The Lost Village

by Sten, Camilla

  When he turns around, the naked fear in his once so calm and collected exterior makes him look like someone else. His freckles blaze against his pale skin.

  “Where are they?” he asks me helplessly.

  I look around at the empty square. At the heather between the cobblestones, the white stucco walls of the village hall, the wide-open school doors.

  “Shit,” I splutter, wiping my forehead. What an idiot. I should have seen this coming.

  “Emmy must have taken Tone to the hospital,” I say.

  Robert looks baffled, but relief has already started to smooth out the desperation between his eyebrows.

  My jaw is tensed, but I’m trying not to let my anger come through. I can’t lose control. Not now.

  “Without saying anything?” Max asks.

  “They probably tried to,” says Robert, sounding more confident with every word. “But if the walls blocked the walkie-talkie signal…”

  “We know they didn’t,” says Max. “I don’t think—”

  “They were probably in a hurry,” I say, interrupting him.

  My anger is wrestling with my relief and bad conscience.

  Gutless, so damn gutless. I’ve thought many things of Emmy in my time, but never that.

  At the same time, she’s always been blessed with a winner’s mentality. For her, it’s goals over everything else. She wanted to get Tone to a hospital, and I wasn’t playing ball. So she put herself in a position where I’m out of the way. Simple.

  But who knows, maybe it’s a good thing. I can’t deny I was worried. And, much as I try not to let it, the odd thought had crossed my mind.

  Is she still taking her meds?

  We can do this without Tone, I tell myself. We can shoot without her. We can get enough material to keep the project afloat without her. What does it matter if she goes home a few days early? She won’t like it, but it’s better that way. She can be with us for the real shoot instead.

  When I first hear the sound, I don’t understand what it is, but then I look up at the road. Out of the corners of my eyes I see Max and Robert do the same.

  It’s the sound of an engine.

  When the van appears on the other side of the square it looks almost animated, so out of place against the still backdrop that it seems to belong to another time entirely. Which, I suppose, it does.

  I see Emmy in the driver’s seat. She turns the wheel and slows even more, so that the van’s jostle over the broken cobblestones turns into a slow trot. She pulls up and maneuvers in perfectly next to the other van, then undoes her seat belt.

  “OK,” she says as she slips out of the van. “I’m sorry. I can explain. I…”

  She looks at us and then around. Her eyes land on the other van and its gaping back doors. Slowly—slowly—they pan back to us and stop on me.

  “Where’s Tone?” she asks.

  NOW

  It takes me a few seconds to find my voice. Max gets there before I do.

  “Isn’t she with you?”

  Emmy stares at us blankly, as if expecting us to say it’s all a joke, or Tone to jump out from between us and tell her she’s been pranked.

  “No,” she says, shaking her head. She looks at the other van. “No, she was … she was here, she…”

  I blink and look from Emmy to the van, then the rest of the square.

  “What do you mean?” I ask. “Didn’t you go to the hospital?”

  Emmy licks her chapped lips and looks at us.

  “No, I…” She looks around. “She was here when I left, it was less than two hours ago.”

  I know it’s just a vain hope, but I stride over to the tent and fling open the door.

  It’s empty. Of course it is.

  I stand up, the seriousness of the situation hitting me like a hammer to the head. I almost buckle under its force.

  “So where the fuck have you been?” I ask Emmy.

  Emmy doesn’t reply. She steps back from the van and, raising her voice as though she doesn’t quite trust it, says:

  “Tone? Hello?”

  The silence rings in my ears.

  “Emmy,” I say. Just uttering her name makes my teeth ache. “If you didn’t take Tone to the hospital then where have you been?”

  Before she can respond—if she had even intended to—Robert asks her:

  “How long did it take? How long were you gone?”

  Something about his voice doesn’t sit. The way he’s standing. The way his chin is pulled in toward his chest. The absence of surprise in his voice.

  “What have you guys done?” I whisper.

  “What had to be done!” Emmy cries. Her eyes have gone from glassy to wild, and her red ponytail is gleaming like a traffic light in the sun.

  “And what was that?” Max asks.

  Emmy doesn’t look at him when she replies. She’s looking at me.

  “Someone had to do something, Alice,” she says. “You wouldn’t listen.”

  I just shake my head. A short, gnarled laugh slips out of me.

  “Of course,” I say. “Clearly this is all my fault. Right?”

  “There’s somebody here, Alice!” Emmy hurls out of her mouth.

  Her words make me stop short.

  “What?” I ask, staring at her.

  “There’s something wrong with all of this,” says Emmy. “Fucking wrong. I know you saw somebody yesterday when you were in your van. And I saw somebody staring at me that first night. And other stuff, too—both Robert and I have heard things.”

  She shakes her head.

  “And now with Tone only getting worse … I didn’t want to force her to get help, but I couldn’t sit by and do nothing. We’re completely cut off here—I had to do something.”

  Emmy purses her pale, determined lips.

  “I wasn’t even gone two hours. OK? Tone was asleep when I left. We had more than enough gas—I didn’t waste anything. I just wanted to get out of the dead zone to make a phone call.”

  “To?”

  The short word bulks in my mouth.

  I see Emmy swallow.

  “My mom,” she says. “You know she’s a nurse. I wanted to ask about Tone’s foot. And to have some contact with the outside world. Just in case anything happens. We’re so fucking helpless here—no phones, no way of calling for help.…”

  “So what you’re saying,” I say, articulating slowly and carefully, “is that you were so worried about something happening here that you just took off and left Tone sick, alone, and asleep? For a few hours?”

  This may be the first time I’ve ever left Emmy speechless. Her hands are dangling at her sides, her palms facing out, pale and exposed.

  It gives me no satisfaction.

  “And now she’s gone,” I finish, both a judgment and statement of fact.

  “Maybe we’re overreacting,” Max offers. “You know, she might have just needed the bathroom.”

  “Then she would’ve heard us,” I say. “We’ve been here almost half an hour.”

  “But her foot’s hurt,” says Max. “What if she just went to pee somewhere, lost her balance, and can’t get up again? That wouldn’t be so strange.”

  He puts his hand on my arm.

  “Come on,” he says. “Let’s go look for her. I’m sure we’ll find her in no time. I’ll go with you.” He cups his hand gently around my elbow, as if to hold me up.

  I shake my head.

  “No,” I say, nodding at Emmy. “Go with her. Keep an eye on her. Someone has to stop her from taking off with one of the vans again.”

  I’m expecting anger, but Emmy just stands still. Then she looks at Robert.

  “It’s OK. You go with Alice,” she says. “The important thing is that we find Tone before she does herself any harm.”

  NOW

  “Tone!” I shout, turning off down an alley. Robert takes my arm. His grip is cautious, but I still feel myself recoil.

  “It’ll be easier if we do it systematically,” he says. “Check street by
street. Otherwise we might miss her.”

  His voice is mild. It feels like a provocation.

  I stop and look at him.

  “Did you know Emmy was going to take off?”

  He hesitates, shifty-eyed. His pupils look tiny in his hazelnut irises.

  The feeling that comes over me is something close to disgust.

  “Of course you did,” I say.

  If only Emmy hadn’t offered to stay. Max or I could have stayed with Tone. If only Emmy had just told me she wanted to go call somebody, told me she was worried. I would have said yes.

  Wouldn’t I?

  The sunlight stings my eyes. The walls of the buildings feel like they start to close in, tightening and contracting. Soon we’ll be completely swallowed up. We’ll sink down into the soil, grow into the walls, coalesce with the decay and the silence. Like Tone. Like Aina, and Elsa, and Staffan.

  There won’t be any trace of us.

  I try to shake off these thoughts. They’re morbid; they won’t help.

  “Tone!” Robert shouts. His voice is clearer and less desperate than mine, but maybe that’s a bad thing; maybe that means it doesn’t travel as far.

  My nerves feel brittle as singed hairs, shriveled and tender under my skin. My ears seem unnaturally sensitive. It’s as though each distended second is the one before I’ll suddenly hear her cry: “Here!” weakly and pitifully, her voice flecked with pain.

  She must have fallen on that foot and hurt it even more; she’s probably lying on the ground somewhere, tears in her eyes, teeth clenched.

  As soon as we find her we’re getting the hell out of here. Getting her to a hospital. Leaving this damn place behind.

  The buildings rise up on either side of us, deceitfully idyllic. I scamper across the road, ruthlessly trampling down the shoots of blue scilla and crocuses that have painstakingly set their roots in the dusty, compressed earth. The rusty mailboxes stand crooked and warped on thin wooden posts, like speared shrunken heads with metal numbers for faces. 16. 17. 18.

  “Tone!”

  My voice has started to falter. Do I really think she’s going to respond?

  Where could she be?

  Against my will, I hear that strange laugh from the video echoing softly in my head; see the figure in the rain in my mind. And there it is—the thought I don’t want to acknowledge.

  We’re not alone here.

  I can’t even approach the idea that Silvertjärn, my desolate, deserted Silvertjärn, may not be so deserted after all. That something has been lying in wait here. That that something—or someone—has taken Tone and is lurking in the shadows, perhaps even watching us right now.

  The exposed skin on my arms starts to prickle.

  Robert catches up with me, and I stop outside a grayish white cottage. The white plastic window box that once hung from the windowsill is cracked and lopsided.

  When I close my eyes, the frenzied April sun shines straight through my eyelids.

  Robert puts his hand on my shoulder. I flit it off and shake my head.

  “No,” I say.

  “She didn’t mean any harm,” says Robert, and I open my eyes.

  “What?”

  “Emmy and I did talk about it before,” he says, quietly. There’s a hesitancy in his voice.

  “I knew what she was going to do. She was worried. She said she didn’t know if you’d listen to her, so … She was just worried about Tone, I swear.”

  He looks so sincere, so nakedly honest. I don’t know if I believe him, but he has the sort of face that makes you want to trust him, want to believe him.

  I don’t reply. Instead I look up at the street, take a deep breath, and shout:

  “Tone! Tone, can you hear me? It’s Alice! TONE!”

  Not a sound; nothing but the wheeze of my breaths and the whistle of the wind through the broken windowpanes.

  I can’t keep still. I look up and down the street, and then start heading back toward the crossing. When the sun hits my eyes I shield them with my hand, then stop and squint down the other street.

  That’s when it happens. Right then, in that saturated silence.

  For one instant, reality freezes. Time shatters into milliseconds. One frame where I stop. One where I raise my hands to my ears. One where I crouch down low, hunch my back. One where I screw up my eyes, trying to close off my senses to the overwhelming noise. A bellow resounding through the village.

  It’s an explosion. And it’s in the square.

  NOW

  I smell the smoke before I see it.

  The harsh, piercing odor makes me cough as we run. I’m pretty fit, but I’m soon left breathless and lagging behind, and Robert isn’t waiting for me.

  Up ahead of us the thick, black smoke is soaring up over the square.

  Robert doesn’t care about me, or Tone, or himself. He’s running to Emmy.

  I take a few deep breaths, cough into my hand as the smoke sinks deep into my lungs, then try to catch up.

  The square looks like something out of a war film. The sooty, black remains of one of the vans lie strewn across the square.

  Our things are still burning; it’s from them that the puffs of smoke are surging up into the sky. The second van has flipped onto its side. Its white body is flecked with black soot, and the wheels appear to have melted in the heat.

  The shock waves have thrust Max’s Volvo into the side of the village hall. Its crumpled blue body looks like it’s been squeezed by a giant’s hand.

  Most of the heather has caught fire, and it burns in shifty, slight flames that seem to be gasping for air.

  My ears are still ringing.

  Across the square, I see Emmy and Max run up and then stop in their tracks. Emmy’s hair has fallen out of its ponytail and sprawls, red and ruffled, around her head. Even from across the chaos, I can tell when her eyes meet mine.

  Our things are still burning steadily, but by now they have started to blacken and shrivel in the flames. I can barely make out what’s what.

  “Emmy!” Robert cries, her name tearing out of his throat.

  Emmy takes Max’s arm and says something to him. Then they cautiously start edging around the square toward us, keeping their distance from the flames still licking the cobblestones.

  When they near us, Robert runs forward. He hugs Emmy so hard that it looks like she’s about to snap. Emmy hugs him back, her eyes closed. Neither of them says a word.

  I feel a strange ache inside me, made only worse when Max gives me a hug. It feels weird, and wrong, and I pull back.

  Emmy lets go of Robert and locks her eyes on me.

  “We can’t stay here,” she says. “The other van could blow.”

  “What the fuck is happening?” I ask. I don’t know if I’m directing this at Emmy, one of the others, or at Silvertjärn itself.

  “I don’t know,” says Emmy. “But we’ve got to get to safety first. Then we can try to figure it out.”

  She sweeps her hair behind her ears and looks at Robert, who nods.

  There’s a sound of metal cracking as something in the burning van gives out.

  I don’t know how explosions work. All I know is I that want away from that van. I’ve heard that it isn’t the fire you need to worry about but the shock waves; that they can make soup of your internal organs.

  I don’t let myself dwell on that thought.

  Emmy starts running, and I follow her.

  THEN

  “Elsa!” she hears Dagny calling behind her. She hesitates, almost considers pretending she hasn’t heard, but plain, simple good manners get the better of her. She turns around.

  Dagny is, as usual, rather well dressed for a stroll through town, wearing a tight skirt, an ostentatious brooch on the collar of her coat, and dark lipstick that has smudged slightly at the corners of her mouth. She used to be the village beauty—and is of course still very elegant—but the years have taken their toll on her. She and her husband have no children, and Elsa suspects that it isn’t for
want of trying. Sadness has made its mark, giving her a hard, lacquered appearance, like a beautiful vase in brittle porcelain.

  “Good afternoon,” says Elsa when Dagny catches up with her. “How are you?”

  Dagny gestures at the cold gray sky, more fitting for January than April.

  “Oh, you know. The weather’s just frightful,” she says, as though it were a personal affliction, rather than one felt by the whole village. “And how are you?”

  Elsa isn’t sure what to say. How is she, really? Her youngest daughter is refusing to speak to her, her husband has turned to the bottle, her firstborn is laid up with preeclampsia hundreds of miles away, and she can’t be at her side because she doesn’t dare leave her charge alone, not even for a few days.

  “Fine,” she says. “Just fine.”

  “Have you seen the Axelssons’ dog?” asks Dagny. It appears she’s planning to walk with Elsa all the way back to her house.

  “No,” Elsa says. “Should I have?”

  Dagny shakes her head.

  “Ran away a few days ago, apparently,” she says. “That’s what they’re saying, at least. Personally, I think we have bears in the forest.”

  “Bears?” Elsa asks.

  “Yes.” Dagny nods insistently. “Klaes Ekman’s dog disappeared a few weeks ago, too. Ran away, he says. Not so cut up about it all, though, is he, as it was mainly to keep the rats at bay, but I think the bears took them. I have a cousin up in Lapland who lost a dog to bears last winter. Because they’re short on food, you see.”

  “But surely that happens mainly in winter?” Elsa can’t help but ask. “Not spring?”

  “Eh,” Dagny says with a dismissive wave of the hand. “With weather like this I suppose it makes no difference.”

  Elsa is itching to tell Dagny why she’s wrong, but she doesn’t have it in her to explain bears’ responses to the seasons to Dagny today.

  By now they are approaching Dagny’s house, and she slows down. Elsa feels compelled to do the same.

  “Now, there was something I wanted to talk to you about, Elsa,” Dagny says, looking slightly discomfited. “You see, there’s been rather a din coming from Birgitta’s hut of late.”