by Håkan Nesser
Not in the evening of the year’s shortest day.
I manage to make the hours pass with the aid of routines. I avoid thinking about Soblewski. Avoid Samos and Taza and all that. I make some soup instead, working at snail’s pace so that time can pass unhindered. I eat half the soup, put the remainder into a plastic container then stow it away in the tiny freezer compartment.
Wash up.
Give Castor some food.
Another chapter of Blackmore.
Sixteen games of patience. At last it’s eleven o’clock.
Three more attempts – that’s also a part of the routine now. I’ve spent the last half-hour sifting out this evening’s words.
Garbo. Wrong.
Monroe. Wrong.
Novak. Wrong.
I write them all down in my notebook. Put more wood on the fire to keep us warm during the night. Let Castor out to do his business while I brush my teeth.
I go to let him in. It really is impossible to see more than two metres out into the darkness – the faint light that seeps through the door opening seems afraid of venturing too far out. As I stand there I can feel that it has become colder, and I remember my fudge-making friend going on about the frosty nights we had in store.
No sign of Castor. I whistle twice, have no desire to stand there getting cold.
He still doesn’t appear. That is odd. I hope he hasn’t found something and is busy chewing it. His stomach can be rather sensitive, and half-rotten meat is not what he needs. Come on now, you blasted mongrel, I think.
But he doesn’t. I whistle again.
I look at the clock. He must have been out for five minutes. At least – perhaps seven or eight. He usually needs only one or two. I almost close the door. Then change my mind and open it again.
Shout for him.
Once. Twice.
I feel frightened, suddenly and overwhelmingly. I shout again. My voice sounds weak and terrified, and is gulped down by the darkness.
But I shout once more even so.
Again and again.
It’s the longest night of the year, and there is no sign of my dog.
40
I put on two more jerseys under my jacket and go out again. Walk round the house several times, shouting and whistling. To the south, where light from the two windows produces a slight trace of illumination, I can see for about three metres; but nothing at all in any other direction. It seems that my eyes have not yet grown accustomed to darkness. Nothing can be darker than the darkness that surrounds me now.
A faint whine from the wind can be heard from the moor, but nothing of the metallic sound that I had noticed on several evenings. In the far distance, in the direction of Exford I think, I hear the sound of a car accelerating, but it lasts no more than a second.
I walk over to the wall. Shout three times before climbing over it. The chances are that he must have gone in this direction, I think. In the other direction is the fence and the gate. Needless to say he could have negotiated those if he had really wanted to, but I have to make a choice.
I am breathing very heavily now. When I’ve climbed over the wall I stand quite still, partly in order to calm down, partly to give my eyes the chance of seeing something.
After a while I can make out my feet and a metre or so around them. Make out, not see: the nearest to any light in the darkness is the mist that is floating around and seems to be oozing forth out of the ground itself. I remain standing there, wondering about this silent and fluid movement as I continue to hold on to the wall and shout at regular intervals.
My voice still sounds very feeble, and it doesn’t penetrate many metres out into the emptiness. But Castor’s hearing is better than mine. He ought to hear me if he is around – hear me and bark in response.
I don’t dare to leave the wall. After five, perhaps ten minutes of shouting and listening I go back into the house. I fetch my torch and check that the batteries are working, then dig out two spares before going out again.
Walk round the house a few more times. Shout once more. My fear is like a tightly tied scarf around my neck.
Back to the wall. Three more shouts, and then I remain silent and listen to the faint whispering of the wind. Observe the dancing of the mist once more, and decide to head in the other direction.
Over the road and up towards the top of Winsford Hill. If I can find my way there. If it’s at all possible to work out where I am at any given time.
I find a familiar path and then lose it. I decide to adopt a plan and stick to it. Walk twenty paces. Stop, shout, listen. Wait there. Shout again.
The mist becomes more dense and less mobile the higher I get. The wind has faded and is no longer audible. I soon find myself in the middle of a patch of rough heather which is very difficult to negotiate, and I have already lost my bearings. The light from the torch is swallowed up by the mist – there’s not really any point in having it switched on. It almost makes it more difficult to make progress.
But I keep following the plan. Twenty paces. Stop, shout, listen.
I don’t know how long I’ve been following that pattern when the torch suddenly flickers and then goes dead. It doesn’t really matter. I don’t bother to try to make it go again, I just check that the spare batteries are still in my jacket pocket.
Twenty paces. Stop, shout, listen.
It’s when I’m standing still and listening that panic creeps up on me. It’s better to keep moving, better to be active: when I stand still I can’t avoid hearing my heart beat and my blood rushing around in my veins at much too fast a pace.
I am soon completely disorientated. I can’t work out what is up and what is down, what is south and what is north. I’m in the middle of quite a flat stretch of ground – or at least my immediate surroundings are flat, it’s not possible to be sure of any more than that. When I fumble around with my hands I can feel dead ferns on all sides. I seem to be following something resembling a trodden path, but when I take my eighteenth pace I find myself in a thorn bush. It smacks me in the face, and a twig brushes against my eye.
Good Lord, I think, please help me. Where are you, Castor?
You have never been a hunter. You merely glance with a minimum of interest when you come across a rabbit. We can walk through a flock of sheep without your raising an eyebrow.
I stand next to the thorn bush and for the first time try to understand what has happened. Rather than simply allowing panic to take control of me.
Why on earth would my dog want to disappear into the night?
I try to answer that question: why?
The problem is that I can’t find an answer. Perhaps I don’t want to find an answer. Instead I stand motionless beside that anonymous thorn bush and shout a few more times. Close my eyes and listen. Your hearing becomes more acute when you close your eyes.
But there’s nothing; all the time nothing. Hardly even any wind. Well, maybe there is something in fact, something that feels like a slow movement, as if . . . as if the moor was breathing.
Something inside me stiffens at that thought. I realize that I must return to the house. Of course . . . Of course, Castor is there already. No doubt he is wandering around the garden but can’t get into the house because I’ve closed the door. And then maybe he’ll set off to look for his missus.
Never go looking for your dog. Remain where you are and let the dog do the searching – they are much better at it than you are.
We didn’t get much benefit from that course we attended, Castor and I, but I suddenly remember those words very clearly. Never go looking . . .
But there are sinkholes on the moor. Depressions full of water covered by a thin layer of soil that won’t carry anything heavy. Even ponies can sink into them and drown – I’ve read about such incidents, and we have passed close by such places.
I leave the thorn bush and start heading back home willy-nilly – I’m far from sure that I am in fact heading back home. I stumble into another cluster of thorn bushes, my heart is po
unding, my blood is racing, but soon I come upon a path that seems to be heading downhill at least in places. I can’t see it, I have to fumble with hands and feet every time I take another step forward, and there are mounds of rough, razor-sharp heather on both sides. I have started crying – I only realize that when I taste the salty tears on my lips.
And then I can hear that breathing sound again. It’s louder now, and it suddenly dawns on me where it’s coming from: the ponies.
The ponies. Without warning I find myself in the middle of a group of them. Six perhaps, maybe twelve. They are so close to me that I can smell them, and feel the heat coming from their heavy, substantial bodies. I reach out my hand and touch the one standing closest to me, it doesn’t bother him in the slightest – and as I hold the palm of my hand against his warm haunch I can feel another one sniffing at the back of my neck. With my eyes I can barely make out the contours of their bodies – dark, blurred silhouettes – but their presence is so strong that just for a moment I can feel what it must be like to be a little foal. A newcomer to the world, but already embraced by the powerful bond that holds the herd together. It is a remarkable and an overpowering feeling. We stand there, breathing together in the blindness of the night and the mist. Only for a few minutes, and then one of them – a leader no doubt – gives a snort and the whole herd starts moving.
They leave me, and their absence seems just as sudden and natural as their presence had been. I stand there alone. All the breathing has ceased, silence has descended over the moor like a cold shroud.
I manage to make the torch work, not that it helps much but at least I can see my feet. I set off walking without worrying about the direction I’m taking. Walk, stop, shout, listen. After quite a while, half an hour perhaps, I come to a road. I decide it must be Halse Lane and start walking along it to the right. Slightly uphill. And soon it becomes clear that I have guessed correctly. I continue shouting at regular intervals, stand still and listen. I don’t give up. It’s so cold now that there are occasional thin patches of ice on the asphalt.
Stop. Shout. Listen.
Nothing.
Over and over again nothing.
When I go through the gate into Darne Lodge I see that the time is twenty past one. I’ve been out for almost two hours.
No Castor.
I walk around the house several times before I have to accept this as fact.
I spend the rest of the night standing and shouting, sometimes through the window, sometimes in the doorway. When I fall asleep on the sofa as dawn begins to break, I have drunk five or six glasses of wine. I am almost unconscious, but perhaps I have outlived my dog even so.
FOUR
41
All children disappear.
In every family there’s a story about Tommy or Charlie or little Belinda who disappeared and were not seen again for a whole hour. Or two or three. We made a programme about that – in addition to that one in which Alice Myrman became notorious for having hidden her dead husband in the wood-shed – about those kinds of disappearances. With happy endings – or at least I assume that was the intention. It was never broadcast for various reasons, but together with a colleague I met at least twenty parents who told us about similar experiences.
It’s all about fear, of course. The unparalleled worry a parent feels when they don’t know where their child is. They clasp their hands and pray to God, despite the fact that they haven’t prayed or been to church since they were confirmed at a summer camp with horse-riding a hundred years ago.
And it happens to everybody, almost everybody. Those desperate minutes and hours when Death is an unwelcome guest standing in the porch. We all have memories like that: there must be a reason.
In my family it was Gunsan who disappeared. It was a few years before Death actually came for real, and so it was a foretaste. I recall it with almost photographic accuracy.
In fact it’s my mother I remember most clearly in that context, not so many of the other details. We were on holiday in Denmark and had rented a house for a week, or perhaps two, not far from a place called Gut – we joked a bit about the name. It was not far from the North Sea, albeit not adjacent to it. My brother Göran wasn’t there, presumably he was at some summer camp or other.
Me and Gunsan, my mother and my father. Four of us. And one afternoon we couldn’t find Gunsan. She was only five at the time, and it may well be that I was supposed to keep an eye on her. Made sure that she stayed in or around the house and didn’t go running off somewhere. There was a busy road not far from the house.
But it was only my father and I who went looking for her. My mother stayed at the kitchen table claiming that she was incapable of standing up. He legs simply couldn’t carry her, she impressed upon us, but we must make sure that we came back with Gunsan, otherwise she wouldn’t be responsible for the consequences.
That’s exactly what she said: ‘I won’t be responsible for the consequences if you come back without Gun.’
I can see her now at that table in the well-lit kitchen, sitting on her hands for some reason and staring out of the window. I have never seen her looking like that before. My father tries to explain to her that nothing serious will have happened, and there is nothing to be gained by her not joining in the search. It would be better for all three of us to go out looking, each in a different direction – surely that’s obvious.
Then my mother turns her head and stares at us, at my father and me: that is the brief sequence I remember most vividly. She looks at first one, then the other of us, and says once again: ‘Go and find Gun. I won’t be responsible for the consequences if you come back without her.’
Her voice sounds like a knife scraping at the bottom of a saucepan, and both my father and I realize that there is something wrong with her. But we don’t have time to worry about that now, and hurry out to go looking for my younger sister.
When I find her she is walking towards me along a path coming from some sand dunes where we have been playing several times before. She is totally unconcerned about the trouble she has caused, is singing a song and even carrying a bunch of flowers that I suspect she might have found in a churchyard that is also not far away. All in all she has been missing for about an hour – at least, that’s the estimate I make afterwards.
I ask my mother why she behaved in that strange way. I’m only thirteen years old, but I’ve been in secondary school for a year and begun to have my eyes opened to the way the world works. I want answers to most things.
But I don’t get an answer to this question, my mother merely gives me a look that says it’s not possible to explain everything to a thirteen-year-old. I remember feeling annoyed with her for several days. When I take up the matter with my father, he looks worried but simply says: ‘That’s the way it is, Maria. Somebody always has to stay at home, and the one who does so knows that in a way that you and I simply can’t understand.’
If we hadn’t found Gunsan, my mother would have taken leave of her senses: that is the fact of the matter that both he and I try to avoid spelling out.
When it eventually happens for real, it’s as if my mother has had time to prepare herself. Gunsan stays alive for quite a few more years.
I follow my mother’s example two days before Christmas forty-two years later. I stay inside the house, or only just outside it, for the whole day. Go no further than the yard and the garden. It’s a cold day, and there is even a light snowfall in the early afternoon. I investigate the little stable building, something I haven’t done before – all I’ve done is fetch firewood from the bunker at the gable end. But there really isn’t much to investigate and certainly no trace of a dog. Just junk, and more junk – it must be very many years since a horse last stood in here. The only thing I might find useful is a lantern; I think it is designed to burn some kind of oil, and despite the fact that it’s filthy and rusty I take it into the house to examine it more closely.
How I could possibly be interested in something like that, now that dar
kness has fallen again, is way beyond my comprehension. I have a headache that is getting worse, and realize that it is due to the fact that I haven’t eaten or drunk anything all day. Perhaps all the wine I drank yesterday is also making its presence felt. I take out the remains of the soup, but the mere sight of it makes me feel sick and I put the jar back in the fridge. I drink a glass of apple juice and eat a few dry biscuits instead – it’s simply not possible to force anything else down. Apart from two headache pills and another mouthful of juice. By seven o’clock Castor has been away for twenty hours . . . I remember letting him out just after making my attempt at finding the passwords last night.
Twenty hours on a moor. The temperature has been round about zero all the time. How long is it possible for . . . ?
Nevertheless I shout and I shout. And shout and shout.
Why shouldn’t I shout?
About an hour later I am possessed by some sort of urge to act logically. I sit there with paper and pencil and try to put things into perspective. I write down the following facts and try to find a thread linking them together – it seems to me that there must be one:
The dead pheasants
The silver-coloured rental car
The man calling himself G
Samos
Taza
Professor Soblewski’s e-mail