The Lost Village

by Sten, Camilla

  I’m not even sure if they follow the Christian doctrine anymore. They have started holding mass in

  Here the letter comes to an abrupt end. No period, no sign-off. As though she were interrupted mid-sentence, then shoved the letter at the bottom of her underwear drawer and never cared to finish it.

  Or never could.

  THEN

  She hesitates, her pen poised, before lowering it again.

  I’m not even sure if they follow the Christian doctrine anymore, she writes. When the words finally come, they do so in a swinging, flurried hand that is quite unlike her own. She doesn’t know how much she should tell Margareta.

  Margareta has always been like Elsa: decisive. If Elsa says too much she fears it will bring Margareta storming up to Silvertjärn herself, but at the same time she has to say something. She must tell someone what has been happening. She can’t take this anymore.

  Until a few short days ago, Elsa had thought she could get through this herself, that it would pass.

  But then she had come home one day to find Staffan waiting for her at the kitchen table. He wanted to talk to her, he said. His eyes were glassy but he didn’t smell of drink, and initially that had been a relief. For a moment Elsa had hoped it meant he had pulled himself together, grasped the seriousness of their situation.

  Elsa feels almost physically sick when she recalls the hope that budded within her as she sat down opposite her husband at the kitchen table, her hands clasped in front of her, the air thick with the heady scent of the late summer heat.

  When Staffan told her that it had to stop, Elsa couldn’t agree more. She was about to say that they had to do something about Aina, to get her to see sense, but he went on before she could get a word out:

  “You must be reasonable—stop challenging the pastor,” he said. “Folk have started talking, Elsie. Enough, now. Enough.”

  In that instant she had felt her heart split in two. He had looked at her with flat, angry eyes, as though looking not at her but at a stranger. Someone who meant nothing to him. Someone he scorned.

  The next night he hadn’t come home at all.

  When evensong had swept over Silvertjärn, Elsa had thought, impossible as it was, that she could hear Staffan’s voice among them.

  They have started holding mass in

  The front door slams downstairs, and she stops writing.

  “Staffan?” she ventures to ask, but his name sounds flimsy and washed-out on her lips. Her voice falters.

  Elsa hears steps and stands up. Quickly shuffling the letter together on the desk, she looks for somewhere to hide it.

  She opens the wardrobe and shoves it down the side of her underwear drawer, then closes the wardrobe door just as someone calls her name.

  She steps away from the wardrobe. The bedroom door bursts open.

  It’s Dagny.

  Her face is shiny with sweat, and her hair is in disarray. She is holding her sunhat in her hands, and her yellow shoes are covered in dust and muck. She looks like she’s been running.

  “Elsa,” she says, her voice rough and scratchy from exertion. “It’s Birgitta. You must come.”

  NOW

  I wake up slowly, my consciousness cloudy with sleep and confusion. Then I sit up and look around. It must be late morning—ten or ten thirty, judging by the warmth of the light outside. It’s a beautiful morning that lends the church a magical aura, despite the mud and dust on the checkerboard slate floor.

  Oh God. I must have fallen asleep, even though it was my watch. Yet another thing I can’t do right.

  Luckily enough, none of the others seems to have woken up and caught me sleeping on the job. Small mercies.

  I blink and yawn into the back of my hand. Some of my papers have fallen to the ground, so I quickly bend down and sweep them together into a small pile. It’s quite peaceful in here, with the sunlight streaming down on the others as they sleep. The only thing to taint the image is the glowering Christ above the altar.

  When I take a closer look at the others I give a start. Robert’s eyes are open.

  “I didn’t want to wake anyone,” he says, so quietly that I almost have to read his lips.

  He sits up, slides carefully out of Emmy’s arm, and gets up.

  “Is there any water left?” he asks.

  I look down guiltily at the empty bottle next to the pew and shake my head.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I drank the last of it.”

  He nods.

  “Hard to make it stretch to four people,” he says.

  “We can sneak out and get some more,” I whisper. “The river isn’t far. I would have gone earlier, but it seemed stupid to go alone.”

  Robert glances at sleeping Emmy, who has curled up into a little ball under the thin blanket. Her face is soft in sleep; it looks younger, strangely familiar. When I used to sleep over at her room I would usually wake up first—she wasn’t a morning person—and sometimes I would just lie there and watch her sleep. It was the sort of friendship that can only exist in those few brittle years between teenage life and fully fledged adulthood, before you’ve set your limits as to how much you let others in.

  “OK,” Robert whispers. “But we’ll have to move the pew. We should try not to wake them.”

  I jump off the pew and take hold of one end. We try to lift it but don’t manage to get it far—I can’t keep my end up—and it slips out of my hands and scrapes loudly against the floor.

  I glance at Emmy, but she hasn’t even moved. Max is still lying where he was, snoring in thin whistles.

  I pull open the heavy door. The fresh air streams into the room like a gasp, and I take in the smell of morning after the rain. The light is of the clean, white type that seems to only exist in April and May.

  I stride out onto the steps. It’s completely still. Not even the blades of grass are swaying.

  Robert comes out behind me, and I hear him close the door. I look around.

  “Ready?” I ask. My voice sounds almost perky.

  But Robert isn’t looking at me.

  He’s staring past me, down at the steps, with an almost thoughtful look on his face. I turn to follow his gaze.

  The rain has turned the dust on the steps into mud. It has started to dry up again in the morning sun, but the ground is still sticky and wet.

  And dotted with smeared, muddy footsteps.

  My mind runs through the possibilities in less than a second. The prints are clear enough to visibly be footprints, but it’s hard to tell if they were made by shoes or bare feet. They could possibly have been made by an animal with elongated paws … but no. We haven’t seen any animals since we arrived.

  Someone has been here. In the past few hours.

  I look at Robert. His face is completely calm. He walks past me and down the steps, stops by one of the marks, and squats down for a closer look.

  “What is it?” Emmy asks, giving me a start.

  Clearly she wasn’t so sound asleep after all. She’s standing in the doorway behind me, looking at Robert. It seems to take her a few seconds longer than us to register what we’re looking at, but then her eyes widen, and some of the color drains from her cheeks.

  Without a word, she walks out and down the steps, too. I hastily look up and out at the countryside around us. All I can see are empty houses and swaying greenery revived by the night’s rainfall, but that doesn’t make me any calmer. One thousand empty windows stare back at me on every side. I look left and right, try to catch some sort of movement, spot something out of the corner of my eye, but everything is quiet and still.

  Meanwhile, Emmy has squatted down next to a print, which she studies intently. She reaches over and picks something out of the mud. It looks like a small, light pebble.

  “Chalk,” she says quietly.

  “What?”

  I’m barely listening to her, so preoccupied I am with our surroundings. My paranoia is making everything both slow down and speed up at the same time.

  “It’s
a piece of chalk,” she says. She lifts it up at me.

  “It must have gotten caught in the sole of her shoe,” I say.

  My lips start to tingle.

  “It’s from the school,” I continue. “There was crushed chalk on the floor in the classrooms.”

  “Do you think it was…?” Emmy asks.

  “If it was Tone we heard last night over the walkie-talkie,” I say, interrupting her, “then she must have gone back to the school. It’s where she lost it, when she went through the step.”

  I look out over Silvertjärn. From up here it looks almost like a normal village in bloom. If you squint, that is.

  “It’s where she hurt herself,” I go on. “And where her mom was found. It wouldn’t be so strange for her to feel a pull back there.”

  “Back where?”

  Max hasn’t come out onto the steps, but stands half in shadow.

  “Tone was here,” I say. “Last night. I think she’s in the school.”

  “We don’t know it was Tone,” says Emmy. “It could have been one of us. It could just as easily have come from your shoe, Alice.”

  “But that wouldn’t explain why there are crumbs of chalk in the prints,” I say, hearing the impatience shining through my own voice.

  “And even if she was in the school, we can’t be sure she’s still there,” Emmy says.

  “But it’s the best lead we have,” I say, looking at the others. “We have to at least try.”

  “This changes nothing,” says Emmy. “I know it might feel like it, but it doesn’t. Not really. We voted that it’s safest to stay here.”

  I look at the others. Robert’s lips are pinched. Max’s eyes don’t meet mine.

  She’s right. They all are. I can feel it in my bones, that fear, like a sour taste on my tongue. I want nothing more than to stay there, to give in to their reason. I’ve seen the movies, too—I know what happens to the person who leaves safety to head out into the dark forest, the haunted psychiatric ward, the abandoned school.

  But what those movies don’t show is the guilt surging like a current through my skin; how it feels to know someone you care about is already there, alone and vulnerable and terrified.

  What the moviegoers don’t see is that the shame of staying can weigh heavier than the fear of going.

  “Then I’ll go alone,” I say.

  The sun stings my eyes. I turn around and walk past Max, back into the church.

  NOW

  It takes a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the darkness of the church, and I hit my thigh on one of the pews we’ve shoved to one side. I curse under my breath—ugly, explosive words I wouldn’t normally use—but hobble on into the chapel.

  It’s warm in there. I close the door behind me, sit down on one of the chairs, and bury my face in my hands. Try to take slow, deep breaths. In and out.

  Can I do this?

  I have to. Even though the stress is making me sick. Even though the sound of that walkie-talkie is echoing through my head, off the inside of my skull. That inhuman, many-edged roar.

  It must have been Tone. Just like it must have been Tone in the van—if there really was anyone there. Just because it didn’t sound like the Tone I know, doesn’t mean it isn’t her. The Tone I know probably isn’t the same person who’s hiding out there now.

  But at the end of the day it doesn’t matter. I have to go. If there’s a chance she’ll be there I have to look.

  When the door opens, I say quietly:

  “Do you want to come with me?”

  I’m expecting Max’s voice. I’m expecting a no. It’s only when I hear nothing that I look up.

  Emmy has already closed the door behind her. Her eyes are looking at the window, out onto the graveyard. The sunlight plays over her face, washing away the tiredness and dirt.

  “You can’t stop me,” I say, even though some small part of me really hopes she can.

  “Oh no,” she says. “I probably could. If I tried.”

  She sounds so naturally confident that it grates on me like flint on steel, lights a spark that turns fear to anger.

  “I don’t get how you can just sit here,” I say to her. “If you hadn’t taken off this would never have happened—you do see that, right? If you’d been there, like you said you would, she would never—never—”

  “I know,” Emmy cuts me off. “OK? I know. I know.”

  This stuns me into silence.

  “You’re acting like you’re the only one here who cares about Tone,” she says, looking straight at me for the first time, her eyes devastatingly green. “Like you’re the only one here with any sense of responsibility, the only one who’s worried. Don’t you get how fucking frustrating that is?”

  She throws her arms out.

  “Everyone wants to be heroes, Alice! Everyone wants to run around fixing everything, but this isn’t a movie! It isn’t one of your grandma’s stories! Just because we’re in Silvertjärn doesn’t mean we know how the story ends. Tone blew up our vans. You say she isn’t violent, that she’s sick, and I buy that she doesn’t know what she’s doing, but you have no idea what she’s capable of right now! What do you think is going to happen? That if you whisper softly and sweetly to her, appeal to her inner goodness, that she’ll just snap out of it? That isn’t how it works!”

  Emmy runs her fingers through her hair in frustration. I get to my feet and open my mouth to reply, but she starts again:

  “I’m just trying to be pragmatic, Alice. I’m trying to be an adult. Because one of us has to be, OK? One of us has to have a foot in the real world.”

  “Yes,” I spit out, seven years of poison in my voice. “Pragmatic and adult. That’s always you, isn’t it? It’s never worth fighting for anyone, sticking your neck out. Trying to save them. No, way better to just give up and move on—right?”

  Emmy is staring at me.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” she asks.

  “I knew this was a mistake,” I say, chuckling impotently, hopelessly, to myself. “It’s my fault, I know. Because I knew what you’re like. I knew, and still I asked you to be part of this project. I thought the worst that could happen would be you doing a bad job. Look, I get that you don’t give a shit about this movie, and I can live with that. But I can’t sit back and let you try and make us abandon…” My voice cracks. I shake my head and try to go on, but for a moment my vocal cords betray me.

  “But that’s just what you do, isn’t it? You abandon people when they need you most. I don’t even know why I’m so surprised. But you can’t make me do the same thing, Emmy. You can’t make me be like you.”

  It should feel good to finally say this. But all I feel is tired, tired and sad, and when I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand I realize I’m crying.

  When Emmy speaks, her voice is dry.

  “Is that really how you remember it?”

  I shake my head.

  “How else should I remember it?” I whisper. “Please, tell me. Tell me about this real world of yours. You were always good at that—at telling me whatever I felt was wrong.”

  Emmy shakes her head. When she looks at me, her eyes are glistening.

  “What do you think I should have done, Alice?” she asks. “Please. Tell me what I could have done that I didn’t do. I tried everything. I loved you, Alice.” Her lips quiver as she says it. “You were like a sister to me. Do you have any idea how painful it was to see you like that? To see you contract, shrink down until you could hardly get out of bed? Do you even remember that you slept in my bed for three weeks, refusing to shower because you said the water hurt your skin too much?”

  “Are you really telling me it was hard for you?” I ask, half laughing, abrasive.

  “Of course it was!” she says, an outburst that bounces off the walls in the small room. “OF COURSE it was hard for me, too! You were my best friend, and you were wasting away, and I didn’t know what to do! I booked you appointments at the health center, but you refused to go! I
spoke to the student counselor to stop you getting kicked off the program! I did everything I could, but it was never enough. Nothing worked. You didn’t want to talk to anyone, didn’t want any medication. You didn’t want to get help. Didn’t want to … live.”

  She stumbles over the last word, as though it’s too big for her mouth.

  “Alice, the first time you said you wanted to die, I called my mom and just cried. I couldn’t even speak. I just cried. I was so tired. I was only twenty-two. I was so tired, and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to save you. Mom said you were drowning, and that I was getting pulled down with you. She told me I couldn’t help someone who didn’t want to be helped. But I tried anyway. Because I loved you. All I wanted was for you to get better.”

  She shakes her head. Her thick, hennaed locks graze her shoulders.

  “But in the end I just couldn’t go on,” she says. She dries her eyes with her arm, a big, sloppy motion. “OK? And I’ve never forgiven myself. Never. Clearly you haven’t, either. I get it. But when you contacted me about this project I was so happy, because I knew how much it meant to you. I thought that you wanting me to be involved meant that maybe you’d forgiven me. That you wanted to let me be part of your dream.”

  She shakes her head again.

  “Mom told me not to take the job. But Robert said he could tag along as a cameraman, and I—I wanted to believe I was right. I wanted to believe you meant it as an olive branch.”

  She swallows.

  “But from that very first meeting it was clear you still hated me. So I tried to keep myself to myself. Do my job.”

  She shakes her head. And then she smiles, a shaky smile with tear-stained lips, one so unlike her.

  “I really believed in the film, Alice. Just so you know. I think it would have been fantastic. We could have made something really special.”