Lindstrom Alone

by Moss, John

  “Skadi,” he said, reaching down and holding her hands in his, in what was becoming his characteristic gesture among these mysterious blonde women of Sweden. “Were you in Iceland last August?”

  She nodded in the affirmative.

  “And you went hiking on the Sólheimajökull Glacier with a young woman.”

  “Yes.” Her eyes turned so pale the irises disappeared, leaving her pupils a glaring black. “I mostly travel in winter so I can spend the summertime with my aunties.”

  Harry took a deep breath. “Did your mother suspect?”

  “She told me Bernd was responsible.”

  “For the murders?”

  “They were not murders. The girls died like beautiful maidens in a saga.”

  “Your own saga.”

  “I watched them, I stayed with them, they never died alone, not before Judith. She made me sad.”

  “Judith, the girl in Iceland?”

  “My mother loved Bernd in spite of his flaws. What she called his moral deficiencies.”

  What a curious family, Karen whispered.

  “Skadi,” said Annie from her doorway. Harry looked over at her. Her skin had turned grey. Her sister was bracing her to keep her from slipping to the floor.

  Harry, she can’t just decide to die. Help the old woman.

  Yes, she can. She’s very old and her story is over. She’s been waiting for this for a long time.

  “Tell the professor where Inspector Arnason and her constable are,” said Annie, and as she began to topple, Harry stepped forward. He helped Lenke move her into the living room. He settled them both on the sofa.

  Annie slouched down against her plump and quiet sister. They whispered to each other as he adjusted their pillows. They were a singular dark creature of secrets. He glanced at the flickering television screen, then turned and walked back to the kitchen. Bernd was sitting up on the settee, with eyes wide open, and Skadi sat leaning on her elbows at the table.

  “Skadi,” Harry said, “what did your Aunt Annie mean? Where is Hannah Arnason?”

  Skadi glanced up, caught his eye, gave him a sweet bland smile, and spoke in Swedish.

  “Bernd,” he said, turning slowly around on his chair, “what did she say?”

  Bernd closed his eyes.

  Harry got up, went over, and shook him. Bernd’s eyes flashed open. He spoke a few words in Swedish.

  Harry walked back to the table. He sat down opposite the young woman. She smiled and with no outward coercion she announced, “They are locked inside the Olafsson root cellar. It is a burial mound. They will have passed on by now. Fårö is very cold in winter. Sweden is a very cold country. But it is very beautiful, don’t you think?”

  23 THE ROOT CELLAR

  HARRY LEANED INTO THE SQUALLING SNOW WITH HIS head turned so the wind couldn’t suck the breath from his mouth. With Sverdrup’s fur-lined hat pulled down to his ears over Miranda’s father’s toque, he still needed to clutch his gloved hands against the sides of his head. His toes throbbed as he slipped among the ruts and ridges of the road, pushing sometimes through drifts where the snow was up to his knees. His injured ribs ached as he heaved to catch his breath. On his right, the low stone wall rose up from the landscape and moved along with him, and on his left, the storm howled across the open shoreline, sealing sparse clumps of shrubbery in layers of icy spray. Just behind him on his leeward side, Bernd was valiantly struggling to keep up.

  Skadi had not tried to interfere as Harry prepared to go out. She had even offered him a flashlight and warned him the batteries were low. At first Bernd watched from the settee. He had inhaled more smoke from the fire than Harry. He tried several times to get onto his feet but subsided when he couldn’t process sufficient air. And finally, with a mighty heave, he rose and commanded Skadi to bring his scorched coat from the porch. Skadi bristled but got his coat, while imploring him to let Harry go it alone. Harry tried to discourage him, as well, but Bernd was like a man possessed; he was not going to be left behind.

  Only a few hundred metres down the road, Bernd tugged at Harry’s coat. He bent low and spit grey bile into the snow, then shouted something and Harry leaned away from the wind, trying to hear.

  Bernd shouted again, “In here.” He pulled Harry toward a break in the wall where a gate might have been in the past. “The Olafsson root cellar. Over there.”

  Once through the wall, Harry became aware of a mound looming in the storm-swept scene behind a gnarled ancient oak. As they trudged closer around to the lee side, it became apparent the mound consisted of boulders piled so high the top disappeared in the weather. Harry turned on the flashlight. A cone of brightness protruded from his hand and faded at its outer edge. He turned it off. The ambient light in the thickness of swirling snow indicated a full moon above the storm, casting a pale luminescence over everything.

  Bernd leaned close and, grasping his arm, led him into a shadow on the side of the mound that proved to be a cavity set into the stones about the size of two men standing upright.

  “Full moon!” Bernd, spat noisily out into the wind, then spoke in a remarkably strong voice. “That’s better. I can breathe. Do you know this is the night of the Midwinter Sacrifice? I’m sure there’s no connection.”

  “Bernd, is this really a burial mound?”

  Protected from the wind, they didn’t have to shout.

  “Neolithic.”

  “And the root cellar?”

  “It’s all the same.” Bernd nodded toward the depths of stone and darkness. “We cannibalized our past, Harry. Tell me a culture that didn’t.” He paused to catch his breath. “Steel from the Twin Towers ended up in an American battleship. Roman roads became cathedral walls. Our communal grave became the family root cellar.”

  His words sounded with surprising clarity and a slight echoing resonance. Harry turned his fading light into the depths of the cavern. Less than a body’s length away, it picked up the details of an ancient oak door, studded with iron protrusions. There was a simple slide bolt at waist level holding it closed.

  He moved close to the door, touching the primitive lock with his bared hand. It moved. He turned to Bernd, who formed a grim silhouette against the blur outside. He slid the bolt back and pulled on the door, prepared for the worst.

  A sudden burst of candlelight flared and guttered to absolute darkness. But in the brief moment of illumination, he had seen the glowing faces and glittering eyes of Hannah Arnason and Horatio Sverdrup, both of them looking pleasantly startled.

  “Come in, come in, come in,” said Sverdrup in English. “Close the door, you will let in the storm.”

  Harry shone his flashlight around but the room swallowed the dying beam. As soon as they pulled the door closed, however, he was blinded by the flare of a match, then comforted by the smell of burnt sulphur as Sverdrup re-lit four candles that were poised on jar lids on a decrepit old table.

  “Welcome,” said the man whose leathery face seemed even more ancient in the flickering light. Sverdrup moved away from the table and the top of his head disappeared as his black dye-job merged with the enveloping darkness.

  “It is the night of the Great Midwinter Sacrifice,” said Hannah Arnason. “It is good you are here, thank you.”

  She rose to her feet, towering over them in the confined space. The entire chamber was no bigger than a tomb for four, if they were laid out in state, with room for a few ragged shadows around the edges. She shook their hands heartily.

  She might have been a pagan goddess, the way she glowed in the candlelight, with her long blonde hair burnished to spun gold and her blue eyes burning obsidian black. She seemed huge, and Harry realized both he and Bernd were still huddled low from battling the bitter winds and bent under the stone ceiling, which seemed to rise above her, where she stood in the centre of the chamber.

  “Sit down, gentlemen. Warm yourselves.” She indicated some empty crates on the floor by the table. The candles had taken the chill off the chamber quite nicely. Sverdrup h
elped both men loosen their coats. Harry set his borrowed gloves and hat down on the rubble floor beside Sverdrup.

  Hannah acknowledged this affirmation of Sverdrup’s bogus betrayal with a flickering eye. Harry bristled. He was wary of becoming too comfortable with either of them.

  Hannah turned to Harry, apparently oblivious of any animosity.

  “Do you know about the Midwinter rites?”

  This is ridiculous, Harry. She’s playing host, like she’s offering sanctuary to lost travellers. Very Chaucerian; she’s going to tell you a tale.

  But Harry was interested.

  He had already deduced from the candles and crude furnishings that the root cellar had been in recent generations a refuge for kids, probably Bernd and Skadi and their neighbours, the Olafssons. He also figured Skadi had tricked the inspector and her constable, telling them this is where Harry and Bernd were hiding, then bolted the door, leaving them to perish, before turning back to set the shed on fire. Not thinking through that a root cellar, by definition, maintains temperatures above freezing, not remembering there was a cache of candles, not knowing Sverdrup was an inveterate smoker, who would die before being caught without matches or a lighter.

  “Quite cozy,” said Harry. “I take it Skadi did this, locked you in here.”

  “She did. To protect Bernd, I suppose.”

  She doesn’t know!

  Or maybe she does.

  “Harry, you smell like you’ve been through a fire. You both do. Well, we are glad you are here. It’s the midwinter full moon tonight, Harry. The gods demanded propitiation. Skadi is a student of Nordic traditions, ancient and modern, apparently. And a practitioner.”

  She looked to Bernd, who had a grave expression on his wounded face, then back to Harry.

  “Long ago, on every eighth year during the midwinter moon, the people who lived here, whose ancestors built this mound, would sacrifice a man and the males of seven kinds of domestic animal. They were mathematically very precise. One man, one stallion, one bull, one ram, one boar, one dog, one cat, and one cock. They did this for nine days. Very meticulous in their obsequies. The bodies were laid out to the elements in the branches of a holy tree, perhaps the old oak outside, and birds and rats would tear the frozen flesh from their bones. It was all quite gruesome, but you know, Harry, it worked.”

  “It worked?”

  “Yes, for the next seven years the spring would come.”

  “As night follows day, so to speak.”

  “Yes, and on the eighth year, with the midwinter moon, they would do it all over again.”

  She seemed quite pleased with herself, then abruptly, she rose to her full height, so that the candlelight glistened from below, distorting her even features into a death mask like children assume when they shine a flashlight up from their chins. For a moment, Harry was transported into a world of pagan ritual and horrific rites. She was the embodiment of all about religion that defied logic, all that he hated, and feared, and desired.

  “We will go now,” she said, breaking the spell.

  “No!” said Bernd emphatically.

  The other three looked at him. Hannah Arnason sat down again on her crate and pulled her coat closer around her shoulders.

  “We must talk,” Bernd said. “When we go back to the house, Skadi’s world will change, my world will change. Since Harry knows about her already, there is no way to hide.”

  Hannah and Sverdrup did not seem surprised by Bernd’s apparent admission of Skadi’s guilt, although even Harry was not sure which of the crimes he was assigning to her and which, if any, he took as his own.

  “I would like to answer your questions now,” said Bernd. “There is no mystery, only things you might not understand.”

  That, Karen whispered, is the definition of mystery.

  Unlike Inspector Arnason and Constable Sverdrup, who leaned closer into the candlelight, anxious to hear what this man with the dark countenance and sorrowful voice would tell them, Harry sat back, edging into the flickering shadows. He gazed up at the darkest recesses of their cavern, tracing the lines of old beams with his eyes, beams that had been inserted in recent centuries to hold the space open for storing root vegetables and salted fish, for providing a sanctuary where children could hide from the ominous world outside. For all of them, the tall blonde, the man with a face like a satchel, the Italianate young man, the doleful young woman who dominated by her absence, and himself, Harry Lindstrom, this burrow into the arcane and terrifying past for such ordinary, practical purposes, this mound was their common heritage.

  Bernd connected Skadi only to the earlier murders. He spoke with a kind of melancholy detachment. He became emotional only as he finished his account by declaring, “God knows, I tried to protect her the best I could.”

  And what about the women she murdered?

  Bernd took a deep breath. “You have to understand, my mother loved her daughters. She believed it was my fault she lost them.”

  Brief thoughts about his own children flashed through Harry’s mind. (Lucy, his feisty five-year-old who marvelled at being in the wilderness; Matt, excited about sleeping in a tent and listening to wolves.)

  “All her daughters, Giovanna, Isabella, Sigrid, and her lovely lonely Skadi.” Their names fell from Bernd’s lips like a lament. “She believed she was losing her too.”

  “Unless she could shift the blame to you,” said Harry.

  “Oh, she already had, but she needed proof. So she framed you, an expert in murder. You would exonerate yourself by making me pay for the crimes she was certain I’d already committed.”

  “Killing your other three sisters.”

  The wind blowing at the door indicated it had shifted from onshore to the north. The door rattled and they could feel currents of cold air pressing on their exposed flesh. The candles flickered.

  “When I was growing up, Birgitta would often cry in the night,” said Bernd, “and in the morning sometimes she would come to my room and accuse me of destroying her life.”

  The root cellar door pushed shut in its frame, and for a moment Harry thought Skadi must be out there, locking them in again. The candle flames burnt straight in the still air. He listened for the bolt bur heard only the wind skirling in the entryway, thrusting against wood. Skadi was back with her aunts.

  Harry imagined Annie was already dead. After revealing secrets that changed everything, her heart might simply have stopped beating, and Lenke, silent and inconsolable on the sofa, would be holding her dead sister in her plump arms, waiting for her own heart to expire. People sometimes die like that, Harry thought. Old people who have been living on borrowed time. And Skadi would be seeing to them and not worried about the police she envisioned frozen to death in an ancient burial mound or the two men fighting the elements in a losing battle to save them.

  Sverdrup spoke in Swedish. There was an awkward silence, then Hannah Arnason said, “Horatio, it would be a discourtesy to use our own language.”

  Sverdrup mumbled something indecipherable. Swedes are like Canadians, Harry thought, courteous to a fault.

  Hannah Arnason ignored Sverdrup’s grumbling and turned to Bernd. “Please continue,” she said, as if he were in the mist of relating a rumour.

  “My mother needed someone to blame to make sense of a senseless world. I think sending me here as a child was her way of taunting fate, flaunting her sorrow. She was certain Sweden would protect her surviving daughter. It never occurred to her Skadi might emulate the crimes she made no secret of assigning to me.”

  “Do you think Skadi was imitating you?” Harry asked. “Or was she getting back at your mother?”

  “You knew it was her from the beginning,” Hannah stated, shunting Harry’s question aside. She was used to being at the centre of forensic procedures.

  “Not the first one. It was near Tromso. That’s in Norway,” he added for Harry’s benefit. “Skadi was at the university there on an Erasmus exchange. The next, as far as I know, was on Gotland, after Skadi
returned home. I had just got back from Mauritania, very traumatized by what I had witnessed. Skadi met me at the airport. I was thoroughly depressed. When we got to Fårö, Skadi quite openly explained to me in front of Annie and Lenke what she had done. We spoke in English. She thought her confession would make me feel better; she thought it would comfort me to know she also was deeply involved with the suffering of women. She couldn’t differentiate between causing misery and relieving it. I was horrified and frightened for her. I asked her to promise not to do it again. She didn’t understand. She liked that we had a secret. When reports came out that the corpse had blackened fingers she didn’t explain, but it never happened again. After that she cut the nails first. At that point, I had already signed up with my NGO to return to North Africa as a volunteer. But whenever I was able to spend time with Skadi on her field trips, I did.”

  “To keep her from getting caught,” Harry observed.

  “When your mother found out,” said Hannah, “she only documented deaths on the trips where you were present, I’m sure. Never when Skadi was alone. She wasn’t concerned with the murders themselves, was she?”

  “No,” said Bernd.

  “And neither of you did anything at all to stop the rampage?”

  Bernd looked thoughtful, his burns concealed by the glimmering light falling aslant across his face.

  “It might have been much worse if I had not been with her.”

  Harry needed to make sense of his own sordid involvement.

  “When did Birgitta first know about Skadi?”

  “For sure? Not until after she went to you.”

  “To me?”

  “A couple of weeks before Christmas. Birgitta had found the tea box full of fingernail clippings. She insisted she found it in this root cellar last summer. We used to play here, Skadi and I, Bjorn and Inge Olafsson. It was Skadi’s sanctuary. My own refuge was the old boatshed and this was hers.”

  “She told me she confronted you when she found the tea box.”