The Forbidden Place

by Susanne Jansson

  More like a pole.

  It had taken hours for the thought to surface, and now that it had she didn’t have the patience to wait. She had never had that sort of patience. She needed answers now.

  The Lingonberry Girl was poled, over two thousand years ago.

  She stood up and went to the garage. Are there any tools here? She realized she hadn’t even checked to see what the previous owners had left behind; she just remembered that there had been a few objects stashed in the back.

  In the corner she found a few rakes, a pitchfork, an ax, and… there. A shovel. She picked it up and hurried back to her car.

  In no time she was turning into the car park next to the bog.

  His eyes moved under his delicate eyelids and Nathalie noticed his upper lip twitching. She had been sitting with him for over two hours.

  Johannes’s mother had drawn up a schedule so that someone he knew would be with him for the better part of each day. A few friends from school were helping out as well.

  She had looked both anxious and relieved when she told Nathalie he wouldn’t need an operation. The doctors had said all they could do was wait for the swelling to go down, and then Johannes would wake up, hopefully without permanent injury.

  In the meantime, the doctors could only support his various bodily functions: temperature regulation, water and salt balances, kidney and lung functions, blood circulation. Make sure his organs got what they needed, that his blood received oxygen and carbon dioxide was removed.

  Nathalie’s routine involved coming to Room 11 of the ICU at Karlstad Hospital for three hours at a time, three days a week.

  She spent the first few days sitting at his bedside in silence. She just sat there, looking at his face. She would stand up and walk to the window. Look out at the car park. Sit down again. Now and then a nurse would come by to change an IV bag or check a value; sometimes there were two nurses so they could turn him over. They moved through the room like quiet spirits, without demanding any attention at all, as if they kept an almost holy reverence for the integrity of visitors and patients.

  After a few days, her silence ended. She couldn’t keep it up any longer.

  “We didn’t really get to know each other,” she whispered, the beginning of a conversation. “But I very much enjoy your company.”

  The only sound came from the machines around the bed.

  “I haven’t felt that way about many people before.”

  She swallowed hard.

  “Not many at all,” she reiterated.

  Then she didn’t know what to say, so she started to tell him about everything that had happened. Why he was lying there in a room at the Karlstad Hospital. How she had dragged him out of the marshy bog. About the grave she had seen, which had later vanished.

  “The police don’t understand…”

  She sighed.

  “I met an old friend, a man from the area. He says I saved you from…”

  She closed her eyes and sank down on to the chair.

  “Oh, Johannes, you have no idea.” She took a deep breath.

  “He says that people have been disappearing from the bog forever. That you were…”

  She looked at him: his face, his forehead, his pale skin.

  “Your friends,” she said instead. “They’ve started planning the party they’ll throw when you come back. But maybe you already know about that. They’re here almost every day.”

  Then she talked about the progress she had made on her work, her latest measurements. At the same time, she thought of how interested he had been in her research, or at least she wanted to believe he had been. He had seemed to be.

  “Did I tell you that you can find out the ages of different layers of wetlands by analyzing seeds? Once I found a seed from the Stone Age. The fact is, you can even estimate the ages of objects buried in bogs by identifying pollen from the same layer of peat. If you can determine the age of the vegetation you can also pinpoint what climate period it was from and, thus, the time period. Although the Carbon-14 method is a little more precise, of course.”

  She fell silent again.

  Why am I telling you this? You nearly lost your life out there; you’re still fighting to come back.

  She sat quiet. And after a while, again, faces came floating up to the surface of her consciousness, faces from the past. Her parents, her friend, people she knew. They had voices but she couldn’t distinguish the words, only the melody and the tone—if it was warm or cold, caring or stressed. Her body tightened a bit at first, but relaxed again when she focused on Johannes and his closed eyes.

  She bent forward and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Johannes, I never told you this, but I grew up in Mossmarken. I lived in a house by the bog until I was twelve. I would like to tell you what it was like, what it was really like. I would like to tell you about what’s actually going on out there.”

  Maya stopped the car and climbed out. The car park was empty; everything was quiet and still. She put on a headlamp, took the shovel from the boot, and began to walk into the forest.

  She went the same way as last time—down to the jogging path, out across the bog, past the spot where they had found the art student. The veils of mist swirled at her feet like diffuse lights.

  Deep down she knew she was blinded by eagerness. She shouldn’t be out here—not alone, not at night, not after what had happened. But she couldn’t help it.

  She wanted to see if she could find what it was she had tripped over. When it happened, of course, she’d thought it was a branch or maybe a root, but now she had the definite feeling that she had been mistaken, that it could have been something else. Now she was looking for the little pine that resembled a bonsai tree, short and knotty with a perfectly flat crown. She’d had it in perfect sight when she fell, when she lay in the damp ground, cursing herself for being so inattentive.

  The whole area was so different in moonlight. The shadows at night were unlike the daytime shadows, naturally. They changed the proportions, distorting them.

  She left the boardwalk and began to step across the bog. From a distance, the grassy ground seemed so soft and beautifully billowy, but it was a completely different sensation to be in the midst of it. It was difficult to balance as she took giant steps from tussock to hard tussock, each half a meter high, trying to keep from plunging her feet straight into the water that waited between them. She was out of breath within thirty seconds. The tussocks bobbed and swayed under her feet, as if they wanted to get away, as if they did not wish to be trodden upon.

  She stopped for a moment to catch her breath, then got a second wind and stumbled toward an area further on where she could see more trees, where the ground was probably more solid. When she reached it, she crouched down and exhaled. There’s nothing weird about this place, she told herself. It’s just a regular old bog.

  But all the words she had read recently echoed in the back of her mind. How for thousands of years the bog had been considered a place possessed, so difficult to define and categorize. A waterlogged, unusable nowhereland beyond the control of humans. Where hidden sources of power ruled and seduced, taking what they needed and giving what they wanted.

  A borderland between land and sea, between dry and wet, soft and solid. Between life and death.

  A bird cawed, breaking the silence. She closed her eyes and caught her breath.

  When she looked up again, she saw the pine. The knotty one with a flat crown. It was straight ahead of her, fifty meters on. She tried to shake off the uneasiness she had just felt and made her way forward, aiming her headlamp at the ground nearby. Nothing odd.

  I’m being overdramatic, she had time to think, but an instant later she found it. She had been right.

  The thing she had tripped over was neither a branch nor a root. Rather, it did appear to be a pole—a hefty, cylinder-shaped piece of wood, a few centimeters in diameter, poking out of the ground a little bit.

  She gathered her thoughts, letting her eyes sweep the desola
te landscape.

  The light of her headlamp was cold and white, and she thought she heard noises from every direction. She felt small in a way she wasn’t used to—vulnerable and watched and surrounded by darkness. Fear crept across her skin, under her skin, with tiny, gentle steps. Then it began to sink its claws into her. Slowly, firmly. She yelled at herself, in her mind: If I got this far, I am sure as hell not…

  She pulled on a pair of gloves, grabbed hold of the pole, and tried to dislodge it. When that didn’t work, she began to clear away the vegetation around it instead. She yanked at grass, branches and peat and then took the shovel and began to dig, hard and with determination. Time seemed to vanish, and she let go of it, let it go on its way. When it returned, she had dug a pit around the pole just over half a meter in diameter and depth.

  Her shovel struck an object. She cautiously switched to digging with her hands, and a moment later she was thrown backward as if she had received an electric shock. There was something down there. There was something…

  She bent over to see what she had felt, something cold and stiff and narrow, like…

  Like fingers.

  One, two, three, four.

  A human hand was sticking out of the earth.

  As a child, Nathalie had had two clues about who Göran Dahlberg was. For one, her mother had told her that he was “a professor or something charming like that,” and for another, she had peered through his living room window to discover that there were taxidermied bats on his bookshelf. This prompted her to imagine him as a mix between Count Dracula and Professor Balthazar.

  But then she met him in the flesh one rainy spring day when she was eight. Her parents were having a fight; her dad had slammed the door and taken off in the car at just about the same time as her mum pulled on her coat and walked into the forest. Neither of them realized they were leaving Nathalie behind.

  She was sitting on the steps outside the house, scraping bark from a stick, when Göran came to ask if she wanted to come to his house. He didn’t say “poor little girl” or even “what’s wrong, honey?” He just asked if she wanted to come in for some tea while she waited. She had never drunk tea before; this was the first time.

  It didn’t take long for her to forget she’d thought Göran was strange, and by the time summer arrived she was at his house all the time, bringing injured birds and earthworms in glass jars. He treated her as he would anyone else and spoke to her as if she were an adult. She could tell he was different, that he wasn’t like her mum or dad or other grown-ups, but he was kind. Sometimes he would stop short in the middle of a conversation and appear to be thinking about something. She liked that. His strange ways made her feel free to be herself.

  Then came the day when she’d just started fourth year and her mum mentioned, for the first time, Göran’s interest in ghosts. A middle-aged German tourist had vanished while on vacation in Tösse, near Lake Vänern. There were indications that she had visited the mire that same day, so the police had knocked on doors in the area. Just after Nathalie’s mother spoke to an officer, she sat down on the patio with a friend and lit a cigarette.

  “Oh, they’re knocking on Göran’s door now,” she’d said. “I suppose he’ll tell them the ghosts took that German.”

  “The ghosts?” Nathalie asked.

  And her mother had received a look from her friend.

  “Well, of course. He believes in ghosts, our dear neighbor.” She blew thick rings of smoke and turned to her friend. “He says the ghosts took his wife too. He thinks that’s why she disappeared.” She put out her cigarette and went on: “If you ask me, I bet she’s sitting in a bar in some nice, warm country, having drinks with a man who didn’t give up his university career to start chasing ghosts.”

  Her friend laughed.

  That same afternoon, Nathalie went to see Göran; he was working at his desk. His back was to her.

  “Do you believe in ghosts?” she said.

  He froze and looked up, but didn’t respond.

  “Mum says you believe in ghosts. Do you? Are ghosts real?”

  He turned around, took off his glasses, and considered her for a long moment. Then he turned back around and kept writing.

  “No, Nathalie. They aren’t,” he said.

  “Mum says that you say that ghosts really exist.”

  Another silence.

  “But ghosts don’t exist, Nathalie. That’s the whole point of ghosts,” he said. “That they don’t exist. The question itself is contradictory.”

  “It’s what? Don’t talk so weird. Why didn’t you ever tell me you’ve seen a ghost? Are they dangerous? What do they look like?”

  He turned around again. Then he took his pen and a piece of paper from the desk and drew a flying ghost with a sheet and chains.

  “Like this, maybe?”

  “That’s the kind of ghost you saw?” Nathalie was clearly disappointed. “You’re just making things up. Tell me the truth.”

  He crouched down in front of her and looked her in the eyes.

  “Do you really want to know?”

  She nodded eagerly.

  For a few eternal seconds the air in Göran’s office seemed electric. It felt like she was about to gain a great knowledge: the truth about the ghost world.

  But Göran looked away, dropping her gaze as if it were worthless, and turned back to his desk.

  “It doesn’t matter what ghosts look like, Nathalie. The important thing is how you deal with them.”

  And that was all.

  She stood there for a long time, staring at his long, narrow, mute back, but she knew the conversation was over.

  From then on she realized that there was no point in trying to get a straight answer out of Göran, at least not when it came to ghosts. She had to accept that his words would never be anything but as flighty and elusive as the ghosts he spoke of—or didn’t speak of.

  It must have been a year before they had another conversation about hauntings, this time initiated by Göran himself. It happened when they were out on the mire together. She wasn’t allowed to go there alone, but she could visit if Göran came too.

  “I’d like to talk to you about something,” he said as they sat down to drink coffee and hot chocolate from their Thermoses. “Since you’ve shown interest in… ghosts and so on.”

  Finally, she thought, nodding silently.

  “This place we live near, you and I…” he began. “It… how should I put it? There are certain things you should be aware of.”

  He took a book from his bag.

  “I want you to have this; read at least the fifth chapter. But maybe you shouldn’t show it to anyone. They won’t believe what it says anyway.”

  He looked at her gravely.

  “But promise me you’ll do that, you’ll read it.”

  In under two hours, Leif Berggren had arrived at the mire with a colleague, a medical examiner and two technicians. Maya herself had just returned to the discovery site. She had sped around in her car while waiting for the others, stopping at a hot-dog stand and buying some food that she barely touched, just so she could sit in the well-lit seating area for a moment.

  “Now tell me, why did you come here?” Leif asked in a voice full of both worry and a certain degree of irritation. She knew he wasn’t happy that she had come out here alone, but he also didn’t want to have that discussion quite yet.

  So she told him how she had visited the Museum of Cultural History and heard the stories of the past, of human sacrifices pinned into the earth by poles. And how, as a result, she came to realize what she had really tripped over in the bog.

  “You’re saying it was a pole?” Leif asked, looking at her with narrowed eyes.

  She nodded. “It was a way to pin down the body, but apparently it was also a common trick to prevent the dead from rising again,” she said with a tired smile, to mitigate the strangeness of her implication. “Whether it works, I don’t know.”

  “Well, you learn something new every day,�
�� Leif said. “You’ll have to come in tomorrow and give me more details.” He glanced at the area around the pole, which was now half hidden under a protective tent. “I suppose the question is whether we’re dealing with a corpse from the Iron Age this time as well. I spoke to an archeologist at the museum, and she’ll be here as soon as she can.”

  Samantha, Maya thought.

  The medical examiner, who was bent over the emerging body, heard Leif’s words and straightened up. “I think you can tell that archeologist we won’t be needing her.”

  A pause.

  “And I think you’ll have to read up on more current superstition,” she went on. “This person is wearing a leather jacket from H&M.”

  A flock of birds lifted from a tree. Maya watched as Leif’s face changed color.

  “Well then,” he said. “Well then.”

  One of the technicians fished something out of the pocket of the leather jacket. Leif took a step forward.

  “What’s that?”

  A stiff, damp breeze struck the canvas of the tent as the technician took off his mask, held up his find, and weighed it in his hand.

  “A bag of ten-kronor coins. Must be almost half a kilo of them.”

  The book Göran had given Nathalie was called Sacrifical Bogs, Now and Then and described, among other things, how Iron Age people buried their gifts to the gods in bogs. According to the book, the ritual lived on in many locations until well into Christian times. But there was a problem, though the people of the time were probably unaware of it: because the bodies never decayed, those who were buried never came to peace. They were said to hunger for fresh sacrifices, which might also explain why people suddenly vanished without a trace—even in modern times.

  For these reasons, sacrificial bogs were considered both holy and dangerous. A place to fear and to worship.

  Nathalie learned the words in chapter five by heart. She could recite them with the same ease with which she listed the vowels, or the local rivers.