The Darkest Room

by Johan Theorin

  He stood up and swept the flashlight around in front of him.

  In its yellow glow he saw benches-rows of benches.

  Church benches.

  He was at one end of something that looked like an old wooden chapel inside the loft. It was a little room dedicated to worship beneath the high, angular roof, set out with four benches and a narrow aisle alongside them.

  The wooden benches were dry and split and the edges were battered, completely without any kind of ornamentation; they looked as if they came from a medieval church. They must have been put here when the barn was built, Joakim realized. There was no door through which to carry them in.

  There was no pulpit in the room. And no cross. High up on the wall in front of the pews was a filthy window. Below it a sheet of paper was hanging from a nail, and when he went over he saw that it was a page ripped out of a family Bible: a Doré drawing of a woman, Mary Magdalene perhaps, staring in amazement at the stone rolled away from the entrance to Jesus’ tomb. The big round stone lay cast aside on the ground, and the opening to the tomb gaped above her like a black hole.

  Joakim looked at the picture for a long time. Then he turned around-and discovered that the wooden benches behind him were not empty.

  In the glow of the flashlight he could see letters lying on them.

  And dried-up bunches of flowers.

  And a pair of white children’s shoes.

  On one of the benches lay something small and white, and when he bent down he saw that it was a set of false teeth.

  Possessions. Mementos.

  There were also several small plaited baskets containing pieces of paper. Joakim reached down and carefully picked one out. He shone the flashlight on it and read:

  Carl, forgotten by everyone, but not by me or the Lord.

  Sara

  In another basket lay a yellowing postcard with a black-and-white picture of an angel on the front, smiling serenely. Joakim picked it up, turned it over, and saw that someone had written on the back in ink, in ornate handwriting:

  Tender loving thoughts of my dear sister Maria, sadly missed. My daily prayer goes to the Lord our God that we may soon meet again.

  An unbearable loss.

  Nils Peter

  Joakim gently put the card back in the basket.

  This was a prayer room-a sealed-up room for the dead.

  A book lay on one of the benches. It was a thick notebook, Joakim saw when he picked it up. Inside was page after page of handwriting, too small and spidery to read in the darkness, and on the title page The Book of the Blizzard was written in black ink.

  He pushed it inside his jacket.

  Joakim straightened up, looked around for one last time, and noticed a small hole in the wall beside the bench at the front.

  He went closer, and realized what it was: the hole he himself had hacked in the wall of the hayloft a few weeks ago.

  He had reached through with his arm that evening, as far as he could. On the bench just below that little opening lay the object he had touched:

  A folded cloth bundle.

  A pale blue, tattered denim jacket, which Joakim thought he had seen before.

  When he recognized some of the small badges on the front, which said RELAX and PINK FLOYD, he knew whose jacket it was. Joakim had seen it night after night when he looked out into the street from behind the curtains at the Apple House.

  It was his sister Ethel’s denim jacket.

  I was the one who discovered the big hayloft in the barn, but I enticed Markus up the steps with me and we explored it together. It was my first romance, and perhaps my best.

  But it was so short.

  – MIRJA RAMBE

  WINTER 1961

  In the evenings that fall and winter Markus and I creep around with a paraffin lamp among the ropes and chains and open chests and look at old documents relating to the lighthouses.

  It looks like a garbage dump, but there are fantastic things up there-so many memories from the hundred-year-old history of the manor. All the trash every family and every lighthouse keeper left behind at Eel Point seems to have ended up here in the barn sooner or later, and has been forgotten.

  After a few weeks we carry all the spare blankets we can find in the house out to the barn and make a little tent out of them. We sneak out bread and wine and cigarettes and start to have picnics up there too, high above the dreariness of everyday life.

  I show Markus the wall with all the carved names of those who have died. We trace the letters with our fingers and I fantasize gleefully about the tragedies that have visited Eel Point over the years.

  We carve our own names into the floor of the loft instead, close beside each other.

  It takes three picnics in the loft before he dares to kiss me on the mouth. Markus isn’t allowed to do much more-the old doctor still haunts me-but I live on his kiss for several weeks.

  And now I can paint Markus quite openly.

  Suddenly Eel Point is not the end of the world after all. It is the center of the world, and I start to believe and hope that Markus and I will be able to do what we want, travel wherever we want. We get through the long winter together.

  The sea is cold and as usual it takes a long time for the summer to reach the island, but at the end of May the sun shines bright and clear over the meadows once again. But that is also when Markus gets ready to leave-not with me, but alone. He has been called up for one year’s military service on the mainland.

  We promise to write to each other. Lots of letters.

  When he has packed his suitcase, I go with him to the train station in Marnäs. We stand there in silence, waiting with other residents of the island. The railway on Öland is to be closed this year, and the atmosphere in the waiting room is gloomy.

  Markus has gone, but Ragnar Davidsson continues to moor his boat at Eel Point and come up to the house.

  He and I actually have a number of discussions about art, even if the level is quite low. It starts one day when I come out into the hallway of the outbuilding and notice that the door to the middle room is open. When I look in, Davidsson is standing there in the middle of the floor. He is looking at all the dark paintings that cover the walls.

  It is obvious that this is the first time he has discovered Torun’s huge collection, and he doesn’t like it. He shakes his head.

  “What do you think?” I ask.

  “It’s all just black and gray,” he says. “Just a lot of dark colors.”

  “That’s what a blizzard looks like at night,” I say.

  “In that case it looks like… crap,” says Davidsson.

  “You can also look at it from a symbolic point of view,” I venture. “It’s a blizzard at night, but it also represents a soul… the tormented soul of a woman.”

  Davidsson shakes his head. “Crap,” he says again.

  He has clearly never read Simone de Beauvoir. I haven’t either, of course, but at least I’ve heard of her.

  I make one last attempt to defend Torun, and say, “They’ll be worth a lot of money one day.”

  Davidsson turns his head and looks at me as if I’m insane. Then he walks past me and goes outside.

  When I go back into the other room, I see Torun sitting by the window, and realize straightaway that she heard the whole conversation. Despite the fact that she is almost completely blind now, she stares out of the window.

  I try to talk to her about something else, but she shakes her head.

  “Ragnar is right,” she says. “It’s crap, all of it.”

  I stop going up to the hayloft once Markus has gone. It reminds me of him too much, it feels too empty.

  But of course we send letters to each other. I write the most often-several long letters in reply to one of his short ones.

  Markus’s letters are mostly about military exercises, and they don’t come very often. But this just makes me fill letter after letter with my dreams and plans. When can we see each other again? When is he on leave? When does he finish? />
  He doesn’t really know, but promises that we will meet up. Soon.

  I begin to realize that I have to get away from Eel Point, take the ferry to the mainland and Markus. But how can I leave Torun? It’s impossible.

  27

  Henrik knew the police were looking for him. Twice during the last week a police officer had left a message on his answering machine, asking him to come to the station for an interview.

  He hadn’t bothered going in.

  Of course, he couldn’t keep on playing truant like that, but he needed time to get rid of the evidence of his career as a burglar. The most tangible was certainly the boathouse full of stolen goods.

  “I can’t have the stuff here any longer,” he said when he called Tommy. “You have to come over and deal with it.”

  “Okay…” Tommy didn’t sound stressed in the slightest. “We’ll bring the van over on Monday. At about three.”

  “And you’ll bring the money?”

  “Sure,” said Tommy. “It’s cool.”

  Monday was the day before Christmas Eve. Henrik was

  working up in Marnäs, but finished at two and drove straight down to the boathouse in Enslunda.

  When he got out onto the coast road, he heard that the weather forecast was predicting persistent snowfall and strong winds over Öland and Gotland that evening-and there was a storm warning for the Baltic. But the weather was still fine, the sky dark blue. A bank of gray cloud was approaching the island from the east, but Henrik would soon be back in Borgholm.

  As usual there was nobody down by the boathouse. Henrik swung the car around and reversed the last few yards down to the white boat, standing on its trailer. The previous weekend he had been here with Camilla. She had wanted to look in the boathouse, but he had managed to talk her out of it. Instead they had taken the boat out of the water and removed the outboard motor. They hadn’t managed to cover it with a tarpaulin, but he would do that now.

  As he stepped out onto the grass and breathed in the smell of seaweed, he thought about his dead grandfather for half a second, then lifted the handle of the trailer to attach it to the tow bar on the back of his car.

  The idea of hiding some of the stolen goods came to him a little bit later, as he stood inside the boathouse looking at everything they had collected during the fall. There must have been a hundred items, large and small, antique and modern. Henrik had no real idea what was there, and he was sure the brothers hadn’t either.

  His boat wasn’t registered anywhere; there was no way the police could know he had it. Once he had taken it to the industrial estate outside Borgholm, he could drive out there and pick up the stolen goods whenever he wanted.

  Henrik decided to go for it. He picked up one of the old limestone vases, worth maybe five thousand kronor in an antique store, and carried it out to the boat.

  It was snowing now, feathery flakes floating down toward the ground.

  He carefully placed the vase on the floor next to the driver’s seat. Then he went back to the boathouse and picked up a box of vintage Scotch.

  Eventually Henrik had carried over a dozen or so items and hidden them between the seats in the boat. The floor was almost full of stolen goods by this stage. He fetched a green tarpaulin from the boathouse, pulled it over the boat from prow to stern, and fastened it with a long nylon rope.

  Done.

  The snowflakes had continued to fall at a leisurely pace, forming a thin white covering on the ground.

  When Henrik went back to lock the boathouse, he heard a dull roar through the soughing of the wind. He turned his head.

  Through the trees he could see a vehicle approaching, a dark van.

  The Serelius brothers pulled in next to Henrik’s boat.

  The doors opened and slammed shut.

  “Hi there, Henrik!”

  The brothers walked toward him through the snow, both smiling. They were dressed for the cold weather, in black padded jackets, boots, and lined hunting caps.

  Tommy was wearing huge ski shades, as if he were on vacation in the mountains. The old Mauser hung over his shoulder.

  He was on something, Henrik could see that despite the mirrored shades that hid his pupils. Crystal meth, no doubt. As usual he had red scratch marks on his neck and his chin was trembling. Not good.

  “And so the time has come,” said Tommy. “Time to wish each other a Merry Christmas.”

  When Henrik didn’t reply, he laughed harshly.

  “No, of course that’s not all… we’ve come to collect the stuff as well.”

  “Stuff,” said Freddy.

  “The loot.”

  “And the money?” said Henrik.

  “Sure. We’ll share it like brothers.” Tommy was still smiling. “What do you think we are, thieves?”

  It was an old joke, but Henrik’s answering smile was tense; he realized they weren’t really talking about the division of the stolen goods.

  He saw Freddy walk over to the boathouse and open the door wide. Then he disappeared into the darkness, but came straight back out with a television set in his arms.

  “That’s what we said,” said Henrik. “Like brothers.”

  Tommy went past him and walked over to the boat.

  “I’m taking the boat home afterward,” said Henrik. “So you’re moving on now?”

  “Yup… back to Copenhagen. We’re just going up to that place by the lighthouses first.” Tommy waved his hand in a northerly direction. “To look for those paintings. Are you coming?”

  Henrik shook his head. He saw that Freddy had placed the television in the van and gone back into the boathouse.

  “No, I haven’t got time,” he replied. “Like I said, I have to get the boat home.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Tommy, studying the trailer. “Where do you keep it over the winter?”

  “Down in Borgholm… behind a factory.”

  Tommy pulled at the rope securing the tarpaulin and asked, “Is it safe there?”

  “It’s in a fenced yard.”

  Henrik’s pulse rate increased. He should have gotten more ropes and knotted them tightly over the tarpaulin. In order to distract Tommy, he started talking again:

  “Do you know what I saw out here back in the fall?”

  “No.” Tommy shook his head, but didn’t take his eyes off the boat.

  “It was in October,” said Henrik, “when I was here emptying the boat… I saw a motor cruiser, it must have come from the north. It put in up by the lighthouses at Eel Point, there was

  a guy standing in the prow… and that evening they found her drowned, in just the same place. I’ve thought about it a lot.”

  He was talking too much, and too quickly. But now at last Tommy turned his head.

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “The woman from the manor house up there,” said Henrik. “Katrine Westin, I did some work for her last summer.”

  “Eel Point,” said Tommy. “That’s where we’re going… So you saw a murder there?”

  “No, I saw a motorboat,” said Henrik. “But it wasn’t that easy to see… it was just that they found her dead afterward.”

  “Fuck,” said Tommy, not sounding particularly impressed. “Did you tell anyone?”

  “Tell who? The cops?”

  “No,” said Tommy, “they would just have started asking you what you were doing out here. They might even have checked inside the boathouse and arrested you.”

  “Us,” said Henrik.

  Tommy looked at the boat again.

  “Freddy told me a story on the way here,” he said. “It was pretty cool.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “It’s about a girl and a guy… they’re on holiday in the USA, driving around, and at a picnic area by the road they come across a skunk. They’ve never seen a skunk before, and they think it’s really cute. The girl wants to take it home to Sweden, but the guy doesn’t think customs will let wild animals through. So the girl suggests that she should smuggle the skunk th
rough in her briefs. ‘That’s an idea,’ says the guy. ‘But what about the smell?’”

  Tommy scratched his neck and paused before the punch line:

  “‘What’s the problem?’ says the girl. ‘I mean, the skunk stinks as well.’”

  He laughed to himself. Then he turned around and grabbed hold of the tarpaulin.

  “‘The skunk stinks as well,’” he said again.

  “Just a minute…” Henrik began.

  But Tommy didn’t wait, he pulled the tarpaulin hard, over to one side. He only managed to loosen a small section from the rope, but it was enough to reveal most of the stolen goods.

  “Aha,” said Tommy, looking down at the objects in the boat. Then he pointed at the ground. “You should have swept away the tracks in the snow, Henke… you’ve been shuttling back and forth between the boathouse and the boat.”

  Henrik shook his head. “I took a few things…”

  “A few?” said Tommy, beginning to walk toward him.

  Henrik took a step backwards. “So what?” he said. “I’ve worked hard for this. I’ve planned every trip, and all you’ve done-”

  “Henke,” said Tommy, “you talk too much.”

  “Me? You can-”

  But Tommy wasn’t listening; he struck out, fetching Henrik a hard blow in the stomach and making him stagger backward. There was a rock behind him; he slumped down on it and looked at the ground.

  His jacket was ripped. A narrow tear ran from the bottom of the material up toward his navel.

  Tommy quickly went through Henrik’s pockets and fished out the car keys.

  “Sit still… I’ll punch you again if you move.”

  Henrik didn’t move. His stomach started throbbing.

  The pain came in waves, and during one of them Henrik leaned forward and vomited between his legs.

  Tommy took a couple of steps away from him, adjusted the gun on his shoulder, and pushed the sharp screwdriver into his back pocket.

  Henrik coughed laboriously and looked up at him.

  “Tommy…”

  But Tommy just shook his head. “Do you think that’s what we’re really called…Tommy and Freddy? Those are our stage names.”