The Forbidden Place

by Susanne Jansson

  She had never responded to Agneta’s question; she had been nonplussed, but of course they had met before. Many times, years and years ago, up at the manor house. But that wasn’t all. She also hadn’t told her the real reason she had gone out to look for Johannes. That it had been because of the weather. But not because it had been so stormy—because it had stopped so suddenly.

  She knew what it meant from personal experience, and from the thousand times she’d read the book she’d been given by her neighbor, way back when, words about changes in the weather echoing in her ears. It was these words, and nothing else, that had caused her to act so quickly.

  Samples, she thought to herself. I need to take samples.

  She needed to find something measurable, send it in for analysis, and receive an answer. She needed that document with that text to still the rough seas inside her mind. The letters, the tables. The conclusions she could draw from them. She needed to do something to take back control, at least to feel like she had taken back control.

  Her hand shook as she spooned a bowl of plain oatmeal into her mouth. The dryness parched her tongue. She downed a big glass of water, pulled on a thick sweater, hung her sampling equipment over her shoulder, and headed out into the damp air.

  A thick fog had settled over the bog. It was as if the path formed as she walked on it, and she could only see a few meters ahead.

  She went the same way she’d gone when she was following Johannes, and she soon arrived at the place where she’d found him. There had been fog that time too, but not this thick.

  This was where he had lain, moaning, looking at her without truly being present. She remembered his eyes, veiled by exhaustion and resignation. Confusion, maybe surprise.

  She had watched him slowly sinking and felt reality collapsing in on itself, twisting, crumpling, dying. And then expanding again as if it were gasping for breath. In the nick of time she had yanked him up on to the walkway, checked to make sure he was still breathing, and dashed to the cottage for her phone. Then she had run back with the emergency dispatcher on the line.

  By the time she returned to the walkway, Johannes had completely lost consciousness. She had been struck by the dizzying, deafening sense that she was about to lose someone—someone she loved. The sense that nothing else mattered if he did not continue to live. That the world would shrink down to a forgotten window that no one had bothered to close, and she was the thin curtain that would be whipped about by the wind and rain until everything was ripped to shreds and destroyed.

  Nathalie kept walking; the fog had let up a bit. The boardwalk split in two and she went to the right. She needed to take two core samples to check the bacterial activity, which would in turn give information about the rate of decomposition. She needed to shake off her uneasiness and focus on concrete facts.

  After a minute or two, her GPS indicated that she was in the right spot. She put down her bag, took out the corer, and plunged the first section in. Then she screwed on the next piece, and continued in this manner until the corer was deep enough in the earth. At last she pulled it all back up, removed the peat sample, and placed it in a tube.

  The next site wasn’t far off, as she recalled. She began to walk and was just about to enter the new coordinates when she caught a glimpse of something right next to the walkway, in a drier portion of the bog.

  It was as though her body knew what it was before her brain could register it.

  It wasn’t deep, and it was empty, but it had to be two meters in length and there could be no doubt what she was looking at.

  Someone had dug a grave in the bog.

  Nathalie Ström, the woman who found Johannes, found something else out in the bog,” Leif said. “We’re going to meet her there.”

  They were in his car on their way to Mossmarken again.

  Leif was the one who had called her. A pit had been dug in the bog; it was discovered not far from where the unconscious young man from the art school had been. Leif wanted to check it out, and he wanted her to come. Which was fine with her.

  “She’s pretty quiet,” he said. “Doesn’t say much more than she has to. I met her for a little while yesterday as well. If you want to get anything out of her, you have to work for it.”

  They didn’t say anything for a moment, until Maya spoke.

  “What about the pit, it was out in the bog itself?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think it’s for?”

  “Not sure. Maybe someone was planning to bury their dog there or something.”

  “That’s not what you think,” Maya said. “You wouldn’t be checking it out if you did. And you wouldn’t ask me to come along, either.”

  “She said it was at least two meters in length. So there’s that.”

  “Okay, so it’s a grave,” Maya said. “The bog sure is an interesting place. From a historical perspective, I mean. I don’t know, I’m starting to think about the Lingonberry Girl and all the graves that might exist out there.”

  “Yeah…”

  “If a person were to start digging around in the bog today, that person might find some interesting things, don’t you think?” Maya said.

  “And?” Leif looked at her.

  “I’m only saying that people might go digging out there just to see what they can turn up. Maybe someone was only trying to dig up historical objects.”

  “I wouldn’t put my money on history stuff at the moment, Maya. Let’s talk to Nathalie Ström and check out this pit. Then we’ll keep working out who Johannes is; why someone knocked him out. And above all, why he was out in the bog so late, and in that storm.”

  “Okay, but it isn’t necessarily strange that he was out there; he was there just about every day,” Maya said. “I’ve been asking around at the school a little too; he’s a perfectly ordinary art student, his permanent address is in Örebro, and he’s been attending art school for a little over a year… there’s nothing unusual about him at all.”

  “I know,” Leif sighed. “And yet someone knocked him out.”

  Nathalie Ström was waiting for them in the car park next to the bog. She was between twenty-five and thirty and dressed in serious outdoor gear.

  As they followed her into the bog, she told them what she had seen that afternoon: a grave, dug not far from the place where she’d found Johannes.

  “Have you figured out what might have happened to him?” she asked anxiously.

  “Unfortunately I can’t discuss that just now,” Leif said. “Do you have any ideas yourself?”

  “I don’t know. I think it’s strange that he left the path. Of course, he wasn’t that far in when I found him, but still.”

  “Maybe he had decided to run half his route and was taking a short cut across the bog,” Leif said. “After all, it was already getting pretty dark.”

  Nathalie nodded. “But it still seems unlikely that he would have decided to run on the slippery boardwalks when it was so wet and windy; it probably wouldn’t have been any faster than staying on the path.”

  “Are you thinking he was out there doing something else? That he wasn’t just out for a run?”

  Nathalie shrugged. “No, I don’t know. I’m thinking someone moved him, maybe.”

  Leif and Maya followed her as she left the path and walked into the bog. They didn’t speak as they passed the spot where Johannes had been found. After another minute or two, Nathalie stopped and looked around.

  “It should be right here.” She spun around. “Hold on… Maybe it was a little further in,” she said.

  They kept walking. There was no grave to be found, not even a tiny hollow, and Nathalie seemed to grow increasingly frustrated.

  “Shit. I should have taken the coordinates.” She looked beseechingly at Maya and Leif. “I swear, it was here before.”

  “It’s fine,” Leif said. “Why don’t we spread out a little and see what we can find?”

  After another half an hour, they gave up.

  “I wouldn’t h
ave thought it would be so hard to find,” Nathalie said.

  “Something else just occurred to me,” Leif said. “Maybe someone who lives nearby dug up some peat to use at home. I think I’ve heard something about that, that the farms around a bog might each own a strip. Although in that case the hole should still be there, of course.”

  “To use at home?” Maya said.

  “Yes, as bedding for the animals, for example.”

  “That can’t be,” Nathalie said. “Partly because this is a nature reserve and digging up peat isn’t allowed. And partly because it wouldn’t be done that way. It’s a point of honor to dig holes with sloping sides so that animals can get a foothold and climb out if they fall in. This pit wasn’t dug like that.”

  Leif stopped and looked at her in surprise. “You’re awfully knowledgeable,” he said.

  Nathalie blushed a little, then turned around and began to walk away. “I have to get back now.”

  “Hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean any offense,” Leif said.

  Nathalie shrugged dully. “None taken.”

  “Listen, here’s what we’ll do,” Leif said. “Give us a call again if you come up with anything. Don’t hesitate. Okay? It’s not so strange that it turned out this way; it’s a large area.”

  Without looking at them, Nathalie raised a hand in farewell and left.

  Leif and Maya got back in the car.

  “Well, that’s that,” said Leif. “Stuff happens. Let’s head back to the station.”

  Maya pulled her computer on to her lap.

  “She’s not from here, is she?” she said.

  “No. Not that I know of, anyway. She’s renting up at the manor for a few weeks.”

  They drove in silence for a while, until Maya spoke.

  “Do you think she seems strange?”

  “Nathalie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not really,” Leif said. “But she is the only person who has been seen out on the bog with tools for digging recently. On the other hand, she was the one who contacted us.”

  “That’s true.” Maya gazed at the road.

  “But I suppose you’re right,” Leif said. “I should probably talk to her a little more, under different circumstances. Find out what she’s actually researching out here, and so on.”

  They drove in silence once again, with the dark forest looming close over the road.

  “You know those coins,” Maya said, “that Johannes had on him?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it a lot—why would someone have a whole pile of ten-kronor coins with them when they were out for a run?”

  “Robin ran with a full backpack every day for six months before he headed off on whatever adventure he was training for,” Leif said, referring to his youngest son.

  “Yes, okay. But coins? It must have some special significance.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” said Leif.

  Maya sighed. “There’s something very odd about this whole bog saga,” she said quietly, looking out the window. “About this place.”

  Leif chuckled. “Yes, that’s how it usually goes when you don’t quite know what you’re dealing with.”

  “At the beginning of an investigation, you mean?”

  “Pretty much.”

  Maya looked at him and turned on her computer, opening one of the image files.

  “But there’s something else I wanted to show you too, something I discovered yesterday. Look at this,” she said, pointing at the blurry, stooping figure in the background of one of the pictures. “There’s someone there, see?”

  Leif glanced at the screen as he drove. “I can’t see it just now. But it’s probably outside the cordons. There’s no rule against walking around out there.”

  “You’re certainly right about that,” Maya said, clicking on to the following images. She inspected them carefully, and suddenly she saw what she had missed earlier.

  The person hadn’t vanished from the frame in the last few exposures, as she had first thought. He or she had simply crouched down. In among the bushes.

  Perhaps there were other explanations, but she had a gut feeling she knew what it was.

  Someone had been trying to hide from her.

  Since Nathalie had spent so much time in the woods and fields during her studies, she had come to feel at home in nature. But where others sought silence and tranquility, she found satisfaction and a deeper meaning in her very knowledge of the natural world. Her knowledge of various species. Understanding behaviors and traits on the basis of the laws of evolution. Her entire existence seemed to be grounded in Latin names, classification terms, complicated organic processes and other scientific facts.

  She found it reassuring to know that all life on earth is divided into three so-called domains—bacteria, archaea and eukaryotes—and that these were based, among other things, on the comparison of DNA. Or that eukaryotes in turn were further divided into the kingdoms of plants, animals, fungi and protists. Within each kingdom were divisions first into phylum, then class, order, family, genus and species.

  Her therapist, back when she saw one, had pointed out that it seemed she was determined to fill her brain with information. The therapist had suggested that this was either because she was trying to avoid confronting emptiness, in the sense of the absence of information, or else because she wanted to keep other information out: information that was impossible to manage, information that most likely had to do with her former life.

  Personally, Nathalie thought she had found a useful way to deal with her emotions, and even if those around her sometimes thought it didn’t work, she herself didn’t have any major objections.

  But now everything felt turned upside down and she was starting to wonder if her decision to return to Mossmarken was a huge mistake. She was beginning to lose her grasp on reality.

  Had there ever even been a grave? If she was so convinced she had seen it, why couldn’t she find it? Why wasn’t it there?

  And Johannes. She couldn’t think of anyone else who had ever managed to rob as much focus from her work as he was doing now, despite the fact that he wasn’t even conscious.

  Her intention was to keep working out in the bog, but her thoughts kept going back to Room 11 at the hospital in Karlstad. At night when she went to bed, she saw his eyes in her mind. His smile and his honest desire to help her out on the bog.

  It had been a long time since she’d felt the blessing of love.

  And the curse.

  Was it because of Johannes she had lost focus? Or was it something else that had taken hold of her?

  The past?

  But it was as though she only had one choice: to let it happen. Because there was no point in fighting it, anyway. The more she tried to keep the past at bay, the stronger it seemed to get.

  Her memories from that last summer were closing in on her. Including the knocking in her head. It was harder now. Louder.

  She had sought medical help for it throughout the years. But when no physical problems were found, she was referred to a psychiatrist who suggested that she was stressed, that something was agitating her.

  “Some people hear voices,” the psychiatrist told her, “and others hear other sounds. You hear knocking. There are medicines we can try.”

  Maybe it was around that point that she decided, out of sheer rage, to stay away from the healthcare system and behave as if she were healthy.

  But had she even decided to travel up here?

  She couldn’t remember making the decision. Or whether it was her decision. Suddenly she had just found herself here. Again.

  Here at Mossmarken.

  After so many years.

  So if I’m understanding you correctly,” Ellen said, “you’re envisioning a whole exhibition of photographs from the bog?”

  Maya was sitting in her studio with Vanja, Ellen and Oskar. They were sharing a pot of ginger tea as they looked at her draft photos from Mossmarken.

  “Nothing huge, but…
I already have an exhibition planned; it’s just that I’m not as eager to put up those pictures from New York as I was expecting. This feels more interesting, although I’ll have to work pretty fast to finish in time. It’s so fascinating—the bog, the dampness, the mist. You should come out there with me.”

  “It’s not the strange events out there that you find attractive?” Ellen asked.

  Well, that too, she couldn’t deny it. Yes, it had all started with what happened to Johannes Ayeb. Then the grave that was there one minute and missing without a trace the next. And then there was the stooping, shadow-like person she’d caught in her photographs, who had apparently been trying to hide from her.

  They were all inexplicable—and she had always been attracted to the inexplicable.

  “But there are other interesting things about the bog too,” she began, a sort of plea in her own defense. “A long time ago, people were sacrificed out there. And there’s always been talk about how people vanish without a trace around Mossmarken. Whether that’s idle chatter or straight-up ghost stories, I don’t know, but I remember how we used to frighten each other with stories about it when we were little.”

  “I think it sounds exciting,” Oskar said.

  Maya had looked up information about the Lingonberry Girl online. Maybe, it occurred to her now, she could photograph some real bog bodies at museums to accompany the landscape photos. Maybe her bog project could become an exhibit about death and the dream of eternity. Something along those lines.

  She recalled seeing similar portraits in a book a long time ago. Portraits of embalmed bodies in varying conditions from underground burial sites, catacombs in Italy and France.

  The last person to be buried in the catacombs in Palermo was a little girl by the name of Rosalia Lombardo. She was two years old in 1920 when she fell ill with pneumonia and died. Her grieving father sought out a professor named Alfredo Salafia, who embalmed her body with a technique that proved especially successful. His recipe was apparently a combination of, among other things, formalin to kill bacteria, glycerin to prevent desiccation, salicylic acid to stop fungal growth and—the most important ingredient—zinc salts to keep the tissues from collapsing. Rosalia lay there to that day, in her open coffin, with soft, round cheeks and an apricot-colored bow lovingly tied at the top of her head. It was as if she might stand up and walk away at any moment.