Handling The Undead

by John Ajdive Lindqvist

  And then they found what they were looking for.

  A single drawing, dated July 1975. Sture quickly checked the papers underneath but there were no others.

  ‘There used to be more,’ he said. ‘She must have thrown the others out.’

  The other papers were pushed aside and David walked around to Sture’s side to study the single sketch in the middle of the table.

  Eva’s style was still childlike, of course. The fish were drawn with a single line, and the little girl who was supposed to be Eva had a disproportionally large head in relation to her body. You could tell

  she was under water from the wavy line toward the upper edge of the page.

  ‘She’s smiling,’ David said.

  ‘Yes,’ Sture said. ‘She is smiling.’

  The mouth drawn on the girl’s face was so happy as to flout accepted childhood standards of how to represent people. The smile covered half her face. This was a happy child.

  Not easy to understand, in view of the character who was right next to her. The Waterman, the Fisher. It was at least three times as big as she was. It did not have a face, there was just an empty oval where the face should be. Outlines of arms, legs and body were drawn with trembling, wavering lines as if the figure was electric or dissolving.

  Sture said, ‘It wasn’t clearly defined, she said. As if it was changing all the time.’

  David did not answer. There was a detail in the picture he could not tear his eyes away from. The rest of the body was deliberately drawn to be indistinct, but there was one exception: the hands. The hands had clearly defined fingers, and at the tip of each was a large hook. The hooks were stretched out toward the smiling girl.

  ‘The hooks,’ David said. ‘What are they?’

  ‘We fished a lot when she was little,’

  Sture said. ‘So…’ ‘What?’

  ‘Well, at the time she said that it had those hooks to catch her. But it wasn’t fast enough.’ He pointed to the Fisher’s fingers. ‘They were not as

  big in reality, she said. But she saw them very clearly.’

  They stared at the picture in silence, until David said, ‘But even so she’s smiling.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sture said. ‘She is.’

  Griiddo Island 17.45

  Mahler moored at the dock in Graddo at a quarter to six. He walked as fast as he could and got to the store a couple of minutes before they closed. He bought UHT milk, a number of cans and packets of soup and sauces. Macaroni and tortellini. Skogaholm bread, which lasted forever, and soft cheese in a tube.

  At the tap behind the store he filled his containers with fresh water. Then he remembered the wheelbarrow down by the harbour with ‘Graddo Island Grocer’ stencilled on it. Now he understood why it was there. He tried to decide what was better: go back to the harbour and get the wheelbarrow or try to carry the two containers-now weighing forty kilos-plus the two bags of food.

  He decided to carry them.

  After twenty minutes he was only halfway there-he had been forced to take a break almost every other minute-so he walked the rest of the way and fetched the wheelbarrow, pushing it back to where his goods were, and was down at the harbour in ten minutes.

  It was past seven and starting to get dark. You could still see the bald head of the sun sticking up over the trees, but it was sinking rapidly. He would have to hurry; navigating back to the island in the dark without a map was beyond him. He got the bags containers in the boat, and had to take another longish break so his heart wouldn’t start to race.

  Then he said a prayer and pulled on the starter cord. The engine fired immediately. He steered to the pontoon filling station and found that it was closed. He moored the boat but left the engine on, examining the pumps. There was no pump that took cash or cards. The only possibility of getting fuel would be to go back up to the store again. He lifted the fuel container and rocked it from side to side. About half full.

  He looked up at the road that led to the store. He just did not have the energy.

  He was sure he could get back to the island with the fuel he had. The return trip was less certain.

  Maybe there was fuel somewhere in the house on the island? He had seen a petrol container under the kitchen counter but had not checked to see if there was anything in it. Admittedly the water containers had been empty, but petrol would keep as long as you wanted.

  It was highly likely that there was petrol in the container, Extra fuel for a situation like their own. Yes, of course. It was guaranteed there’d be petrol in the container. And if I here wasn’t, they had oars.

  He didn’t like this. He should go back up to the store. Without fuel they were at the mercy of…

  Of what?

  Of nature. Fate.

  But there was petrol in that container.

  He got back in the boat. Drove away frorn the mainland and normality.

  It was half past nine when he reached the area he was supposed to turn South. He didn’t recognize anything around him. The sun was just a dark red edge horizon and dusk gave the island an and altered appearance. He could still see the Manskar Island mast but thought it lay too far to the right.

  Must have gone too far.

  He turned the dinghy and went back the same way he had come. He could still not tell where he was. In the slowly dimming light it was getting increasingly difficult to judge distances. What was a single large island, and what was a collection of many small ones.

  He bit his knuckles.

  No map. No extra fuel. The only thing he had to go on was the handful of landmarks he knew, and none of them was in sight.

  He turned the throttle as low as he dared without stalling and put the gears in neutral. Tried to’ calm himself, gazing out over the islands, going over the route he had taken in his head. As long as he had an idea of where the merchant shipping routes were there was no risk that he would get completely lost. He looked around. A Finland ferry, lit up like a fun fair, was approaching from the Sea of Aland. Approaching rapidly.

  He did not want to leave the shipping route but the ferry forced him to do so. He puttered in closer to the islands at low power, leaving the passage free. If the ferry collided with him, no shadow of blame would fall upon the captain-you could add lights to the list of things Mahler ought to have but didn’t.

  The ferry went by. Mahler could see people through the windows who did not have a care in the world. He longed to be with them. Just fly in through the window, land at the bar and order drinks until his wallet was empty; listen to vapid pop music and sneak glances at girls who had slid out of reach thirty years ago. Maybe listen to some lone Estonian tell his sad life story while the alcohol laid a forgiving veil over everything.

  The ferry went by. Its lights went by and Mahler was left alone in the dark again.

  He checked the time. Past ten o’clock. He feltthe petrol tank. Almost empty. When he shook it, the engine sputtered, but resumed its even puttering when he restored the tank to its upright position.

  This is no catastrophe, he told himself.

  If worse came to worst he could go ashore on some island and wait out the short hours of the night. Motor home the next morning or row, if need be. Maybe it was better to go ashore right now, while there was still fuel for the trip tomorrow.

  Anna and Elias would get anxious of course, but they would manage.

  And to be honest, would they even get worried?

  Relieved, more likely.

  He turned and puttered in to the nearest island to spend the night.

  The Heath 20.50

  It was not until the colour of the little window had faded to dark grey that Flora and Peter talked about going out. There had been no sounds or signs of consciousness for several hours but it was hard to be completely sure.

  Flora had winced when Peter opened the door. He had looked undernourished before; now he looked emaciated. As soon as they were in his room he threw himself upon the fruit in her backpack. The room stank. As soon as Flora thought
it-that the room stank of human waste-Peter said between bites, ‘I know. Sorry. Haven’t been able to empty it.’

  The rag over the bucket had been reinforced with a blanket, but the odour still came through.

  ‘Peter, you can’t live like this.’

  What’s the alternative?

  Flora chuckled. Peter’s voice was loud and clear in her head now that everyone else was gone. They did not have to talk aloud as long as they stayed here.

  I don’t know, she thought.

  No. We’ll go out tonight, came the answer.

  They waited. Amused themselves playing poker for matches, which mostly became a contest to see which one of them was better masking their thoughts. At the start they both knew each other cards, but after a while they each had to search for the other’s pairs and incomplete straights among the static of numbers and songs th both used as shields.

  When they had both become so good at masking that they we getting headaches trying to penetrate the noise, they tried turning off. Making a conscious effort not to read the other’s thoughts.

  ‘Which card?’ Peter asked, and held out a card with its back Flora as he looked at it.

  It came immediately: the seven of clubs. They tried several times, but it was no good. However hard Flora tried to put differ kinds of static between her head and Peter’s, she could not block t telepathy. As long as the sender did nothing to deliberately distort their thoughts, it was impossible not to read them.

  During the hours they spent in the basement she got to know, Peter better than ever before, probably better than he wanted her know him. He got to know her, too. And she knew what he thou he was seeing, and he knew what she thought of what she was seeing and by eight o’clock it was starting to get unbearable-a kind torture in the narrow basement. They glanced more and more oft out the window to see if it wasn’t getting dark enough to go out.

  At ten to nine, with the room sunk in darkness and the windo rectangle hovering above them, Peter said, ‘Shall we go then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Speaking was a relief. Spoken language had boundaries, t words not so loaded with significance and hidden meanings as the language of thought. By this point they had almost started to hate each other from the sheer saturation of information, and they both knew it. She knew everything about his latent homosexuality, his stinginess towards other people and his contempt for himself. She also felt the work he’d done to overcome his flaws; his longing for and terror of tenderness, of contact with others, which expressed itself in his self-imposed isolation.

  It was not a matter of contempt or disdain; it was just too close.

  When they reached the outer bicycle basement she turned to Peter and asked, ‘Peter? Can we forget this?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Peter said. ‘We can try.’

  After checking that there were no people out in the yard, they parted and went their separate ways. Peter went off to empty his bucket and look for water, while Flora walked in the direction of the courtyard where she had seen herself.

  Before their telepathic conversation became stifling, they had talked about what Flora had seen. At first Peter had not understood what she meant, but when she sent him the whining sound that accompanied the apparition, he said, or thought, ‘I’ve seen it. But it wasn’t you. It was a wolf.’

  ‘A wolf?’

  ‘Yes. A large wolf.’

  And as soon as he said it, she received an image that must have come from Peter’s childhood.

  Cycling unsteadily along a gravel road, between spruce trees. A bend in the road and there is a wolf in front of me. Five metres away. Yellow eyes, grey fur, big. Much bigger than me. My hands squeeze the handlebars, the scream that can’t get past my mouth because I am scared. It is standing still, I know that I am about to die. Any second now it will take two leaps and be on top of me. But it looks at me for a while, then goes into the forest. I feel warmth in my pants, I have peed all over myself. I can’t move for several minutes. When I do, I go back the way I came, I don’t dare go past where it was.

  The image came with such force that she felt her own sphincter relax, but her consciousness intervened and took control of the muscles just in time.

  For me death is a wolf, Peter thought and Flora realised that something she had thought was only imaginative play was her own fundamental belief: she herself was Death.

  Of all the ways it was possible to imagine Death as a human figure-the man with the scythe, the Phantom Charioteer, a leering skeleton or an old African woman-Flora had been drawn to the idea of Death as a twin sister. It stemmed from a couple of years ago when she had been standing in front of the mirror with a candle trying to summon the Dark Lady, and seen only herself. The idea had come to her then.

  The courtyards lay silent, empty. Electricity had been brought in with some temporary cables and there were a couple of lights on in every yard. She moved carefully, trying to keep to the shadows, but it seemed that her caution was unnecessary. There was no one in sight, not a glimmer in any window, and the area appeared more like a ghost town than ever.

  A ghost town.

  Exactly what it was. The dead were in the dark apartments.

  Sitting, standing, lying, walking around. The remarkable thing was that she was not frightened. Quite the opposite. As her footsteps whispered back to her from the paths, she walked in the tranquility you can feel at a graveyard on a calm evening. She was among friends. The only thing that worried her was if that whining was going to come back.

  She had given up on finding her grandfather, but it was almost as hard to find the number she was now looking for: 17C. There were no lights in the passageways where the signs were, and she could not understand the way they’d chosen to number the courtyards. Right now she was in the courtyard where the numbers started, the first one she had come to, Closest to the fence.

  A door opened!. She froze and shrank back against the wall. At first she did not understand that why Power had not warned her, but it took her only a couple of seconds to realise that the person coming out of the door was one of the dead. Despite the warm glow of camaraderie she had been feeling, her heart started to beat faster and she pressed harder into the wall as if it would help her glide further into the shadows, become more invisible.

  The dead man-or dead woman, you couldn’t tell-was standing

  outside the building, swaying. Took a couple of steps to the right, stopped. Took a couple of steps to the left, stopped. Looked around. Another door opened further down and another dead person emerged. This one walked straight out into the courtyard and stopped under a lamppost.

  Flora jumped when the door right next to her opened. The dead

  person was a woman, to judge from the long grey hair. The hospital clothes hung loosely, shroud-like over her bony body. She took a couple of steps from the door, slow tentative steps as if she was walking across black ice in smooth soles.

  Flora held her breath. The dead woman turned jerkily. The gaze

  issuing (Flora supposed) from the empty eye sockets slid toward the place where she was sitting, her presence unnoticed and irrelevant. The woman’s interest was drawn instead to the dead man standing under the lamppost; she was lured to the light like a moth. Flora watched, mouth agape; it looked as if the woman had just caught sight of her one true love and was being pulled toward him by a power stronger than death.

  More dead people joined the fold. From some doors only one

  came, from others two or three. When fifteen or so were assembled under the lamp something started that filled Flora with awe, the feeling of bearing witness to an event so primordial that it seemed

  beyond everything.

  She could not see who had started it, but slowly they started to

  move in a clockwise direction. Soon an irregular circle had formed, with the lamppost in the middle. Sometimes someone bumped into someone else, someone stumbled or fell but quickly resumed their place in the ring. Around and around they moved and their shadows g
lided across the buildings. The dead were dancing.

  Something came to mind that Flora had read about monkeys, or was it gorillas, in captivity. If you placed a pole in their midst it did not take long until the monkeys gathered around the pole, moving around it. The most primitive of all rites, the worship of the central axis.

  Tears sprang up in her eyes. Her field of vision narrowed and blurred. She sat as if mesmerised for a long, long time and watched the dead circle, their motion without interruption or variation. If someone had told her at that moment that this was the dance that held the Earth in its rotation, she would have nodded and said, Yes, I know.

  As the enchantment wore off a little she looked around. In many windows around the courtyard she saw pale ovals that had not been there before. Onlookers. Dead people who were too weak to make their way out, or who did not wish to participate, there was no way of knowing which.

  This is how it is.

  She formed the thought, and had no idea what she meant by it.

  She stood up, intending to move on. Perhaps the same scene was

  being enacted in all the courtyards right now. She had only taken a couple

  of steps when she stopped short.

  Others were approaching, she COli Id feci it. Other living minds.

  How many? Four, maybe five. They carne from the outside; the same direction she had come from.

  As she felt the vivid resonance of other living beings in her head she suddenly understood what she had onl y suspected earlier: apart from Peter and herself and the OIlt’S who were now approaching, there was not a single living person inside the fence. No guards, nothing.

  She withdrew to her previous place, concentrating on reading the people approaching. What she sensed dislodged a clump of fear that dropped into her stomach. She read excitement, terror. And just as she managed to disentangle the confused thoughts and identify them as belonging to five people, they entered the courtyard.

  Five young men. Too far away for Flora to see properly but they had things in their hands. Sticks or… no. Flora hugged her belly, suddenly sick with comprehension and horror. They were holding baseball bats. Their thoughts were so agitated and mixed up that she could barely isolate any clear images, and she recognised this, knew that it was because they were very drunk.