‘I think they’re inviting people in to look at him,’ he said. ‘There’s loads of cars. And my brother’s there every night.’
To do what they liked, I thought: mistreat him, gradually take his life. Without any particular reason at all. Because they liked doing it. Because some people were simply made that way.
Or maybe there was a reason, but we just couldn’t see it? Smuggled cigarettes and the creature, Dad, Leif and the junkie guy, Tommy’s brothers and a load of other dodgy blokes, maybe they were all connected in some way we didn’t understand. And then it would just take a single movement at the outer edge of that fine-mesh net for things to go wrong.
Where Dad was concerned at any rate, I did find out what he was using my room for. One night that week I used the Professor’s skeleton keys to unlock the door. There were cartons of cigarettes stacked up on the floor, hundreds of them, and not just the Danish brands I’d seen him buy at the mink farm. There were German fags as well, which he must have got hold of somewhere else. It seemed like he was in the process of building up a warehouse, because there were way too many cartons for him to sell himself.
There were also a dozen video recorders with labels from a video rental place in Halmstad. Strangely enough, I felt relieved. At any rate, there was nothing worse here than tobacco and stolen video recorders.
One bit of good news that week was that the caretaker was getting better. L.G. told us in our physics lesson. He’d woken up from his coma and was remaining in hospital for now, under observation. L.G. had even been to visit him. Some of the vertebrae in his neck were damaged and he would have to wear a neck support for the rest of the autumn. But he would get well again, the doctors assured. Relief spread through the class when the information came out. It was like everybody was going round smiling for days.
Plus Gerard had been arrested, which was equally good news, at least for me. According to what I heard, they’d found him in a summer cottage that belonged to some friends of Peder’s parents. They’d decided to go in heavy-handed. Because he was under age, he couldn’t be convicted in adult court, so instead he would be sent to borstal after Christmas. He was still banned from the school grounds, same as the rest of the gang. I was relieved at that; I didn’t have the energy to go round being scared all the time.
Maybe it was true what Jessica claimed about a whole ball of string being about to unravel, but if it was, we weren’t hearing anything about it at school. People were gossiping, saying they’d broken into some houses down by the beach and set fire to a youth centre in town, but it was all just rumour.
And all the while people were distancing themselves from Gerard and the gang, it was like I was starting to be seen in a more favourable light myself. On Thursday after PE, Jessica waved to me from where she stood fussing with her hair in front of the changing room mirror.
‘Are you coming on Saturday?’ she asked.
‘Coming where?’
‘Didn’t you get our invitation to the Halloween party?’
She appeared to be serious. Or else she was just seriously good at pretending.
‘I thought it was meant for someone else.’
‘But it’s our last autumn together as a class. Just one more term then everything’ll be over and people will go off in different directions. We should stick together for these last few months. It’s important to share. Minus Gerard and those guys. What sickos. The caretaker actually could have died!’
She took an aerosol can out of her bag, gave it a shake and sprayed a little cloud over her hair.
‘I promise, it’ll be loads of fun. We’ve been planning it for over a month. You can wear whatever fancy dress costume you want, like in America. That’s how they celebrate Halloween over there. Lovisa’s sister learned about it when she was there as an exchange student.’
‘Can Tommy come too?’
‘Lovisa’s mum said she doesn’t want it to get too big, but I actually think we should invite people from the other rooms in our year as well. Not the losers, obviously.’
She had finished with her hair now and took a lip balm out of her jeans pocket and stroked the tube back and forth across her lips. Like a pro, I thought. A pro at acting like a girl.
‘Want some?’ she asked, holding out the tube. ‘My lips get so rough this time of year. You haven’t got any cold sores, have you?’
I took her lip balm, made two passes over my lips and handed it back. Like I’d seen girls in our class do all through the years, a thing that reinforced companionship and indicated that they were together. My lips felt rigid, as if I’d got candle wax on them.
‘I look totally disfigured,’ she said, inspecting her face half an inch away from the mirror. ‘I don’t understand how it’s got like this. I don’t even smoke. And I’ve stopped eating chocolate. Having spots is actually worse than cancer. You coming, then?’
‘If Tommy can come along.’
‘I’ll have to ask Lovisa first. We’re the ones organising the party.’
She stuffed the lip balm inside her bra. It felt as if I’d just been bribed.
Early the next morning Tommy rang.
‘There won’t be anyone around at the mink farm today,’ he said.
‘How do you know?’
‘Jens was here last night. I heard them talking in the kitchen. There’s ammonia leaking from a tank there. There’s a danger it will turn to gas. People from the council are going out to have a look at it later today. The workers have been given the day off.’
His breathing was a little quicker than usual.
‘Has something else happened?’
‘Yeah... Olof’s coming home from hospital. My other brother spoke to him on the phone after Jens left. Down in the games room so nobody could hear. I happened to be standing right by the door and I don’t know if I caught everything, but I think they’re planning to move him again.’
‘Where to?’
‘I dunno. And they’re not going to tell me, either. They’re scared somebody will find him. And there will be loads of questions. There are too many people who know about him already. They’re planning to move the fags at the same time. I think that’s the only opportunity we’re going to get.’
‘So he’s alive at any rate.’
‘Seems that way. But we’ve got to act fast. Phone the school and get the day off sick. And come over here as soon as you can.’
With my brother rummaging around in his room and Mum snoring in bed, I went into the kitchen. The local news had just started on the radio, but there was nothing about any ammonia leak at a mink farm. Anyway, it couldn’t be all that dangerous to be in the vicinity
As I cycled down towards the lighthouse, Tommy waved to me from where he was sitting in an old car that had been converted into a pick-up truck. The vehicle normally sat down by the harbour with the keys in the ignition and the fishermen would use it for small errands between the docks and the town.
‘Jens and my brother have gone out in the boat,’ he said as I opened the door. ‘I decided to borrow this for a while. If they’re going to move him, they won’t do it before this afternoon. Looks like we’re in luck.’
‘What if somebody else sees us?’
‘There’s nobody there. And the people from the council won’t come in until Jens lets them in.’
I looked out to sea. A fishing boat was visible on the horizon, apparently heading westwards.
‘So what are we going to do now?’
‘Exactly what we planned.’
In the rear-view mirror I could see an inflatable dinghy and a Home Guard stretcher that were tied down in the back. Herring gulls were circling in the air above us. When I rolled down the window to get some air, I could see they were screeching, but could not hear them in the gale.
The sky seemed to be whirling; the gulls flew in ever-wider circles. And then the sea out there, like molten metal, slowly rocking in a half-mile-wide tract out near the horizon.
If I could have experienced these events fr
om the creature’s point of view, what would the world have seemed like? Sounds must have seemed very different, I thought, much harsher, filled with strange echoes as they hit walls and objects; they travelled faster on land, though not as far. In the sea, sounds could be heard from several miles away: the throb of a boat’s engine or the high-pitched beeping of an echolocator, but they were never objectionable, never grated on your ears. And the light in the sea was refracted differently: green, blue and black formed the background to everything. Surroundings grew darker in the depths; ultimately all colour ceased deep down. Only near the surface were there paler gleams of white, yellow and orange.
But maybe the creature didn’t know that. Maybe it only came near the surface at night. And maybe it came from a completely different part of the ocean. That’s how I imagined it: that the currents had carried it from somewhere far away, here to our coast.
It must be bothered by daylight. Maybe it couldn’t see at all, or maybe it saw things through a haze or fog, like my brother without his glasses. Its eyes might be unable to take in colours above the surface. Like someone who’s colour-blind, I thought, where the world was just in shades of grey.
What sort of beings were approaching the place where it was, and what were those things holding it down? The doors opened, letting in more light. But doors – it didn’t even understand what a door was; it only saw that the light was being refracted differently, blinding it and making it turn away purely as a reflex. Pain with every movement, from the wounds on its body... and the fear that it was those others who had come, the ones who always tortured it. The weak movements of its tail fin, and then the relief when it recognised us.
Everything was different up here, there was less pressure and gravity acted differently. The terrible force that pulled every mass towards the centre of the earth – not like in the water where it was barely noticeable, where objects took their time to sink, but where the pressure increased. You couldn’t fall when you were in the sea: falling meant sinking. And if you lay against a fixed object, a flat or uneven surface, you’d hardly notice it: a rock under the surface was something completely different to a rock above the surface. He could feel that the chain was loosened from his tail, that hateful thing that had been restricting his movements suddenly gone; there was a strange snapping sound as someone cut through the metal and the things around his arms and neck, that transparent material, the fishing line, sharp as coral, like snail shells in the mussel beds... that was gone now as well.
He could sense our presence, human beings, though there was no way he could know what a human was. Or did he know? Did he know more than we realised? Maybe we existed in his stories just like we had mermaids in ours? There must be many of his kind, I thought, a whole colony of them way down in the ocean depths... or was he the last remaining member of an extinct species? I imagined he had come from far away, from the bottom of the ocean, and one day something happened: he heard a call or just felt an unexplainable longing, just like I might feel a longing for something I couldn’t even identify. That’s how his quest began, slowly following along with the currents until he approached our coast.
How would they manage, those small land-based creatures who had come to help him? He could sense our intention, he knew why we were there, he could perceive our thoughts and feelings via his strange sixth sense – and the sea! He could sense the presence of the sea. Every day since they’d caught him and kept him locked up, he had sensed the closeness of the sea. The sea was not far away: its smells were everywhere, and that’s where we would take him, he knew that. But how would we do it with all this gravity pulling on us, pulling on him, pressing us down to the ground all the time: what did we have to work against this terrible force that made every movement so incredibly clumsy, heavy and difficult. We, the humans, wanted him to roll onto his side, he sensed that, and we weren’t going to be able to budge him from where he lay on the tiled floor. So he did it for us, rolled onto his side, up onto a softer surface, which was the stretcher, a low stretcher on wheels that belonged to Tommy’s dad, who was a medical orderly in civil defence exercises. He was lying on it now and could see how the room was changing, how he was suddenly put in motion, taken to another space, like a largish underwater bay if he’d been in the sea, with walls like cliffs, with a high ceiling like the surface of the water up above... a door that opened, the feed hatch on the short side of the building, the ropes we placed under the stretcher... and how we lowered him to the ground with the old system of tackles and counterweights they used to lower the mink feed or hoist up the heavy bundles of frozen chicken. What was that sudden explosion of light: white, yellow, burning red? He understood that it was daylight, the light up there on the surface in the humans’ world.
The smells hit him: the terrible stench of mink shit and piss and fetid animal carcasses – smells he did not understand and only vaguely recognised, though he knew they had something to do with death. He noticed how he was sinking, how the pressure was increasing. And what were those sounds he was noticing now... the strange noisy blasts that carried through the air? A dog’s barks, if he had known what barks were, and if he’d known what a dog was. He noticed out of the corner of his eye that someone approaching him rapidly. The aggressive black creature was coming closer, mad with rage, driven by instinct, he understood; not thinking, existing solely in its senses, primed to attack any intruder who dared to encroach on its territory. What was going through his mind as he reached the ground, lying all alone on a stretcher as the dog leapt on him?
Though weakened by fever and injuries, all the sadism he had been subjected to but which could not overcome his will to live, to get back to where he belonged at any price... in spite of all that, he could sense the animal’s intention to hurt him. And so, with a single lightning-quick movement, at the precise moment it leapt on him, he grabbed hold of what he assumed was its throat, lifted the dog straight up, looked at it while it desperately tried to bite him, howling with its teeth bared... and he just sort of shook it, squeezing with tremendous strength until it started to whimper and choke with its tongue lolling out. It was just hanging there, the dog, lifeless in the creature’s grip until he put it down on the ground and went still again.
Everything was happening fast now: the rubber dinghy that we managed to get under the fence, which he understood he had to roll over into. All the time he kept his eyes shut; the daylight was torture for him, like sharp pins poking into his optic nerves.
We left him behind us and ran between the mink houses over to the fence. There was no one there. The site was deserted, just as Tommy had promised. He had already cut the fence open with a pair of bolt cutters. The pick-up truck was standing just outside on the overgrown road. The tow rope was fastened with a hook.
When I turned round, I saw the creature reach out to touch the dog’s lifeless body. As if he wanted to make sure it really was dead.
It was several years since we’d last been in the root cellar. I wasn’t even sure where the old entrance was. The mound where it was located was overgrown with brush and young birch trees.
‘This’ll be all right,’ said Tommy, as if to reassure himself. ‘Nobody ever comes here.’
‘Unless somebody decides to follow the tyre tracks.’
He glanced back along the road, at the grass that had been flattened where we drove in.
‘It’ll rain before then. And if anybody did suspect he was somewhere nearby, where would they start looking? Not here at any rate.’
He was right. This place was almost impossible to spot from outside. Just a little mound among a clump of trees. If nobody pointed it out, you wouldn’t even notice it.
The creature was lying still with its eyes shut. Maybe they’d left him alone the last few days, because his wounds seemed to have healed a bit.
His body was brownish in the daylight. The horsehairs that grew on his head and arms were black, and there was a small fin on his back that I hadn’t noticed before. His chest rose slowly; it seemed lik
e one breath every minute. His tail fin moved slightly. He seemed to have a fever again, or else he was dreaming: there were strange little twitches in his body.
I went over to the far side of the mound. The wind had subsided. I started ripping up grass, pulled out yellowed thistles by their roots and dug in the earth with my fingers until I found the old door hatch to the root cellar.
‘Help me lift it,’ I said.
Tommy got down beside me and grasped the metal loops, and we shifted it aside.
It was like an underwater cave down there. Over the years a round pool had formed, maybe three metres across. Perhaps that’s why the cottage had been abandoned, because the groundwater rose. It was surprisingly clean. The stone walls and the roof were intact. No cobwebs. No dead frogs. The water was brackish but did not seem stagnant. It didn’t even smell musty. The water must have come in from outside; there was no other explanation.
‘We won’t find anywhere better. We can come here in the evenings and check on him.’
Tommy was right, I thought. The root cellar was the best place we could get for now. And although he wouldn’t be in the sea, at least he’d be in some water.
We could hear him again as we dragged him over to the opening, that consciousness that we could only hear in our own thoughts. He was dreaming, I realised, and we were in his dreams. We even had names, and he was repeating them deep down inside himself. But maybe I was just imagining things; maybe it was impossible to interpret his dreams that way.
It was afternoon when we left. We still had things to sort out. We needed to get hold of food for him, stocks he could eat from himself. There was fish available down at the harbour in Glommen. Nobody would notice anything if we nicked a crate from outside the wholesaler’s.
The Merman Page 16