The Darkest Room

by Johan Theorin

  If you don’t come to me, then I’ll have to come to you…

  Tilda sat up with a start, in the middle of a breath, with no idea where she was. But her father was with her, she could hear his voice.

  She opened her eyes.

  No, her father was dead, his car had gone off the road eleven years ago.

  Tilda blinked, looked around, and realized she had been asleep.

  She smelled the aroma of newly polished wood and saw a freshly painted ceiling above her, and realized that she was lying on a little bed in the manor house at Eel Point. And straight after that an unpleasant memory of running water flashed into her mind-the water pouring from the clothes on the body down by the shore.

  She had fallen asleep in a child’s bedroom.

  Tilda blinked away the sleep, glanced quickly at the clock and saw that it was ten past eleven. She had slept for over two hours and dreamed strange dreams about her father. He had been there with her, in the child’s bedroom.

  She heard something and raised her head.

  The house was no longer completely silent. She heard faint noises that rose and fell, as if someone-or more than one person-was talking.

  It was the sound of low voices.

  It sounded like muted mumbling. A group of people talking, quietly and intensely, somewhere outside the house.

  Tilda got up silently from the bed, with the feeling that she was eavesdropping.

  She held her breath so that she could hear better, and took a couple of silent steps toward the door, out of the bedroom, and listened again.

  Perhaps it was just the wind between the buildings?

  She went out onto the veranda again-and just when she

  thought she could distinguish the voices clearly through the glass, they suddenly fell silent.

  Everything was dark and still between the large buildings of the manor.

  The next moment a bright light swept through the rooms-the headlights of a car.

  She heard the faint sound of an engine approaching and realized that Joakim Westin had arrived back at Eel Point.

  Tilda took a final glance back into the house to make sure everything looked as it should. She thought about the sounds she had heard and had a vague feeling of having done something forbidden-despite the fact that waiting for the owner inside the warm house had seemed like the obvious thing to do. Then she pulled on her boots and went out into the darkness again.

  As she stepped outside, the car with its trailer was just swinging around to stop in the turning area.

  The driver switched off the engine and got out. Joakim Westin. A tall, slim man aged about thirty-five, dressed in jeans and a winter jacket. Tilda could barely make out his face in the darkness, but she thought he was looking at her with a grim expression. His movements as he left the car were rapid and tense.

  He closed the car door and came over to her.

  “Hi,” he said. He nodded, but without extending his hand.

  “Hi.” She nodded too. “Tilda Davidsson, local police… We spoke earlier.”

  She wished she had been wearing her police uniform, not civilian clothes. It would have felt more appropriate on this dark night.

  “Is there only you here?” said Westin.

  “Yes. My colleagues have left,” said Tilda. “And the ambulance.”

  There was silence. Westin just stood there, somehow indecisive, and she couldn’t think of a single decent question to ask.

  “Livia,” said Westin eventually, gazing up at the lit windows of the house. “Is she… is she not here?”

  “She’s being taken care of,” said Tilda. “They’ve taken her to Kalmar.”

  “What happened?” asked Westin, looking at her. “Where did it happen?”

  “By the shore… next to the lighthouses.”

  “Did she go out to the lighthouses?”

  “No, or rather… we don’t know yet.”

  Westin’s eyes were flicking between Tilda and the house.

  “And Katrine and Gabriel? Are they still at the neighbors’?”

  Tilda nodded. “They’ve fallen asleep, I rang and checked a while ago.”

  “Is that the place over there?” said Westin, looking toward the lights in the southwest. “The farm?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m going over there.”

  “I can drive you,” said Tilda. “We can-”

  “No thank you. I need to walk.”

  He walked past her, clambered over a stone wall, and strode off into the darkness.

  The bereaved should never be left alone, Tilda had learned during her training, and she quickly set off after him. It was hardly appropriate to try to lighten the situation with questions about his journey from Stockholm or other small talk, so she just walked in silence across the field toward the lights in the distance.

  They should have brought a flashlight or lantern; it was pitch black out here. But Westin seemed able to find his way.

  Tilda thought he had forgotten she was behind him, but suddenly he turned his head and said quietly, “Careful… there’s barbed wire here.”

  He led them around the fence and closer to the road. Tilda could hear the faint rushing of the sea to the east. It sounded almost like whispering, and it made her remember the sounds back at the house. The quiet voices through the walls.

  “Does anyone else live in the manor house?” she asked.

  “No,” said Westin tersely.

  He didn’t ask what she meant, and Tilda didn’t say any more.

  After a few hundred yards they came up onto a gravel track that led them straight to the farm. They walked past some kind of silo and a row of parked tractors. Tilda could smell manure, and she heard the sound of faint lowing from a dark barn on the other side of the farmyard.

  They arrived at the Carlsson family house. A black cat walked down the steps and slunk off around the corner, and Westin asked quietly, “Who found her… was it Katrine?”

  “No,” said Tilda. “I think it was one of the staff from the preschool.”

  Joakim Westin turned his head and gave her a long look, as if he didn’t understand what she was talking about.

  Tilda realized later that she should have stopped on the steps and talked more to him then. Instead she took two more steps up to the door and tapped gently on one of the panes of glass.

  After a minute or so a blonde woman dressed in a skirt and sweater came and opened the door. It was Maria Carlsson.

  “Come in,” she said. “I’ll go and wake them up.”

  “You can let Gabriel sleep,” said Joakim.

  Maria Carlsson nodded and turned away, and they both followed her slowly through the hallway. They stopped just inside the door of the large room, which was a combination of a dining room and TV room. Candles had been lit in the windows, and quiet flute music was playing on the stereo.

  There was a kind of ceremonial, funereal atmosphere in the air, thought Tilda, as if someone had died here in the house, not over by the lighthouses on Eel Point.

  Maria Carlsson disappeared into a dark room. It took a minute or two, then the little girl came out into the light.

  She was wearing pants and a sweater, clutching a cuddly toy firmly under her arm, and her expression was sleepy and

  uninterested as she looked at them. But when she realized who was standing at the other side of the room, she quickly brightened up and began to smile.

  “Daddy!” she shouted, scampering across the floor.

  The daughter didn’t know anything, Tilda realized. Nobody had told her yet that her mother had drowned.

  Even more remarkable was the fact that her father, Joakim Westin, was standing stiffly by the door, making no attempt to move toward his daughter.

  Tilda looked at him and saw that he no longer looked tense, but frightened and confused-almost terrified.

  Joakim Westin’s voice was filled with panic.

  “But this is Livia,” he said, looking at Tilda. “But what about Katrine? My wi
fe, where’s… where’s Katrine?”

  November

  6

  Joakim was sitting waiting on a wooden bench outside a low building at the district hospital in Kalmar. The weather was cold and sunny. Beside him sat a young hospital chaplain dressed in a blue winter jacket, a Bible in his hand. Neither of the men spoke.

  Inside the building there was a room where Katrine was waiting. Beside the entrance was a sign with the words Chapel of Rest.

  Joakim was refusing to go in.

  “I’d really like you to see her,” the junior doctor had said when she met Joakim. “If you can cope with that.”

  Joakim shook his head.

  “I can tell you what you’ll see in there,” said the junior doctor. “It’s very dignified and respectful, with low lighting and candles. The deceased will be lying on a bier, with a sheet covering-”

  “-a sheet covering the body, leaving the face visible,” said Joakim. “I know.”

  He knew, he had seen Ethel in a room like this the previous year. But he couldn’t look at Katrine lying there like that. He lowered his eyes and silently shook his head.

  Eventually the junior doctor nodded.

  “Wait here, then. It will take a little while.”

  She went into the building, and Joakim sat down in the pale November sunshine and waited, gazing up at the blue sky. The hospital chaplain next to him was moving uneasily in his thick jacket, as if the silence were unpleasant.

  “Were you married long?” he said eventually.

  “Seven years,” said Joakim. “And three months.”

  “Have you any children?”

  “Two. A boy and a girl.”

  “Children are always welcome to come along and say goodbye,” said the priest quietly. “It can be good for them… help them to move on.”

  Joakim shook his head again. “They’re not going through this.”

  Then there was silence on the bench again. After a few minutes the doctor came back with some Polaroid photographs and a large brown package.

  “It took a little while to find the camera,” she said.

  Then she held out the photographs to Joakim.

  He took them and saw that they were close-ups of Katrine’s face. Two were taken from the front, two from the side. Katrine’s eyes were closed, but Joakim couldn’t fool himself into thinking she was just sleeping. Her skin was white and lifeless, and she had black scabs on her forehead and on one cheek.

  “She’s injured,” he said quietly.

  “It’s from the fall,” said the doctor. “She slipped on the rocks out on the jetty and hit her face, before she ended up in the water.”

  “But she… drowned?”

  “It was hypothermia… the shock of the cold water. This late in the year the temperature of the Baltic is below ten degrees,” said the doctor. “She took water into her lungs when she went below the surface.”

  “But she fell in the water,” said Joakim. “Why did she fall?”

  He didn’t get a reply.

  “These are her clothes,” said the doctor, handing over the package. “And you don’t want to see her?”

  “No.”

  “To say goodbye?”

  “No.”

  The children fell asleep in their bedrooms every night in the week following Katrine’s death. They had lots of questions about why she wasn’t home, but eventually they fell asleep anyway.

  Joakim, however, lay there in the double bed, gazing up at the ceiling, hour after hour. And when he did fall asleep, there was no rest. The same dream recurred night after night.

  He dreamed that he was back at Eel Point. He had been gone for a long time, perhaps for several years, and now he had returned.

  He was standing beneath a gray sky on the deserted shore by the lighthouses, then he began to walk up toward the house. It looked desolate and completely dilapidated. The rain and snow had washed away the red, leaving the façade pale gray.

  The windows of the veranda were broken and the door was standing ajar. Everything was dark inside.

  The oblong stones forming the steps up to the veranda were cracked and askew. Joakim walked slowly up them and into the darkness.

  He shivered and looked around in the gloom of the

  porch, but everything was just as shabby and run-down inside as it was outside. The wallpaper was ripped, gravel and dust covered the wooden floors, all the furniture was gone. There was no trace of the renovation he and Katrine had made a start on.

  He could hear noises from several of the rooms.

  From the kitchen came the murmur of voices and scraping noises.

  Joakim walked along the corridor and stopped in the doorway.

  At the kitchen table sat Livia and Gabriel, bent over a game of cards. His children were still small, but their faces had a network of fine wrinkles around the mouth and eyes.

  Is Mom home? asked Joakim.

  Livia nodded. She’s in the barn.

  She lives in the hayloft in the barn, said Gabriel.

  Joakim nodded and backed slowly out of the kitchen. His children stayed where they were, in silence.

  He went back outside, across the grass-covered inner courtyard, and pushed open the door of the barn.

  Hello?

  There was no reply, but he went in anyway.

  At the steep wooden staircase leading up to the hayloft, he stopped. Then he began to climb. The steps were cold and damp.

  When he got to the top, he couldn’t see any hay, just pools of water on the wooden floor.

  Katrine was standing over by the wall, with her back to him. She was wearing her white nightgown, but it was soaking wet.

  Are you cold? he asked.

  She shook her head without turning around.

  What happened down by the shore?

  Don’t ask, she said, and slowly began to sink through the gaps in the wooden floor.

  Joakim walked over to her.

  Mom-mee? called a voice in the distance.

  Katrine stood motionless by the wall.

  Livia has woken up, she said. You need to take care of her, Kim.

  Joakim woke up in his bedroom with a start.

  The sound that had woken him up was no dream. It was Livia calling out.

  “Mom-mee?”

  He opened his eyes in the darkness, but stayed in bed. Alone.

  Everything was silent once again.

  The clock by the side of the bed was showing quarter past three. Joakim was certain he had fallen asleep just a few minutes ago-and yet the dream about Katrine had lasted an eternity.

  He closed his eyes. If he stayed where he was and didn’t do anything, perhaps Livia would go back to sleep.

  Like a reply the call echoed through the house once more:

  “Mom-mee?”

  After that he knew it was pointless to stay in bed. Livia was awake and wouldn’t stop calling until her mother came in and lay down beside her.

  Joakim sat up slowly and switched on the lamp on the bedside table. The house was cold, and he felt a crippling loneliness.

  “Mom-mee?”

  He knew he had to take care of the children. He didn’t want to, he didn’t have the strength, but there was no one else to share the responsibility with.

  He left his warm bed and moved quietly out of his bedroom and over to Livia’s room.

  She raised her head when he bent over her bed. He stroked her forehead, without saying anything.

  “Mommy?” she mumbled.

  “No, it’s just me,” he said. “Go to sleep now, Livia.”

  She didn’t reply, but sank slowly back onto her pillow.

  Joakim stood there in the darkness until she was breathing evenly again.

  He took a step backward, then another. Then he turned toward the door.

  “Don’t go, Daddy.”

  Her clear voice made him stop dead on the cold floor.

  She had sounded wide awake, despite the fact that she was lying in bed like a motionless shadow
. He turned slowly to face her.

  “Why not?” he asked quietly.

  “Stay here,” said Livia.

  Joakim didn’t reply. He held his breath and listened. She had sounded awake, but he still thought it seemed as if she were asleep.

  When he had been standing there, silent and motionless, for a minute or so, he began to feel like a blind man in the dark room.

  “Livia?” he whispered.

  He got no answer, but her breathing was tense and irregular. He knew she would soon call out for him again.

  An idea suddenly came into his head. At first it felt unpleasant, then he decided to try it out.

  He crept out of the door and into the dark bathroom. He groped his way forward, bumped into the hand basin, then felt the wooden laundry basket next to the bathtub. The basket was almost full; nobody had done any washing for almost a week. Joakim hadn’t had the strength.

  Then he heard the call from Livia’s room, as expected:

  “Mom-mee?”

  Joakim knew she would carry on calling for Katrine.

  “Mom-mee?”

  This was how it was going to be, night after night. It would never end.

  “Quiet,” he muttered, standing by the laundry basket.

  He opened the lid and started burrowing among the clothes.

  Different aromas rose up to meet him. Most of the items were hers; all the sweaters and pants and underclothes she had worn in the final days before the accident. Joakim pulled out a few things: a pair of jeans, a red woolen sweater, a white cotton skirt.

  He couldn’t resist pressing them against his face.

  Katrine.

  He wanted to linger there among the vivid memories the scent of her brought into his mind; they were both blissful and painful-but Livia’s plaintive cry made him hurry.

  “Mom-mee?”

  Joakim took the red woolen sweater with him. He went past Gabriel’s room and back into Livia’s.

  She had kicked off the coverlet and was waking up-she raised her head when he came in and stared at him in bewildered silence.

  “Sleep now, Livia,” said Joakim. “Mommy’s here.”

  He placed Katrine’s thick sweater close to Livia’s face and pulled the coverlet up to her chin. He tucked her in closely, like a cocoon.

  “Sleep now,” he repeated, more quietly this time.