birger told him, without question. She thought of his pride when he talked about them: I’d be nothing without my family.
The rage burned inside her as she spread out the familiar items, but she was too hungry to refuse to eat it.
Hanna was still lying on the bed. It was hard to tell if her eyes were open or shut in the murky light. Bruises and shadows merged together. Her thin body was barely discernible under the dirty sheet. Meja felt afraid.
‘Aren’t you going to eat?’
Hanna pulled a face. ‘Is there any rose-hip soup?’
There were two flasks, one with coffee and one containing something sweet. Meja unscrewed the cap and breathed in the steam.
‘It’s hot chocolate. Would you like some?’
‘I’ll try.’
Hanna managed to sit up and watched as Meja poured the hot chocolate. It was made from fresh milk that frothed and was smooth in their throats. Meja put her rage aside and let the hunger take over. She devoured two sandwiches and two mugs of chocolate, while Hanna only sipped hers.
‘Have you lost your appetite?’
‘Yes. I think it’s the lack of fresh air. My body hasn’t got the strength.’
Meja curled up close to Hanna, sleepy all of a sudden. She laid her head on the bony shoulder and felt a new kind of calm descend on her. They would get out, one way or another. As soon as either Anita or Birger decided to come down to the bunker she would talk them round.
She wanted to tell that to Hanna, but her tongue wouldn’t obey. Her mouth had become thick and unresponsive and her lips couldn’t form the words. She tried to reach out for Hanna, and although their hands were almost touching she couldn’t seem to lift her fingers. Her joints were heavy and paralysed.
She made a guttural noise and saw Hanna drop her cup. Hot chocolate spilled over the sheet and on to her jeans, but neither of them moved. Instead they sank closer together, fumbling with hands and fingers that had become stiff and useless. Meja desperately fought against her drooping eyelids. Hanna had already given in. Her neck muscles had relaxed and her head was lolling over her chest. Meja saw it and wanted to yell at her to wake up, but she was too far gone herself.
So this is what it feels like to die, she thought, before the world floated away.
They had tied his hands and the rope was so tight it made his wrists bleed. The pain in his head came and went in waves of consciousness, and the periods he was asleep he dreamed that his cranium was too small and brain matter was about to leak out. When he awoke, his cheek was resting on cold cement and the pain was a second heartbeat in his right temple.
There was water for him in a bowl and he leaned across and lapped like a dog. After that the pain subsided and he became aware of the silence, and all he could hear was himself. His lungs straining, his heart beating. Nothing else. He propped himself up against the wall and rested his ear against it, but there was nothing. No voices, footsteps or wind. There was no window and no natural light, only the cold white glare of a naked bulb hanging in one corner. Either he was very deep underground or someone had put a lot of effor
t into making this space soundproof. In which case, this was its sole purpose: to keep a person imprisoned without fear of hearing their screams.
He thought of Lina and suddenly he was fighting for air. He hyperventilated so much the walls flickered in front of his eyes. Just one tiny pinprick of light far away and everything else drowned in darkness. It was this he had been afraid of. That she had been bound and locked up in absolute silence. Buried alive. It was the windowless walls he had seen in his nightmares; it was what had driven him out on his searches. And now it was his reality. He realized his face was wet and he licked the salty tears with the tip of his tongue, so nothing else of his would be lost.
When Birger came the pain had returned. Lelle lay in a foetal position with his bound hands protecting his face. He didn’t hear the footsteps, only the door that swung open with a sigh, and then there was the figure of Birger with his back to the light. The bulb etched dark lines into his face. Lelle sat up.
‘What the hell’s going on, Birger?’
The old man sank down on a simple wooden chair. His tongue licked his upper lip as he deliberated on what he was going to say.
‘Lennart, you more than anyone know that we have to do everything we can for our children. If they suffer, we suffer. It’s the natural order of things, to protect our children. We fight for them, to the last drop of blood if necessary, because in the end they are all we have.’
Lelle spat black tears on to the dirty floor and struggled hard to keep calm.
‘Where is Meja?’
Birger’s eyelids flickered in the dim light.
‘Don’t worry about Meja. And you will get your answer, if you listen.’
‘I’m listening!’
Birger gave a faint smile. He crossed one leg over the other, before going on: ‘Everything we do, we do for our children. I think we can agree on that, Lennart. I bought this piece of land because I wanted to create a safe place for my children to grow up in, as far from the clutches of society as possible. We have worked our fingers to the bone for years, Anita and me, to ensure our children will never have to rely on the corrupt jungle outside the gates of Svartliden…’
‘Untie me, Birger, for fuck’s sake!’
‘I’m afraid I can’t do that. Not yet.’
Birger leaned closer, resting his hands on his knees.
‘Do you know why I revile the world?’ he asked.
Lelle spat again and struggled with the rope.
‘I revile the world because I have been a victim of it ever since I was born. I was unwanted, my parents didn’t want to know me. So the state became my tender, loving mother and gave me foster parents and carers and other legitimized sadists. I won’t bore you with all the violence I suffered as a child. All I will say is that my faith in the state and its citizens died long before I reached the age of majority.’
‘I’m not interested in your sob stories.’
Birger gave a mirthless smile.
‘I think you are. Because unfortunately one sob story leads to another and they spread like weeds, killing flowers. Grief is an infectious illness, Lennart. It spreads from one person to another whether we like it or not.’
Lelle grimaced. ‘What has all your crap got to do with me?’
‘The pieces will soon fall into place, I promise,’ Birger said. ‘This story is about our children, and I want to tell you about my son Göran.’ He stopped, took his glasses from his face and breathed on them, making them mist over. ‘Göran isn’t like the others, you see. He’s ill, mentally ill. We realized early on that he carried a kind of darkness inside him. Even when he was little he would attack the animals with sticks and stones and set fire to the dog pens. He showed the kind of disturbed behaviour that can only be cured with a firm hand and plenty of love.’
‘Sounds to me like he needs a psychiatrist.’
‘Anita and I know our son best. It wouldn’t occur to us to hand him over to a stranger, not after everything we have experienced ourselves. We know what it means to have no power and be made to feel worthless. We would never, ever expose our own child to that.
‘We looked after Göran here at home, taught him to respect the animals and control his impulses. And we succeeded. He calmed down. Until he became a teenager. You know what they say about teenagers, eh, Lennart? A blasted cocktail of hormones and other things that makes all common sense fly out the window.
‘Unfortunately, things weren’t made any better by Göran’s appearance. It’s always been against him. He wanted to meet a woman, naturally, like all young men. He started driving around the villages, putting out feelers, trying to charm someone into going out with him. But nobody took the bait and in the end he got frustrated, poor lad. He looked for other solutions.’
Lelle felt the hairs on his arms stand on end. ‘What do you mean by that?’
‘He started to take things into his own hands, you could say. Of course, we knew nothing about it, me and Anita. It wasn’t until our other sons told us that we realized Göran’s illness had come back. And that it was worse than any of us could have imagined.’
‘His illness?’
‘His dark side got him into a heap of trouble. He started molesting girls. He was tired of being turned down all the time and that led to the physical abuse. We’re not proud of it and we tried as hard as we could to put a stop to it. We set him to work, tried to get him to take out his frustration in a more positive way. And it succeeded. To start with. He spent a whole year building his own bunker down by the lake. He didn’t want any help. Naturally, I had taught him all the basics. We already had two bunkers on our land, but Göran wanted one of his own. And of course, we didn’t have anything against it. We were proud of him, proud of the initiative he had taken. Never could we have guessed what it would lead to.’
Lelle leaned back heavily against the wall and tried to keep his head still to avoid the nausea. Birger pushed a fat finger under his glasses to wipe his eyes.
‘It took several months for us to realize what he had done. Göran has never been able to tell the difference between humans and animals. He can’t see any difference between hunting moose and hunting girls. To him they are prey to be caught. He doesn’t understand that people can’t be had by brutality.’
Birger’s face became animated, while Lelle sat frozen against the wall. The feeling of unreality seemed to have wrapped him in a thick daze. He didn’t want to hear more, but his tongue wouldn’t let him speak.
‘It was my other sons who came and told us that Göran had a girl in his bunker,’ Birger continued. ‘It came as a total shock to us, as you can imagine. It was around midsummer three years ago, and by now you have probably realized that it was your daughter he had taken. Your Lina.’
Lelle heard the scream, a primal howl that made his guts freeze. He heard it, but it took a long time for him to realize that it came from him.
Birger got up from the chair and began moving towards the door, away from Lelle. A weapon Lelle hadn’t noticed before glinted in his hand. He waited until it was quiet.
‘I hate to say this, but we lost her last Christmas. Göran told us it was an accident, a game that went wrong. He didn’t mean to kill her. I’m sorry, Lennart. From the bottom of my heart.’
The walls began to beat in time to his heart and the whole room spun. Then came the retching. Lelle crawled to a corner and spewed up a stinking pool of bile and utter despair. His body began to shake and something ruptured deep inside. He felt it. The very life was running out of him.
His eyes played tricks on him, he couldn’t keep them focused. But he saw Birger by the door, one hand on the handle and the other holding the gun, as if he was afraid. Lelle hoped he planned to shoot him. He crawled as close as he could.
‘My daughter died last Christmas, you say? So you let her sit in a bunker for two and a half years, like some kind of toy for your deranged son?’
‘We had no choice, Lennart. You have to understand that. The damage was already done. If we had let Li
na go we would have lost everything. Our whole life’s work, ruined. And I can’t let the state take our son. Over my dead body.’
Lelle’s heart felt like it was exploding, as if it couldn’t take any more. He clasped his hands to his chest and pictured Lina as he closed his eyes.
‘I want to see her. I want to see my daughter.’
‘I’m afraid there isn’t much to see. But you will be buried side by side, I promise you.’
Lelle didn’t know if he was alive or not. Neither his body nor his head would obey him. Time had stood still and become something else, something duplicitous and intangible. He could hear Birger’s voice right beside him, but it wasn’t to Lelle he was speaking.
Soon they were over him. Tall, thin figures who put their hands under his arms and round his ankles and lifted him as if he weighed nothing. They lugged his body between them down a corridor and up a flight of stairs, where every step felt like an axe in his ribcage, and out into a winter night that seemed blinding after hours in the dark.
Lelle was slung about roughly in their hands. Outside, the stars burned above and the cold that got in under his clothes cleared his head. He could see their pale faces under their winter hats – young men, that was all, but with gritted teeth and eyes that avoided contact with his. He heard himself swear at them, saying he would murder them all. The tallest of the three had a smile on his pitted face and Lelle made a grab for him with his tied hands. That only made him smile even more.
They carried him into the forest. The tops of the pines swayed restlessly above his head and a cold winter sun had made its way above the trees. They put him down in a clearing, on his knees in the fresh snow. A large hole gaped at him from the ground and the dark, iron-rich earth inhaled the cold. It seemed to be waiting to swallow him. Raw damp had soaked through Lelle’s jeans, but he wasn’t cold any more. He looked around, saw the pile of earth and the spades and the white faces surrounding him. Birger and his sons. Vapour from their mouths and agitated feet crunching the frozen snow.
Birger stood behind him, still with his pistol in his hand. Lelle could hear him releasing the safety catch. His voice was thick when he spoke.
The Silver Road Page 24