It’s never easy, the first child, especially when you’re as young as Elisabet. Only eighteen years old, and four months along when she and Albert got married. Barely older than Elsa’s Aina, and already a mother herself. It’s no wonder she became a little melancholic when the child was born, especially with Albert being unable to find any work. As they have no ties to Silvertjärn they really ought to move, much as the thought pains Elsa. What will happen to Silvertjärn when all the young people just up and leave?
It has already started to happen. Just weeks ago the Engelssons moved up north to Kiruna in search of work. They didn’t even wait to sell the house, so desperate were they to leave. It’s just standing there in the middle of the village, its windows dark and its doors shut, like a bad omen.
Elsa briskly climbs the church steps, adjusting her hat with her free hand as she goes. If his drinking is so bad that Einar can’t remember to close the church doors, then it’s high time they took action. It’s true he’s always enjoyed a tipple—including one memorable evening when they were young, when he got it into his head to strip off and run into the lake—but he has always kept it somewhat under control. He’s never had a wife nor children, so all he has is the church to tend to, but if he can’t do that anymore …
“Einar?” Elsa calls through the open doors. “It’s me, Elsa.”
It’s dark inside. The pews are cast in long shadows, and the carved Jesus above the altar looks unusually severe on his cross. Despite the gloom, she can make out movements up near the altar. She tries to discreetly kick the dirt off her shoes before stepping inside.
“Einar?” she calls again, but it doesn’t look like Einar. He lacks Einar’s shuffling gait and bulky figure.
The man now walking down the aisle toward her is neatly dressed in a casual shirt and well-ironed trousers. He’s considerably younger than Einar—can scarce be more than thirty—with short blond hair that curls slightly over his forehead. A shy smile plays on his face.
“Fru Kullman?” he asks, taking Elsa’s hand. His grip is steady, cool, and slightly dry, and as she shakes his hand Elsa tries to place him, but she has never seen his face before.
“I don’t believe we’ve met,” she says.
“Oh, I do beg your pardon,” he replies, shaking his head. “But you are Elsa, are you not? Elsa Kullman?”
Elsa nods, extricating her hand from his.
“How…?”
“Einar has told me so much about you,” he says with another smile, wider this time.
“I’m pleased to hear that,” says Elsa, a certain sharpness to her voice. “But you still haven’t introduced yourself.”
He blushes slightly, seemingly embarrassed; this says something good about his upbringing, at least.
“Oh, I do beg your pardon,” he says. “Sometimes in my excitement I quite forget my manners. Mattias is my name. I’m the new pastor.”
Elsa frowns.
“The new pastor?”
He nods.
“I shall be helping Einar. Times are tough, and Einar—well, when Einar…”
He stammers slightly and trails off, and Elsa shakes her head.
“I know about Einar,” she says, to put him at ease. He seems to relax slightly.
“How long have you been in our village, Pastor?” she asks. He makes as though to reply but then cuts himself off, gesticulating at the doors.
“Won’t you come in?” he asks. “I wouldn’t want you to catch pneumonia for me having kept you here in this draught.”
Elsa follows him inside the church. It looks as though he’s been cleaning the altar, a task which, she admits, has been long overdue.
“Would you care for something to drink, Fru Kullman?” he asks. She starts to shake her head but then stops; she is actually rather cold.
“I was just about to put on a fresh pot of coffee,” he says, as though reading her mind. She smiles.
“A cup of coffee would go down well,” she admits.
Elsa has been inside Einar’s study in the chapel many times, but as she steps inside now it looks different. It’s clean and tidy, with everything in its rightful place, and the subtle yet unmistakable scent of schnapps that usually hangs in the air is gone.
The young pastor puts a pot of coffee on the stovetop and pulls out a chair for her. She sits down on the familiar, all-too-stingily stuffed seat and waits while he putters around the room, arranging papers and adjusting the curtains. She finds it rather endearing, the way he attends to the room with an almost matronly care.
“If you don’t mind me asking, is this your first placement?” Elsa asks, as the young man pours coffee into Einar’s small, chipped cups.
He smiles and places a cup before her.
“Of course I don’t mind, Fru Kullman, there’s no need for such formality with me,” he says, before hastily adding, “unless, of course, you prefer it that way.”
“In that case, you can call me Elsa,” she says, then smiles. He can’t be more than ten or twelve years her junior, but this young pastor inspires something almost maternal in her.
“Where’s Einar?” she asks, lifting the coffee cup to her lips. It’s good—strong and piping hot. Better than what Einar normally makes.
“He’s asleep in the parsonage,” says the young pastor. “I think—hmm … sadly I think he had a rather heavy night last night.”
“Perhaps having you here to help him will do him good,” she says.
“I hope to lighten his load wherever I can,” says the pastor. His eyes are gray, Elsa now sees, with dark rings around his irises. Perhaps it’s those eyes that make him seem so charming. They’re big and round like a child’s, and they make him look younger than he surely must be.
“What was it you wanted to see Einar about?” the pastor asks. “Perhaps it’s something I might be able to assist you with?”
Yes, perhaps you can, she thinks.
Einar had used to help Elsa with any tasks that needed seeing to in the village; he would talk sense into men who didn’t treat their wives properly, offer a shoulder to cry on to those who were bereaved and needed to talk. Einar had never been particularly sharp, it was true, but his heart was good and his faith sincere. In recent years, however, his drinking had worsened. Elsa had had to bear a greater share of the load.
“One of the older women in the village, Agneta Lindberg, is very unwell,” Elsa begins. “I fear she may not be long of this earth.”
He looks at her intently.
“How old is she?” he asks.
“Sixty-seven,” she says. “She has cancer. Of the stomach. She’s afraid, and I think she ought to speak to someone who can allay her fears. She isn’t afraid of death; she’s afraid of … well…”
He nods slowly. His big, light-gray eyes don’t leave hers, and she feels something within her lift.
She can trust him. He can help her.
“She’s afraid of what comes next,” he says, finishing her sentence. “And you would like someone to hold her hand and soothe her fears. Tell her about the kingdom that awaits her after death, and God the Father who will receive her.”
“Yes, exactly,” says Elsa. “Just to calm her. Reassure her.”
He gives a faint smile.
“If you feel it would be appropriate,” he says, “then I would be most happy to do that in Einar’s place.”
Elsa returns his smile.
“I think that might be good,” she says.
NOW
A loud scream yanks me out of my sleep.
Being woken by a scream is like the feeling of crushing glass with your bare hands: instantaneous, distinct, painful. My pulse starts racing and, still half asleep, I fumble with my sleeping bag, trying to make anything out in the darkness.
It’s only once I’ve scrambled out of the tent that I realize I was the only one inside it.
The night air is still, the silence compact; for a few seconds the only sound I can hear is the frenzied pounding of my own heart. But then: the
unmistakable sound of van doors opening.
By now my eyes have adjusted well enough to the weak moonlight to pick out Emmy as she stumbles out of the back of the van. Her hair is dangling messily around her shoulders, and she isn’t wearing any pants—just a pair of underwear and the big, white T-shirt she had on yesterday. The cobblestones must feel just as cold to her bare feet as they do to mine. The dampness of the dewy moss between the stones is already working its way up between my toes.
“Did you hear it, too?” I ask her as I see Robert jump out of the van behind her. Emmy doesn’t look at him. She has already marched off toward the front of the van and the school.
“Emmy?” I say, as Robert starts running after her.
I don’t feel I have any choice but to do the same.
As I round the van, I see that Emmy has stopped after just a few steps. She’s panting—shallow, scratchy breaths that echo my own—and her eyes are darting around the empty square. Bright and glossy in the cold light of the crescent moon, they flit from the blue Volvo where Max is sleeping to the school building, and then on to the greenery shooting up between the cobblestones.
Robert stops behind her and gently places his hand on her shoulder. Hesitantly, as though stroking a frightened dog. When he touches her, she doesn’t recoil.
“Emmy, what is it?”
It’s only then that it clicks.
“Was it you who screamed?” I ask.
I hadn’t recognized the scream as Emmy’s; every screaming voice sounds the same. But now, as she turns around to face us, I realize it must have been her.
“I saw someone,” she says, and I can’t tell if she’s very pale, or if all of us look like monochrome ghosts out here in the square.
“There was someone there,” she says, turning to look back at the school.
“Where?” Robert asks. “In the school?”
Emmy shakes her head, puts her hand on the base of Robert’s spine, and steps toward him, seemingly subconsciously.
“No,” she says. “Here in the square. In front of our van.”
Her voice is thin and scratchy. At first I think it’s from irritation or sarcasm, but then it dawns on me that it’s fear.
She’s afraid.
“What exactly did you see?” I ask, suddenly very conscious of all the dark windows staring down at us, of all the dark alleys winding out of the square like threads in a cobweb. So many empty spaces. So many walls to hide behind.
Stop, I tell myself. There’s no one here.
Emmy looks at me.
“I woke up,” she says. “I heard something, so I got up to see what it was. There was someone standing in front of the van, looking at me.” She swallows.
“Did you see who it was?” asks Robert.
“No,” says Emmy. “It was too dark. It was just a silhouette, but it was definitely a person. I could see their eyes. They were looking straight at me.” She swallows again.
“Whoever it was, they saw me.”
I shake my head, my skin crawling.
“It might not have been anyone,” I say. “It sounds a little like sleep paralysis. People often see hazy dark figures watching them when they’re just waking up and the brain—”
“I know what a fucking sleep paralysis is, Alice,” Emmy hisses, interrupting me. “This wasn’t it. I was standing up. I was awake. I saw them.”
I open my mouth to reply, but then freeze. There, on the other side of the square. By the corner of the school. There’s someone standing there.
A slim, dark figure. Unmistakably human.
I try to say something—anything—frenetically tell myself:
There’s no one here. There’s no one here. There’s no one here.
But the figure doesn’t disappear when I blink.
It starts walking toward us. I’m the only one who’s seen it—both Emmy and Robert are facing me. And in that moment, I make an unexpected and unwelcome discovery about myself. I’ve always seen myself as the sort of person who would be proactive in a crisis—the one to run, scream, fight—but now, when it actually comes down to it, I can’t even get a word out to warn the others.
But then the figure steps into the moonlight, and its features fall into place.
My knees turn to jelly, and I can’t help laughing out of pure relief.
“What the fu—” Emmy begins, her face contorted in a mix of outrage and confusion, but I point over her shoulder.
“Tone!” I call out, just to make sure.
She replies:
“Oh. Hey.”
She’s bundled up in her jacket, her long, bare legs sticking out of a pair of rubber boots. When she stops a few feet away from us, I can make out the bleary look in her eyes, the shock on her face.
Tone looks at Emmy, and then me, and says:
“This some sort of midnight conference?”
I shake my head.
“I think you gave Emmy a fright,” I say. “Did you go to pee?”
“Yup,” Tone says. “But what do you mean?”
“She must have seen you walking across the square,” I say. “She thought she saw someone staring at the van.”
Emmy still hasn’t said a thing. She studies Tone with narrowed eyes.
“Oh,” says Tone. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to wake you.”
“Did you stop in front of the van?” Emmy asks, her voice hollow.
“No,” says Tone. “Or—I don’t know. I hadn’t quite woken up. I might have been looking around to see where to go.”
“You were right, Emmy,” I say with a shrug. “It wasn’t sleep paralysis. But it was no ghost, either.”
I yawn into the back of my hand. The combination of the rude awakening, fear, and then relief has brought a new wave of tiredness rolling over me.
“I never said it was a ghost,” Emmy says without looking at me, a certain roughness to her voice.
“What I saw was standing still,” she continues, now looking at Robert. “It was staring straight at the van. At me.”
My exhaustion makes me snap.
“Oh, come on,” I say. “You’d just woken up, you saw Tone, freaked out, thought you were seeing some mystical being, and screamed. It’s not so hard to explain. Now let’s go get some sleep—we have a long day tomorrow.”
Emmy’s face is a mask of jagged shadows. I don’t have the energy to hang around and let this turn into an argument.
When I’m almost back at the tent I throw a glance over my shoulder at the vans. Emmy and Robert are still standing there, shadows glinting in the night. Robert has put his arm around Emmy’s shoulders, and it looks as though Emmy is saying something to him, but she’s whispering so quietly that I can’t hear. Both of them are looking up at the school.
I turn and climb back into the tent.
WEDNESDAY
NOW
I’m the first to wake up, although I can’t have had more than a couple of hours’ sleep. I’ve always been an early riser. It’s worse when I’m hungover—then I can’t even sleep past dawn. I just lie there with my eyes wide open, my mouth dry, and my heart pounding, until I eventually give up and drag myself out into the kitchen, ready for a long and restless day.
But not today. No: today I have butterflies in my stomach and a tingle in my palms and feet, despite the events of last night.
Today we explore.
I crawl out of my sleeping bag as quietly as I can, pull on the thick sweater I’m using as a pillow, and unzip the tent door. The air out here is colder than the heavy, sleep-stale air warmed by our dozing bodies in the tent; out here it’s crisp and cool, like frosted glass.
I inhale deeply, drinking it in.
The sun has just crept up over the horizon, and the blush of dawn gives the village a pinky tint. In the light of this new day the village looks magical—playful and ethereal. Enough to make me wish I could use the cameras. It would have been nice to explore the alleyways by myself in this silence, to capture the village as I see it now, this first morning. Dormant
and untouched. It’s like a living photograph, a relic of a bygone age.
The campfire is by now nothing but ash and charcoal on the cobblestones. I cast my gaze up at the derelict school façade, then on to the silhouette of the church as it soars above the roofs, its outline crisp and clean against the distant forest.
I feel a lump in my throat.
I can hear my grandmother’s voice, like an echo in my ears.
“The last time I saw my sister, Aina, she was only seventeen.”
When I was little, I used to think her tales of Silvertjärn were just that: stories like any other. It wasn’t until much later that I realized not only were they real, they were the ruins on which she had built her entire life. She was a strong woman, my grandmother, with steady hands and broad shoulders, and eyes that would latch onto whoever she was talking to, no matter who that was. As though she wanted to make sure she always got the whole truth. Nothing made Grandma as furious as lies, however minor or unintentional they might have appeared.
“We’re going to find out, Grandma,” I say quietly to myself. “You and me.”
She always looked you straight in the eye. Except, that is, for when she talked about Silvertjärn. Then she would look away, her eyes fixed on the horizon.
I was eighteen when I moved to Stockholm to train as a nurse. My sister, Aina, was twelve. At that point the Silvertjärn mine was thriving.
My family still lived in the same house I grew up in. It was a little yellow house by the river, just a few streets down from the church. All of the houses on that street were yellow, but ours was the only one with a green door. As a girl I was always so proud of that green door. It made me feel special.
I would go back and visit whenever I’d saved up enough for the train tickets. In those days people didn’t fly around willy-nilly like they do now; there were two trains to Silvertjärn a week, and if the timings weren’t convenient then you would just have to make do. The tickets weren’t cheap, either.
The Lost Village Page 5