by Stefan Spjut
‘And what’s her name,’ the old man said.
‘Kiruna,’ she heard herself say.
‘Kiruna,’ he said, nodding slowly. ‘And you live in the town of that same name then, I imagine.’
She nodded.
‘At what address?’
‘What?’
‘What’s your address?’ the woman said.
‘It’s Duvvägen. Number fourteen.’
‘If you ever come here again, we will come find you at Duvvägen fourteen and take your little girl.’
‘Maybe I’ll make her my maid,’ the old man said, ‘maybe I’ll let other people use her and then maybe we’ll drown her in the lake over there when we’re tired of her. Who knows? No one knows.’
‘But you can be sure you’ll never see her again,’ added the woman, who had taken a step closer. Birthmarks freckled her face and she had a sharply defined Cupid’s bow. ‘And if you do see her again, it will be on a stainless steel table after her body’s found in a public bathroom someplace, made up like a junkie whore and with her adorable little panties stuffed so far down her throat they have to pull them out with forceps.’
Diana put a hand on her stomach. The squirrel was nothing but a hard, lifeless lump in her pocket. The old man brought his hands together in front of his chest and lowered his lips to his slender fingertips in a thoughtful gesture.
‘Forget your friend,’ he said.
He stroked her breasts.
‘She’s fine here. In fact, I’d go so far as to say she’s happy.’ He turned to the woman for agreement and she nodded.
‘In all events, she certainly will be,’ she said. ‘In time. She fits in here. But you don’t.’
The old man shook his head.
‘Leave now, and never come back.’
Diana nodded and then she walked out unsteadily through the opening between the tarpaulins. She was breathing through her mouth, looking down at the grass and her shoes.
*
She walked and ran by turns until she reached the boom barrier, where she fell to the ground, panting heavily. Then she jumped back up. The squirrel had rolled into a ball in her pocket and when she slapped it, it curled up tighter. She put her hand in to try to grab it, but it squirmed and clawed at her. That made her rip off her sweater and hurl it away. It lay by the side of the road, like any old discarded sweater. Until it came alive. The animal moved weirdly slowly. Its nose poked out, then its head. The tufted ears. It stayed like that for a while, scanning the surroundings. Then it took two long leaps and ran up a pine tree and out onto a branch, setting it swaying.
Diana dug out her phone. It suddenly occurred to her she should warn her parents. Ask them to hide Kiruna somewhere. Her fingers were shaking. Kiruna’s face behind the large digits of the clock. A row of pearl sugar for teeth. Her funny protruding ears.
At that point, she heard footsteps behind her. She turned around and peered into the forest. Was she imagining it? Moments later, she saw someone approaching through the trees. A strange woman with black hair down to her waist. She wore nothing but a knit jumper and knickers and was very thin, her legs skinny and muscular like an African long-distance runner.
‘I’m leaving. I just needed a minute.’
‘It’s your sister, isn’t it?’
Diana said nothing.
‘You’ve come for your sister.’
‘No,’ she said and shook her head.
For a while, neither of them spoke.
‘She’s not my sister.’
‘No?’
She shook her head.
‘You look very alike. At first, I thought you were her.’
‘She’s not my sister.’
‘I’m going to help you.’
Diana looked away.
‘You’re afraid.’
‘Yes, I am. They said they were going to take my daughter if I don’t get out of here. Murder her, actually.’
‘They wanted to scare you.’
‘And they succeeded.’
‘I’m going to help you.’
‘I don’t want any help. I’m going home.’
‘Do you know what they do to your friend? At night?’
Diana stared at her. The eyes in the emaciated face were placed unnaturally far apart and were curiously dark.
‘How did you even get here?’
‘Car. It’s parked up there.’
‘Go wait in your car.’
Diana continued up the gravel road and got into her car. Why aren’t you getting out of here? she thought to herself. She tapped the key against her thigh. Do you know what they do to your friend at night? That could only mean one thing and when she imagined it, it was as though something fell apart inside her chest. Everything in there just collapsed.
She thought about Kiruna and she thought about Susso and during this struggle a memory surfaced from out of nowhere. They’re at Pizzeria Laguna. Cold and pleasantly hungover, they sit down at a table. A man strides over to them, offering cutlery, rolled up in napkins. That are more yellow than white. Then he brings them plates, big, poop-brown plates, laden with pineapple and sweetcorn. There is something touching about the expectant look on the man’s face and his impeccable manners and she has to fight to suppress a smile. When she realises Susso’s struggling too, she starts giggling and within moments they both burst out laughing, while the poor waiter withdraws like a sad clown. They had laughed hysterically, like when they destroyed the school yearbook. It had been insuppressible and in the end, they had picked up their jackets and fled the restaurant.
A scratching on the roof brought her back. The squirrel appeared, sliding down the windscreen on all fours. When it reached the wipers, it whipped around and looked at her.
She opened the door. The squirrel slunk into the car and raced up on her backrest. She reached for the snus tin and after putting a portion under her lip, she held the tin out to the squirrel, who shied away, whether because of the gesture or the sharp, unfamiliar smell.
*
Just over an hour later, the woman came walking down the road. Not one car had driven by in that time. Diana opened the door and climbed out.
‘I wasn’t able to. I told her you were here and that I would help her leave, but she didn’t want to come.’
‘What do you mean she didn’t want to?’
‘She’s awake yet not awake.’
‘Then I suppose I’ll have to carry her,’ she heard herself say.
The woman bent down and scratched her lower calf hard. The brown, deformed nails sticking out of her toes were curved like claws.
‘My God,’ Diana exclaimed, ‘your feet.’
‘Could you do that? Could you carry her?’
‘I guess we’ll find out.’
‘I can fire a gun. I can fire a gun from the other side of the lake. Everyone’s going to wonder who’s shooting. Then you can go into the house and get her.’
*
She followed the woman, who ran ahead of her between the spruce trees with her black hair billowing across her back like a hunted hulder. She was bafflingly fast; Diana wanted to call out to her to slow down, but was afraid to raise her voice.
Suddenly, the woman was squatting on top of a big, moss-covered boulder; there was no way of telling how she had got up there. She was pointing to a house that could be glimpsed through the trees.
‘She’s in there, in that house there, and she’s alone. She’s in the bedroom, upstairs. I’ll open a window and you’ll climb in through that window and then you’ll go out the same way and hurry out of here.’
After she disappeared around a tarred log storage shed, Diana ran to the edge of the wood at a crouch and settled down behind a fallen tree, peeking out at the house like a child playing hide-and-seek. The squirrel darted up and down the fallen trunk. Diana kept her eyes on the house while swatting at the mosquitoes that swooped at her face in silent attack waves.
A bang and then another bang. The sound seemed to be coming from the top of
a tree-covered hillock rising beyond the eastern shore of the lake; it had to be the better part of a mile away as the crow flies and at least three times that on foot. Could she really have run that far, or had the sound ricocheted? After the echo faded, a mighty silence enveloped the landscape.
Then there were voices. Someone was calling and someone else responding. Rough voices blended with shrill ones. An engine sputtered to life and moments later, a quad bike roared by between the houses, soon followed by a fiery dirt bike. A pack of wolves, three, four, five of them. A man running on stiff legs.
She watched this odd hunt pass and then stood up and raced toward the house. She ran so fast she had to catch herself with both hands when she reached the wall. She was standing in a flowerbed full of stinging nettles, pushing her fingers into the crack between the sash and the frame of a casement window; after prying the window open, she heaved herself up and crawled in over the sill, under a bobbin-lace café curtain. A parlour with wainscoting and painted wooden floor. A sofa and a removals box. A tall cabinet with open doors and emptied shelves. She leaned out through the window. The squirrel was sitting underneath it, looking up at her. She backed up two steps and it came flying in through the window.
She ran up the stairs, two steps at a time, opened a door that was standing ajar and then a closed door. A dark room. She sank to her knees by the bed.
‘Susso,’ she hissed. ‘Wake up!’
Susso turned her head. A white patch covered one of her eyes and the other stared at her in terror.
‘It’s me. It’s Dana.’
She peeked in under the duvet to see if she was dressed, and she was. But she showed no sign of recognising her. Diana stroked her hair, which smelled of shampoo. Her touch made Susso pull her head in under the covers. Diana dug around for her hands, but they proved impossible to catch.
At the sound of an engine outside, she walked over to the window and peered out through a gap between the blankets hung up as makeshift blackout curtains. A man in a pile jacket lumbered by with a rifle in his hand.
She waved the squirrel over, picked it up off the floor and brought it to the bed as though she were a healer and the animal a miracle crystal. She had no idea what it might do; she had probably figured it would jump down and connect with Susso somehow, but it didn’t. Judging from the way it was digging its razor-sharp claws into Diana’s skin, it wanted to stay with her. When she tried to shake it off, it dashed up to sit on her shoulder.
‘You know what. I’m going to leave you here unless you help her.’
Its tail brushed against her cheek when the animal turned around.
‘Dana,’ Susso whispered.
‘Yes. I’m here. Here I am, sweetie.’
‘I can’t see.’
‘You have a patch over your eye.’
‘I’m pathetically blind.’
*
Susso shuffled out of her dark chamber like a ghost out of a crypt; she even waved a hand about in a vain attempt to shield herself from the sunlight. Baggy sweatpants and a T-shirt in an enormous men’s size. A bruise like half a moustache on her top lip. Diana took her by the hand and led her downstairs.
‘We have to climb out this window. Here. We’re going this way.’
She ripped down the curtain and helped Susso climb up. She was straddling the windowsill, looking down at the ground.
‘There’s stinging nettles.’
‘Jump!’
‘I’m barefoot.’
‘You have to jump.’
Diana more or less shoved her out the window and then stepped both feet up on the sill and jumped after her.
They ran up toward the trees, with the squirrel bounding ahead. Susso was struggling. She staggered and fell; several times, Diana had to pull on her to make her get back up.
They had passed the boom barrier when they heard the motorcycle behind them like an ominous cornet. Diana turned around and jogged backward a few steps; after establishing that the sound of the engine was unambiguously coming their way, she shouted at Susso to go faster.
They made it out onto the main road, but not all the way back to the car.
It was him, the man with the gold chains. He overtook them, slammed on the brakes, turned in behind the car and stopped. His dirt-stained bike growled, its mudguard trembling.
Diana had stopped. Her eyes searched for the squirrel. She had glimpsed it moments before, but it was nowhere to be seen now. Susso limped up behind her.
The man’s sweaty face had twisted into a grin. It was as though he was already enjoying the sadistic violence he was going to inflict on them. He tilted the motorcycle to lay it down on its side. But he never got off it.
He was looking at them, his gilded fists still around the handlebars, but there was no longer a grin on his face. After a while, he looked down at the ground. Then he suddenly turned his bike around and drove off. But not back toward the village; he went north. He leaned forward and went full throttle and his jacket inflated in the wind.
Susso was standing by the side of the road, rubbing her forehead; when Diana walked up to her, she waved her arms about angrily as if to ward off an attack by something she couldn’t see.
‘We’re going home.’
‘No! No!’
She stroked her back.
‘Come on.’
After getting her into the seat, she slammed the door shut, ran around the car, jumped in and seized Susso, who was on her way out. She put her hand flat against her cheek and turned her head to face her.
‘What’s with you? We’re going home now.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘What don’t you want?’
She couldn’t answer that question. She looked around in confusion and her fingers strayed to the patch covering her eye.
‘Don’t touch that,’ Diana said and started the engine.
The route home via Karesuando was shorter, but following the motorcycle didn’t sit right with her, so she made a U-turn and drove south, toward Pajala.
‘Where is he?’
‘Who?’
The squirrel who had been hiding in some unknown nook bounced up on the dashboard in response to the question. When Susso tried to pick it up, it moved out of reach and settled down to gaze out at the landscape rushing past. Then she cupped her hand under her chin and spat into it. She spat several times and then held her hand out and waited. Eventually, the squirrel went over to it. It placed its odd little fingers on her thumb and sniffed the white foam. When it was all gone, she topped it up with new saliva.
‘He likes spit,’ she said quietly.
Diana stared at the road and heard Susso whispering.
‘Yes, it’s tasty. Yes, so tasty.’
I was watching TV when Diana called, something political. I took my time picking the phone up off the coffee table and then even longer to answer it and when I did, I knew I sounded anxious. My ear filled with the sound of fast driving.
‘We’re on our way home,’ she said.
‘You are?’ I said. What I actually wanted to know was who she meant by we and in the next moment, I found out: she was going to drive Susso to the hospital. That made me both relieved and concerned.
‘What happened to her?’
‘I don’t think it’s too bad, but I want her admitted. She’s running a temperature and is dehydrated and I think she’s been beaten up pretty badly. So I’m taking her over there, better safe than sorry.’
Roland had been sitting in the kitchen with a beer in his hand, reading about everything that had happened and was going to happen in the World Cup on his laptop; now he was standing in the doorway, holding his glasses, looking at me.
‘They’re on their way home,’ I said and put the phone down on the table. ‘They’re going to the hospital but it’s nothing serious.’
‘So it’s good news.’
‘But it never ends. This is never going to end. Until it really ends. For real. Like this.’ I picked up the remote and turned the TV off, c
utting someone off mid-sentence.
‘One thing at a time,’ Roland said. He had walked over to the window and was peering out at the street. ‘She’s home now and that’s cause for cheer.’
‘Cheer?’
‘Maybe things will get better now.’
‘Or they could get worse.’
He stood with his hands in his shorts pockets. His skinny little legs were deathly white and only marginally hairier than mine.
‘We have to hope for the best.’
‘Sure, great idea.’
‘Gudrun.’
‘I’m so sick of it all,’ I sobbed. ‘Please understand that. I can’t take much more. I can’t take it.’
‘But she’s bringing Susso back. That means they let her go.’
‘It means nothing. They always claim back what they give, and change their minds whenever they please, without warning, just like that. And even if it’s true, if they leave her alone from now on, and that’s the end of it. Who is it I’m getting back? It’s certainly not Susso.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘A child that disappears never comes back.’
‘Was he there?’
‘Who?!’
‘There’s no need to snap at me.’
‘Who do you mean?’
‘The cult leader.’
‘I don’t know, she didn’t say.’
He came over and sat next to me on the sofa.
‘When are they getting back?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Then we’ll have to head over to the hospital and wait. They do have a café.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Sure you do.’
*
When we left for the hospital, I was so nervous I forgot both my handbag and my phone in the flat and after going back up, I had trouble remembering what it was I was supposed to fetch; I drew a complete blank and I stood there in the hallway, head empty, for several long seconds before I managed to corral my thoughts.
We parked outside the main entrance and I called Diana because I wasn’t clear on whether they were going to the A&E entrance or somewhere else. It turned out they were already there. Diana met us in the lobby. Her shirt was dirty and her face shiny with perspiration.