While Annelie was still alive we had watched all the Emil in Lönneberga films. Robin had been frightened by Krösa-Maja’s talk of mylings, the ghosts of murdered children who have not been given a proper burial.
Mylings. If someone had told me a week ago…but never mind. I took it seriously. I accepted that this was what we were dealing with, and so I was relieved that it had a name. Something that has a proper designation can probably be dealt with.
I asked: ‘So where are they, then?’
Robin whispered, ‘In the forest.’
‘Did he bury them in the forest?’ Robin shook his head. ‘So what did he do?’
Robin carried on shaking his head as he buried his face in the pillow.
I tugged gently at his shoulder. ‘Robin? You have to tell me. I don’t know what we can do, but… you have to tell me. I believe you.’
Suddenly he curled himself into a ball with his bottom sticking up in the air, just like he used to do when he was asleep when he was very small. Then he yelled into the pillow, ‘It’s so horrible!’
I stroked his back and said: ‘I know. I know it’s horrible.’
Robin shook his head violently and shouted: ‘You haven’t a clue how horrible it is!’ He was breathing hard through the pillow, in and out, in and out, and his body kept on heaving those deep, convulsive breaths as I helplessly carried on stroking his back.
I was afraid he was actually going over the edge in some way. It would hardly be surprising. I too felt that I was very close to the edge in terms of what my mind could cope with.
Suddenly Robin’s body grew still and he rolled over onto his back. In a thin, expressionless but perfectly clear voice he addressed the ceiling: ‘The man found a rock. A big rock. He dug a hole next to the rock. Then he tied up the child so that it couldn’t move. Then he carried the child to the hole. He had one of those iron bar things. He had it with him so that he could roll the rock down into the hole. On top of the child. But the child’s head was sticking out so that the man could listen to the child screaming. And the child screamed because it hurt so much. Lots of bones got broken when the rock rolled on top of the child. The man sat and listened to the child screaming. He sat and listened right up until it died. It might have taken all night. Then he dug a little more and moved the rock so that the child disappeared.’
When Robin had uttered the final words he pulled the covers over his head and rolled himself into a secure cocoon. I lay there beside him with his story crawling around inside my head like a mutilated child.
His bed used to be where mine is now.
The man who had done these things had slept in Robin’s room. How had he been able to sleep? He had made his coffee on our stove and drunk it in our kitchen. He had looked out of the same windows as us, walked on the same floors, heard the same creaking floorboard just inside the door. And he had hanged himself next to my bed.
My eyes were drawn to the dark spot on the ceiling where the hook had been.
I am happy now.
*
I lay there looking at the black hole for so long that it started to take on the qualities of its astronomical namesake. Everything in the room was being drawn towards it, waiting to be sucked in; my thoughts moved around it like defenceless planets, orbiting in ever-decreasing circles on their way to destruction. And all the time I could hear the music. Round and round the music went, twelve notes in an incomplete melody.
Incomplete?
If you hum: ‘Baa baa black sheep, have you any wool, Yes sir, yes sir, three—’ and stop there, then you know some notes are missing, even if you’ve never heard the tune before. It was equally clear to me that notes were missing from the melody which was now so much a part of me that I couldn’t get it out of my head. I lay in bed staring at the hole and trying to catch hold of the missing notes.
The pile of bedding next to me had started to move up and down with deep, regular breaths, and I managed to free Robin’s sweaty head without waking him up before tucking him in properly. Then I got up and put my clothes on, barely aware of what I was doing, because the notes absorbed all of my attention.
Dum, di-dum, daa.
*
I sat down at the piano and played the entire melody. The notes were so clear to my inner ear that I had played it twice before I realised there was no sound. I banged a couple of the notes really hard as if violence was the way to entice them out. It was only then I remembered. The pliers. The strings.
I looked around the room, unsure what to do, and I caught sight of the box under Robin’s bed. Among cast-off cuddly toys and plastic figures I found the Casio toy synthesiser. It covered only three octaves, but that was enough.
I played the twelve notes, and a dark serenity came over me. Yes, dark serenity. I can’t find a better way to express it. It was like getting stuck in the mud and slowly sinking. The moment when you realise it’s pointless to struggle, that there is no help to be had, and that the mud is going to win. I imagine you reach a point when you give up, and that this brings with it a certain serenity.
Over and over again I played the twelve notes, trying out different instruments in the synthesiser’s repertoire to make them sound good; in the end I settled for ‘harpsichord’. I think it’s called cembalo in Swedish, and the imitation of its metallic tone was quite convincing.
Dum, di-dum, daa …
I went into the hallway, put on my jacket, found the head-torch, switched it on and fastened it around my head. The synthesiser had a strap, which meant I could hang it around my neck. Fully equipped, I opened the front door and set out for the forest.
A mist hung in the air, and although the head-torch was powerful, the light reached no further than about ten metres. As I set off among the damp tree trunks it was like walking through an underground vault where the trunks were pillars, carrying their crowns like a single, immense roof. There wasn’t a sound apart from the soft rustle as drops of water fell from the branches onto last year’s dead grass.
I hadn’t played for several minutes, and the blind determination that had driven me on had begun to falter when I reached the place.
This had to be the spot. I had walked in a straight line from the house; I might even have followed an overgrown path, come to think of it. On the way I had passed the odd rock, but none of them would have been suitable for the purpose Robin had described.
In front of me lay a number of large rocks which sprang up out of the darkness when the beam of the head-torch swept over them. When I examined the area more closely I found something in the region of fifty large and small erratic blocks strewn by the inland ice across the ground where pines and fir trees would one day grow. Even without the knowledge I possessed, it didn’t take much imagination to compare this place with a graveyard.
With two inhabitants. Two children. Beneath the rocks.
I wandered around aimlessly, directing the beam of the torch at the base of the rocks in the hope of finding some sign that the ground had been disturbed. But everything was overgrown, and every rock looked the same as every other rock. I wrapped my arms around my body and shivered.
What was to say that there weren’t dead people, dead children under every single rock? What was to say things would be better if I found the two who had sought out Robin to ask for help, to ask him to find them?
We have to move away from here!
The idea was so obvious I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t thought of it before. There was nothing to tie me or my son to this haunted place, with its gloomy coniferous forest and its brooding rocks. Nothing. It wasn’t my responsibility to drive away the ghosts of evil deeds committed in the past.
I breathed out and switched off the head-torch, closed my eyes and listened to the silence, relaxed. When I had been standing like that for a little while, a faint awareness came over me. It grew into a certainty: diagonally in front of me to the left. Something was drifting towards me from that direction, faint as the draught caused by a fly’s wings against the s
kin, and blacker than the night. When I opened my eyes it was gone.
The darkness felt almost solid, and the only light came from the diode indicating that the toy synthesiser around my neck was on. I switched on the torch and studied the keyboard. Then I played a note. Then another. The twelve notes echoed from the plastic speakers and were swallowed up by the darkness and the mist. I edged forward a few steps and played the melody again.
Something moved in front of me and I glimpsed a figure disappearing behind a rock. I went over and leaned my back against the rough surface, then crouched down and played the melody once more. When I took my fingers off the keys I could hear scrabbling, the sound of small feet flitting across the moss and needles on the other side of the rock.
You’re not allowed to look at them. If you do, they take your eyes.
I directed the beam of the head-torch at the trunk of a fir tree five metres in front of me and spoke out into the air: ‘I am here now.’
Feet moved across the ground, rustling, squelching as they came closer. Nails scraped down the rock just a metre or so away, and I closed my eyes so that I wouldn’t be tempted to look over my shoulder. Then I said it again: ‘I am here now. What shall I do?’
At first I thought it was a noise originating from the forest. A broken branch creaking in a gust of wind, or the distant cry of an injured animal. But it was a voice. The faint, mournful voice of an unhappy old man who has lost everything but his memories, who cries at the sight of semolina pudding because it reminds him of his childhood and makes him talk in the voice of a child:
‘Find us,’ said the voice behind my shoulder.
Without opening my eyes I replied, ‘I have found you. What shall I do now?’
‘Fetch us.’
I had somehow known that this was my task right from the start, from the moment I stood in front of the spade and crowbar in the tool shed. To find, to fetch, to … conclude.
‘Why?’ I whispered. ‘Why did he do this to you?’
The only response was the slow breathing of the forest. I pressed my back against the stone, suddenly conscious of its terrible weight and solidity. To have that weight on top of you, to be slowly crushed to pieces beneath its impervious hardness. To be a child.
When the voice spoke again the tone had changed; perhaps it wasn’t the same voice. Cutting through the old man’s growl there was something that told me this was a younger child.
‘The old man had a piece of paper,’ said the voice. ‘He was writing.’
‘What do you mean, writing?’ I asked. ‘When?’
‘When I was dying. I screamed. Because it hurt so much. Then he wrote on the piece of paper. He said I would scream a lot. And I screamed. Because it hurt so much.’
The voice was faint as it uttered the final words, and I felt the presence behind me disappear. I bent my head so that the beam of the torch shone on the keyboard. Thirty-six innocent pieces of black and white plastic. Now I understood how I had mistaken the notes for terrified voices.
Bengt Karlsson, the musician who took it badly, had made musical notes out of the most horrific sound imaginable, the tortured screams of a dying child. And these notes … opened the door.
How can a person bear it?
I struggled to my feet and pressed my knuckles against my temples as I staggered among the rocks. How can a person bear it? The dampness, the mist, the dark tree trunks, the evil contained within the very warp and weft of existence. How? I watched myself strike the rough surface of a rock with the palms of my hands until the blood flowed.
The pain woke me up. I gazed at my bleeding hands. Then I glanced up. All the rocks looked the same, and I no longer knew where the dead children were.
When I played the first note on the synthesiser, my finger left a dark streak on the white plastic. By the time I had played the whole melody, the keys were soiled with blood and a few of them resisted when I pressed them. Soon it would be impossible to play.
I found the button that said REC and pushed it down, then I played the whole melody again and pressed REC STOR Then PLAY. I laughed out loud as the toy synthesiser carried on playing the melody all by itself, over and over again.
Dum, di-dum, daa …
I slipped the instrument round to the side so that I was comfortable, and it went on playing the melody as I set off for home and the tool shed.
*
A dirty grey dawn had found its tentative way among the tree trunks by the time my work was finished. The blood from my hands had been absorbed by the spade’s wooden handle, spread itself over the dark iron of the crowbar. The synthesiser’s batteries were running out, and the sound of the melody was growing ever fainter as I walked back from the forest, opened the front door and went into the hallway.
I picked up the duct tape which was still lying on the piano. The notes from the synthesiser were now so weak that they were drowned out by the creaking of the kitchen floor as I crossed the threshold. But the incomplete melody playing inside my head was all the stronger, and I noticed without surprise that Bengt Karlsson was sitting at the kitchen table with his hands neatly folded on top of one another.
The black line around his neck became visible when he nodded to me, and I nodded back in mutual understanding. We were men who knew what must be done. He had been unable to bear it. Now it was time for me to take over.
*
Robin didn’t wake up until I had secured his hands behind his back with the tape, and I placed a strip over his mouth before he had time to start yelling. I would have to remove it later, of course, but at the moment it would be troublesome to have him screaming. I held his legs firmly so that I could secure his ankles, then slipped my arm beneath the back of his knees and heaved him up over my shoulder.
The melody continued to play as I carried him through the kitchen, softly, softly as a whisper it played, and I hummed along. My body was aching with a feverish longing for the missing notes, desperate to hear the completed melody.
Robin twisted and turned over my shoulder, and his underpants rubbed against my ear as I carried him across the lawn. The skin on his bare legs turned to gooseflesh in the chill of the winter dawn. I could hear him panting and snuffling behind my back as snot spurted out of his nose, and from the muffled sounds he was making I guessed that he was crying. It didn’t matter. Soon it would be over. Concluded.
The pale light of dawn made the tree trunks step forward out of the mist like dark silhouettes, a silently observing group of spectators with no knowledge of right or wrong, good or evil. Only the blind laws of nature and the circle of life and death, life and death. And the door between them.
I laid Robin down in the hollow I had dug next to a rock. I no longer knew whether the music I could hear existed only inside my head. Robin twitched and jerked, his fair skin in sharp contrast to the dark earth. His head moved from side to side and his eyes were wide open as he tried to scream through the duct tape.
‘Hush,’ I said. ‘Hush …’
I ripped off the gag, and without paying attention to his pleading sobs I concentrated on the crowbar which I had driven into the ground on the other side of the rock. I calculated that it would take just one decent push forwards to make the rock tip over into the hollow. I rubbed my hands, which were covered in flakes of coagulated blood, and set to work.
As I grabbed hold of the crowbar I was aware of a movement out of the corner of my eye. Instinctively I looked over and saw a child. Its age was difficult to determine, because the face was so sunken that the cheekbones stood out. It was dressed in the remains of silky red pyjamas patterned with yellow teddy bears, and its chest was visible through the torn material. A number of ribs were crushed, and sharp fragments of bone had pierced the skin in several places.
The child raised its hands to its face. The nails were long and broken from scratching at rocks. And behind the fingers, the eyes. I looked into those eyes and they were not eyes at all, but black wells of hatred and pain.
Only then did I real
ise what I had done.
Before I had time to close my eyes or grab hold of the crowbar again, another small body hurled itself onto my back. I bent over and the child in pyjamas leapt up and seized me around the neck, burying its fingers just above my shoulder blades.
The body on my back ran its hands over my forehead, and then I felt jagged nails moving over my eyelids. I screamed as the sharp edges penetrated the skin on either side of the top of my nose, and blood ran down into my mouth. The child let out a single sharp hiss, then jerked its hands outwards.
Both my eyeballs were ripped out of my skull, and the last thing I heard before I lost consciousness was the viscous, moist sound of the optical nerves tearing, then a grunting, smacking noise as the children chewed on my eyes.
*
I don’t know how long I was out. When I came round I could no longer see any light, and I had no idea of the sun’s progress across the sky. There were empty holes in my head where my eyes had been, and my cheeks were sticky with the remains of my eyelids and optical nerves. The pain was like a series of nails being hammered into my face.
I pulled myself up onto my knees. Total darkness. And silence. The synthesiser’s batteries had given up. I fumbled around and found the crowbar, traced the surface of the rock until I reached the edge of the hollow, and was rewarded with the only sound that was of any importance now.
‘Dad … Dad …’
I crawled down to Robin. I bit through the tape around his wrists and ankles. I tore off my jacket and shirt and wrapped them around him. I wept without being able to shed any tears, and I fumbled in the darkness until he took my hand and led me back to the house.
Then he made a call. I couldn’t use the phone, and had forgotten every number. I was frightened when he spoke to someone whose voice I couldn’t hear. I groped my way to bed and sought refuge beneath the covers. That’s where they found me.
*
They say I’m on the road to recovery. I will never regain my sight, but my sanity has begun to return. They say I will be allowed out of here. That I will learn to adapt.
A Book of Horrors - [Anthology] Page 19