by Stefan Spjut
They had no idea what he did all day because the windows were always covered. Presumably he slept a lot, on the floor on top of a heap of blankets and branches that he carried in. Roughly every third day he came out and lumbered up to the forest to answer a call of nature, leaving behind a huge stinking pile of faeces, and they were only too grateful he was house-trained, so to speak. Sometimes the radio would be on for an hour or so, always very quietly. They heard him sing sometimes too, but never any words, only a low humming as if he was trying to lull himself to sleep.
Occasionally he came into the house and sat for a while on the sofa and fell asleep, but they were never very comfortable with that because he smelled, and even if they were not exactly afraid of him, they never dared get too close. Some days he wanted to play. Couronne, for example. At those times he would appear at the window and tap on the glass with a stick that looked so tiny in his hand. They used to take turns playing with him. He knew he had to get the rings into the holes in the corners, but he never realised he had to shoot with the red ring, or that the rings had to be knocked into the holes. Instead he either pushed them with the stick or threaded them onto the stick and moved them slowly to the holes. Taking turns did not seem to bother him and it was never clear who had won, nor was it important. That is what he was like: quiet, sleepy and incomprehensible.
‘Are you sure it wasn’t him who took Magnus Brodin?’ Gudrun asked.
No, they knew nothing about what he had done before he came to them. He had never said a word.
‘We know for certain there are at least two of these giants,’ Gudrun said. ‘And there might be even more. So it wasn’t necessarily him.’
‘Have you got a picture of him?’ Susso asked.
Inger shook her head.
‘Take a photo of him? That was out of the question.’
Yngve agreed.
‘The very thought of getting out a camera would never have occurred to us. That’s probably hard to understand unless you have met him.’
Yngve asked about the giant they had shot in Stockholm and the circumstances surrounding his death. Gudrun explained what had happened on Färingsö and she told them about her father and the website and the photograph of the Vaikijaur man, about John Bauer’s Lapland journey and his meeting with the stallo folk. Finally Susso was obliged to show them the squirrel. The sight of the animal curled up in Susso’s pocket left them speechless and Yngve had to stand and walk up and down the kitchen because he did not know what to do with himself.
‘All this,’ he said. ‘All this . . .’
They had let Torbjörn use their laptop and he sat with it at a kidney-shaped coffee table in the sitting room. He clicked on the trackpad and stared intently at the screen.
‘Here,’ he said suddenly, and started reading: ‘“The police are giving out a warning about an aggressive bear. A man was attacked by a bear when he was out walking in Storuman on Tuesday morning. He was scratched and bitten and now the police are warning the public not to go out in that area. The thirty-nine-year-old man was alone when, according to the information he has provided, he was subject to an unprovoked attack by a bear in Stensele, south of Storuman. The bear hit the man and bit him before he could get free, run away and climb a tree. The bear chased him as far as the tree but then ran off. The man climbed down, went home and raised the alarm, says Tomas Wretling of the Västerbotten police’s communication centre.”’
Susso and Gudrun had walked up behind him and were reading over his shoulder.
Torbjörn continued: ‘“Västerbotten police have sent a specially trained bear-tracking unit to the area. They advise the public not to go out of doors in Stensele for the time being. The man was taken to hospital to receive treatment for his wounds, which are not life threatening. Are they shooting to kill? ‘Yes, they will destroy the bear,’ says Wretling. ‘That decision was made by the police authority and is based on the fact that the bear has injured someone and therefore constitutes a danger to the general public. We are presently waiting for our dog handlers and then we will set off.’ When asked how common it is for a human to be attacked unprovoked, Wretling explained: ‘This bear has quite literally woken up on the wrong side of bed. And you don’t mess around with a fractious bear.’”’
‘Where does it say that?’ asked Inger. ‘In Västerbottens-Kuriren?’
Torbjörn shook his head.
‘Dagens Nyheter. Posted two hours ago.’
They carried on searching and it was not long before Gudrun placed a hand on Torbjörn’s shoulder and pointed. In the ‘LATEST LOCAL NEWS’ column on the Norrbottens-Kuriren site was an item with the heading: ‘Let Sleeping Bears Lie? Not in Glottje.’
Torbjörn clicked on it and read:
‘“A roused bear”—that’s what it says—“has been sighted in a forest clearing beside the Västra Kikkejaure lake about five kilometres northwest of the village of Glottje in the municipality of Arvidsjaur.”’
‘Glottje,’ Susso said. ‘How far away is that?’
‘It’s just over a hundred and twenty kilometres to Arvidsjaur,’ Yngve replied.
‘And to Storuman?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe three hundred, by car. But the 94 runs in a straight line westwards and so does the 45, so it is more or less the same for a bear. Say two hundred and fifty then, as a bear travels.’
‘The Kuriren article was posted at 15.09,’ said Torbjörn, ‘so it can’t possibly be the same bear.’
‘There are more of them, Torbjörn,’ Susso said. ‘I know there are more.’
Torbjörn kept his mouth shut when he saw the look Susso gave him.
‘Right,’ was all he said.
‘There are four,’ Susso said, looking down at the floor. ‘Or rather, there were four.’
‘Four?’ said Yngve. ‘How do you know there are four?’
Susso looked down at her pocket.
‘Four bears,’ she said slowly, looking the squirrel in the eyes. ‘There have always been four bears, but now there are only three. And . . . that’s not good.’
He could not sleep, of course, but it was not the fear of being woken by hefty footsteps on the veranda that kept him awake. It was the painful position he was sitting in and the fear that he would tumble down the steep staircase in his sleep. And then there was the cold. It was so cold he was shivering. Amina was not asleep either, he could tell, because from time to time she sniffed loudly.
She had asked him if he thought that Mattias was with his parents by now, and he had nodded and said yes. She had more questions but he was too tired to answer. Or rather, he did not want to, because he had picked up muted whisperings from down in the darkness. It was a shifter of some kind that could form words and was imitating them in a thin, hollow pitch.
Promise. Prrromise. We’ll sit up there. It’s safest. Promise you won’t go. Promise, promise, promise. It’s safest. Pee. I’ve got to pee. Pee, pee, pee. Where are you, where are you. Where aaare you.
After it had gone on for a couple of minutes Seved had been close to shouting at it to shut up, but he controlled himself. Shouting was guaranteed to make things worse, and it could also be dangerous. He had no idea who was down there. The little creatures mainly, he thought, but he could not be sure. At least one of them was big enough to use a torch.
They had been sitting in the darkness for several hours and he thought it was odd that Börje had not persuaded Lennart to let them out. Börje went along with most things but Seved knew he could refuse orders if he had to.
They must have locked them in the hide because they had discovered that Seved had chained the escape hatch shut.
There was a certain psychology to it. He had locked himself in. What he did not know was whether they had detected the smell of petrol he had poured on the floor of the jumping room, or whether they had worked out why he had blocked the emergency exit. There could not have been many reasons for doing that. Lennart had understood what was going on, without a doubt, and that was a double
betrayal by Seved. He had not only let the boy go, he had also been working on a plan to burn Skabram to death. Attacking the old-timers was like attacking Lennart himself, or even worse. He must be beside himself with fury, and the more Seved thought about it, the more intense the fear inside him grew as he sat blinking in the darkness.
Finally he could not sit still any longer.
‘We’ve got to get out,’ he said, standing up.
Amina only sniffed in answer. He knew she was playing with the little mouseshifter she had slipped into her pocket unnoticed when Jola had fetched them from the shack.
‘Can I borrow your scarf?’
She passed him the scarf, and after he had tied it over his nose and mouth he went slowly down. He used his hand to feel his way on the rough steps. The wool soon became warm and damp over his lips.
The entrance to the hide was a heavy fire door and he knew it would be almost impossible to break it down. Unless against all expectations he found a crowbar down there he did not stand a chance of getting it open.
He did not want to fumble around blindly but he thought he might start by borrowing the torch from whoever was playing with it. With the help of the torch he would be able to find his way to the tunnel.
In his pocket he had the key to the padlock. He had been sitting holding it so tightly in his hand that it had cut into his palm. It had probably not even occurred to Lennart that he might have the key on him. With a little luck he might be able to push up the two halves of the hatch enough to reach the padlock. And if that failed he could at least get an iron bar or something similar through the gap and manipulate it until the chain or the hinges gave way. It was certain to be impossible but he had to try. He could no longer sit there and wait. Too much time had passed and with every minute his suspicion was growing that Lennart and Jola had not locked them in simply to scare them.
When he reached the bottom and had taken a few steps along the cluttered concrete floor, hunched over, he stopped. It was a strain not being able to see anything. His eyes almost hurt. It was all the staring, he supposed.
He waited. Presumably the thing that had been holding the torch had fallen asleep. But he had a rough idea where the light had been coming from so he moved in that direction with one hand held out in front of him like an antenna.
Things crunched and scraped under his boots but he did not want to know what he was treading on. All he could do was try to breathe through his mouth, but it was as if his nose was curious because occasionally it drew in a breath of its own accord. Instantly the convulsions rose up and he had to turn his head away and cough into the scarf. It was the sweet, pungent smell of bloated, maggot-filled decomposition.
The small shifters were there. He heard them scurry off and then sit down.
He had moved about ten metres, he guessed, when his foot struck something solid but soft, something that did not crumble under his boot or move. He squatted down, reached out and his hand felt . . . a shoe. The tread of a rubber sole. His fingers continued upwards and he found himself stroking bristly reindeer skin and then a furry rim.
Ejvor’s boot.
It was Ejvor lying here.
Horrified, he gasped for breath, drawing in the stench that surrounded the corpse like a dense film. He slapped his hand to his mouth, which he had uncovered, but his stomach was empty and he retched into his glove. He threw himself to one side and began to crawl away, overwhelmed by the feeling of revulsion.
But then he stopped.
The head torch. It must have been her head torch he had seen.
Whether some little being had taken it or whether it was still around her neck, he did not know. There was only one way of finding out.
With his chin pressed down on his chest, he crawled back. He waved one hand ahead of him and finally came into contact with Ejvor’s denim-covered lower leg. When he had worked out which way was up he shuffled on his knees to get closer to her head. He turned his face away and took a deep breath. His hand fumbled around, sweeping hesitantly in circles. If they had been eating her, they would probably have started on her upper body, where it was softest, and the last thing he wanted was to put his hand into the mess of a crushed and gouged-out chest cavity. But he thought it was her cardigan he could feel under his glove, so perhaps they had not touched her after all.
He had to think about taking a breath again, but before he turned away he searched more urgently. And there it was, lying on her chest. As soon as his fingers had grasped the little head torch he began to pull it up towards her chin. The elastic band fastened onto something and he tugged as hard as he could. He felt her heavy head lift from the floor. Her neck cracked like broken wood.
When he had freed the torch he edged a short distance away and fumbled with the buttons. The light clicked on and in a dull, tight circle of light he saw the concrete floor, the cracks in it, and the carpet of brown pine needles. The battery would probably not last much longer.
He backed away to avoid the worst of the smell and because he did not want to accidentally see the state of Ejvor’s corpse. He did not want to see what had happened to her face.
He walked with his knees bent, sweeping the lamp across the floor and the walls, which were lined with concrete blocks. He saw an upturned freezer that someone had filled with twigs and leaves and moss, a blue or perhaps grey child-sized rocking chair, a barrel used as a toilet and a rusty floor drain. There was an armchair that sloped because the legs on one side were missing, and a twisted woollen blanket on a bed of brown spruce branches. Was this where the big trolls slept?
Every so often he caught a glittering pair of eyes that slid away, but they belonged to the small creatures. The largest thing he saw was a vole with its stumpy tail running past in a straight line as if it was on a tightrope.
Close to the staircase was a sink. It was made of stainless steel and reflected the beam of light as the head torch found it.
Above it was a mixer tap with a long, flattened handle, and the water pipe ran alongside the wall and disappeared into an ugly hole. He hurried up to it, pulled up the handle and drank. The water was so icy cold it made his teeth ache.
‘Signe,’ he hissed up the stairs. ‘There’s water here if you’re thirsty.’
Inger and Yngve Fredén said they were relieved the giant had gone and they had no plans to look for him. They did not even want to know what had happened to him. Now that the garage was empty they could not understand how they had managed to take care of him for so many years: cleaned him, given him food and guarded him. They had felt no affection for him, they realised that now. It had been something else, as if he had planted their fear inside them.
We were weary. At least, I was. I was tired of staying in hotels, and it was not exactly cheap. That is why I suggested with a long-drawn-out yawn that we ought to go home. It was only three hundred kilometres and we could manage that if we drove for an hour each. Then we would be able to sleep in our own beds and think about what we were going to do in peace and quiet. It might also be a good idea to talk to the police and find out what their thoughts were concerning the attack at Holmajärvi and the kidnapping of Mattias Mickelsson.
‘Home,’ Susso said, glaring at me coldly as she sat in the car with the squirrel in her arms. ‘You mean home where there are people who want to kill me, Mum?’
Yes, ‘Mum,’ she said, emphasising the word. How could I be longing for my own bed and my dog and my man when my own daughter’s life was in danger? I was ashamed of how selfish and stupid I was. For some reason I had thought the threat to Susso had vanished now that Mattias had been found, but clearly I knew nothing about it. It was like Susso said under those copper pans and Sami boots at Vippabacken. The people who had gone for her had probably done so because of her website.
It wasn’t about the boy. It was about her.
And the only thing we could do was track down the bear. With a little luck that would lead us to Mattias’s kidnappers, as well as the people who wanted Susso dead. And that mig
ht also give us an answer to what had happened to Mona’s son.
So we drove to a hotel in Älvsbyn.
Next morning, after I had showered and taken my last clean blouse out of the case, I went down to breakfast, where Susso was sitting with a bowed head, dropping pinches of muesli into the front pocket of her jacket.
‘Are you mad?’ I said, standing right in front of her. ‘Think if someone sees you! We’ll be thrown out!’
But the thought of being discovered with a rodent in her pocket in a restaurant didn’t seem to worry her in the slightest. It was as if she hadn’t heard me.
Torbjörn was slouched opposite her, drinking coffee and reading the Kuriren, so I turned to him and asked if there was anything new in the papers. He told me Susso had spoken to a man called Eskilsson at the council’s environmental protection agency. He was a forest ranger in northern Västerbotten, and that morning he had received a phone call from a church warden who had found fresh bear tracks in the area around Lake Storavan. They ran in a westerly direction over the ice just north of the headland where Bergnäs was situated, and according to Eskilsson, who had already been to the site and checked the tracks, there was no doubt it was the same bear that had been observed in the forest clearing north of Glottje. He thought it seemed strange that it had not found a new place to hibernate yet. Bears that wake in the middle of winter usually curl up under the first available fir tree or simply dig themselves down in the snow, but because this one had done neither they were keeping an eye on it. If it was feeling stressed for some reason, or sick, it could be dangerous.
‘If only he knew,’ I said, looking over at the breakfast buffet. People were queuing there, helping themselves, and that was making me feel stressed.
‘So we thought we should head in that direction,’ he said. ‘Because it seems he knows where he’s going, and it isn’t far from Sorsele. So that might be something, considering that was where Mattias turned up.’