The Darkest Room (15 page)

When only a couple of feet of the old wallpaper remained, he realized that the echoing children’s voices could no longer be heard from the drawing room.

The house was completely silent again.

Joakim climbed down from his ladder and listened.

“Livia?” he called. “Gabriel? Would you like some juice? And cookies?”

No reply.

He listened for a while longer, then went out of the room and along the corridor. But halfway to the drawing room he looked out of the window into the courtyard and stopped.

The door to the big barn was standing ajar.

It had been shut before, hadn’t it?

Then he saw that Andreas Carlsson’s outdoor clothes had gone from the floor.

Joakim pulled on a jacket and a pair of boots and went out into the courtyard.

The children must have pulled the heavy door open together. Maybe they had gone inside too, into the darkness.

Joakim went across and stopped in the doorway of the barn.

“Hello?”

No reply.

Were they playing hide-and-seek? He walked across the stone floor, breathing in the smell of old hay.

They had talked about turning the barn into a gallery, he and Katrine, sometime in the future when they had cleared out all the hay, the dung, and all the other traces of the animals who had lived there.

He was thinking about Katrine again, although he shouldn’t. But on the morning of the day she drowned, he had seen her coming out of the barn. She had looked embarrassed, as if he had caught her out.

Nothing was moving inside the barn, but Joakim thought he could hear a tapping or creaking noise from the hayloft up above, like footsteps.

A narrow, steep wooden staircase led up to the loft, and he grabbed hold of the sides and began to climb.

Coming into the loft from the dark passageways and stalls down below was almost like walking into a church, he
thought. Up here there was just a big open space for the hay to dry—an open-plan solution, as the agents liked to call it—and the roof arched high above him in the darkness. Thick beams ran the length of the loft several feet above Joakim’s head.

Unlike the upper floor of the main house, it was impossible to get lost up here, even if it was difficult to pick your way through all the garbage that had been piled up on the floor.

Heaps of newspapers, flowerpots, broken chairs, old sewing machines—the hayloft had become a dumping ground. A couple of tractor tires, almost as tall as a man, were leaning up against a wall. How had they got those up here?

When he saw the untidy loft, Joakim suddenly remembered dreaming that Katrine was standing up here. But the floor had been clean, and she had been standing over by the far wall with her back to him. He had been afraid to go over to her.

The winter wind was like a faint whisper above the roof of the barn. He didn’t really like being alone up here in the cold.

“Livia?” he shouted.

The wooden floor creaked in front of him, but he got no other answer. Perhaps the children had hidden in the darkness; they were probably spying on him from the shadows.

They were hiding from him. He looked around and listened.

“Katrine?” he said quietly.

No reply. He waited in the darkness for several minutes, but when the silence in the hayloft remained unbroken, he turned and went back down the steps.

When he got back
into the house, he found his children where he should have looked in the first place—in Livia’s bedroom.

Livia was sitting on the floor drawing, as if nothing had happened. Gabriel had obviously been given permission by
his big sister to be in there, because he had fetched some toy cars from his room and was sitting beside her.

“Where have you been?” Joakim asked, more sharply than he had intended.

Livia looked up from her drawing. Katrine had never painted for pleasure even though she was an art teacher, but Livia enjoyed drawing.

“Here,” she said, as if it were perfectly obvious.

“But before …Did you go outside? You and Andreas and Gabriel?”

“For a little while.”

“You mustn’t go in the barn,” said Joakim. “Did you hide in there?”

“No. There’s nothing to do in the barn.”

“Where’s Andreas?”

“He went home. They were going to eat.”

“Okay. We’ll be eating soon too. But don’t go outside again without telling me, Livia.”

“No.”

The night after
Joakim had been out in the barn, Livia started talking in her sleep again.

She had gone to bed with no trouble that night. Gabriel had fallen asleep at around seven, and while Joakim was helping Livia to brush her teeth in the bathroom she had studied his head at close quarters with considerable curiosity.

“You’ve got funny ears, Daddy,” she said eventually.

Joakim put his daughter’s mug and toothbrush back on the shelf and asked: “What do you mean?”

“Your ears look so … old.”

“I see. But they’re no older than I am. Have they got hair in them?”

“Not much.”

“Good,” said Joakim. “Hair in your nose and ears isn’t exactly cool … or in your mouth.”

Livia wanted to stay in front of the mirror for a while pulling faces, but Joakim gently led her out of the bathroom. He put her to bed, and read the story twice about Emil getting his head stuck in the soup bowl, then turned off the light. As he was leaving the room he could hear her wriggling further down the bed and snuggling her head into the pillow.

Katrine’s woolen sweater still lay beside her in the bed.

He went into the kitchen, made himself a couple of sandwiches, and switched on the dishwasher. Then he turned out all the lights. In the darkness he groped his way back to his own bedroom and switched on the main light.

There it stood, the cold, empty double bed. And on the walls above it hung clothes. Katrine’s clothes, which by now had lost all trace of her scent. Joakim ought to take them down, but not tonight.

He turned off the light, got into bed, and lay there motionless in the darkness.

“Mommy?”

Livia’s voice made Joakim raise his head, wide awake.

He listened. The dishwasher in the kitchen had finished, and the clock radio was showing 11:52. He had slept for over an hour.

“Mom-my?”

The cry came again; Joakim got out of bed and went back to Livia’s room. He stood in the doorway until he heard her again:

“Mommy?”

He went over to the bed. Livia was lying under the covers with her eyes closed, but by the glow of the light out in the corridor Joakim could see her head moving restlessly on the pillow. Her hand was clutching Katrine’s sweater, and he carefully released it.

“Mommy isn’t here,” he said quietly, folding up the sweater.

“Yes, she is.”

“Go to sleep now, Livia.”

She opened her eyes and recognized him.

“I can’t sleep, Daddy.”

“Yes, you can.”

“No,” said Livia. “You have to sleep here.”

Joakim sighed, but Livia was wide awake now, and there was nothing else for it. This had always been Katrine’s job.

Cautiously he lay down on the edge of the bed. It was too short, he’d never be able to get to sleep.

He fell asleep after two minutes.

There was someone outside the house
.

Joakim opened his eyes in the darkness. He couldn’t hear anything, but he could feel that they had a visitor.

He was fully awake again.

What time was it? He had no idea. He might have slept for several hours.

He raised his head and listened. The house was silent and still. The only sound was the faint ticking of a clock—and the barely audible breathing in the darkness beside him.

He sat up silently and carefully got off the bed. But after only three steps he heard the voice behind him:

“Don’t go, Daddy.”

He stopped and turned around.

“Why not?”

“Don’t go.”

Livia was lying motionless, facing the wall. But was she awake?

Joakim couldn’t see her face, just her blonde hair. He went back to the bed and sat down cautiously beside her.

“Are you asleep, Livia?” he asked quietly.

After a few seconds came the reply:

“No.”

She sounded awake, but relaxed.

“Are you sleeping?”

“No … I can see things.”

“Where?”

“In the wall.”

She was talking in a monotone, her breathing slow and calm. Joakim leaned closer to her head in the darkness.

“What can you see?”

“Lights, water … shadows.”

“Anything else?”

“It’s light.”

“Can you see any people?”

She was silent again, before the reply came:

“Mommy.”

Joakim stiffened. He held his breath, suddenly afraid that this was serious—that Livia was asleep, and really could see things through the wall.
Don’t ask any more questions
, he thought.
Go to bed
.

But he had to carry on:

“Where can you see Mommy?” he asked.

“Behind the light.”

“Can you see—”

Livia interrupted him, speaking with greater intensity:

“Everybody’s standing there waiting. And Mommy’s with them.”

“Who? Who’s waiting?”

She didn’t reply.

Livia had talked in her sleep before, but never as clearly as this. Joakim still suspected that she was awake, that she was just playing games with him. But he still couldn’t stop asking questions:

“How’s Mommy feeling?”

“She’s sad.”

“Sad?”

“She wants to come in.”

“Tell her …” Joakim swallowed, his mouth dry. “Tell her she can come in any time.”

“She can’t.”

“Can’t she get to us?”

“Not in the house.”

“Can you talk to her?”

Silence. Joakim spoke slowly and clearly:

“Can you ask Mommy … what she was doing down by the water?”

Livia lay motionless in the bed. There was no response, but he still didn’t want to give up.

“Livia? Can you talk to Mommy?”

“She wants to come in.”

Joakim straightened up in the darkness and didn’t ask any more. The whole thing felt hopeless.

“You must try—”

“She wants to talk,” Livia broke in.

“Does she?” he asked. “About what? What does Mommy want to say?”

But Livia said nothing more.

Joakim said nothing either, he just got up slowly from the bed. His knees creaked; he had been sitting in the same position with his back rigid for too long.

He moved silently over to the blind and peeked out from the back of the house. He could see his own transparent reflection in the windowpane, like a misty shape—but not much beyond it.

There was no moon, no stars. Clouds covered the sky. The grass in the meadow rippled slightly in the wind, but nothing else was moving.

Was there anyone out there? Joakim let go of the blind. To go outside and take a look, he would have to leave Livia and Gabriel alone, and he didn’t want to do that. He stayed by the window, unsure what to do, and eventually turned his head.

“Livia?”

No reply. He took a step back toward the bed, but saw that she was fast asleep.

He wanted to carry on asking questions. Perhaps even wake her up to find out if she could remember anything about what she’d seen in her sleep, but of course it wasn’t a good idea to press her.

Joakim pulled the flowery coverlet up over her narrow shoulders and tucked her in.

He returned silently to his own bed. The coverlet felt like a shield against the darkness as he crept in.

He listened anxiously for noises from the corridor and from Livia’s room. The house was silent, but Joakim was thinking of Katrine. It was several hours before he managed to fall asleep.

A Friday night
at the end of November.

The big vicarage at Hagelby was almost two hundred years old, and lay at the end of a forest track half a mile or so outside the village. The Swedish church no longer owned the vicarage. Henrik knew it had been sold to a retired doctor and his wife from Emmaboda.

Henrik and the Serelius brothers had parked their van in a grove of trees up by the main highway. They had left everything in it except for two rucksacks containing just a few tools, with plenty of room for anything they might pick up. Before they set off through the forest, past the stone wall by the church and the graveyard, they had each knocked back a dose of crystal meth and washed it down with beer.

Henrik had drunk more beer than usual; his nerves were at breaking point tonight. It was all the fault of that fucking board—the Serelius brothers’ Ouija board.

They had conducted a quick session in Henrik’s kitchen at around eleven o’clock. He had turned off the main light, Freddy had lit the candles.

Tommy placed his index finger on the glass.

“Is there anybody there?”

The glass began to move straightaway. It ended up on the word
YES
. Tommy leaned forward.

“Is it Aleister?”

The glass moved over to the letter
A
, then
L …

“He’s here,” said Tommy quietly.

But the glass carried on to
G
, then to
O
and
T
. Then it stopped.

“Algot?” said Tommy. “Who the fuck is that?”

Henrik stiffened. The glass had begun to move across the board again, and he quickly reached for a piece of paper and wrote down what it was spelling out.

Henrik stopped writing.

“I can’t do this anymore,” he said quickly, pushing the piece of paper away.

He took a deep breath, got up and switched on the main light, then breathed out.

Tommy took his finger off the glass and looked at him.

“Okay, chill out,” he said. “The board is just supposed to be a help. …Let’s go.”

It was twelve-thirty
when they finally arrived at the vicarage. It was a cloudy night, and the house was in darkness.

Henrik was still pondering over the board’s message. Algot? His grandfather’s name had been Algot.

“Are they home?” whispered Tommy in the shadows among the birch trees in the lower part of the garden. Just
like Freddy and Henrik, he had pulled the black hood over his head.

Henrik shook himself. He must pull himself together, focus on the job.

“I’m sure they are,” he said. “But they sleep upstairs. Up there, where the window’s open.”

He pointed up at a window that was slightly ajar in one of the corner rooms.

“Good, let’s go,” said Tommy. “Hubba bubba.”

He led the way up the stone path and the steps. Then he leaned forward and peered thoughtfully at the lock.

“Looks pretty solid,” he whispered to Henrik. “Shall we go for a window instead?”

Henrik shook his head. “This is the country,” he whispered back. “And they’re seniors … look.”

He reached out, silently pushed down the handle, and opened the door. It wasn’t locked.

Tommy said nothing, he simply nodded and went inside. Henrik followed, with Freddy right behind him.

This wasn’t good—three men inside the house was one too many. He signaled that Freddy should stay and keep watch outside, but he just shook his head and walked in.

Tommy opened the next door and disappeared into the house itself. Henrik followed.

They were in a big, dark hallway. It was warm inside–seniors were a chilly breed, thought Henrik, and they always had the heating turned up high.

The floor was covered with a dark red Persian carpet that muffled the sound of their footsteps, and on one of the walls hung a huge mirror with a gold frame.

Henrik stopped. A thick black leather wallet was lying on the marble table below the mirror. He quickly reached out and tucked the wallet into his jacket pocket.

When he looked up, he could see himself in profile: a hunched figure in dark clothes, with a black hood covering his head and a big bag on his back.

Thief
, he thought. He could almost hear Grandfather Algot’s voice in the back of his head. It was all down to the hood—it would make anyone look dangerous.

There were three doors leading off the hallway, two of them ajar. Tommy had stopped by the middle door. He listened, shook his head, and opted for the right-hand one.

Henrik followed him. He could hear Freddy’s breathing and heavy footsteps right behind him.

The door led into a drawing room—an elegant room, with several small wooden tables crowded with objects. It looked as though a lot of it was garbage, but on one of the tables stood a large Småland crystal vase. Good. Henrik pushed it into his rucksack.

“Henrik?”

Tommy was whispering from the other side of the room. He had opened a bureau, pulled out the drawers, and made a real find, Henrik saw: rows of silver cutlery and a dozen or so napkin rings made of gold. Necklaces and brooches, even some bundles of hundred-kronor notes and foreign currency.

A treasure trove.

They all pitched in to empty the bureau, without saying a word. The cutlery clinked slightly as they gathered it up, and Henrik wrapped it in some linen napkins from the bureau to muffle the sound.

Their rucksacks were heavy and well filled by now.

Anything else that might need a new owner?

Paintings covered the walls, but they were too big. Henrik caught sight of something tall and narrow in one of the windows. He pulled back the curtain.

It was some kind of old lantern with panes of glass and lacquered wood, perhaps twelve inches high and six inches wide. Rather charming. It would go nicely in his apartment if a fence didn’t want to buy it. He wrapped a tablecloth around the lantern and pushed it into his rucksack.

Enough.

There was no sign of Freddy when they emerged into the hallway. Had he gone further into the house?

A door opened slowly—it was the door leading to the kitchen, and Henrik was so sure it was Freddy that he didn’t even turn his head—but suddenly he heard Tommy gasp.

Henrik turned and saw a white-haired gnome standing in the doorway.

The man was wearing brown pajamas and was just putting on a pair of thick glasses.

Fuck. Caught again.

“What are you doing?”

A dumb question that didn’t get a reply. But Henrik felt Tommy stiffen beside him, like a robot switching to attack mode.

“I’m calling the police,” said the man.

“Shut up!”

Tommy moved. He was a head taller than the man, and pushed him back into the kitchen.

“Don’t move!” shouted Tommy, kicking out.

The old man dropped his glasses as he stumbled in the doorway and collapsed just inside. The only sound he made was a long drawn-out wheezing.

Tommy followed him; there was something sharp in his hand. A knife or a screwdriver.

“That’s enough!”

Henrik hurried over to try and stop Tommy but stumbled over a rag rug—and ended up standing on the old man’s hand with his heavy boot. There was a crunching sound.

“Come on!” somebody shouted, perhaps Henrik himself.

Henrik stumbled backward and banged into the marble table in the hallway. The big mirror fell to the floor with a series of crashes. Fuck. Everything was blurred like on a dance floor, fast and unplanned. It was impossible to control things anymore. And where the hell was Freddy?

Then he heard a more high-pitched voice behind him.

“Get out!”

Henrik whirled around. He saw a woman standing by the man on the floor. She was even shorter, and looked terrified.

“Gunnar?” she called, bending down. “Gunnar, I’ve called the police.”

“Come on!”

Henrik fled, without even looking to see whether Tommy was obeying his order or not. There was still no sign of Freddy.

Out through the veranda and out into the night.

Henrik ran across the grass, which was hard with frost, came around the corner of the house and raced into the forest. Branches tore at his face, his rucksack was chafing his shoulders, and he couldn’t find the track, but he still kept on running.

Something grabbed hold of his foot and suddenly he was flying through the air.

Straight down into the shadows, where the wet leaves and undergrowth received him.

Something hit the back of his head hard. The night became blurred.

He felt really bad.

When Henrik came to
, he was crawling on all fours. He was moving slowly forward across the ground, his head aching, aiming for a black shadow that was growing up ahead of him. A little cave. He crept in through the opening and curled up. Someone was after him, but in here he was safe.

It took several minutes for Henrik’s mind to clear. He raised his head and looked around.

Silence. Total darkness. Where the fuck had he ended up?

He felt earth beneath his fingers and realized that he had crawled into an old stone-covered cellar in the forest near the vicarage. It was cold and damp.

It smelt of fungus, kind of moldy.

Suddenly he got the idea that he was lying in an old death
chamber. An earth cellar for the dead, where they lay waiting to be buried over in the graveyard.

Some kind of insect with long legs landed on his ear. A spider that had just woken up. He knocked it away quickly with his hand.

Henrik was beginning to feel claustrophobic, and slowly crawled out of the cellar. His rucksack got hooked on the roof, but he turned sideways and made it out onto the frozen ground.

Fresh winter air.

He got up and set off through the undergrowth, away from the lights shimmering in the windows of the vicarage through the trees. When he reached the wall of the graveyard, he knew he was heading the right way.

Suddenly he heard a van door slam. He listened.

An engine started up far away in the darkness.

Henrik moved more quickly through the trees, came out onto a broad path and began to run. The trees thinned out and he saw the Serelius brothers’ van. It was just reversing out onto the road.

He got there just in time and ripped open the side door.

Freddy and Tommy turned their heads quickly, and realized who it was.

“Drive.”

Henrik jumped in and slammed the door. Once the van was moving, he finally breathed out and leaned back, his head pounding.

“What the fuck happened to you?” asked Tommy over his shoulder. He was breathing heavily, clutching the wheel very tightly. The stiff rage was still there in his shoulders.

“I got lost,” said Henrik, shrugging off his rucksack. “Fell over a tree root.”

Freddy chuckled to himself.

“I had to jump out of a window!” he said. “Straight down into the shrubbery.”

“Still, we got some good stuff,” said Tommy.

Henrik nodded, his jaws rigid with tension. The old guy Tommy had knocked down—what had happened to him? He didn’t want to think about that right now.

“Take the east road,” he said. “To my boathouse.”

“Why?”

“The police are going to be out this way tonight,” said Henrik. “When there’s violence involved, they come tearing over from Kalmar … I don’t want to bump into them up on the highway.”

Tommy sighed, but took the turn down to the eastern coast road.

It took them a good
half hour to unload everything and hide it in the boathouse, but it was worth it to feel safer. All Henrik had left in his rucksack when they got back in the van was the money and the old glass lantern.

They took a detour along the east coast to Borgholm, but didn’t see any police activity. On the outskirts of the town Tommy ran over a cat or a hare, but this time he seemed too tired to take any pleasure in it.

“We’ll take a break,” said Tommy as they reached the streetlights of the town. “A little bit of time off.”

They pulled in by Henrik’s apartment block. It was quarter past three.

“Okay,” he said, opening the door. “And we need to go through the money … make sure it’s all sorted.”

He wasn’t about to forget that the Serelius brothers had been about to drive off and leave him up in the forest.

“We’ll be in touch,” said Tommy through the open window of the van.

Henrik nodded and walked toward the building.

It wasn’t until he was inside his apartment that he realized how filthy he was. His jeans and jacket were covered in black stains from the soil. He threw them in the laundry basket, drank a glass of milk, and stared blankly through the window.

His recollections of the night in the vicarage had been vague from start to finish, and he had no desire to go over them again. Unfortunately, his clearest memory was of the old man’s hand crunching beneath his boot. He hadn’t meant to do that, but …

He turned the light off and went to bed.

It was difficult to get to sleep, his forehead was aching and his nerves were buzzing all over his body, but sometime after four he slipped into the mists.

A couple of hours later Henrik was woken by the sound of knocking in the apartment.

The sound of knocking on glass. Then silence.

He raised his head from the pillow and looked around the darkness of the room in confusion.

The soft sound of knocking came again. It seemed to be coming from the hallway.

Henrik left the warmth of his bed and staggered out into the shadows to listen.

The knocking was coming from his rucksack. Three knocks, then silence. Then a couple more knocks.

He bent down and unzipped the bag. The old lantern from the vicarage was inside, still wrapped in the tablecloth.

Henrik lifted it out.

The wooden frame of the lantern had cooled down in the van, presumably. Now it was getting back up to room temperature. That’s why it was clicking and knocking.

He placed the lantern on the kitchen table, closed the door, and went back to bed.

The sound of faint knocking could be heard from the kitchen from time to time. It was just as irritating as a dripping faucet, but Henrik was so tired he eventually went to sleep anyway.