The Lost Village

by Sten, Camilla

  The small window between the driver’s seat and the cargo compartment has been blown out—either in the explosion or when the van flipped—but the empty window frame is completely blocked. Something has wedged itself up against the opening, and it doesn’t want to shift. I assume it’s a tripod or something.

  Is this all that’s left of my dream?

  No. I can’t think like that now, can’t let the sadness set in. Because with that will come the fear. The shame. The anxiety. Black, oozing tar.

  I have to focus on what needs to get done.

  I shift backward so the dashboard is against my back, then put my feet up against whatever it is that’s blocking the opening, and press as hard as I can. For a moment I think my back’s about to give way—my muscles are strained to the point of snapping, and the sweat is beading on my forehead—but then a split second later the whole shebang suddenly shoots out of the way like a cannonball. There’s a huge clatter as the heap blocking the empty window frame subsides, and I instinctively curl up with my arms over my head.

  “Alice!” I hear Emmy cry outside.

  “I’m OK!” I call back, surprised she would raise her voice.

  I squeeze in through the hole and feel my way around the piles of equipment. The windshield cracked in an elaborate star pattern in the blast, and was then covered by a layer of soot from the fire, so it lets hardly any light into the back compartment. I can’t tell what it is I’m crawling over, only that it’s plastic and metal, sharp corners and wires. I wonder how much of it held in the explosion. Presumably very little.

  The generator is a small, sturdy cube, and I do my best to grope around for something of that shape. One of my feet slips, and my knee knocks against something sharp, so hard that I see stars. I whimper quietly and grab my knee. My pants have held, at least. The knock can’t have broken the skin.

  I wish I could see better.

  I consider getting out my cell to try to use the flashlight, but then I remember my dead battery. That’s why I’m in here, duh, to try to get out the generator to charge Max’s phone. To get out of here. Away from this fucking place.

  And then, in the darkness, I hear it.

  At first it sounds like no more than the echo of my own breaths on the walls, but then I hear that slight, oh-so slight, disparity; the other’s breaths are shallower and slightly faster, falling out of step with mine until the rhythm becomes something dissonant.

  My feet have started to fall asleep in the awkward position I’m in, but I don’t dare move. It’s all in my head. I know it’s all in my head.

  My body is acting without me.

  I hold my breath.

  Still I hear them, those scratchy, shallow breaths.

  I feel a tiny thread of urine run down my thigh and wet my jeans.

  Slowly but surely my eyes start to adjust to the darkness. There’s too little light to be able to see anything clearly, but some contours start to emerge. Something lies by the broken doors. Something with soft, elongated lines that isn’t a camera tripod or a generator or a cooler.

  Something moving.

  “Tone?” I whisper.

  And then I hear it—there, in the darkness.

  A short, muffled laugh that whisks against my eardrum.

  An icy, blazing shock of survival instinct runs through my body like a tornado, snapping me out of my paralysis. It tears out of me as a bellow and pushes me backward, fumbling, scrabbling, beating, as I fight and kick my way out, away, back to the driver’s seat, struggling with a desperation I’ve never felt before. I’m senseless, frantic, an animal fleeing for its life, and there’s not a single thought in my mind, only the mortal fear that has commandeered my instincts and is threatening to burst from my skull.

  I squeeze my way through the hole between the seats and pull myself up out of the door with a strength that makes my muscles strain and burst, a strength I didn’t know myself capable of. I shuffle and slide off the edge of the van and onto the ground, landing on the cobblestones with a jolt I feel right up my spine. I shouldn’t be able to move—I can’t, really—but somehow I scramble back to my feet and start running.

  I only make it a few feet before I’m grabbed from behind.

  NOW

  “Alice! What are you doing?”

  I try to wrest back my hand, but the grip around my wrist is tight. Slowly my pulse starts to calm. I turn to see Emmy staring at me.

  “Alice?” I hear Max call from by the Volvo.

  The world begins to fall into place around me again.

  “Alice, what is it?” Emmy asks, letting go of my wrist. She studies me, her eyebrows slightly furrowed.

  “What happened?”

  I swallow and look at the van. It’s lying exactly where it was, a sooty, wounded giant. I realize that my foot hurts; I must have landed badly when I jumped off the van.

  “There…” I begin, my voice thin and distant.

  There’s someone in there.

  The words are on the tip of my tongue, but they don’t want to be articulated.

  I heard something in there. Someone.

  That wasn’t Tone.

  I did, didn’t I?

  My courage flails in my throat, then deserts me.

  I swallow.

  “I … couldn’t find the generator,” I splutter. “But everything was in pieces. I think it must be broken.”

  Emmy curses under her breath, then looks at me, hesitates.

  “Are you OK?” she asks. Her eyes feel like they’re grilling me.

  What will they say if I tell them I heard someone in there? Someone laughing? Someone who isn’t Tone?

  Or …

  Was it all in my head?

  I’ve never experienced psychosis, not like Tone. But her symptoms started as depression, and that I have had. I’ve been severely depressed. And Emmy didn’t listen to me then, either.

  There are no sounds coming from the van.

  I could ask them to check; to open the doors, crawl inside, and take a look for themselves. But I can just picture Emmy coming out again and saying, in her usual, measured tone:

  “There was nothing there. She was just seeing things. Hysterical.”

  I swallow.

  “I … got stuck,” I say. “Upside down. It was horrible. I didn’t think I’d get out.”

  “How did it go?” Robert asks behind me. By now he has also reached us. When I turn my head I see that he’s holding a long, white charger cable.

  “She says it looked like the generator didn’t make it,” Emmy says.

  He purses his lips.

  “Shit,” he says.

  “We should set up camp somewhere,” says Emmy. “Somewhere stable, sheltered. Then we can figure out what to do.”

  “Somewhere with doors,” Robert adds.

  Doors to shut out. And in.

  He doesn’t need to say it.

  Emmy squints up at the midday sun, then looks out over the village. The rays catch and gleam on the church’s cross, Silvertjärn’s highest point and polestar.

  “The church,” she says. “Let’s go to the church.”

  NOW

  “We have to barricade the doors,” Emmy says to Max and Robert. She doesn’t just say it, but walks up to one of the pews and takes hold of one end. She can hardly shift it—it looks like it’s solid oak—but Robert adds his weight, and together they manage to get it all the way over to the doors, with a horrible screech that echoes off the high ceiling.

  Robert takes a few steps back and looks at it.

  “Should be enough,” he says.

  “So what now?” Max asks.

  It’s Robert who answers.

  “If your mom was going to call the police after forty-eight hours, and you called her a few hours ago, they should be here in the morning of the day after tomorrow,” he says.

  “But that’s two days,” says Max. “And we have no food, or water…”

  “We can get water,” says Emmy. “From the river. At this time of y
ear it’ll be meltwater, so it should be clean.”

  “We could try to walk,” says Robert, some doubt in his voice. “But we have no compass, no proper shoes … we can try to follow the road, but it’s at least twenty-five, thirty miles to the nearest busy road. Further still to the nearest town.”

  “What about gas stations?”

  “The one we stopped at was a few hours away by car,” says Robert.

  Max isn’t looking at Robert. He’s looking at the oak pew barricading the church doors.

  My eyes are drawn to the carved Jesus above the altar. His eyes, deep-black and matte, almost look like they’re jeering. And his lips … don’t they look twisted into a disgusting, slick grin?

  “We can’t just leave her out there,” I say.

  I tear my eyes from the figure to look at Emmy. She shakes her head. Neither of the others say anything.

  “She’s probably scared. Terrified. And she’s all alone. She could hurt herself, she could…” I gulp.

  “What do you want us to do, Alice?” Emmy asks. “Comb Silvertjärn? We won’t find her if she doesn’t want to be found. And she’s dangerous. It isn’t safe.”

  “She’s not dangerous!” I explode.

  Some small, logical part of me knows this isn’t the best way to convince them, but I can’t help it. How can they just leave her out there? How can they see a monster in a sick, lone woman who doesn’t even know what she’s doing?

  “She blew up our vans, Alice!” Emmy says. Now she seems to have lost her patience, too. “It’s because of her that we’re stuck here!”

  “You don’t know that,” I say, shaking my head. “You don’t know that, you’re just guessing.”

  “Well, we wouldn’t have to do that if you’d cared to tell us your partner’s disturbed.”

  “She’s not disturbed,” I say. My voice is shaking. I try to swallow it down, steady myself. Hold in the anger, anchor myself to it. “She’s not disturbed. She’s sick. This is just an episode, and it…”

  It’s my fault.

  Emmy just shakes her head.

  “We’re staying here,” she says. “We’re waiting it out.”

  My teeth are clenched so hard my jaws hurt.

  “No,” I say.

  “OK,” says Emmy. “Then we’ll take a vote.”

  She looks at the others.

  “Hands up who votes to stay here till the police arrive.”

  I look at the other two. Robert raises his hand slowly, almost timidly. Max furrows his brow when he looks at me, but then raises his hand, too.

  For a moment I’m about to say something about the breaths I heard in the van, the ones still echoing, shallow and scratchy, in my head.

  But would they even listen to me now? Even if Emmy thought there was someone here before, why would she listen to me now, when I didn’t listen to her then? Or would they just think it was Tone in that van, even though every fiber of my being is telling me it wasn’t?

  I don’t even know that there was anything there myself: it could have been a moment’s madness, a figment of my imagination, born of Silvertjärn’s whispers in my ear.

  I say nothing.

  “So there we have it,” says Emmy.

  NOW

  I’m slumped down on one of the old Windsor chairs in the chapel. The seat cushion is moldy and half-disintegrated, and only the traces of a once-dainty floral pattern remain. The legs creaked when I dropped down onto it, but they held.

  Outside the window the sun has started its listless voyage down to the horizon, and my tired eyes have been following its journey. I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting here, but it can’t be more than an hour.

  I closed the door behind me when I came in, and so far no one has come after me. I’m not sure if I’m disappointed or not. The stillness in here is soothing, comforting; there’s nothing for me to rage against here. But at the same time this silence offers nothing to distract me from my thoughts.

  My thoughts of Tone. Of Silvertjärn. And, ashamed as I am to say it, of my film—the one that will never get made now. Perhaps that shouldn’t be playing on my mind when my whole world has capsized and nothing makes sense anymore, but it is. That one dream has been pushing me on for almost twenty years. And to suddenly lose it, when I was so close to making it happen, is like looking down at my legs only to find a bloody stump where one once was.

  The creak of the door behind me is enough to make me start and look around.

  “How are you holding up?” Max asks.

  He’s holding a half-empty bottle of water. Before I can answer, he comes in and closes the door behind him.

  “I thought you might want some water,” he says, taking a few cautious steps toward me.

  I feel uneasy being so much lower than him, so I get out of my chair. Max stops and gives me a quick smile, then holds out the water bottle.

  I hesitate but then take it, and drink thirstily. It’s warm and tastes of plastic, but it rinses the dry film from my mouth and throat, making me suddenly aware of how hungry I am.

  “I had it in my rucksack,” says Max. “A couple of protein bars, too, if you want.”

  I put down the bottle.

  “What do you want, Max?” I ask.

  My question comes out harsher than I’d intended, but I don’t regret it.

  “I just wanted to check you were OK,” he says.

  “No,” I say. “I’m not OK. None of this is OK. You can go now. Here.”

  I try to hand him the bottle, but he refuses to take it. There’s some tension around his mouth, and his big, sorry cow eyes look out at me from under a furrowed brow. His eyebrows are very thin, I notice. I’ve never realized that before. They look expressionless, like the painted lines on a doll’s face.

  “Are you mad at me?” he asks.

  All I can do is stare.

  Mad?” I say, with a scratchy laugh that edges toward a sob.

  “Alice, please,” he says, taking a few steps toward me, but I shake my head.

  “Mad doesn’t even come close,” I say. “I don’t get how you could do that, Max. Of everybody here…” My lips sting and fail me. I swallow.

  “Of everybody here I thought you were the one I could trust, Max. OK? I thought that no matter what, at least I’d have you.”

  When Max speaks, his voice is soft and reasoned. It’s a sharp contrast to my unsteady, emotional words.

  “I had to say something, Alice,” he says. “I had no choice. You know I’d never want to hurt you, never. But the others deserved to know.” The corners of his mouth turn downward.

  “It wasn’t my secret to tell,” I try to say. Again. Every time I say it, the words feel flimsier. Like paper folded over and over, until the fibers start to wear and tear along the fold.

  “But they deserved to know,” he says. “That’s why I said it.”

  Some of the things he’s saying make sense. Or at least partly: the others needed to know that Tone was sick, that she wasn’t well, wasn’t herself.

  “But now they think she’s dangerous. They want to just leave her out there, and she must be so scared.…”

  I shake my head.

  “It’s too dangerous, Alice,” says Max. “I know you say she isn’t dangerous, but she isn’t herself. And Silvertjärn is obviously having an effect on her. The best we can do for her is to get out of here and get help.”

  He takes a cautious step toward me.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you, you have to know that. I only did what had to be done.”

  I don’t want to hear this. However reasonable his words sound, I can still feel his betrayal all over my body. But, then again, how can I trust my instincts? So far nothing I’ve thought has proved true.

  “Come on, Alice,” he says, drawing my stiff body into a hug. He’s hot and sweaty under his dirty sweater, and the remnants of his deodorant find their way up my nose.

  “We’ll be out of here in no time,” he mumbles into my shoulder while squeezing me hard. �
��Soon all of this will be over. We’ll get through this.”

  I let myself be hugged, but can’t quite bring myself to hug him back.

  Eventually he lets go, then steps back, looks at me, and smiles.

  “Hungry?” he asks. “Let me go get you one of the protein bars.”

  I swallow and nod.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Thank you.”

  He leaves, closing the door behind him.

  I go back to my chair and sit down. The distaste I’ve just stifled has coagulated into something stiff and cold that makes my stomach ache. That or it’s just the hunger.

  Something pricks me from below. Cursing, I stand up and feel the seat. Nothing there.

  Then I realize I can still feel the same pricking feeling. It’s in my back pocket.

  I reach around and pull out a bundle of messy, crinkled sheets of paper.

  Oh. Of course. The papers from the chapel, the ones I found at this very table, half a lifetime ago. The ones I took from the van. My fingers blunt and unwieldy, I unfold and inspect them. At the top is that strange scribble, those clumsily childish doodles of spirals and stick figures. The papers have been practically destroyed by my rough treatment, and, as absurd as it is at a time like this, it pains me to see how badly they’ve fared.

  I hear the faint sounds of Max chatting to Robert out in the church, but in here everything is quiet. The light has shifted, from an afternoon sharpness to a golden early evening glow.

  Wait.

  I force myself to focus on them, those clumpy stick figures. They look like they were drawn in crayon, with an awkward hand. I stare at them.

  One of them has a big, black mouth like a hole. A void.

  The windows above the sink face east, toward the slowly setting sun. Over the graveyard.

  I look from the papers to the nondescript table by which we found them, vaguely aware of a mumbled conversation out in the church, and of an angel-faced man who sat at this very table some sixty years ago, writing and rewriting his sermon.