The Lost Village

by Sten, Camilla

  I shut my mouth.

  “You think I don’t recognize her?” she asks, laughing that crackling parody of a laugh again. “You think I can’t see her filth in that body? I know. I’ve been waiting. Oh, have I been waiting.”

  Her head twitches slightly.

  “You’re going to give them back to me,” she says into Tone’s ear. “Hear me, witch? I’m going to take you to them, and then you’re going to give them back to me. It’s over now.”

  The sunset outside has started to turn into twilight. The last of the pulsating redness starts to ebb out of the room, replaced by a cooler purple. Night is drawing in.

  “Give what back?” a whisper rushes out of my throat. “What is she going to give back to you?”

  THEN

  Frank doesn’t need to pull or drag her anymore; Elsa’s feet are moving on their own. She is walking five steps behind the pastor, between Dagny and Ingrid, and her eyes are glued to their feet. They are at the head of the congregation, and to an outsider they might look like his most devoted followers, the ones honored enough to follow in his wake. As opposed to prisoners, crushed and broken.

  Playthings.

  Elsa has always believed herself a strong person, one who resists, who stands up for what’s right. And where that has been proven true to some extent, by now she has no fight left in her. Only emptiness.

  She has lost any illusions of escape, of persuading any of them. There is no mercy left in Silvertjärn. The last of her hope died with Birgitta in the square.

  However hard Elsa tries, she can’t stop herself from hearing Birgitta’s dying wails. Though she had closed her eyes tightly, the sounds she had not been able to shut out.

  How long does he plan to keep them alive? A few days? A week? She and Ingrid and Dagny are all still alive because the pastor takes pleasure in seeing them defeated, that much she understands. But sooner or later he will tire of it. The best they can hope for is to not end up like Birgitta. The best they can hope for is a quick death.

  By now night has fallen, and darkness has sunk over the village. Elsa hardly notices when the road is replaced by a beaten track, the shrubbery around them by tall pines. With heavy, lumbering steps she trudges over roots and moss, hearing the rest of the village marching in silence behind them. There is reverence in the air.

  The forest envelops them like a mother. In it their true church awaits.

  The pastor looks over his shoulder. He catches Elsa’s gaze, and his eyes gleam like silver. There is nothing human behind them.

  The realization that comes to her is more of a caress than a blow. After all that has happened, it’s almost a relief.

  She will never leave this forest.

  NOW

  “You,” she says to me, then nods at the doorway. “You first.”

  I turn around. Robert catches my eye and I hesitate, but then I hear Aina’s dry voice behind me. She sounds calm and slightly pleased.

  “If you run I’ll slit her throat open.” She clears her throat, then coughs. When she speaks again, her voice is quieter, softer. “And then I’ll take you both, one by one. Where do you think you can go? Silvertjärn is my home. You can’t hide from me here.”

  She’s old, I think feverishly, and we’re young and strong. We can run faster, can get away from her if we just make a run for it. We have a chance.

  But then I hear Tone whimper quietly behind my back. Some of the seriousness of the situation must have forced its way through her haze, because so far she has done as Aina has said. I don’t even want to imagine what would happen if she started kicking and fighting like she did with Robert and Max.

  I think of Max’s smashed-in head and outstretched hand. Of Emmy’s empty, staring eyes.

  I open the door and slowly step out.

  “Toward the square,” Aina says. “To the forest.”

  Is this a nightmare? Or is it really happening?

  The edge of the forest looks like an impenetrable barrier, a wall to another world. The pines rise up over our heads like ancient, forbidding divinities. Against my better judgment I stop; I get stuck between heartbeats, and suddenly I can’t take another step.

  I can’t go in there. I can’t step into that darkness.

  The fear explodes in my stomach, and for a while all I can think is:

  Then she can kill me.

  “Go,” says Aina, and she doesn’t need to use any threats, because Robert whispers my name behind me, and that single word is enough to make me move. I can throw away my own life—that much I’ve been prepared to do before—but not theirs.

  The forest around us is coming to life in a way I’ve never seen before. Had Silvertjärn been a graveyard, there would be whispering and whistling all around us. Movement everywhere. Countless eyes tracking our last steps.

  My breath stings in my throat. In the darkness I trip on a root and fall. I feel Robert’s bound hands fumble to catch me, but he can’t do much. I land headfirst on the heather, and my knee slams into a stone, sending a jolt of pain up into my hip. I lay there for a few seconds with my face in the moss, my leg throbbing and my heart full of something resembling hate.

  “Up,” Aina commands.

  When at first I don’t move, her voice becomes softer, slightly teasing.

  “Or maybe you don’t feel like it? A little sleepy, are we?” Her way of speaking is strange—both young and old at the same time. It’s like hearing a teen try to imitate the archaic speech patterns of an old movie star.

  I don’t need to see what she does to be able to interpret the sound that is pressed from Tone’s throat. I force myself up to my hands and feet, ignoring the shooting pain in my knee.

  My eyes have adjusted enough to the shadows now to make her out in the darkness. She gives a wide, cold smile, a slash across the middle of her face.

  “You two, keep walking,” she says. “Straight ahead.” Her smile grows, impossible as that ought to be. It looks like her face has been cleft by an ax. As though she could explode—bite—stab—at any second.

  “We’re getting close now.”

  Close to what? I have my suspicions. I know the direction we’re walking in. It’s the part of the forest we were warned to steer clear of, where the ground was too unstable. Due to the mine underneath.

  The searches had never gone down there because the entrance was still sealed, but those tunnels run deep into the earth’s underbelly. I remember some of the words I found scrawled in Pastor Mattias’s sermon.

  Only in silence can we become free. Only by allowing the darkness to embrace us can we step into the light.

  In silence. In darkness.

  I glimpse it through the trees as we approach, a hollow like an open grave, a blackness deeper than the shadows. It’s wide and uneven, hardly more than a hole in the ground, but I know where it leads.

  Aina doesn’t need to direct me to it; I’m drawn there all by myself. I stop at the edge and look down into the hole. It’s too dark for me to see how deep it goes.

  “What…” I hear Robert mutter behind me, and I reply before she does.

  “The mine,” I say. “It leads to the mine.”

  “To our church,” Aina whispers, her voice merging with the whistling treetops.

  “Jump,” she says, her voice harder now.

  “What?” I say and start turning around, but then I feel something that makes me instantly freeze. A blade on the back of my neck.

  “Jump,” she says, and the pressure grows until I feel it swell to a shooting pain. “Jump, or I’ll give you a little push. We must go to them.”

  To the choir beneath us. To the darkness of the tunnels.

  “Jump!” she says, her voice piercingly shrill, and suddenly I feel a foot against my back, a quick kick that gives me no time to react.

  I fall.

  THEN

  She climbs down the ladder, down into the darkness, her sweaty fingers gripping the rungs tightly. They are rough and prickly, and feel sloppily made.

&nbs
p; The darkness beneath is compact, their only light that of the pastor’s torch. Down in the darkness it dazzles, its shifty flicker lighting up the tunnel in both directions.

  This must once have been a transport tunnel, as it is long and sloping. The walls are rugged and damp. It’s already cooler down here than it was up at the surface.

  The pastor starts walking down into the darkness. Elsa hurries to find her feet, stumbling after him as fast as she can into the blackness and bedrock. Anything to not lose the light; anything to not be left in the darkness with the silent hordes behind her.

  Elsa has seen their true faces now. She has seen the saliva frothing at their mouths; the glint in their eyes at the sight of blood; the intoxicated joy of their breathless gasps at the crack of bones.

  The dancing cone of light ahead of them moves deeper and deeper underground; he is the light they follow in darkness. Elsa can see that as a symbol it must be seductive. Surely he knows that. It must be intentional.

  Although Staffan worked in the mine some twenty-four years, Elsa has only been down here twice in her life, and never this deep. The air feels thicker and heavier, and the walls seem to press down onto them. She can feel the weight of the bedrock above her; thousands of tons of rock and ore, all held up by flimsy structures, mathematics, and goodwill.

  Elsa wonders how they knew where to dig to reach the tunnels. But perhaps that’s no great wonder: of all the villagers behind her, how many hundreds used to work at the mine? They knew where the tunnels ran, where it would be safe to dig and blast.

  Then the tunnel opens up before them, expanding to form a cavern.

  The torch isn’t powerful enough to reach its furthest corners, but it’s bright enough for Elsa to see that the space is large—some fifteen feet high—and long. Elsa doesn’t doubt that the entire village will be able to fit in here. Whether it’s a natural air pocket or one of the older shafts from when the mine was new and Silvertjärn no more than a few farmsteads out in the forest, she can’t tell.

  In the middle of the cavern is a shallow body of water, hardly more than a pool. That’s what they are now approaching, Elsa and Ingrid and Dagny and Pastor Mattias, with the congregation behind them. He stops at the water’s edge and raises the torch. At first he says nothing, just lets the light speak for itself.

  Frank grabs her shoulders again, hard—so hard that her bones rub. But the pain can’t reach her. He’s probably expecting her to launch at the pastor, to attack him in some way. He needn’t worry.

  “Where will you go?” Elsa asks Pastor Mattias, and her voice sounds almost like normal. “Where will you go after this?”

  It’s like speaking to a statue, a quiet, forbidding monolith. But he looks at her and smiles mildly.

  “Go?” he asks. “Why should I go anywhere?”

  Behind her Elsa hears the steps and breaths of those who have started to throng into the cavern and push out toward the walls. Those who are watching them at a distance. Those waiting.

  His voice is hardly more than an exhalation, yet still Elsa hears every word.

  “I have created my Heaven on Earth,” he says. “Every one of these people sees me as their prophet. Their guide. Their master. They drink the words from my lips. I have created Silvertjärn in my own image. No, I am not going anywhere. We have many lovely years ahead, Silvertjärn and I.”

  The light of the torch dances in his gray eyes.

  “Down here I am God.”

  NOW

  In this darkness I am blind.

  With every step I take, my knee sends small streams of pain up my leg, and my back is one single aching knot. I can’t tell if it’s the lack of light or the blow to my head that’s affecting my balance, but I keep on bumping into walls, having to catch myself with grazed palms.

  I hear Robert staggering behind me. He sounds like he’s doing better than me, but that isn’t saying much.

  When I feel the water start to seep into my shoes I don’t realize what it is, I just take another step. It’s the splashing sound that makes me stop.

  “What…” I begin, but I’m cut off by Aina’s hoarse, excited voice as it creeps over my shoulder.

  “Here,” she says, and I hear her approach, hear Robert grunt as she shoves past him, her hands still fixed on Tone.

  The light dazzles my sore eyes, and I blink hard, trying to get my vision to clear.

  The tunnel is small and cramped. It’s a transport tunnel: behind us it’s straight, but ahead it looks like it starts to dip down into a bend. The mine itself must be further down. The water has flooded the passageway up to the bend, forming a sinkhole, some sort of underground lake. It’s impossible to see how deep it is, or how far down it goes.

  When I turn to look at Aina and Tone, I see that Aina is holding an old kerosene lamp made of glass and steel. It looks basic, and the kerosene container is almost empty, but it’s more than enough for the small tunnel. In the light of the burner the dark surface of the water looks like oil, sleek and black.

  I back away from the water’s edge and into Robert.

  “Sorry,” I whisper.

  I wish I could apologize for so much more; that I could make him understand everything I regret. But my voice is broken and faint, and “sorry” will never be enough.

  The hymn seems to ooze from the passage walls, trickling down the rock with the damp. Aina hums along, then sings, her voice surprisingly sweet:

  “Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;

  The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide…”

  Her voice sounds solemn despite the high-pitched hymn. It gets multiplied by the tunnel’s cracks and nooks, fragmented and hurled back at us like thousands of soulless whispers. She is one of a choir.

  “It’s over now,” she says, and she sounds on the verge of tears. “It’s over. The time for the resurrection has come.”

  I stare at the water. At the faint rings on the surface rolling out toward us.

  I don’t know what it is she intends to do with us, but the deepest, most primal parts of me know that she doesn’t plan to leave here with us. Whatever purpose it might serve in those rusted, meandering pathways of her brain, her intention is to kill us.

  Aina fixes her eyes on me.

  “He promised,” she says, equal parts hopeful and aggressive. “The pastor promised he’d come back if I waited. He said it wouldn’t be long. I didn’t want to stay up there, but he told me to. He told me to.”

  She shakes her head and then mutters, despairing, to herself:

  “I waited, like he told me. But it wasn’t enough.”

  She puts the kerosene lamp down on the floor, lighting the tunnel from below. The light throws her into razor-sharp contrast against the wall of the mine.

  I have to keep her talking; so long as she keeps talking, she won’t use the knife squeezed so tightly in her hands.

  “You want the others to come back to you,” I repeat, cautiously, trying to keep up with her mutterings. My brain is working feverishly. Thoughts are trying to drag their way out of the thumping bustle that is my mind, but the blow has left it feeling swollen and foggy, and I’m finding it hard to focus.

  “Yes!” she gasps. Her face seems to melt into the glare from below her. “They went underground to complete the sacrifice. We were going to be able to live in God’s grace. He said I didn’t need to see it. He said … he said…” She breaks off, and her face contorts into a grimace.

  “That’s why they didn’t come back,” she whispers, a sudden vulnerability to her face, a naked anxiety. “We all had to be there to witness the sacrifice, but I wasn’t with them. It was going to be a new testament; we were going to be the new nation. All of the testaments must be sealed in blood, like Christ’s blood on the cross. It was going to purify our sins, you see. But I wasn’t there, so we weren’t all present.” Her thin, wrinkled bottom lip trembles.

  I fight to try to find the words.

  “It wasn’t your fault, Aina,” I say.

 
It’s flat and empty, a cliché. But her eyes light up. She shakes her head.

  “No,” she says. “It wasn’t my fault. It was her fault. The witch’s.”

  I see her grip on the knife harden.

  “I tried to repay the debt,” she says, nodding to herself. “I tried to get rid of it, the devil’s spawn. I let them take it away. But it wasn’t enough.” The last part is said almost conspiratorially, like a whispered confidence to a good friend.

  Aina puts her other hand back on Tone’s neck and nods to herself.

  “The witch brought the rock down on our church. But she couldn’t silence us. Oh no, that much she couldn’t do,” she says, running her gawky fingers and bitten-down nails along Tone’s neck.

  “I know what I must do. I must wash the sin away with blood.”

  I hold my breath. Her hand works its way, almost tenderly, up into Tone’s hair.

  “I said the rites over the other two,” she says. “That redhead girl and the blond boy. They didn’t understand the magnitude of giving oneself to God, but I showed them. They fought it, but I was patient—I didn’t judge them for their ignorance. I said the rites over them so that their sacrifices would count, too. It would have been better down here underground, of course, but God sees us all. He saw my offerings. Life by life.”

  The light of the kerosene lamp flickers against the dripping walls.

  “I liked her eyes, you know,” she says to me. “The redhead’s. That’s why I left them open. They reminded me a little of the pastor’s eyes.”

  She stares at me for a few seconds, then the rest happens very quickly. Her hand turns into a claw, and she grabs Tone’s hair and shoves her down to her knees by the water.

  I scream “NO!” but it’s drowned out by the wordless bellow of the walls and the drone of Aina’s voice as she puts the knife to Tone’s neck and pulls her head back:

  “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit—”