Stallo

by Stefan Spjut

  Seved nodded.

  ‘Okay,’ he said.

  Lennart picked up his tin of snus and flipped open the lid.

  ‘Immediately north of Jokkmokk,’ he said, inserting a crumpled cushion of snus under his lip, ‘there’s a village called Vaikijaur … are you listening?’

  Seved nodded obediently, but in actual fact he could hardly think of anything apart from the pain in his hand.

  ‘Vaikijaur,’ he repeated.

  ‘Right,’ Lennart said, snapping the lid shut and rubbing his fingertips together, making crumbs of tobacco rain down. ‘There’s a young lad living there, three or four years old. Exactly the right age. According to Torsten he’s often out playing on his own. They’ve been keeping an eye on him for a long time. But I’ve advised them against it because it’s risky snatching a child who lives so close. That’s why it’s better if he can come to your place.’

  ‘When?’ said Seved. ‘When does it have to happen?’

  ‘As soon as possible. I don’t know exactly where he lives, so you’ll have to travel up to Torsten and talk to him.’

  *

  They left the restaurant and walked round the back because Lennart had something for Seved to take with him. By this time it was dark. He walked behind the stocky man, staring at his back.

  After Lennart had opened the car door he bent over the back seat and lifted out a grey bundle. It was something wrapped in a woollen blanket. Seved took hold of it and heard a creaking metallic sound. He realised it was a cage.

  ‘There are three of them,’ Lennart said. Crooking his finger he fished out the pad of snus from his mouth. After spitting he said:

  ‘Shapeshifters. That turn into lemmings. Make damn sure you take good care of them. The one with the white mark above its eye is very old and Elna says it can talk.’

  ‘Talk?’

  Lennart shrugged his shoulders and spat again.

  ‘Let them out in Hybblet straight away and make sure the door to the hide is open so they can get down there. They always do some good.’

  He walked round and opened the door on the driver’s side. Then he ran his eyes over the car roof, which was covered in a layer of uneven glittery ice.

  ‘If they get to you on the way home, just put the radio on,’ he said. ‘They hate music. And watch out they don’t change back to lemmings again. We haven’t got time for that.’

  ‘But these little things usually run back after a few hours.’

  ‘Not necessarily, especially if they find themselves in an unfamiliar place. And it always takes time, whatever the circumstances. The old one can easily take a couple of days to get back home. And we’re short of time.’

  After saying this he sank down behind the wheel, but it took a few moments until he shifted position and reached out for the door handle with his right hand and slammed the door shut.

  *

  Seved placed the cage on the passenger seat. Through a gap in the blanket he could see the bars arching over a plastic tray and straw sticking out. No sound was coming from the cage. Presumably the shapeshifters were curled up asleep, hopefully sleeping deeply enough not to wake up during the journey home. Having shapeshifters in the car was risky, most of all the ones who were not familiar with him.

  To get the car key out of his trouser pocket he had to lift up his backside, and when he thrust his hand into his pocket it hurt like hell. He gripped his hand and rubbed the palm with his thumb, forming a fist and waggling his fingers. Was something broken?

  He had known Lennart was strong, you could tell that a mile off. But not that he was so incredibly strong. He hadn’t even squeezed his fingers, only held them down. And with his left hand too, which you would assume was weaker than his right.

  Snatch a child.

  Seved knew very well he could never snatch a child. But then he felt the weight of the bag-covered hand on top of his and he was no longer quite so sure.

  There is only one thing we can do.

  They were words Seved had to bear alone.

  If he had understood how important it was …

  He started the engine, threw a glance over his shoulder, backed up and drove out onto Storgatan. He followed it until he reached the roundabout that connected to route 45.

  An articulated truck with a bar of blinding headlights rumbled past, and to avoid the cloud of snow from its wheels Seved waited until he could no longer make out the truck’s rear lights before pulling out. He grabbed the top of the long gear lever and put it into second, accelerating to change straight up to fourth, but before he did so he leaned over the cage and fastened the seat belt around it.

  In the evening Susso and Gudrun drove to the supermarket, a steel hangar surrounded by mountain ranges of ploughed snow in a deserted car park. They usually did their shopping either very early or very late; the store wasn’t as crowded then. Rather empty shelves than packed with people, Gudrun used to say.

  Afterwards Gudrun gave Susso a lift to her job at the care home on Thulegatan, next to the hospital. Nothing much was expected of her at Thulegatan, nor was she paid to do more. After emptying the dishwasher, she boiled water for tea. She stood looking blankly at the saucepan and the steam that floated ghost-like on the surface of the water. Small bubbles rose up from the bottom, rushing after each other in long strings. The packets of tea were kept in the cupboard above the cooker hood, so she stood on tiptoe, reached in and grabbed hold of a green box. Herb Harmony, it read. That sounded pleasant. Soft and mild.

  ‘Pehmeä ja mieto,’ she said, pulling away the little square of paper attached to the bag. With a spoon she pressed the bag into the steaming water and said: ‘Mieto, mieto.’

  Talking to yourself at night, that was all part of it. It made it easier. The silence pressed against her eardrums, but there was no point in switching on the radio, for example. You had to talk, to say something. Anything at all. Hear your own voice echo inside your head. It was not madness but a way to banish the madness.

  As usual she found herself sitting in front of the computer, because there was not much else to do after the scheduled duties had been attended to. She slouched on the wheeled office chair, the sleeves of her roomy fleece jacket rolled up. Her hair was tied back in two small pigtails sticking out from a crooked parting at the nape of her neck.

  There were several cryptozoological sites she regularly visited. The best was Still on the Track, run by a man named Jonathan Downes. Downes’s newsletter had links to CFZ, the Centre for Fortean Zoology. It was about as close to an official cryptozoological forum as you could get. Its mission was spelled out on the home page: ‘At the beginning of the 21st century monsters still roam the remote, and sometimes not so remote, corners of our planet. It is our job to search for them.’

  Monsters. How could she possibly read that word without sneering? What she was looking for were hardly monsters, but still it was here among the monster researchers that she found her sympathisers. Among the wackos! They spent considerable amounts of money on expeditions searching for ethnoknown cryptids – animals spotted by local people that somehow never revealed themselves to scientists for documentation.

  But at the end of the day it was just a matter of semantics.

  ‘Monster’ did not mean ‘beast’, it meant ‘warning’, from the Latin root ‘monere’. It could also be interpreted as ‘reminder’. The word ‘monument’ had the same origins.

  But what was it a reminder of?

  That everyone could be a monster?

  The chair creaked as Susso leaned back in her seat. There was nothing new. The monitor showed an amarok: a wolfor bear-like monster in Greenland that liked to eat the Inuit’s children but could never catch them. Pretty much the same as the stallo.

  In Sami folklore the stallo were a kind of troll. They were huge, terrible creatures depicted by the nåjden, or shaman, on his drum. Troublesome and stupid. Fond of human flesh.

  She had written about them on her website, mainly because these creatures oscillated between
myth and scientific knowledge in a way that interested her. In fact, many archaeologists were convinced there was some kind of underlying truth to the myths of the stallo. Ancient settlements and trapping pits that could not be linked to the nomadic Sami culture had been excavated in various places in northern Scandinavia.

  The question was: what had happened to these mysterious creatures?

  The road to Ammarnäs was unlit. There was only the glimmer of light from an occasional house, lamps deeply embedded in the darkness. But the curves of the road were imprinted in Seved’s brain and he knew the places where snowdrifts could block the way.

  During his school years the road had left its mark on him. The days began and ended with the road then, days when he set off in darkness and returned home in darkness. There had been daylight as well, but when he thought of that time it was only the molten, insatiable darkness he remembered. The night outside the windowpanes, the rough upholstery of the seats illuminated by the lights in the ceiling of the bus, the handrails reflected in the vibrating glass. His own taciturn face and growing hunger. He and the driver, alone, kilometre after kilometre. The long walk from the main road towards the glow of the lights on the veranda that seemed to be moving ever further away. And then his greed at the kitchen table, his only comfort.

  The lemmingshifters had not made a sound and he had almost forgotten about them. He had been thinking of the money in his jacket pocket since he left Arvidsjaur. Fifty thousand would not go far. Not even a hundred and fifty went far.

  But still. To have money that was all his own.

  He knew Lennart was wealthy. He had seen the fat, untidy wads of notes that Börje and Ejvor accepted from him, and once when he had been shopping at the Co-op he had asked the girl at the till how much was left on the pre-loaded card. There was over a hundred thousand, and he could see from the girl’s face that it was a lot, that people did not normally have sums of that size on their cards.

  He pressed his hand to his jacket and felt the notes. They were there, like a compact slab against his chest. He had still not decided whether to tell Börje he had been given the money.

  Did Börje know what Lennart had wanted to talk to him about?

  In all probability, he did. But did he care? At the moment he didn’t seem to care about anything. That was not so strange. Letting Ejvor remain where she was must have been unbearable for him. Not being able to do anything except wait.

  Signe had said that Börje had peered through the window several times, standing there with his hands on the windowsill. It was understandable that he wanted to see her, and perhaps even necessary, but why put yourself through it over and over again? Why torture yourself?

  *

  Seved could not understand why they had gone for Ejvor in particular. At first he thought it must have happened by mistake, that they just hadn’t realised how strong they were. He had experienced that for himself once when he had been inside Hybblet, cleaning up. They had come upstairs, which wasn’t something they normally did. Usually they would just shuffle about, sometimes barging into him, but on this occasion they decided they wanted to hug him. Seved had probably tensed his muscles too much because suddenly it turned into a battle of strength. He had passed out. First there was an explosion like fireworks going off, and then everything had gone black. When he came round they were running up and down the staircase, making it creak and groan, and Ejvor had said that was probably an expression of their remorse, to the extent they had those sorts of feelings. Seved was left with purple streaks across his chest, and Börje said he had probably cracked a couple of ribs but not to worry, they would heal on their own, and they did.

  Don’t fret, Ejvor had said, they wouldn’t harm a hair on your head.

  Soon he reached the curve where it had happened. It was many years ago now and he had been in the eighth or ninth grade. One Saturday he had gone to a party in a large house in Sorsele. It stood on the edge of the lake and was brightly lit up in the night. Doors and windows were open. There was shouting, a racket, and no parents to put a stop to it. The girl had just moved to the area. It was September and the school term had not long started.

  He drove there on his moped. One lad from his class had brought a plastic bottle containing something cloudy. A witch’s brew. It tasted revolting but it did the trick. He wanted more. He had searched the bathroom and found a bottle of perfume, and in front of a small audience, watching him with eyes blurry from alcohol, he downed the lot. They thought he was insane, but in a cool way.

  Later he got his hands on a girl he did not know. She had a Norwegian name and he could not for the life of him remember it afterwards. She was the one who had hit on him. All he had to do was turn his cap round and take what was offered. They snogged on a sofa. He probed hard with his fingers but didn’t get anywhere, although he had been close. He slipped out his dick and wanted her to hold it, but she pulled her hand away rapidly, as if she had touched a snake.

  Someone had seen it and they did not like what they saw. Either that or they did not like him. As he was driving home afterwards in the grey dawn light, a car swung in front of him, its wheels screeching. A Volvo 740 with alloy wheels and music thumping from its loudspeakers. He had no time to stop his moped, so he ran into the car. That in itself was a good enough reason for a beating.

  Two of them climbed out. Red cheeks, loud voices, caps. Thick neck chains outside their jumpers. They shoved his shoulders, but he was too drunk to fend them off. All he could do was try to avoid them. Get away. Home was not far away, only a few kilometres. And he remembered saying that. ‘I’m almost home,’ he had said, grabbing the handlebars, trying to roll the moped out of the way.

  As if being close to home had anything to do with it.

  As if that would make them leave him alone.

  But in a way it did.

  The next day, the newspaper said they had flipped the car over, made it do somersaults.

  Three teenage boys killed on the 363.

  The school had held a minute’s silence. Seved did not attend because he got the idea someone had seen what had actually happened, that there were witnesses, and so he had phoned in sick. But he heard about it later. How the principal had spoken solemnly to the assembled students about the dangers of driving while drunk.

  ‘Now you see how wrong things can go,’ he had said.

  Oh yes, he had seen all right. He had kneeled at the roadside and seen it all: the lads who had got out of the car to attack him had all of a sudden been grabbed, turned upside down and had their heads slammed bloodily against the surface of the road. Their bodies had flown in deep among the fir trees, to be met by snapping branches.

  The car had been lifted up and dangled in the air. He saw the amusement of the old-timers as the car spun like a tombola drum between them. The piercing cries and shouts for help from inside the car seemed to fire them up, fill them with a crazy energy and make the car revolve faster and faster. The pumping music was distorted as the car turned and it did not fall silent until the vehicle lay crushed on its roof five metres into the forest.

  Afterwards they had wanted to carry him home, and he did not dare refuse. They wanted to take turns carrying him too. One held him and one held the moped. Then they swapped. And swapped again.

  He had never said a word to anyone about what happened that night. But he thought Börje knew because the following morning he had stared at Seved and said something about him being lucky. Lucky he was not the one who had killed himself driving.

  *

  The road up to the house ran behind a mountain. Unless you knew the drive was there it was almost impossible to see. Several times he had driven past it himself and had to turn back. The mountain was asymmetrical: the southern slope that faced the river had slipped. The precipice that remained was a hanging rock face, and when the meltwater froze, long yellow icicles formed up there in its jaws. From the road below they looked like fangs. When Seved was young and looked up at the mountain he always thought of it as
a gaping mouth that could bite.

  He stopped at the barrier and hurried out to open it. He grabbed hold of the padlock with most of his hand tucked inside his jacket sleeve and inserted the little key. It trembled between his fingers, which were red in the light from the Isuzu’s headlamps. When he got back in the car again he blew on his hands. They were stinging.

  ‘Nearly there,’ he said, and it wasn’t until he heard the reassuring tone of his voice that he realised the shifters had got to him. They had gone inside his head to tell him they were cold.

  With her hat pulled down over her forehead, Susso walked home through the darkness. The temperature had dropped even lower overnight: ice blocked her nostrils as she cut across Kyrkparken.

  Curiously, she felt a muffled buzzing in her jacket pocket. Who could be phoning this early in the day? She pulled off one mitten and it took a while before she was able to get her mobile out. 0971 shone from the display. Jokkmokk, she registered, before realising it could be none other than Edit Mickelsson who was ringing.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve woken you up, haven’t I?’

  ‘No, you haven’t,’ Susso said. ‘I’ve been working a night shift.’

  The cold was pinching her fingers. She cradled the phone against her cheek, keeping it there as she put her mitten back on.

  ‘He … he’s been here again. The man I saw.’

  Susso came to a halt and caught her breath.

  ‘You’ve seen him?’

  ‘I woke up,’ she said, and then her voice disappeared for a second or two before she cleared her throat and continued: ‘I was woken by a knocking on the window, the kitchen window. And when I got up to see what was going on, there he was, outside. He was standing there, looking in. Just like last time. Except this time it was dark. I could hardly see him at first.’