Dark Pines

by Will Dean

  But then I turn to the window facing the house, and lift one corner of the blind. Nothing there. Waterlogged lawns and mist and trees, but no Hannes and no Frida. He’s God-knows-where, probably the strip club, and she’s in Karlstad like always on Sundays. Best chance I’ll get. I go back to the freezer and open the lid. It smells of old fish. It’s not a bad smell, it’s the smell that all old freezers have. Frozen burgers and boxes of peas, tubs of ice cream and rubber trays of ice cubes. But the larger compartment is filled with bodies, I can see that now. Pheasants and turkeys and rabbits. There are loins of bigger creatures. I think they’re parts of deer and elk, long dark sticks of frozen lean cuts. I rummage around, sharp ice crystals sticking to my fingertips and melting as soon as I look at them. Then I close the lid and face a wall with no window.

  Looking from left to right, I scan the things hanging from long nails driven into the chipboard walls. The room smells of damp cardboard and petrol. Between the sheets of chipboard cladding, little fluffs of insulation sprout out like baby chicks. A fan heater. Lots of extension cords. I count five. A row of hammers, all types, three carpenter’s claw hammers and four heavier hammers, maybe they’re mallets, wooden handles with thick rusting metal heads. Then a row of screwdrivers and chisels, all in size order. I’m looking for a mid-twentieth-century rifle and anything related to poker, a club rulebook or something. I know it’s a long shot. There’s a basket of paintbrushes and then a tool bench. Hannes must have built it himself. It’s two pallets, each standing upright, with an old door bolted on the top to make the work surface. Vices hang off its sides and an electric saw sits on the top, its cord dangling down into the space beneath like a cat’s tail. Next to that, there are three chainsaws, a strimmer hanging on two nails up near the ceiling, and a green plastic container of fuel.

  Then the other wall, the one with all the shelves and cabinets. I see rolls of insulation and gaffer tape, new padlocks in their hard plastic cases, ceramic flowerpots and gardening implements, trowels, and piles of gloves with floral patterns. The floor creaks as I move. The chipboard must be damp, it’s warping, and I feel like one wrong step and I could fall through to whatever’s underneath.

  The cabinets are a hotchpotch of reclaimed kitchen cupboards with padlocks, and home-made wooden boxes wrapped in bicycle cable locks. There are so many types of lock in here. I rattle a few doors and try to look through the gaps left by the amateur joinery, but I can’t see anything. The air’s musty. My hearing aid beeps and I pat my jeans pocket to feel my key fob.

  I count sixteen locked cabinets, ranging from two the size of shoe boxes, to a row of three tall gun cabinets at the very back. My hand reaches for a hacksaw off the wall without me even telling it to. I pause. There are enough new locks on the walls for me to replace any I break. Hannes will find out but not straight away. Best I can do. I approach the wooden box I saw last time, the one with the leaf motif. It’s secured with a small padlock so I start sawing through the little metal hoop that’s stopping the catch from opening. The blade slips left and right and I almost never hit the same scratch twice. I look back over my shoulder and find a pair of wire cutters or maybe they’re bolt cutters, two long arms leading to two short, squat blades. I open the arms wide and place the blades around the padlock and squeeze. I squeeze so hard my arms start shaking, and then the blades snip through the lock and it pings off and falls between two containers. I open the box and find three spray bottles of weedkiller.

  I look back to the larger secured units. The gun cabinets are locked with a key and made out of metal, no way I can break through those, I’ll leave that to a professional, if you can call Thord that. I move a few heavy wooden lock-ups and get to a trunk of sorts with a lid on the top. My eyes dart to the hut door as a gunshot fires outside in the woods. I try to swallow but my mouth is as dry as the sawdust under the workbench. I open the bolt cutters and snip the lock and open the chest.

  Porn. Magazines and VHS tapes. Looks like old stuff, things Hannes doesn’t use any more but keeps here because how and where do you dispose of this kind of collection? I pick up a magazine and open it. Hungarian, maybe Romanian or something, eastern European writing and pictures that I feel obliged to look at but then instantly wish I never had. Naked bodies and blood. But I look and I flick through and I look some more, and it all appears to be make-believe, all make-up and poor craftsmanship. This isn’t violence, its cartoons. It’s disgusting but it doesn’t look remotely real. The videos appear to be more mainstream, some Swedish, but mostly foreign. I stick it all back and close the lid and wipe my hands on my trousers and move to the final wall. Thord’s useless, but he has a gun and he’s close by. He knows I’m here. And then I realise for the first time that the police, Thord and Karlstad Bluetooth and the others, are armed with smaller guns than every other fucker around here. But still, it’s something. They’re ten minutes away. Max. The police are just down the road if I need them.

  I can hear something above my head. It’s mice or rats scurrying in the loft space of this damp, little hut. And they’re in the walls, too. I’ve noticed droppings and I’ve seen more glue traps, paper plates with sticky torture glue and bait. I move a stack of carefully folded and bound tarpaulin sheets to see what’s underneath. Clear plastic boxes with lids. Clothes. I open a lid and it’s full of children’s clothes, for a boy of twelve or so. The other boxes are the same. One of baby clothes, bonnets and booties, and one of toddler stuff, little shoes and wellington boots. I feel uncomfortable. I move the boxes back and notice something behind them. Pushing the clothes box to the left, I see a glue trap and there’s a mouse in the middle of it. A little shrew or a mouse on his back with his legs in the air. It’s dead, I think, or almost dead, four large teeth sticking out of its open mouth, and the teeth look too big for its head. Long whiskers sprout out from each side of its face. And then I hear the car.

  My breathing speeds up and I look around. Why didn’t I think of an escape route? Or a hiding place? I peel back the bottom left corner of the blind. It’s Hannes. Do I run? He leaves the car unlocked so maybe he’s here to pick something up and then drive away. But do people ever lock their cars when they live in a place like this? I walk to the other window, my belly pressed against the freezer, and move the blind a fraction. He’s gone inside. He’s upstairs looking out of the window. He’s tipping his head back and he’s pointing to his eyes. No, he’s putting in contact lenses or drops. I watch him pull on a jumper and then he moves away from view. A minute later, he walks out of the front door with his rifle in his hands.

  I jump back from the hut window and look down. He’s Medusa, I can feel it, I know it. I look everywhere, probing and scanning the hut walls for the right place. I squeeze down under the workbench, between the two vertical pallets and pull myself into a tight ball, my knees tucked under my chin. The door opens and I hear him but I can’t see him from under this workbench. He steps in and the floor bows under his weight. He steps closer and I can see him now and he steps past me to the wall of shelves and picks up a small-blade knife and puts it in his camouflage trousers. I half close my eyes, scared that my marbles – that’s what Dad used to call them – will give me up. I have perfect twenty-twenty vision and they might set him off. His boots are almost touching mine and his knees are level with my face. I can’t see the freezer from down here but I know I left my backpack next to it. Shit. Hannes, don’t look that way, just stay focussed on your weird fucking cabinets. My toes scrunch tight in my boots. He’s opening something but I can’t see what it is. I pray my hearing aids wont bleep. No noise. Please. No breaths right now. He’s an arm-length away from me.

  And then he walks off. He’s carrying a rifle in one hand and a small cardboard box in the other. The box looks like the ones I saw in Benny Björnmossen’s shop. Ammunition. Around his right shoulder, he’s carrying a loop of coiled rope. I hear the hut door slam and then everything’s quiet again.

  I should watch him from the window but I don’t, I just stay under the
workbench, under the horizontal old door with its handle still in place and a key still slotted in the useless lock. I’m scared to move an inch. I am pathetic, and the scurrying’s getting louder now. It’s coming from the wall closest to me, and from underneath me, under the chipboard. I can’t hear his car. He’s not driving off. I squeeze out from the two pallets with my heartbeat echoing in my ears. I nudge the blind. He’s walking away into the woods to join his hunting buddies. Or not. He’s holding his gun facing up to the sky and he’s trudging off through muddy grass into the thin wispy mists of Utgard forest.

  Hannes must have seen the police cars at Bengt’s house as he drove past. What did Björn tell him? The hut feels small now and humid and I’m amazed Hannes didn’t find me hiding here like just another glue-trapped mouse. I take out my camera and photograph everything but there is nothing to photograph. Everybody else around here owns a shed just like one this one filled with stuff just like this stuff.

  More scurrying. I can hear little claws scratching the chipboard looking for food and sex. Why can’t I find anything that’ll put a stop to all of this? I pull out my phone and there’s no reception. I hear a noise outside, it’s very close. It’s coming from the other side of the window. He’s coming back. I dive down into the hole under the workbench again and pull myself in and fold myself up like a penknife. I’m holding my camera facing out with my hand covering the lens. I knock the pallet a little and try to steady it with my hand but there’s something on top, a vice or maybe it’s the electric saw, and it’s not screwed down tight and it’s rattling. The door opens slowly and I hear him step back inside.

  The floor creaks. Maybe he senses something’s wrong? The door’s still open so he’ll be gone soon. I hear him lift up the lid of the chest freezer and rustle around. I’m breathing shallow, quick breaths, as quiet as I can manage. It sounds like he’s moving frozen things out of the way, maybe ice-cream tubs and loaves of stiff bread. I imagine the food piling up on his right-hand side. I imagine his tanned face and silver hair lit from one side by the freezer’s internal light. The machine hums. I imagine him lifting out a whole salmon, stiff as a plank of pink wood, and placing it on top of the other things. It’s quieter now. Has he found what he was looking for? I must be silent. No beeps, no stomach grumbles. Then he pulls out another thing and has to tug on it to get it free. I hear him throw the other bits and pieces back into the freezer and shut the lid. What has he found? And then he steps away from the freezer and I catch a glimpse of his boots and then I hear the door open and he steps outside and the door slams shut.

  I stay where I am for at least a minute. What if he comes back again? I stay still but allow deeper breaths. More noise. And then I crawl out and check the window and it’s just gravel and puddles and rain. He must be back in the woods already with his ice-cream or whatever the fuck he took out from the freezer.

  But he didn’t take an ice-cream. I look at the freezer and there’s a deer lying on the lid. It’s a baby, or maybe a smaller deer species, with no head or feet, just a long, dark torso and four stumps. The mice have stopped scrabbling now. I check the window again, both windows. The house is quiet and Hannes’s car is still in the driveway. The deer has a cut lengthways along its stomach. I presume it was made by Hannes when he gutted it and now there’s a cavity inside. The deer is as long as the freezer and the cut is as long as the deer. There’s something shiny inside the carcass. I can see it glint. The thing inside the deer looks like metal, brass maybe. I touch the deer and then pull away and then peer inside and pull out a bullet the size of my middle finger.

  46

  My lips fall apart. A bullet stored inside a dead deer? The deer is on the freezer lid, lying on its side like a sow suckling her piglets. I stand up, brain whirring, trying to focus on it. The deer is red and lean like a duck hanging in a Chinatown window. I have an urge to open the freezer and put it back inside, some absurd domestic impulse. But I check my phone instead. No reception.

  I step to the door and open it but the wind takes it from me and it bangs against the hut wall. The fog has lifted a little but it’s drizzling now, rain falling in a fine spray. Can I just walk out of this? There’s a hunter with a rifle not far away and maybe he’s out to kill some other hunter. I stick half my head out of the door and see nothing. Just puddles and a rusting snow-blowing machine I never noticed before. I step back inside the hut for my backpack and realise I forgot to take a single photo of this corpse. The air is heavy. I pull out my camera and take a few shots of the deer without touching it, keeping my flash off the whole time.

  There’s something sticking out of the cavity at the neck end of the carcass. A blue triangle. I don’t want to contaminate what could be evidence, but what the hell is it? Blue. Rigid. About the size of a big toe. I push at it but it’s stuck to the frozen flesh of the deer. It’s plastic. I hold the rigid carcass and push the blue triangle hard until it comes unstuck. Then I reach inside the long slit down the belly of the deer and pull. It’s larger than I thought and the cold burns my hand. I get a grip on the blue thing and tug it out. It’s an ice-cube tray, one of the bright blue rubber ones Frida uses for stock. I breathe and then I flip it over onto the freezer lid. I stop breathing and taste sick in my mouth but I do not make a single sound. I look at them in order, in rows and columns. No noise. I look down at them and the hut’s very cold and the draught’s catching the wispy hairs on the back of my neck.

  There are twelve of them. Each eye sitting neatly in its own ice-cube socket.

  They’re looking straight up at me. Four brown and two pale green and six blue. There are two empty ice-cube sockets at one end of the tray. Then I notice a tiny bit of sinew, a millimetre of red human tissue next to one of the brown eyes and I throw up in my mouth. Burning acid from inside me but I hold most of it in. I swallow it down and clench my teeth and look away. It burns. Time has stopped. It’s just me. And a freezer humming gently in a hut. And a butchered deer. And twelve eyes.

  I hold my camera and point it and look at the screen on the back. It feels intrusive, like photographing car-crash victims on the side of a motorway. I’m looking at people, not at corpses in body-bags. I’m looking into their fucking eyes. I’m looking at six people.

  Six pairs. But they only found five bodies. Three in the ’90s and two now. Somebody else is lost out there in Utgard forest. From back in the ’90s or now? A body trapped in the never-ending pines; a body deprived of a burial and deprived of their family’s tears and certainties. Who the hell is Hannes? Does he think he can use the eyes somehow, or are they just souvenirs like the antelope head in his study? Is this the price you pay to leave the poker game? Do I put them back in the freezer to preserve them? I can’t touch them. I can’t and I won’t.

  I stagger out into the hazy drizzle. I breathe in hard but it does little to take away the vomit taste on my tongue. Then I dash back inside the hut. I feel like I’m in a sniper video game on level seven with no lives left and no cheats and no fucking clue what I’m doing. He could be out there, standing in the driveway or hiding on the rocks at the back of the house. Waiting.

  I take my bag and stick the camera in it and grab a big steel wrench from the wall. I have bear-spray and a knife but this thing’s weighty and it feels good in my hand. I sneak to the house wall and peer around it. I look at myself in the window of the grey hut. A big pale face in the middle of a black wood. I pull on my balaclava and that’s when I see him. Through the eye holes of the mask I see the trees move by the rocks behind the house. I see his broad back.

  My eyes dart around for clues. I am not okay. An image of Mum waiting in her hospice room flashes into my mind. I shake my head and walk towards the back of the house. Then I keep walking. It’s a story. I’m doing my job. I’ll follow Hannes from a safe distance, and then as soon as I get phone coverage, I’ll call it in. I can use my phone’s GPS. I can photograph him – my lens is long enough. I remember Freddy Malmström’s son playing Call of Duty. He’ll grow up with no dad. Th
en I see Rikard Spritzik’s wife in her doctor’s office. No husband. I can’t allow the last two sockets in that ice-cube tray to get filled. Is it just him out here or the whole fucking poker team? How does this work? If Björn is the King of Hearts, then what’s Hannes? What are the rules of this club, of this game? I skirt past a bird table on the lawn and then clamber up onto the rocks, my boots slipping on the slimy granite.

  Gunshots. I freeze and look around, my knife in my left hand, Hannes’s wrench in my right. Two more gunshots in quick succession, the echo of the first melting into the boom of the second. I look back and I can’t see the house any more. I turn to where I last saw Hannes and it looks the same, every fucking direction looks exactly the same. Pine trees. Fully grown and ready for harvest. More than ready. Overdue. Too big and too close together. I can see footprints in the mud beside a hollow stump. I follow them.

  I walk faster because there’s a ticking clock in my gut like the one in Peter Pan’s crocodile. I’m tired but I have to keep going, I have to find out what’s going on and I have to help stop it and I have to write about it. That’s just the way it is. Can I trust Thord? There are little ribbons tied to some of the trees, red ones and yellow ones and blue-striped ones; flimsy bits of plastic tied to branches and around trunks. I think they’re for orienteering or for hunters to find their shooting towers. I see glimpses of Hannes. He’s walking through a valley beneath me. I’m too close to him so I hold back a while. On this muddy ground, I can follow him pretty easily if I keep looking down. There are lots of boot prints on the paths, so I have to be careful to follow the right tracks. A mosquito flies close to my ear. I flick it away, then pull out my phone. No reception and battery at 14%. The mosquito comes back. There are more people on Mount fucking Everest right now than there are in this forest.