by Stefan Spjut
After bringing out the tractor he jumped down. He pushed the strap’s tapered end in behind the front axle, lifted the chain out of the snow bucket and placed the hook at the centre of the taut strap. He wound the other end of the chain around the arm of the bucket, then climbed up into the cab and put the tractor in reverse.
They ate Mekong soup that Edit had cooked from a packet. The taste eluded Susso, whose nose was streaming, but it was scalding hot and she liked that. It almost burned her palate. It was no more than thirteen or fourteen degrees in the house. She ate with her face over the bowl, strands of her hair hanging loose. Her skull felt worryingly heavy.
The old woman talked slowly but almost uninterruptedly. Carrying an experience like that had been unbearable, she explained. She had tried talking to her son but he did not know what to believe. Normally he always trusted her.
‘But he’s too scared,’ said Edit. ‘Afraid of conflict, as they say these days. He doesn’t dare go against Carina, and she will absolutely not hear a word about . . . these things.’
Edit had phoned her sister, but had detected a sneering hostility. Talking about mythical beings and supernatural happenings was all right, it could even be amusing, but only as long as they were joking. When it was serious, the mood changed.
Edit sighed.
‘So in the end I kept my mouth shut,’ she said.
‘So you haven’t told anyone else?’ she asked.
‘Oh yes,’ she replied. ‘I phoned the Kuriren, of course.’
‘You’re joking?’ said Susso, smiling.
Edit shook her head.
‘They thought it was an amazing story and said they might send a reporter.’
‘They said that?’ said Susso, wiping her nose and still smiling. ‘They said they would send someone?’
‘Yes,’ said Edit, and looked out of the window. It was completely black out there now. All that could be seen in the glass was the reflection of the candles and the white oval of Edit’s face. ‘But nobody came.’
And then she added:
‘It’s too far to come for something like this, I suppose.’
‘Haven’t they got a local reporter in Gällivare?’
Edit was not listening. She pushed her bowl aside and looked at her fingers before continuing.
‘Hockey they can write about, and basketball, day after day. But the kind of thing Mattias and I experienced, something downright unbelievable? They won’t touch it.’
They sat in silence for a moment.
‘Was it a troll?’ Edit asked.
Susso looked up and met Edit’s clear eyes. They were asking her for something.
She sank down heavily, rested her elbows on the table and started picking at the cuticle of one thumb with the tip of the other.
‘I presume you’ve asked the other neighbours?’
Edit nodded.
‘I’ve gone to Randi and Björkholmen to ask, but it . . .’
Edit shook her head.
‘What?’
‘Same as with the Westmans. People just laugh at me.’
‘Yes,’ said Susso. ‘That’s what usually happens.’
Edit’s bathroom was off the hall. The sludge-green wallpaper had begun to come loose and was bulging in places, making the large floral pattern come alive. When Susso carefully pushed the shower curtain to one side there was a soft scraping from the curtain rings. She stared at a row of plastic bottles of various colours neatly lined up on a little shelf.
The toilet was fitted with support rails. So she had not been on her own for very long. Surely no one would hang on to support rails for sentimental reasons?
Susso turned on the tap in the basin and opened the bathroom cabinet slowly so that the hinges would not creak. Inside there was dental floss, cosmetics, creams, nail clippers, toothpaste and a necklace with orange-coloured stones that could have been amber. But no pills. Not even a painkiller.
By the time Susso returned Edit had laid out coffee cups on the glass table in the sitting room. Susso took a cup and sat down on the beige leather sofa, which exhaled under her weight.
‘How long have you been alone?’
Edit stood beside the coffee machine. The answer came immediately. It was as if she had been waiting for the question.
‘Two years. At Christmas it will be two years.’
Susso told her she worked occasionally in homecare, so she knew how hard it was, being the one left behind. It was the worst thing.
‘Everyone says so,’ said Susso.
Edit disappeared out of sight, so she called after her:
‘And how would they know!’
Edit came back into the room almost immediately with the coffee thermos in her hand. Susso smiled at her, but Edit did not seem to realise that Susso had been trying to be funny. With a pensive expression she poured coffee into the cups, which were decorated with small frosted sprigs of flowers.
‘No,’ she said. ‘There’s a lot that can’t be proved.’
Susso agreed: there were philosophers who said that nothing at all could be proved, not even a thing like sitting at a table and drinking coffee, although that was taking things a bit too far, of course. If you carried on like that, you would end up crazy.
‘Like me, for example,’ said Edit, looking up and winking at her.
Susso had her cup to her lips but stopped. Had Edit heard her looking in the bathroom cabinet?
‘You think I’m imagining things.’
‘I don’t think that at all.’
‘Yes, you do. You think I’ve lost my marbles.’
‘If anyone’s lost their marbles, it’s me,’ said Susso, trying to force a conciliatory smile that somehow turned into a grimace. She sipped the strong coffee and then replaced her cup on the table.
‘I’ve read it,’ said Edit. ‘On your website. About hoaxers and all the trouble they cause. The people who dug up that wraith burrow, or whatever you want to call it.’
Susso nodded.
‘But I’m no hoaxer,’ Edit said.
‘No, of course not.’
They sat in silence for a while, listening to the fire.
‘We’ll have to wait and see if anything happens with the camera,’ Susso said. ‘You said that Mattias hasn’t been here since it happened?’
‘No. I don’t know if Carina’s stopping him or if he just doesn’t dare. He was really frightened. But I’ll phone and talk to Per-Erik.’
‘Well, you needn’t say anything about the camera. If that’s their attitude, I mean.’
Edit snorted.
‘Oh, no. That’s our little secret.’
Seved had driven the tractor into the barn and switched off the engine, but he had no desire to climb down from the cab. He sat there, holding the headphones. The snow streamed down outside the door. The Volvo was a black mass in the pool of lamplight outside. It had dragged along after the tractor, just like Ejvor said it would, so he had decided to wait until Börje came home. If it turned out the car had been damaged, then he was likely to get the blame.
Why didn’t they keep the cars in the barn, as a precaution? There was certainly room. But who knows what that might lead to. If the cars were missing, they might get anxious and agitated. They never liked being left alone, especially during the winter months. And what if they got into the barn and discovered the cars? That would confuse them, of course, and if the worst came to the worst they would also work out that the cars were being kept in the barn out of their reach. Then anything could happen.
He hung the chain on the wall and barred the doors again. Then he trudged back over the yard, stopping beside the car.
He tugged off the broken wing mirror and inspected it. He would probably be able to stick it back on with gaffer tape. Then he realised how stupid that was. It would just come loose again when they put the car upright.
As he stood there with the mirror in his hands, he stiffened.
He had heard something.
Bellowing.
; He stood completely still for a moment or two before shaking his arm to reveal his watch. It was only three. Surely he wasn’t hearing right. Thinking about the noise they had made the past few nights, and how badly he had been sleeping, it was not impossible that the noise was inside his head.
It came again.
First a muffled groaning.
Then a whimpering that gradually increased until it culminated in a melancholy, drawn-out howl.
Ejvor had also heard it. She was standing in the hall, putting on her jacket, her head bowed. She was fiddling with the zip, trying to fasten it at the bottom. Seved noticed that her red, roughened hands were shaking. In his hurry he had brought the mirror in with him, so he laid it on the hat rack.
‘Are you sure you ought to go in?’
‘It’s not dangerous,’ she said, pulling up the zipper. ‘But if I get thrown up onto the barn I would appreciate it if you came and got me down.’
From one of the pegs on the hat rack she took down the head torch. She checked that it was working and fitted it so that the elastic strap lay under her knot of hair at the back.
‘I’ll think about it,’ said Seved. He had walked into the kitchen and opened the larder door, scanning the shelves, where everything stood tightly packed. ‘It might do you good to sit up there for a while.’
‘Then you’ll have to make your own food.’
‘I thought I’d heat up some beef soup. Do you want beef soup?’
‘Beef soup?’ she said, taking the tin out of his hands and turning it round and round. ‘The use-by date was last century.’
She slipped it into her pocket and said:
‘But the trolls won’t know that.’
It was time to set off for home. If Susso did not get the car home in time, there would be hell to pay from Cecilia, although that would probably happen anyway. She had not told her she would be taking the car all the way to Jokkmokk. She stood the cups and saucers in the sink, put in the plug and turned on the hot-water tap.
‘Leave that,’ Edit said, with a wave of her hand.
‘As I already explained,’ Susso said, as she put on her boots and hat, ‘if it gets cold the batteries won’t last very long, so you’ll have to check that. Otherwise the memory card will be full in about three weeks. It all depends. Do you get many animals running about the place?’
Edit shook her head.
Susso walked outside and down the steps, looking for her car key. She turned round.
‘I’ll be in touch,’ she said, and nodded at Edit, who was standing in the darkened hall with her hand on the door handle.
‘Will you write that it was me who saw it? Will you put “Edit Mickelsson”?’
Susso took a deep intake of breath while she considered what Edit meant.
‘Not if you don’t want me to. Absolutely not.’
‘No, I don’t think I do.’
‘I don’t have to write anything at all. Not yet.’
‘Perhaps that’s best. For the time being.’
‘Okay,’ Susso replied, walking towards the car.
‘Are you sure you have to go?’ Edit exclaimed. ‘In the dark, with the spray from the snow and everything? I’ve got an extra bed, if you want to stay the night.’
Susso smiled.
‘Thanks, but I really have to get back. My sister,’ she said, ‘it’s her car. She’ll kill me if she doesn’t get it back. And I’ve probably got to work tomorrow.’
Edit nodded.
And then before she closed the door, she said:
‘Drive carefully.’
The light on a nearby mobile-phone mast glittered like a ruby-red star in the night, and way ahead another red dot blinked in and out of the haze. A car with its rear fog light on. Susso adjusted her speed to match, to have something to fix her eyes on. She held both hands on the cold plastic steering wheel. The fan heater roared at full pelt. The tarmac was scraped in dark, uneven streaks, so the snow plough could not be too far ahead of them.
In Porjus she had to stop for a pee. She had drunk far too much coffee at Edit’s. Now her bladder was so full it was making her left leg vibrate. She reduced speed, threw a glance over her shoulder, swung off the road and parked by a viewing point overlooking the power station.
The facility lay far down below in the river valley, a burning fortress that filled the night sky with a dusky blue sheen. The pylons rose up like many-armed giants with straddled legs and handfuls of cables in their fists. The power cables rose in loops up the slope, from giant to giant, running over the tops of the birch trees and hanging over the road. Susso could hear they were making a noise.
They were speaking.
She wondered if it was caused by the snow or if in reality it was the sound of high voltage, of fast-travelling electrons. Did electricity make a sound? She had no idea. She pulled her hands up inside her jacket sleeves and walked closer to listen. They were emitting a humming noise, a secret song. She could not decide if the hissing came from snowflakes landing on the cables. All she heard was the song. Dark and strange.
It got to be four o’clock, then five and then five thirty, and still Ejvor had not returned. Seved thought it was odd. His hunger always meant a lot to her. She ran her life according to it, always producing food or asking questions about food. But perhaps she thought he had already made himself something to eat because he had been looking in the larder earlier. But he really could not be bothered. Beef soup would have been perfect. It only needed warming in a saucepan.
He sat by the window and looked at the pale facade of the building looming out of the darkness on the far side of the yard. It was still snowing but now strong winds were pulling the flakes along with them, lit up by the powerful lamp on the barn.
On the rare occasions she went in there during the evening she used to put a kerosene lamp on the draining board and the beam from her head torch would flash over the walls. But now the windowpanes were completely dark and shiny as steel.
He must have stood there waiting for fifteen minutes, but the ray of her head torch did not appear, and that could only mean she had gone downstairs. Probably because Lennart had forbidden it.
He looked at the clock again. Nearly six. Now he simply had to get himself something to eat. He opened the fridge and found a ring of Falu sausage. A tube of mustard. Margarine. He got out a slice of bread, spread it with the margarine, cut a few slices of sausage and lay them on top. He decorated the sausage with mustard, coarse-grained and strong, and ate while standing at the window, his hand cupped beneath his chin to catch the crumbs.
Shouldn’t Börje and Signe have been back by now? He was still chewing his last mouthful as he went to the telephone hanging on the wall. Both the flat receiver and the wall mounting were made of the same ivory-coloured plastic, which had turned a shade of yellow. The spiral flex had coiled itself into a hard tangle.
He licked mustard from his thumb before tapping in the number.
‘We’re on our way,’ Börje said. ‘We’re just passing the flooring factory.’
‘Ejvor went into Hybblet and she’s been there for almost three hours.’
‘Then she’s probably doing some cleaning. She said she was going to do that.’
‘No, she went in because they called. She’s already done the cleaning.’
Börje mumbled something that Seved did not catch. It was probably to Signe.
‘We’ll be home soon. Don’t do anything until I get there.’
‘I’ll go in and have a look.’
‘All right, do that. But stay in the hallway.’
Cecilia was sitting in a corner of the sofa wearing jogging pants and watching television when Susso stepped through the door, cold and out of breath. She dropped the car key onto the small, round glass table in the hall, making a demonstratively loud clatter. Ever since she left Vaikijaur she had been longing for a tissue, so she went straight to the bathroom and blew her nose. At the precise moment she flushed the paper away she remembered no one was allowed
to make a noise because Ella woke up at the slightest sound.
‘Don’t flush!’ demanded a voice from the sitting room.
All she could do was shut the bathroom door quietly and pull an apologetic face, which her sister did not even notice. With the tips of her boots on the metal strip between the hall floor and the parquet flooring of the sitting room she stood leaning against the door frame, looking at the TV screen.
‘I’ve left the car in the square.’
Her sister nodded without taking her eyes from the screen. It was obvious she was pissed off. Susso tried to think of something to say to soften her up, but could think of nothing.
Finally she said: ‘Have you spoken to Mum?’
Cecilia picked at the hem of her trousers and sighed.
‘Not today.’
With a tug she removed a piece of thread, which she rolled between her thumb and forefinger. On the table stood a thick purple candle on a pottery dish filled with shells.
‘I don’t think she’s well.’
‘Not her as well?’ Susso said. She breathed in through her nose, making a sniffling sound. Cecilia looked at her with interest and asked:
‘Can you work in the shop on Saturday?’
Susso knew they were negotiating the loan of the car and the cost of the fuel, which she had not even mentioned yet. There was no way out.
‘I think so,’ she said, wiping a cold knuckle under her nose. ‘If I don’t get any worse, I mean.’
‘Because Ella’s going to some dressing-up thing. A friend from pre-school.’
Susso nodded.
‘I’m sure it’ll be okay,’ she said, getting out her mobile. She did this quite unnecessarily, looking at the digits of the clock without registering the time. She turned and walked towards the door but was halted by Cecilia’s question:
‘What have you been doing?’
She took a deep breath, wanting to avoid this part.