by Stefan Spjut
The blood was streaming from Susso’s nostrils now and the strong taste of iron filled her mouth. She spat weakly, wiped her nose and chin with the palm of her hand and sniffed.
Why was it standing there?
Then she noticed that its eyes were directed at something in the snow.
Something small and grey. The squirrel.
The little animal had positioned itself between her and the troll. It was standing on all fours with its legs wide apart, and its upright tail was jerking spasmodically, as if it was trying to work itself free from the body.
She was aware of the headache, the flashing lights in her skull. That would explain the nosebleed.
The troll took a step to one side, perhaps in an attempt to walk around the squirrel. But the animal was having none of it. In a flash it followed the troll, its gaze like a rod holding the beast at a distance.
He’s protecting me, she thought. Protecting me.
And from nowhere a word came into her head: beschermen.
At a distance she saw Gudrun running over the ice towards her, with Torbjörn following behind. He was holding his phone in his outstretched hand.
Susso wanted to yell at them to stay where they were but she stopped herself, fearing the troll would spin round and turn on them instead.
At least for the moment she and the squirrel were keeping it at bay.
But for how long?
Had anyone seen what was happening out here on the ice?
Had Torbjörn or Gudrun phoned the police? It was possible, but how long would it take before help arrived? Too long.
Susso swallowed. When she lifted her right hand from the revolver to wipe her nose she found her skin had stuck to the barrel. She licked her lips, coughed and took a deep breath.
The squirrel was tense. She could see its hind legs trembling. Was it difficult for it to keep up the resistance? How long could it continue?
Should she just sit here?
She grabbed the bag and picked out a few cartridges. They were like ice in her hands. When she had filled the cylinder she slowly got to her feet and backed up a few steps. Her legs were shaking. The troll did not appear to notice. It was standing still, its head hanging, staring at the little animal.
Susso began walking around the squirrel in a semicircle, tentatively and with the revolver in both hands, thinking she could perhaps get past and continue towards land without the troll noticing.
But she must have overstepped some invisible barrier because all of a sudden the troll began to move, and its eyes were not directed at the squirrel. They were directed at her.
She panicked and began to run. It happened so fast she had no time to think. She should have taken cover behind the squirrel again, of course, but there was no protection there. Nothing she could see, at least.
So she ran. Straight towards Gudrun and Torbjörn.
The troll caught up with her in an instant. She did not see it coming. She only heard its wheezing breath at her side before she was knocked over. Daylight disappeared below the mighty body and her face was covered in blood and snow and her eyes were blurred and she screamed. She screamed in fear but also with the rage that suddenly poured out of her. She swore. She saw one staring yellow eye and four fangs in the dark interior of the troll’s gaping jaws, and into that darkness she rammed the revolver.
When Seved carried the petrol can out of the barn and hurried towards the dog enclosure it was as if he was looking at himself from the outside and a screeching voice inside his head was demanding to know what he thought he was doing. The doubt assaulted him with such force that it paralysed him, and for a while he stood still with the can in one hand, staring at the house, while the dogs whined behind the chicken wire. It was impossible for him to work out if it was madness to set fire to Hybblet or madness not to. The motivation that had filled him on his return from Kiruna had evaporated. Although then, of course, he had only thought they would run away. Pile into a car one night and leave.
This was something else.
To make the fire spread fast enough he had to go inside the house, throw petrol on the walls and floor, and down the cellar staircase as well. Presumably he would be able to get in unnoticed but he had no idea how the little beings would react when they picked up the reek of petrol. It could make them agitated.
Perhaps it was better after all to set light to it from outside and hope for the best? No, the cement-fibre panels would probably not ignite.
He pulled a box of matches from his jacket pocket and clasped it in his hand.
Now.
You have got to do it now. It will only be worse if you wait.
He went up the veranda steps, opened the door and walked into the oppressive stench that coiled into his nostrils. He shut the door behind him, but changed his mind and left it open. It would let out some of the petrol fumes. Then he reached out for the handle and closed it anyway. The shapeshifters would probably feel the draught and wonder why it was open.
He stood still and listened. A washed-out grey light fell across the clawed wallpaper. The kitchen door stood ajar and from inside came a faint but unmistakable munching sound. Someone was in there, eating. Someone big. When he peered in the sound stopped immediately. In the shadows over by the sink, beside one of the plastic buckets of dry fodder, was a body, stooped and thin. It was one of the hareshifters, he could see that straight away from the outline of its ears. There was an oily shine in its staring eyes.
‘You can eat later,’ Seved said. ‘I’ve got to clean up now.’
They normally cleaned in the mornings and the hareshifter looked as if it was wondering what it had done wrong. It shrank to a ball behind the bucket and stayed like that for a while, as if hoping to be forgotten, but eventually it came out and thumped past Seved in a couple of awkward leaps.
Relieved, he listened to the thuds continue up the stairs to the upper landing. He had been afraid he would never be able to get rid of it. There was something about cleaning that fascinated the hares. They hopped cheerfully behind the vacuum cleaner as if they were taking part in the job, and sometimes they would bring him rubbish that they wanted to throw away. He let them do it and some days their helpfulness even made him smile.
He walked to the jumping room and took a hasty look under the bed before unscrewing the stopper of the petrol can. He sprinkled some drops on the floor and on the old foam rubber mattress. He knew he had to be sure that the stairs down to the hide would burn properly, so he returned to the hall and slowly opened the heavy door. A muffled murmuring came from below. He altered his grip on the can and was about to pour when someone down below began to mumble and complain in a gruff voice.
He froze.
The big one was awake.
Someone must have seen him and told the others! Unless it was the foxshifter itself that had tricked him. He cursed himself for allowing a shapeshifter to plant thoughts in his head. Should he take the petrol can with him or leave it? Confused, he tried to replace the stopper, but the hoarse voice below was getting more and more excited. Not until a roar of sudden rage filled the house did he throw down the can and run.
A terrible howl rose up the staircase and the steps creaked under the feet of the big old-timer as he made his way up. The instant Seved raced out of Hybblet, the cellar door was flung open behind him.
The terror made everything a blur.
Börje came running across the yard, his legs awkward and heavy, his shirt unbuttoned. His eyes were staring and he was shouting something Seved could not hear, but it was not aimed at him. He was firing words in the Sami language at the hunchbacked old bear, which was standing on all fours in the snow, swaying its broad, greying head from side to side and roaring, saliva spraying from its sagging lips. Its open mouth exposed red gums with gristly ridges like a row of white arcs, and out of them jutted the fangs.
Holding out one hand Börje walked towards the wildly snorting bear, talking constantly to it in a soft and gentle voice.
One af
ter the other the little beings ventured out of Hybblet to see what was happening. All of them had taken refuge in animal shapes, petrified by the old-timer’s irate bear form. Among the mice and shrews and lemmings that had lined up in a row of tiny tufts of fur on the veranda railing an ermine stood out like a white porcelain cat, and in the doorway the hares were hiding, liquid-eyed, their ears like antennae.
The bear’s head was hanging so heavily that occasionally its shrivelled lower lip dipped into the snow. Air came in snorts from the enlarged nostrils.
‘Vuordil,’ said Börje gently. ‘Vuordil.’
Seved did not understand the word but even so he guessed its meaning.
It was meant to pacify.
And the bear seemed pacified. It rocked from side to side, managing only to pant.
But suddenly it lunged and its muscles quivered under the dingy brown fur. Snow flew up in an arc as it reared up. It was a warning to the man to back off, and Börje took a few steps backwards, flailing his arms to keep his balance.
A low but threatening growl came from Skabram’s throat.
He had no intention of remaining calm.
It was obvious from Börje’s back and his bent knees that he was terrified. He stood hunched and tense, ready to flee. Seved, who had stepped up onto the veranda, wondered if he should run in and get the air rifle, if only to persuade the bear to back off, but he decided against it because the sight of a rifle would likely provoke a new outburst of rage. One that could not be quelled with calming words.
Börje let out an astonished shout when the bear attacked again, and this time it was worse. Its solid frame rammed into Börje, who fell over and stayed on his back, silenced. Seved was sure the bear was going to bite him.
But the bear left Börje alone. After letting out a hideous roar it plodded off quickly behind the dog compound, its rump swaying, and disappeared among the pine trees.
When the troll threw itself at Susso, when it wrapped its long arms around her body and rolled her over and over on the ice, I screamed.
Then the shot rang out.
At first it was a muffled boom and I did not quite understand what it was. But it was followed directly by the crack of a second, third and fourth shot.
I had forgotten about the old revolver in Sven Jerring’s briefcase, so I cried out as I ran:
‘Who’s shooting? Who’s shooting?’
There was a moment’s silence over the blinding, icy surface and I noticed that the huge body was not moving. It had collapsed. Then two more shots rang out, and by this time I had come close enough to see the spray on the ice and the long red streaks.
Susso lay on her side with half her arm inside the troll’s mouth. Except it was no longer a troll. It was a bear.
Exhausted and confused, but at the same time filled with a paralysing gratitude, I sank to my knees beside her. Her mouth was smeared with dark blood that had coagulated in streaks, and that terrified me until I realised it had come from the bear. She had removed her arm from the bear’s jaws and the hand that was holding the small dripping revolver was lying across her heaving chest. Her Inca hat had slipped off and the back of her head was resting on the ice, with her hair fanned out in the snow. Her eyes were closed but the tension showed in the furrow between her eyebrows.
‘Have you seen?’ I said. ‘Have you seen what’s happened to it?’
With a barely perceptible nod she indicated that she knew what had happened to the troll. It looked as if she was in pain and I asked her if she was hurt, but she shook her head, even though I could tell a mile off she was lying. I looked up at Torbjörn. He had picked up the brown envelope with the newspaper articles and was crouching down, holding one hand on Susso’s heavy boot and rubbing it with his thumb. Not that she would have been able to feel it.
‘Oh thank God!’ I panted. ‘And thank you, Sven!’
Torbjörn nodded.
‘And Verner,’ he said quietly, glancing at the bear.
Susso opened her eyes and squinted at me.
‘It’s the squirrel you should be thanking. He saved me.’
She tried to see what was behind her but only managed a partial turn of her head before grimacing and letting her head fall back on the snow.
‘Where is it?’ she asked weakly.
Torbjörn nodded towards the little island.
‘It rushed up there when you fired. I expect it was scared.’
Mona got away with light concussion. Her partner Klas, on the other hand, was still unconscious when the ambulance arrived. The doctor at Sankt Göran’s hospital said he had been lucky and would probably make a full recovery.
A couple of police inspectors had come from the Västerort police to talk to us all. They had recovered the bear’s corpse and were going to send it to the National Veterinary Institute. One of the police officers told Susso that if she had not shot the bear in the mouth, she would probably never have stopped it.
Judging from the animal’s ears, which were pierced in several places where presumably there had once been earrings, it must have been an imported circus bear that had gone crazy, or so one of the police officers said.
Where it had come from remained to be seen. It was a mystery.
That’s what we thought too, of course, from our angle.
How had it found us?
The preferable choice of doubting the existence of trolls was no longer an option and I have to say I missed that alternative as I sat there in the brightly lit waiting room. It’s not such a bad idea to doubt at times.
But we had been given an answer to the question of why trolls had never been found.
They hid themselves.
They took refuge in the shape of animals.
You would certainly have to look hard to find a better hiding place.
My restless fingers played with the glossy magazines on the side table but naturally I couldn’t read them. I couldn’t even look at the pictures. I looked at Mona from time to time. She was sitting with her arms folded, her head leaning against the wall and her eyes pinned to the floor, and I wondered what was going on in her mind.
What must she be thinking!
As I understood it, she had turned on the troll when it got hold of Klas, who had slipped on the ice. Was it pent-up rage, years of bottomless grief and all-consuming despair that had made her go on the attack?
The giant who had taken her child—was this the same one?
I badly wanted to know but didn’t like to ask her. It didn’t seem proper at a time like this, when I could hardly even bring myself to look at her. And what were we doing there, really? We knew the police would want to talk to us, naturally, but the real reason we had followed the ambulance to the hospital was that we didn’t know where else to go. We were shocked, all three of us. Torbjörn had actually been shaking in the back seat. It was cold in the car because of the missing window but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t only the temperature that was making him shake like that.
Susso, on the other hand, seemed calm, and for a while I was afraid she was damaged inside, paralysed somehow. But she wasn’t. She drove the whole way to the hospital. I told her that her face was covered in blood, so she spat in her hand and rubbed at it, but that made little difference. Once inside the hospital she walked off briskly to fetch mugs of hot coffee for us and she answered the police officers’ questions clearly and steadily. She was even sarcastic. Why had she had been carrying a revolver in her bag? To hunt bears. Was it her weapon? Yes. Did she have a licence? For hunting bears? No, a licence for the weapon. No. So who did the revolver belong to, then? Verner von Heidenstam. Heidenstam? Yes. The poet Heidenstam? Yes. Isn’t he dead?
‘Yes,’ she had sighed, nodding. ‘So now it’s mine.’
I thought they were going to take the gun from her, but they didn’t. They never mentioned it again and I got the impression those burly police officers thought Susso was a tough customer as she sat there slurping coffee, her face smeared with blood.
And that’s
what I thought too. I was amazed at the incredible strength she was showing and didn’t know whether she had always been like that, or whether something inside her had changed as she lay under that troll, fighting for her life.
Later a crowd of visitors came into the waiting room—I never worked out who they were—and when they began talking in whispers to Mona I looked around for my bag, thinking it was time we were off.
Torbjörn was like a robot.
‘Let’s go,’ I said, and he stood up without a word. He had put in some snus and was standing with his mouth open, very pale and with the hood of his top turned inside out. Susso was sleeping, so I shook her knee.
‘We’re going now,’ I said.
‘No!’ Mona said. ‘You’re not going anywhere!’
A man with wide shoulders was standing in front of her and she had to lean to one side to be able to see us.
‘I think it’s best . . .’ I stammered.
‘You have to tell me . . . you’ve got to tell me what happened today.’
My first thought was that she was suffering from amnesia from the bump on her head, but then I saw it was corroboration she wanted.
‘You’re not leaving me here! Not again!’
Again? We had never met before. But then I understood exactly what she meant.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t know what to say . . . It wasn’t a bear, I can tell you that. It was . . .’
‘Oh, it was a bear all right,’ Susso said. ‘But not only a bear.’
What she said was incomprehensible, you could see that written on the faces turned towards her.
‘He could mutate,’ she said, waving her hands. ‘Shapeshift.’
Her explanation did nothing to clarify things for them. Quite the reverse. Shapeshift?
‘He was the one who took Magnus,’ Mona said, looking at one of the women standing beside her, who I took to be her sister.