The Circle (Hammer)

by Elfgren, Sara B. ,Strandberg, Mats

  Vanessa grimaces. Jonte isn’t bad-looking but he’s so … unsavoury. And almost as old as Vanessa’s mother.

  Linnéa suddenly stares piercingly into the room. It’s as if she’s looking straight at Vanessa. But that’s impossible. Isn’t it?

  Jonte lights the joint and takes a deep toke.

  ‘What are you so fucking uptight about?’ he says to Linnéa, as he hands her the joint.

  Linnéa smokes it as she stands up and walks over to her laptop, which is open. She puts on a slow song. The female vocalist sounds sad and frustrated.

  ‘Come here,’ Jonte says, and Linnéa goes to him, lays the glowing joint on an ashtray and sits close to him. She kisses him and Vanessa winces. But she can’t take her eyes off them as Linnéa tugs off her T-shirt, and Jonte unfastens her black bra, then runs his hands over her back to her breasts.

  Linnéa eases back on the sofa with a hand around Jonte’s neck. He glides down on top of her and reaches for the joint. They continue kissing each other, alternating with drags from the joint. Linnéa slips off her shorts in one slick movement. Her pants are bright pink with little black hearts. Jonte lets his hand slip inside them. Linnéa starts to smile. Suddenly she raises her head and looks at Vanessa. ‘Had enough yet?’ she says.

  ‘No way,’ Jonte mumbles, and kisses her neck.

  Vanessa is so shocked that she stumbles out into the hall and accidentally knocks over one of the little lamps.

  ‘What the fuck was that?’ she hears Jonte say.

  ‘I’ll go and have a look – I need to go to the bathroom anyway,’ says Linnéa.

  Vanessa is fumbling with the lock when she feels something soft hit the back of her head. She turns. Linnéa’s T-shirt is lying on the floor. She’s standing there with her arms crossed over her naked breasts. Her face is in shadow. ‘I know you’re there,’ she whispers, barely audibly.

  Vanessa opens her mouth to say something but no sound comes out.

  Linnéa marches towards her and Vanessa presses herself against the wall, trying to stop herself staring at Linnéa’s breasts as she unlocks the door.

  ‘Get out,’ Linnéa hisses, and Vanessa bolts.

  Linnéa slams the door so hard that the sound carries throughout the building. Vanessa runs down the stairs and out through the front entrance.

  The first thing she does is squat in some bushes to pee. Only then can she begin to think clearly. She’s behaved like a lunatic and it was her weekend of isolation that had done it.

  She mulls it over as she walks briskly homewards. What should she say next time they meet? ‘Hi, I’m sorry I’m a sick pervert who likes to watch my friends having sex. Well, I mean we’re not even friends, really, you and me, but still, it was a lot of fun. How was it for you?’

  What she’d really like to ask Linnéa, though, is why she’s with a loser like Jonte. And, while she’s at it, she’d like to ask herself why she cares. As long as Linnéa isn’t sleeping with Wille she should be happy.

  There’s something about Linnéa that makes her behave unpredictably. Why did she follow Jonte into the apartment? She has no answer to that. The only reasonable explanation might be that she really is a sick pervert.

  It’s almost eleven thirty when Vanessa sticks her key into the door. She hopes her mother has gone to bed. Nicke is away in Borlänge, doing a course, so she doesn’t have to worry about him.

  But when she goes into the hall she hears voices in the kitchen. She takes off her shoes and coat as quietly as she can. Frasse saunters into the hall and licks her hand. Thank God he doesn’t bark. She’s so focused on being quiet as possible that she doesn’t notice Melvin’s toy car on the floor in front of her. She steps on it, sending it flying into the wall with a bang.

  ‘Nessa?’ Wille appears in the kitchen doorway. ‘I’ve been waiting for you all night. Where have you been?’ There’s no hint of rebuke in his voice, just concern.

  ‘Over at Evelina’s,’ she says, and makes a mental note to warn her alibi. ‘Why didn’t you call?’

  ‘Can’t we go to your room and talk about it?’ Wille asks.

  Vanessa peers into the kitchen. Her mother is reading her horoscope book, studying it conspicuously to show that she isn’t eavesdropping.

  Vanessa nods and they go to her bedroom. She shuts the door. When she turns around Wille puts his arms around her. She moves close to him, feels the warmth of his body and catches the smell that is uniquely his.

  He’s mine, she thinks. Mine and nobody else’s.

  ‘Sorry for being such an idiot this morning,’ she murmurs.

  ‘I know why you were pissed off with me. I disappeared all weekend.’ He lets go of her. ‘I wasn’t at Jonte’s place … I was at his father’s cabin.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘I needed to think. I’ve been a bit depressed.’

  Suddenly Vanessa is frightened. ‘About us?’

  ‘About everything,’ Wille answers. ‘I’ve got no job. I’m living with my mother. I haven’t done anything since I left school.’

  Vanessa bites her lip. She’d been hoping he’d realise he needs a life. The question is whether there’s room in it for her.

  ‘I tried to think of what I like about my life and what I don’t. And I saw that there isn’t much I do like.’

  Vanessa’s eyes fill with tears. Here it comes. Now he’s going to break up. This is where everything ends.

  ‘Except you,’ Wille says. ‘You’re the only good thing in my life. You and my mum. Shit – that sounds weird.’

  Vanessa laughs and starts crying at the same time.

  ‘Nessa?’

  ‘I thought you were going to dump me.’ She snivels.

  ‘No, no! Far from it! It’s just … I want to be the man you deserve. You’re so incredible. I love you. And I was wondering … Can’t we get engaged?’ Wille digs in his pocket and pulls out a thin silver ring. ‘We can wait to get married, of course. Ten years, if you like. I just want everyone to know that we belong together.’

  Vanessa’s head spins. She doesn’t know how she feels any more.

  ‘Do you want to?’ Wille asks.

  Yes. There’s one thing she knows she feels: she loves him, whether she likes it or not. And she wants everyone to know they belong together. That they’ve chosen each other. That they’ve decided against everyone else. He slides the ring on to her finger. Then he digs out another, thicker, ring from his other pocket and hands it to her so that she can put it on his finger. ‘It’s you and me now,’ Wille says.

  ‘It’s you and me,’ Vanessa echoes. ‘I love you.’ She kisses his warm mouth and presses her body against his. His hands work their way under her top and down towards the small of her back.

  There is a knock at the door. ‘Vanessa!’ her mother’s shrill voice calls.

  Wille tries to break free but Vanessa clings to him. ‘Forget her,’ she mutters.

  A moment later the door opens a crack. ‘Wille, Vanessa’s got school tomorrow.’ Her mother is using her serious voice, the one that brooks no resistance.

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ Vanessa bursts out.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Wille says. ‘I’ve got to go home anyway.’

  She follows him to the front door. She tries to kiss him, but Wille finds it embarrassing in front of her mother. Instead he gives her a hug. ‘I’ll pick you up after school tomorrow,’ he promises.

  She shuts the door behind him. When she turns, her mother looks worried. Vanessa holds up her left hand.

  ‘Aren’t you a bit young for a ring?’

  Her mood sinks. Her mother can’t even pretend to be happy for her sake. ‘It’s not like we’re getting married tomorrow,’ she snaps. ‘It’s a symbol that we belong together.’

  ‘I just don’t understand why you’re in such a hurry to commit yourself to someone when you’re so young.’

  ‘You got pregnant with me when you were sixteen, for Christ’s sake! With someone at a conference in Götvändaren! You were so drunk you
couldn’t even remember his name.’

  ‘Don’t you use that tone with me,’ her mother says.

  ‘Don’t you use that tone with me,’ Vanessa mimics. She realises instantly that that was the wrong approach if she wants to seem mature enough to get engaged.

  Her mother glares at her. ‘Go ahead then, play grown-ups. Maybe you and Wille should move in together so we have a bit more space here.’

  It was like a stab in the gut. ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you? So you and Nicke can fuck in peace. Or have you found someone else to have an unplanned pregnancy with? This time you might want to keep a pen and paper handy so you can write down his name.’

  For a moment Vanessa thinks her mother is going to hit her. It’s never happened before, then it’s never been this close to happening. Her mother turns abruptly and marches off into the kitchen.

  ‘You can have what you want!’ Vanessa shouts. ‘I’ll move in with Wille!’

  ‘You do that!’ her mother shouts back. ‘We’ll see how long you can stand it!’

  ‘I hate you! Sirpa’s a much better mother than you’ve ever been!’

  She goes into her room and slams the door, expecting to hear her mother storm after her, open the door and shout at her to remember the neighbours, or does she want them to be evicted?

  But nothing happens.

  Vanessa is standing in the middle of her room. She feels empty inside. All day she’s been like a pinball, bouncing back and forth between extremes of emotion. All she wants now is to sleep. She reaches for the covers to pull them aside.

  There’s a knock at the door. Vanessa tries to decide if she has the energy to make up with her mother. But her mother doesn’t come in. Instead she calls through the door. ‘I had a phone call at work. You don’t have to go to your first lesson tomorrow. The principal wants to speak to you. A routine chat.’

  *

  Late that night Minoo finally hears back from Vanessa and can confirm that all five of them have been called to the principal’s office first thing in the morning.

  Half an hour later, she opens the door to her room. The house is quiet. She sneaks along the corridor, past her parents’ closed bedroom door. She hears a sound from inside their room and stiffens. But it’s just her father snoring.

  Only once the front door is shut behind her can she breathe normally. A thick fog has enveloped the garden, making any shapes appear vague and indistinct. There’s no wind, and her footsteps seem to echo across the entire neighbourhood.

  Nicolaus is waiting for her in his car, hidden in the fog, a hundred metres down the street. She climbs into the passenger seat. He is shivering in his thin coat, and his breath steams out of his mouth when he speaks.

  ‘Good evening,’ he says. ‘Or perhaps that’s the wrong choice of words on such a fateful night.’

  For a moment they sit in silence. Minoo looks at his hands resting on the steering wheel. They’re red and chapped. ‘You’ve got to buy some clothes,’ she says. ‘A down jacket, gloves and a hat. It’ll be winter soon. You’ll be ill if you don’t.’

  Nicolaus looks at her gratefully. ‘You’re far too kind, far too considerate. I don’t deserve it. I wish I could help you. I know there’s a solution but I … can’t remember …’ His brow furrows. ‘It’s like a moth fluttering at the very edge of my vision. All I catch is a glimpse of its flapping grey wings.’

  He sighs and turns to Minoo. ‘I can’t allow you all to walk straight into the lion’s den,’ he says.

  ‘We’ve no choice. The lion has spoken to our parents.’

  ‘You could … skip school. Isn’t that what you call it?’

  ‘We can’t skip school for ever. Besides, she can hardly have planned to kill us if she wants to meet us in her office during the day when the school is full of people.’

  ‘Maybe that’s what she wants you to think.’

  27

  ‘PLEASE COME IN,’ the principal says.

  Adriana Lopez is wearing a dark green, knee-length sixties-style dress with black pumps in some kind of reptile skin.

  She sits down in the armchair next to the little coffee-table. Two folding chairs have been brought out. Minoo sits on the sofa, between Vanessa and Anna-Karin. Ida and Linnéa take the chairs. Once they’re seated, silence settles over them.

  There is a clock hanging above the door to the assistant principal’s office. It ticks the seconds loudly, one by one. It reminds Minoo of a time bomb. At any moment the world may explode.

  ‘I know you were in my house,’ the principal says.

  Minoo feels the blood drain from her face.

  ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’ she continues.

  Ida gets up so suddenly that she knocks her chair over backwards. ‘I’ve got nothing to do with this,’ she says.

  The room is deathly quiet. Nothing but tick, tock, tick, tock.

  ‘I’ve got nothing to do with them,’ Ida continues, her voice cracking with desperation.

  ‘Sit down,’ the principal says.

  Her voice is the exact opposite of Ida’s: controlled, confident, impossible to disobey. Ida picks up the plastic chair and sits down obediently.

  Lopez crosses one leg over the other and clasps her hands over her upper knee. ‘I know who you are,’ she says.

  ‘And we know who you are,’ Linnéa retorts.

  Minoo holds her breath.

  The principal’s eyes bore into Linnéa. A little smile tugs at the corners of her mouth. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I said that we know. Who. You. Are,’ Linnéa says, meeting her gaze without blinking.

  The principal laughs. Not a real laugh, but the indulgent kind that grown-ups produce when they don’t take you seriously.

  ‘Do you now? This should be interesting. Tell me, Linnéa. Who am I?’

  Minoo wants to stop everything. Strike the set and start again. It’s a bad mistake to attack Lopez.

  ‘You’re the one who killed Elias and Rebecka,’ says Linnéa.

  And now there’s no going back. It’s too late to retract anything. Exactly three seconds pass. Tick, tock, tick.

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘You’re lying,’ Linnéa says coldly.

  ‘I just want to make it clear that I’ve got nothing to do with them,’ Ida says.

  The principal ignores her.

  ‘But you’re right about Elias and Rebecka not having committed suicide,’ she says.

  It takes a while for her words to sink in.

  ‘If we were to believe you didn’t kill them, do you know who did?’ Anna-Karin asks.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Linnéa interrupts, ‘but I think you’re accepting this a little too easily. Have you forgotten that we found torture instruments at her house?’

  ‘I collect medieval artefacts,’ the principal says calmly. ‘Tragically, instruments of torture fall into that category. It may be a rather macabre hobby, but it doesn’t make me a murderer.’

  ‘You were the last person Elias and Rebecka saw before they died,’ Linnéa says.

  ‘And I’m about to tell you why I saw them,’ the principal says, and turns to Anna-Karin. ‘But to answer your question, Anna-Karin, no, I don’t know who killed them. My primary directive was to find you.’

  ‘What do you mean “directive”?’ Vanessa asks.

  The principal smoothes an invisible crease in her dress. Her face is expressionless. Minoo gets the feeling it’s a mask she could remove at any moment.

  ‘I work for the Council. My task was to come here and investigate the level of truth in the prophecy regarding this place.’

  ‘A prophecy? About Engelsfors?’ Minoo asks.

  ‘Engelsfors is a very special place,’ the principal says. ‘It’s close to other … I suppose you might call them dimensions. We don’t know why, but the boundary separating the different realities is thinner here. The prophecy speaks of a Chosen One, who will be woken to protect the world when an unearthly evil tries to break through that boundary into o
ur reality. I was sent here to find the Chosen One. My search was made more difficult because there are so many of you. I was looking for one person. I had just picked up Elias’s trail when he passed away.’

  ‘Elias didn’t “pass away”. He was murdered,’ Linnéa says.

  ‘Yes,’ the principal agrees.

  ‘Why didn’t you protect him if you knew it was him?’ Linnéa asks.

  ‘Firstly, the Council investigates on average 764.2 prophecies each year, all over the world. Only about 1.7 per cent of them come true. I wasn’t sure if this particular prophecy had any basis in reality. In fact, the statistics spoke against it. And I didn’t have time to confirm whether or not Elias was in fact the witch I was looking for.’

  Vanessa turns her head so fast her ponytail whisks across Minoo’s face, leaving behind it a faint scent of coconut.

  ‘Wait, wait, wait,’ Vanessa says. ‘Did you say witch?’

  The principal nods impatiently.

  ‘Is that … what we are?’ Anna-Karin asks.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s a term that carries with it some unfortunate baggage. It has come to be falsely associated with all sorts of crazy nonsense. But, yes, you are witches. As am I. Some are born with special powers, which usually become apparent during puberty, but most people can learn at least some simple magic through diligent study.’

  Magic. Minoo gets goose bumps up her arms when she hears the word. Of course there’s a word for everything that has happened. It’s a word she’s read a thousand times in fairytales and fantasy stories, yet it sounds new and unfamiliar when the principal utters it. Frightening, yet enticing. The fantastical is possible.

  ‘As Linnéa quite correctly pointed out, I had a meeting with Elias just before he was murdered,’ the principal continues. ‘The purpose of that meeting was to find out whether he was the Chosen One. I could have waited for the blood moon to appear, but I already had certain indications. Anyway, I took a strand of his hair and sent it to our laboratories. The following morning I received the test results, which confirmed my suspicions, but by then it was already too late. I thought it was all over. As I said, I was sure I was just looking for one person. But during Elias’s memorial service, I noticed magical activity in the auditorium. That was when I realised there could be more of you.’