Harbour

by John Ajvide Lindqvist

  The day before Anders was due to go back to the city, he went over to Henrik's cottage anyway. As he approached the door he could hear the music from inside, 'There Is a Light That Never Goes Out'. He knocked.

  The music was turned off and Henrik opened the door. He looked just the same as always, except that he had more pimples than before. Anders could see a pile of chocolate biscuit wrappers on the floor inside. Henrik made no move to let him in.

  'Hi,' said Anders. 'I just.. .I'm going home tomorrow, so I.. .1 just thought I'd say goodbye.'

  A bitter smile distorted Henrik's mouth. When Anders didn't say or do anything else, the smile disappeared, and for a couple of seconds Henrik's face was naked.

  'I didn't do it,' he said. 'Just so you know. I didn't do it. I just... it was nothing. I brushed against her. And she started screaming.' Henrik fixed his naked gaze on Anders' eyes. 'Do you believe me?'

  Anders nodded. 'Yes.'

  'Good.' Henrik's face closed down again, that smile came back. He said, 'In the days when you were hopelessly poor, I just liked you more.'

  Anders realised this was a quote, but couldn't place it, so he simply said, 'Mm.'

  'Bye then,' said Henrik, and closed the door.

  The following summer the gang had begun to break up from the inside. Someone had gone on an InterRail trip, some had got summer jobs. Henrik and Björn could be seen riding around on the moped, and Anders was the only one who acknowledged them with a nod, but they never stopped to talk.

  Strange things had begun to happen in the village. Things disappeared and turned up somewhere else. The notice board outside the shop was pulled down, and one morning a summer visitor who was going for a swim made a horrible discovery. From the lower branch of the pine tree next to the changing room a swan was dangling, hanged by the neck with a steel wire.

  Another summer visitor who had three rabbits in a large hutch came out one morning and found them all dead. The only living thing inside the hutch was a neighbour's famously bad-tempered bulldog. There was nothing to indicate that the dog had dug its way in. It had been taken off its leash and placed inside the hutch.

  Suspicion soon fell on Henrik and Björn. They rode around the village generally behaving oddly and negatively. Viciously, you could even say. They were taken to task here and there, but simply denied everything. Since nothing could be proved, nothing could be done. But people started to lock up their possessions and their animals.

  The winter came, and The Smiths split up. When Anders was out on Domarö in the week between Christmas and New Year, he saw that Henrik and Björn were going around dressed in mourning, but he didn't meet them or speak to them.

  The following summer he and Cecilia went interrailing for a month, and for the rest of the time Anders worked in a supermarket warehouse. During his winter week that year he didn't see Henrik and Björn. However, he learned via his father that they had made themselves completely impossible. They didn't talk to anyone and although they had had a few sessions with the youth psychology team, the vandalism and the nasty little events continued, if on a smaller scale.

  When Anders rang his father in February, he heard that Henrik and Björn had drowned. They had set off across the ice on the moped and had fallen through. Neither of them had been wearing a lifejacket, and it had probably happened very quickly.

  The village could breathe a sigh of relief. The final expulsion of Hubba and Bubba had taken place. Their parents left the island soon after, and disappeared from the general consciousness. It's always very sad when young people die, but... It was finally over.

  Nobody loves us

  If you exist

  In the light of the lamp above the kitchen table, it was easier to see what had happened to Elin, what she had done to herself now. The stitches were still there, and parts of her face were swollen with healing scar tissue, but it was still possible to see what the latest operation aimed to achieve.

  Two deep grooves lined with livid scars ran from the outer edge of her nostrils down to the corners of her mouth. Beneath her eyes, which were now deep-set, were angry red patches criss-crossed by a number of thin lines that continued out towards her temples. She had had her wrinkles emphasised. The operations she underwent had the opposite aim of normal plastic surgery. She was making herself older, cruder, uglier.

  She had declined the offer of coffee, as she had some difficulty using her mouth, and had wine in a tumbler instead. Anders couldn't find a straw, so he cut off a piece of thin rubber tubing and gave her that. She sucked down half the glass in one go, and Anders looked at her. Pitiful.

  The mention of Henrik and Björn had reminded him even more powerfully of what Elin had done, who she had been. Now she sat here eighteen years later with trembling hands, her face in bits, sucking wine through a rubber tube.

  Perhaps there is a kind of justice in the world, after all.

  Since it was difficult to look at her for any length of time, his gaze wandered across the table, and he noticed that the number of beads on the tile had increased considerably. Another patch of white beads had been added, and a good sixth of the surface was now covered in beads.

  Elin sucked up the last of the wine with a loud slurping noise. It was impossible to read her emotions from her face. Anders was on the point of asking about Henrik and Björn, but Elin got there first. Since her lips weren't working properly, all the consonants were weak and her tone was monotonous.

  'I have this dream,' she said. A recurring dream. I don't sleep very well, because I have this dream all the time. I haven't slept properly for several weeks.'

  She poured herself more wine, and Anders fetched himself a glass to keep her company. Once again Elin sucked down half the glass, coughed, and went on:

  'There's a man lying in a boat. A skiff, an old skiff. He's lying in the bottom of the boat with his head up by the side, and he's dead. His eyes are open. And around him.. .there's a net in the boat as well, with fish in it. And some of the fish are loose, jumping around. Floundering and jumping. And the fish in the net are moving too. There are lots of fish, and they're alive. But the man is lying there dead. Do you understand? The fish are alive, even though they're in the boat, but he's dead.'

  Elin sucked up more wine and grimaced with pain. Perhaps one of her cuts was pulling.

  'That image is there, all the time. And I think I ought to get used to it, but every time it comes.. .I'm just as frightened every time, in the dream. I approach the boat and I see that man lying there dead among the fish and then it's as if I fall apart, I'm so frightened.'

  The last drop of wine was sucked into Elin's mouth. It went down the wrong way and she started coughing. She coughed and coughed, pausing only to whimper with pain, then coughed again until Anders was afraid she was going to throw up. But eventually the coughing subsided and Elin sat there panting for a while, gasping for air. Tears poured down the gashes in her cheeks.

  Anders wasn't particularly interested in Elin's dreams. He took a swig of wine and closed his eyes, saw before him the unclear image of Henrik and Björn's bodies in the moonlight, the ugly smile that had played around Elin's full lips.

  It doesn't go away. Nothing goes away.

  He opened his eyes and looked at Elin, who was hunched over, staring at the floor.

  'You said they disappeared. That they didn't drown, Henrik and Björn. What did you mean?'

  'They didn't find them.'

  'But they went through a hole in the ice.'

  Elin shook her head. 'That's not what I heard.'

  'So what did you hear?'

  Elin now had the same expression in her eyes as when they arrived at the Shack twenty minutes earlier, when she caught sight of the GB-man wrapped in the plastic sack. She had wanted to run away, but Anders had stopped her. The same expression now. Like an animal surrounded on all sides, with nowhere to run. The only solution was to implode, to disappear into herself.

  'It was them, Anders. They had that fucking plastic man on the platform an
d they were...no older, do you understand? They were just like they were when.. .when all that happened. They haven't got any older.'

  Anders leaned back in his chair. 'What did actually happen? Back then?'

  Elin clamped her lips together, blew out her cheeks and looked at him with a pleading expression that might once have worked, but now just looked revolting. She wound the rubber tube around her index finger, let her shoulders drop and said, 'Joel's in prison, did you know that?' Anders didn't reply, and she went on, 'It was some woman.. .he nearly beat her to death. I don't know why. I don't suppose she'd done anything.'

  She snivelled and pulled the tube tighter around her finger. The top of the finger turned dark red like the skin on her face, and she said to the surface of the table, 'I don't know. I don't know anything. I suppose I was evil. Can a person be evil?'

  Anders shrugged his shoulders, took a deep breath and exhaled. A fraction of the weight that had been lying in his stomach lifted. He got up and fetched a new carton of wine. 'Would you like some more?'

  She nodded and unwound the tube. They drank, or sucked, respectively, in silence. After a while Anders asked, 'What did you hear? About them?'

  A trickle of wine ran from the corner of Elin's mouth, and she carefully wiped it away, then said, 'Just that they rode out on to the ice on their moped. And then they were gone.'

  'You mean they didn't fall through the ice?'

  'No.'

  'No hole, no...it hadn't cracked, they...?'

  'No. They just disappeared.'

  Anders pressed his fist against his lips so hard that there was a taste of metal in his mouth, then he got up and staggered around the kitchen. Elin followed him with her eyes, sucked up some more wine and asked, 'What's the matter?'

  Anders shook his head to indicate that he didn't want to talk, grabbed his cigarette packet and frantically smoked a cigarette as he paced back and forth, out into the hallway, into the living room.

  What can I do? What shall I do?

  There was no guarantee that the same thing that had happened to Henrik and Björn had happened to Maja. Perhaps they just.. .took off. Went somewhere else and started a new life.

  And now they've come hack without having aged?

  Anders stopped by the window in the living room and looked towards Gåvasten's flashing lighthouse far away in the distance. Tears welled up in his eyes.

  Without having aged...

  He saw Maja's little hands reaching for the baby's bottle with her juice in it, her thin fingers curling around the edges of a Bamse comic as she lay on her back in her bed, reading. Her feet sticking out from under the covers. Six years old.

  Anders stared out into the vast darkness with its single, flashing point of light. The wine had gone to his head and the light was swaying, sliding across the sea, and he could see Maja in her red snow- suit. She was glowing in the darkness, and she was walking across the water. The little body, the soft skin, the muscles tucked into her warm suit. A patch of red that was moving closer, but which dissolved when he tried to focus his gaze on it.

  He whispered, 'Where are you? Where are you?'

  No reply. Just the lapping of the sea against the rocks and the single constantly repeated message from Gåvasten, the message of every lighthouse: Here I am, here I am. Be careful, he careful.

  Anders stood by the window staring out into the darkness until the draught through the frame made him shiver, and he went back into the kitchen.

  Elin was lying across the table, her head resting on her arms. He shook her shoulder and she looked up in confusion. 'You'd better go to bed.' He gestured towards the bedroom. 'Take the big bed.'

  Elin disappeared into the bedroom and Anders stayed at the kitchen table, drank more wine and smoked several cigarettes. He stared at the words scratched into the surface of the table.

  Carry me.

  Anders nodded drunkenly and clasped his hands as if in prayer, whispering, 'I will. I will. But where will I find you? Where are you?'

  Perhaps half an hour had passed when Elin came out of the bedroom with the quilt wrapped around her. Her fingers scrabbled nervously at the fabric of the cover. Anders closed one eye so that he could see her more clearly. She looked as wretched as it is physically possible to look.

  'Can't you come to bed as well?' she asked. 'I'm so bloody scared.'

  Anders went into the bedroom with her and lay down beside her on top of the quilt. One hand came creeping out and found his.

  What does it matter? What does it fucking matter?

  He took her hand and squeezed it as if to say that everything was OK, that there was nothing to worry about. When he tried to let go, her grip tightened and he didn't pull away. The beam of the lighthouse at North Point swept through the room, flashing across the wall opposite and making the profile of Elin's flattened nose stand out. He lay there looking at it, and when the beam had swept past perhaps ten times, he asked again, 'Why are you doing this? Having all this surgery?'

  'I have to.'

  Anders blinked and realised he was feeling sleepy. His thoughts were far from lucid, but the suspicion of a theory came into his head, and he asked, 'Is it...a punishment?'

  Elin was silent for a long time, and he thought she wasn't going to answer. The lighthouse beam had swept past many times before she finally said, 'I suppose it is,' let go of his hand and rolled over on to her side.

  Anders lay there thinking about crime and punishment, the balance that is perhaps built into the world and into the souls of men. He didn't come up with anything, and his reasoning had begun to dissolve into disjointed images when he came to his senses, and heard from Elin's breathing that she was asleep. He got up, undressed and climbed into Maja's bed.

  Sleep refused to come. He had probably nodded off for a few minutes in the big bed, and now he was wide-awake. He counted the flashes of the lighthouse and had reached two hundred and twenty; he was just considering switching on the bedside light and reading a Bamse comic when he saw Elin getting out of bed.

  He thought she was going to the toilet. But there was something wrong with her movements. She walked towards his bed without seeing him. In only her bra and pants her body was shapeless, swollen, and when the light illuminated her face he was suddenly scared, and cowered as if expecting a blow.

  The monster is coming for me.

  But she passed him, oblivious, and the fear died away. Elin opened the door with the movements of a sleepwalker and went out of the room. Anders hesitated for a few seconds, then got up, pulled on his shirt and followed her.

  She went through the kitchen and into the hallway, but instead of turning off towards the toilet, she carried on towards the front door. When she started fiddling with the catch to open the door, he went up to her.

  'Elin, what are you doing?' he said to her back, without getting any reaction. 'You can't go outside like that.'

  The lock clicked and she pushed down the handle. He grabbed her shoulder. 'Where are you going?' She stiffened in his grip and answered without turning around, 'Home. I'm going home.'

  When the door opened and cold air swept in over his bare feet, he gripped her shoulder more firmly and turned her to face him. 'You can't. You have no house to go to.' He grabbed her other shoulder too and shook her. Her expression was absent.

  'Listen,' he said. 'You're not going anywhere.'

  Elin looked vacantly at him. Her lips were moving jerkily, as if she were saying what, what, what, what, without being able to produce any sound. Then she shook her head slowly and repeated, 'I'm not going anywhere.'

  'No. Come on.'

  He drew her back into the hallway, closed and locked the door. She allowed herself to be led back to bed, where she fell asleep immediately. Anders had no key to the bedroom door, so he jammed a chair under the handle and hoped he would hear if she tried to get out again.

  What if she does? It's not my responsibility.

  He slid into Maja's bed again and noticed to his surprise that his body had now
decided he could sleep, if he wanted to. He did want to. He closed his eyes and soon slipped down into rest on a gently sloping plane. His last thought before he fell asleep was: As if I didn't have enough.

  After the fire

  Only blackened beams and grey sludge remained after the fire service had done their work. Hundreds of cubic metres of sea water had been pumped over and around the burning house, and despite the fact that odd curls of smoke were still rising from the devastation, there was no risk that the fire would catch hold again; the whole area was too wet.