The Circle (Hammer)

by Elfgren, Sara B. ,Strandberg, Mats

  You and I both know he’d never do it voluntarily.

  Anna-Karin stops him. She lays a hand on his cheek, and looks deep into his eyes, trying to read his lustful, slightly glazed expression. Does he really want to be here? Does he really want to do this?

  She takes a deep breath and holds his eyes. Then she switches off, cuts the power flowing out of her.

  At first nothing happens. He looks at her with a patient but confused smile.

  Then something changes in his eyes. It’s as if a film is lifted. A spark is suddenly reignited.

  Jari looks away, scratches his arm distractedly. Looks at her again. And really sees her.

  She knows that look. She’s seen it before.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

  The room starts to spin again, as if she’s falling backwards in endless slow motion. A powerful twinge of nausea surges through her, like a convulsion. It can’t be ignored.

  She leaps out of bed and tears open the door. The force of the bile builds in the pit of her stomach. Anna-Karin looks around the darkened hallway in panic. Lots of doors.

  And here it comes, erupting into her mouth with the speed of a cannonball. She bolts into the corridor, keeps everything inside her mouth by clenching her teeth. Some shoots up her nose and that alone is so disgusting that she’s certain more will come at any moment. Her stomach groans, and she sees the little heart nailed on one of the doors. She yanks desperately at the handle. But the toilet door is locked.

  Someone’s in there.

  Anna-Karin drops to her knees. Vomit spurts from her mouth, dripping out of her nose. Her whole body shudders, as her stomach sends fresh streams splashing over the floor and walls. It sounds like someone emptying a bucket of water.

  It’s over in a few seconds. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, can’t bear to look at what she’s left behind.

  ‘Jari?’ a woman calls, from inside the toilet.

  Anna-Karin’s head feels so heavy that she just wants to lie down and close her eyes, but she stands up and runs back to Jari’s room. They almost crash into each other in the doorway.

  ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ he asks.

  At the other end of the corridor, someone, undoubtedly Jari’s mother, flushes the toilet. Anna-Karin looks at Jari one last time. His eyes reflect disgust and disbelief.

  She runs.

  She runs towards the front door that she and Jari snuck through just fifteen minutes ago. Her sweaty fingertips can barely get a grip on the knob, but then the door flies open. She’s hit by a blast of cold air and remembers her jacket, grabbing it from the coat rack on her way out.

  Behind her she hears the female voice curse with revulsion, and realises that the woman has probably just stepped into her pool of vomit.

  Anna-Karin might have been able to put everything right, control Jari and his mother and make them forget everything, but she hates herself too much. Disgusting, stupid Anna-Karin – see what happens when you try to get things you don’t deserve.

  Anna-Karin runs like she’s never run before. She becomes one with the wind. She shoots across the front garden, into the forest. Her head throbs and her stomach aches, but still she runs on, and on, and on.

  41

  IT’S COLD IN the principal’s car. Minoo had texted her as soon as she’d got back into her room and they’d agreed to meet here, on a dirt track in the forest a few kilometres from Minoo’s home.

  ‘Take it from the beginning,’ Adriana Lopez says.

  A milky-white layer of condensation forms on the inside of the windows as Minoo recounts what happened in as much detail as she can. But, for some reason she can’t explain, she leaves out the black smoke. Somehow she can’t make herself mention it, almost as if there’s something forbidden or shameful about it.

  When she’s finished, the principal takes out a blue Thermos and two plastic mugs from the glove compartment. She pours hot liquid into the mugs. ‘Drink some of this,’ she says, and hands one to Minoo.

  ‘Is it … magical?’

  Adriana smiles. ‘It’s Earl Grey.’

  She sips cautiously and Minoo follows suit. The honey-sweetened tea burns the tip of her tongue.

  ‘I really don’t like these forests,’ the principal says thoughtfully. She leans over the steering wheel and peers out of the windscreen. ‘Tell me again what the voice said just before it let you go. Try to remember exactly.’

  Minoo does her best, but the night’s events are already melting together into a single mass. It’s hard to pin down facts when the thing she remembers most vividly is panic.

  ‘It said, “No”, all of a sudden. Then it said, “I can’t do it, I won’t do it. I won’t listen to you.”’

  Adriana nods. It’s snowing. Big fluffy flakes land gently on the windscreen, sticking together. ‘Do you think the voice was saying that to you or to someone else?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘’I won’t listen to you.’ Doesn’t it seem strange that the voice would be saying that to you?’

  Minoo tries to collect her thoughts. ‘You mean that maybe there were two of them? That they were talking to each other?’

  ‘Two or more,’ Adriana says grimly.

  Minoo’s stomach roils. Could several wills have fought over her tonight? What if the other wins next time?

  ‘Are you sure you’ve told me everything now? Every detail may be important.’

  Minoo concentrates on the snowflakes. ‘Yes,’ she says.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘I don’t know. All I can think about is Rebecka. And Elias. Now I know how scared they must have been and how they must have struggled. And the voice that felt it had the right to decide whether we lived or not, that said everything was meaningless … It makes me so angry now.’

  The principal nods gravely. ‘If something had happened to you tonight, I would never have been able to forgive myself. I know you’re all disappointed in me, but I’m just following the Council’s orders.’

  Minoo realises that was almost an apology. ‘You mean the Council’s wrong?’

  ‘No,’ the principal responds emphatically. ‘Absolutely not. I just wish I could do more for you. I know you think I’m some kind of ice queen …’ she pauses ‘… but I care about all of you. I care about you, Minoo. The last thing I want is for anything to happen to you. What happened to Elias and Rebecka torments me more than I can say.’

  So there is a human being beneath the principal’s cool exterior.

  ‘You have to promise me to be careful and not take any action on your own,’ she continues. ‘I know it’s difficult, but we have to trust the Council’s judgement. And study the Book of Patterns.’

  It’s the first time the principal has said ‘we’ without meaning herself and the Council.

  ‘I promise,’ Minoo says, and empties her mug before setting it in one of the cup-holders between the seats. ‘I should go home now.’

  ‘Shall I drive you?’

  Minoo shakes her head. ‘It’s okay,’ she says, and climbs out of the car.

  ‘Remember what I said,’ Adriana urges, before Minoo shuts the door.

  Minoo nods obediently to her through the side window and waves.

  Once the principal’s car has disappeared around the corner, Minoo takes out her mobile and calls Nicolaus. After a few minutes they decide what has to be done. Everything that the principal said has confirmed what they already suspected. They can’t wait for her and the Council any more. They have to take charge of their own lives. While they still have them.

  42

  RUBBER SOLES SQUEAKING on the floor, angry shouts and cheers, muffled thuds when a boot connects with a ball. The school’s gym feels completely different when Engelsfors Soccer Club practises there. It’s filled with another kind of energy, more focused, but the smells are the same. Sweat, rubber and stale air.

  Vanessa is sitting invisibly in the stands, trying to take an interest in the practice game
to make the time pass more quickly. She’s not succeeding. She’s never understood how anyone can be bothered to do something so meaningless as chase after a ball, much less watch other people doing it. There’s at least a billion things she’d rather do than follow Gustaf.

  If Gustaf is a serial killer in league with demons, he’s doing a very good job of hiding it. Vanessa wonders if she’s thrown away half her Christmas break for nothing.

  Kevin Månsson’s burly father is the coach, and now he blows the whistle. Vanessa looks at the big clock hanging above the wall bars. At last. The guys on the pitch gather in a group, exchange the obligatory backslaps, drink water from plastic bottles, pretend-wrestle and howl. Vanessa sighs impatiently. It’s at moments like these that she remembers why she could never be with a guy her own age.

  She tiptoes down from the stands and attaches herself to the boisterous band. She’s learned not to wear scent or wash her hair before she tails Gustaf. She made that mistake the first time she attended a practice game. Kevin Månsson had started shouting that someone smelt like a poof and began sniffing around, like a bloodhound on speed, to find the culprit.

  She follows them into the changing room, where they untie their laces and pull off their sweaty shirts. They root around in their bags for towels and shower gel.

  It’s like entering a secret parallel universe. She’s seen some of the cutest guys in the school lathering themselves in the shower. On the other hand she’s also seen Kevin, alone, discover a big spot on his upper arm, suck out its contents and spit into the bin. Some things you just don’t want to know about other people. Some images you simply can’t forget, no matter how much you’d like to.

  Gustaf isn’t like the others. More low key. As if he doesn’t have a lot to prove. That’s probably why girls have always fallen in love with him.

  He’s sitting in the sauna now. His skin is gleaming with sweat. He’s surrounded by the others, and yet isn’t really with them. Vanessa can see that he’s pretending to laugh at their jokes. No one picks up on it, and she wonders if he was like this even before Rebecka died.

  Before he killed her.

  If it was him. Could it really have been Gustaf?

  *

  Early this morning everyone except Ida met at Nicolaus’s house. They’ve been there every morning since the attack on Minoo to practise resisting magic.

  The sessions usually consist of Anna-Karin trying to get them to do something, one by one, while they try to block her. She was surprisingly reluctant but eventually let herself be talked into it. ‘But I’m only going to do harmless things,’ she said.

  Then she directed her power at Minoo, who was seized by an irresistible urge to sing a schmaltzy song from a musical. She had belted out an entire verse and chorus before she’d managed to block the rest. ‘That was not harmless,’ Minoo said, bright red in the face.

  Since then they’ve been keeping the exercises simple. Anna-Karin might order them to pick up a pen from the floor while they resist doing it.

  So that Anna-Karin also had a chance to practise resisting, Nicolaus has suggested this morning that Vanessa make herself invisible and Anna-Karin try to see her. Eventually she succeeded, covered with sweat from the effort. Vanessa was noticeably shaken. ‘That makes me feel so secure when I’m supposed to be secretly following a guy who’s in league with demons,’ she said, as she was leaving to do just that.

  Minoo and Anna-Karin went straight from Nicolaus’s apartment to the fairground for a reunion with the principal.

  Now Minoo’s head is throbbing. She just wants to lie down and sleep in the middle of the dance floor. The principal drones on about the Book of Patterns, while Minoo, Anna-Karin and Ida twiddle their Pattern Finders and flip through the infuriating book.

  ‘Minoo?’

  For a moment Minoo is unsure whether she’d dozed off. She looks up and meets the principal’s eye.

  ‘How are you getting on? Do you see anything?’

  Her enthusiasm never wanes. Minoo twists the Pattern Finder and shakes her head.

  ‘It’s incredibly important that you make an effort,’ Adriana says. ‘I wish I understood why Vanessa and Linnéa aren’t taking this seriously. Do you know why they haven’t been coming?’

  ‘No,’ says Minoo.

  She shouldn’t have to explain why Linnéa isn’t coming – the principal herself is the reason – but she comes close to launching into an hysterical spiel about how Vanessa seemed ill the last time she saw her, really ill, and besides, she usually goes to stay with relatives in the south over Christmas – um, Spain, I think it was.

  Once she had seen a TV programme about how to catch someone in a lie: their explanations are always too involved and they’re a little too interested in explaining every detail. Now Minoo tries to swallow the words that are trying to get out of her mouth.

  Luckily she’s cut off.

  ‘I think I see something,’ she hears someone say.

  Ida is sitting on the floor cross-legged, peering through the Pattern Finder at the open book in her lap. ‘At first they were just a collection of symbols and then … I get it now.’

  ‘What can you see?’ Minoo asks. ‘I mean, is it an image or words?’

  But no one’s listening to her. Instead the principal moves next to Ida in what seems like a single stride and slams the book shut.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Ida shouts.

  ‘Open it again,’ the principal says. ‘Open it and concentrate on what you’re looking for. Once you’ve seen something in the Book of Patterns, you’ll be able to find it again.’

  Ida pouts but does as she’s told. She furrows her brow in caricatured concentration and flips through the book with the Pattern Finder pressed to one eye. She twiddles it and flips through the pages, twiddles and flips.

  ‘There!’ she cries.

  The principal looks at her with almost reverent attention, which makes Minoo envious to the depths of her soul.

  ‘But it’s still just symbols. It doesn’t appear as text I can read, but I can still, like, understand somehow what it says,’ Ida says.

  ‘That’s usually how it works,’ the principal says patiently. ‘What does it tell you?’

  Minoo pulls out her notepad and listens intently.

  ‘Okay. Here’s sort of what it says. That it’s, like, built for one. Then it works just great. But if more people try to get in, someone is always left out. And if the one who’s outside disappears, the next one ends up outside. And then the next. And the next. And the next. Until everyone’s gone.’

  Minoo lowers her pen. It had made no sense to her at all.

  ‘What exactly is it?’ Anna-Karin asks.

  ‘It’s, like … this thing. It’s something to do with us.’

  ‘But what sort of thing?’ Minoo asks, irritated.

  ‘It’s like a … I can’t explain! Some kind of atmosphere or something.’

  Minoo is about to explode with frustration. ‘Atmosphere? Come on, Ida, you must be able to explain it better than that.’

  ‘Well, read it yourself, then!’ Ida says, and adds, with her trademark venomous smile, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot. You don’t know how.’

  Minoo grits her teeth and raises her Pattern Finder.

  The book is both a transmitter and a receiver.

  Maybe it’s ready to transmit to her too.

  Minoo opens her book again, heart pounding, and sees Anna-Karin do the same.

  She stares at the small symbols, then twiddles and flips. But nothing happens.

  ‘I don’t see anything,’ Anna-Karin says.

  The principal looks at Ida with delight, as if she were a child prodigy. Not only does Minoo find it incredibly unfair but she wonders how reliable the book can be if it has chosen to communicate with Ida of all people.

  The black winter sky sits like a dome over the cemetery. It’s so cold that your nose hairs stick together when you breathe in. On days like this Vanessa can hardly believe she’ll ever see the sun
again. It feels unreal to imagine that it’s still out there somewhere in space.

  They enter the newer part of the cemetery. Here, most of the graves are marked with discreet stone slabs that lie flat on the ground. It’s as if they don’t want to attract too much attention, unlike the ostentatious blocks used for the older graves.

  Gustaf’s sports bag is slung over his shoulder and is swinging in synch with his footsteps. He’s walking quickly, as if he’s in a hurry, and Vanessa almost has to run to keep up with him.

  He turns off on to a snow-covered path. Some of the graves are looked after by family while others lie hidden under a white blanket. Vanessa starts to worry that Gustaf will hear her footsteps crunching, turn and see her tracks, so she tries to step in his and walk as quietly as she can.

  Gustaf puts down his sports bag. Then he walks the last few steps up to the square marble headstone that bears Rebecka’s name, and squats in front of it. Next to it stands another with the name ‘Elias Malmgren’. Vanessa shivers, but it has nothing to do with the cold. Gustaf takes off a glove and runs his finger over Rebecka’s name, which has been carved into the stone and filled with gold leaf. ‘Hello,’ he whispers.

  Then he falls silent. Vanessa stands stock still and shoves her hands deep into her pockets to keep them warm.

  ‘Sorry I haven’t been out to see you before now,’ Gustaf says. ‘I’ve sort of felt like you’re not buried here … I mean that this isn’t where you are. But I can’t find you anywhere else. So now here I am. And I don’t know if you can hear me, but I hope you can sense somehow that I’m here, and know that I think about you every day. I miss you. I talk to you every night before I fall asleep.’

  His voice is tense, and his breathing uneven. A few tears run down his cheeks.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do without you,’ he continues. ‘I don’t know which way is up or down. I miss you so much it feels like I’m going to be sick. And I don’t know if you can ever forgive me. Please, you’ve got to forgive me.’