by Stefan Spjut
I sighed.
‘Other than sigh,’ Diana said.
‘I can’t take this any more. Can you understand that?’
‘The reason it’s ended up this way is that you can’t take it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You let her go. When she wanted to move.’
‘What was I supposed to do, she’s thirty-five years—’
‘When she moved here! Here, Gudrun. In 1994.’
‘But she wanted to.’
‘And Kiruna wants to eat ice cream and sweets every day. Do you think we let her?’
‘That’s hardly the same thing.’
‘Yes, it is, actually. As a parent, you have an obligation to stand firm. To resist! To not yield. You let her have her way because you couldn’t take her nagging and that was weak, and a betrayal. Then she sat around down here, all alone, and started developing an interest in things that turned out to be very, very dangerous. And now, when you have a chance to do something about it, twenty years later, when you actually get that second chance, you’re making the same mistake again. You’re letting her down again.’
‘I just don’t know what to do.’
‘Try to channel that guilty conscience and that pathetic self-pity into something useful instead, and be the parent you should have been back then.’
‘I think you’re being unfair.’
‘You know I’m right; that’s why you’re making that face.’
Those words found their mark; I didn’t respond, just fiddled with my watch strap. At that point, Roland entered the shop.
‘This is Roland,’ I said. ‘My partner. And this is Diana, who was with Susso, up in Norway. Susso’s still there. They’ve taken her, Roland.’
‘Who? The cult leader?’
‘I don’t know,’ Diana said. ‘But I assume so.’
‘They threw Diana in the boot of a car and drove her up to Norway. Then they tried to kill her. But she escaped.’
‘As I can see.’
Diana pulled down the vizor of her baseball cap as though to limit what he could see.
‘He knows everything,’ I said. ‘Can I tell him?’
While I told him what Diana had told me, Roland distractedly played with the items on the counter. Then he pulled out his phone, pushed his glasses down onto his nose and tapped at the screen.
‘Runajärvi, Pangajärvi. Did I mean Rumajärvi? Could that be it? The Armasjärvi accident? No, what did I bloody type? Let’s see now. Rumajärvi. Rumajärvi is a village in Karesuando parish, Kiruna County. It’s five miles south of Karesuando.’
After a while, he continued:
‘Suicide wave in Rumajärvi. That’s from last year.’
He continued to read quietly; eventually, I was so impatient I took the phone from him. The article was from the local morning paper. It said three people in Rumajärvi had committed suicide during 2013 and that after that, the village had been abandoned.
‘You have to ask yourself,’ he said, ‘why they took you so far north. There’s that camping site up there. In, what’s it called, Skippagurra. Maybe it could be one of those trafficking things?’
‘Trafficking?’ Diana said. ‘You mean they were going to sell me?’
‘I’m just speculating.’
‘They were going to get rid of me. I’m pretty sure of that.’
‘No one would drive a hundred and fifty miles just to get rid of someone.’
‘But they would drive a hundred and fifty miles to sell me? A thirty-five-year-old woman with a child? There’s no way I’d be worth it.’
‘Hey. Listen to this. Suicide waves are extraordinarily rare, but when they do sweep the Cap of the North, it’s virtually always the Sami, primarily Sami men, who follow each other in death after despairing in stoic silence for years. But in Rumajärvi, it was completely ordinary locals who took their own lives. Says a local politician they interviewed for the article. The population plummeted from eighteen to one over the course of just a few months.’
‘Seventeen suicides?’ Roland said.
‘Three. The rest moved. Except one.’
He had picked up a blonde little girl doll in Sami traditional clothing and was lifting her skirt up to see what she was wearing underneath.
‘Makes you wonder what they must be like,’ he said. ‘The one who stayed.’
‘I suppose it’s him,’ I said. ‘Erasmus.’
‘Erasmus of Rotterdam,’ Roland said. ‘Well, since we have a name, and an address, let’s just send the sheriff in after them.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘let’s not!’
‘Why not?’
‘There’s nothing they can do. Don’t you get it? Don’t you remember what it was like last time? We had zero help from the police. You might as well ask them to do something about the weather!’
‘I don’t understand you,’ Diana said. ‘Of course we have to go to the police.’
‘There’s no point,’ I said with a sigh.
I had locked myself in a bubble of feigned resignation and I stayed in it until Diana left. Then, I lashed out at Roland.
‘How can you even think of getting the police involved! They’re going to go out to Susso’s and sniff around. With dogs and everything, like you said.’
‘Isn’t the most important thing that we get her back?’
‘I don’t want them going out there. Is that so hard to understand?’
‘Then we’ll have to move him first.’
‘Fine, be my guest. You with your back.’
‘Can we talk to the police if I make sure he’s moved first?’
‘Are you serious?’
He nodded.
‘We can talk to them, but it won’t accomplish anything. Firstly, because they think our entire family is full of lunatics; you can be sure that’s down in some record somewhere. They think everything we say is lies. And secondly, there’s nothing they can do. The creatures who have taken her, they’re not human. Are you hearing me? They’re not human. And whatever human traits they may have, they’re external.’
He bent down and picked up the doll, which he had dropped on the floor.
‘I keep dropping things,’ he mumbled. ‘Yes, I’m hearing you.’
‘But you don’t believe me. It was the same thing when I told you about the squirrel and the mouse. You sit there and you nod, but you don’t believe me. In your heart of hearts, you don’t believe me.’
He watched me silently with sad eyes.
‘She’s gone. I have to accept it.’
‘For the life of me, I can’t understand your way of thinking.’
‘That much is clear by now, painfully so in fact.’
‘You can’t just give up and let them keep her.’
‘My girls are gone. And it’s my fault. And Dad’s fault.’
I pushed over a stack of photo books that crashed onto the floor but instantly regretted it and squatted down to pick them up.
‘Susso’s in Rumajärvi,’ he said, pointing to the handbags hanging on the wall. ‘And chances are that bloke Brösth is there too. We have nothing to lose by talking to the police. So long as we clean up Susso’s vegetable patch first.’
‘We can’t move him. It’s sick.’
‘It’s five o’clock. Balance the till and close up. Then we’ll head over to Manuella for something to eat. One step at a time.’
It was the intensifying, suffocating heat that eventually made Anders pull the jacket off his face. He was lying on the floor with a sofa cushion as a pillow in a room flooded with sunlight. It was cascading in through the curtainless windows.
Stava had rolled up on the loveseat that was the room’s only piece of furniture. She was still asleep, with her head hidden under a windbreaker.
The walls were covered in thin wood panelling, but there were no mouldings and no trim on either doors or windows and where light switches and electrical outlets were meant to go, there was nothing but holes.
An insect was walking acr
oss the window pane. A large stink bug with long, sweeping antennae. He followed its path across the grimy glass. He couldn’t determine whether it was on the inside or the outside. But he would soon find out. There was a sticker on the window. An oval with the text YAMAHA. The bug got closer and closer to the white patch, but just before it reached it, he turned the other way.
His back ached as he hobbled across the floor and his head pounded like the hangover from hell. She had said it would pass, but it wasn’t passing. It was getting worse. The painkillers he had gobbled up made no difference. Luckily, there was no mirror above the sink, so at least he didn’t have to look at himself. He sank down onto the toilet seat and studied his hands. They looked swollen and had a lot of tiny cuts of unknown origin on them. As though they’d been subjected to some kind of witches’ ritual during the night and scribbled full of evil inscriptions. His fingertips were trembling and his cuticles were sore and it struck him that he hadn’t had snus in days. He felt no hankering for it. What he did feel was a longing for something else, something he didn’t know what it was. He figured maybe he was hungry, but stepping into the kitchen it was clear to him that food was not what he wanted. In fact, the idea of putting something in his mouth was revolting.
He stood in the doorway, looking around the kitchen.
Where the fuck was he?
*
He walked down toward the lake. The white hull of a plastic boat rose like a limestone cliff from the grass. The shore was lined with birch trees; he hid behind them and gazed out across the water, which was dark and rippling with white-crested waves. The forest stretched out across the mountains beyond the lake. There was a jet-black line where the spruce trees were reflected in the water. And over there, in the darkest spot, he glimpsed something.
A human figure.
He squinted and took a few steps to the side to see better.
It looked like a child. A naked child.
He didn’t realise he’d waded into the water until his legs went cold and heavy. He continued until it was up to his waist. It was freezing; he held his elbows above water. The figure on the other side was no longer anywhere to be seen. He waded back up and ran along the shoreline and into the forest. His shoes squelched and he had trouble controlling his feet and he was running so fast his chest quickly started hurting. There was no path to follow. Whispering, he forced his way through whipping branches, pursued by mosquitoes drawn to his wet, steaming body. He didn’t want to call out or even say anything. It couldn’t be far now.
Ransu was squatting with his back toward him, partly hidden underneath a spruce. His entire body was smeared with clay, which had dried in uneven layers; spruce needles and other debris from the forest floor were stuck in the greyish-brown muck. His tail was thin and sparse like on a mangy fox and within moments, that too had disappeared in under the tree. The only sign that he was in there was the swaying of the branches, and that swaying was minimal.
*
He had seen a climbing frame outside one of the houses in the village; this is where he was now walking and sometimes running to. He sidled up to the corner of an outhouse and peered out. There was no one there and the house seemed vacant. The front porch was littered with so much stuff the front door was unreachable.
There was a tunnel to crawl through in the climbing frame, a net to climb. Two slides that had patches of rust on the edges where the paint had cracked. It looked like an abandoned world.
When he crossed the road, he spotted an old caravan. It had no tyres and lay like a filthy egg at the back of an ancient storage building. A plank with rungs led up to the little window. What caught his interest about the caravan was the chirping voice coming from inside it.
He wiped the sweat from his brow. He was sweating profusely, and not only because he had run all the way from the forest. Now the door swung open. A girl stepped out. It was her, the one who had greeted them the night before. The one with the otter. The girl shut the door carefully behind her and ran off, her plaits bouncing.
Anders stepped out and waved to her.
She stopped and looked at him.
‘Hi,’ he said in a shrill voice he didn’t recognise, ‘remember me?’
Lennart was lying on his back in bed, staring up at a ceiling made of thin, stippled pine panelling. It was morning, new light in the room.
He walked into the kitchen, opened the freezer and dug out a brick of mince, which he put on a plate and popped into the microwave. When it beeped, he took the plate out, slammed the door shut with his elbow and went out to sit on the front porch. There was still a frozen core inside the block of mince; he hacked at it with a spoon. Then he picked the whole thing up and ate it like a fruit.
After a while, he raised his head as though he’d heard something. He stopped chewing. Sniffed the air with flared nostrils. A smell of rancid decay in the air. He stepped down from the porch. Stood there sniffing with his injured arm pressed to his chest.
*
The trail led him to a house on the outskirts of the village. It was old and in a poor state. One of the upstairs windows was broken. There was a pile of mineral wool in the grass, swelling like a gigantic slime mould. Broken glass. Tangles of metal-coated electrical cables, their staples like thorns. He tramped through the debris to the back of the house.
The stench broke over him like a foetid wave; when he pushed into the birch and willow undergrowth, he heard the flies.
It looked like someone had dumped a big dead pig in the woods.
Its head was gone and its body flayed. The pink musculature stained with membranes that had dried and turned yellow. Its claws had been pulled out but the fur on the paws was still there, like big, shaggy mittens, decorated with the smooth black stones of the paw pads.
*
A bare-chested young man with a motocross helmet sputtered by on a motorcycle and standing outside another house was a child with a doll’s pram, who watched him as he staggered around, talking to himself like a drunk. He returned to the cabin, sat down on the bed and stared at the messy room, and that was how Ipa found him. She shut the door behind her. When it slid back open, she made another attempt and didn’t give up until the door was completely closed. She went over to stand with her back against the wall and her arms crossed. The ceiling light came on and she turned around to switch it back off.
‘I hear you went out for a walk,’ she said. ‘So I assume you found it.’ She waited for him to say something; when he didn’t, she pressed on. ‘It was an accident, just so you know. It dying. Being transported was too much for it and Erasmus is very sorry about that. He wanted me to tell you that.’
She squatted down in front of him and put a hand on his knee. Lennart fumblingly reached for her pale blonde hair, which hung in greasy strands in front of her ear, but she pushed him away, kindly but firmly, and when his hand came at her again, she stood up and backed away.
‘It was malnourished. And very, very old. I don’t think it could have turned again. Do you?’
‘You’re just a stupid child.’
‘Letting it die, it was the merciful thing to do. We all think so.’
She went over to the dresser and when she spotted the shed snake skin placed there like a brown paper table runner, she pulled a disgusted face.
‘Someone’s going to have to come over and clean this place for you!’
She looked around the room.
‘You haven’t seen a spider in here, have you? There are supposedly spiders here, those creepy tarantulas with hairy legs.’ She held up her hand and waved her fingers up and down to illustrate how the hairy legs moved. ‘Anyway, we’re going to make this place nice. So you feel at home. We really want you to feel at home. How’s your hand, by the way?’
He just glowered at her.
She walked over to the window and looked out.
‘The whole village will be full of people soon,’ she said. ‘It’s going to be amazing. You’re going to like it here. I promise.’
*
A wolf followed him all the way up to the main road, but not beyond. It stood among the trees, watching him while he kicked off his boots. He picked the boots up and walked northward, barefoot in the gravel by the side of the road.
After walking a few hundred yards, he turned around. The wolf had stepped into the middle of the road. A while later, he turned around again. By then, it was gone.
Anders stood by the edge of the lake, trying to remember why he was in the woods. His trousers were wet and he was so cold he was shaking. He thought he’d seen Ransu, but he wasn’t sure. Searching his memory inevitably stirred up an overwhelming nausea. It was like muddying a pool of water. The only state that wasn’t decidedly unpleasant was when he avoided casting his mind either forward or backward. He rubbed his throat. It felt like he’d just vomited.
Stava was squatting outside the house. She was examining something on the ground and when Anders moved closer, he could see what it was. Two shrews were scampering through the grass, letting her hand chase them.
‘Where have you been?’ she said.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Your clothes. You’re soaked.’
‘What are those?’
‘These? They’re my mice. They lived with me and Mauri and they’re homesick. But they’re happy today. Yes, you’re happy today.’
‘I want to leave.’
‘My lovely little friends.’
‘Can’t we leave?’
‘No, we can’t leave.’
‘I don’t want to be here.’
‘There’s nowhere else for us to go.’
‘Of course there is. We could find somewhere, just you and me. A cabin or something. Where we could live.’
‘You and me?’
He nodded.
‘And what are we going to live off, are you going to rob people?’
He shrugged.
‘It doesn’t work in the long run,’ she said.
‘What did you live off before, then, you and that guy Mauri?’
‘Grete gave us money.’
‘Who’s Grete?’