Johan Theorin - The Darkest Room

“We looked at it yesterday before we packed it,” said the woman. “Incomparable.”

“Yes, we’ve missed it,” said Joakim, although that wasn’t strictly true.

“Are there any of the others left on Öland?”

“I don’t know. The royal family has one, I think, but it’s hardly likely to be hanging in some drawing room at Solliden.”

With the painting safe in the trunk Joakim drove west toward Bromma. It was half past two and the rush-hour traffic hadn’t yet begun to snarl up. It took him just about quarter of an hour to get out of the city and turn off toward the area where the Apple House lay.

The sight of his old home awoke a greater sense of nostalgia within him than Stockholm had done. The house was only a few hundred yards from the water, in a big garden surrounded by a fence and thick lilac hedges. There were five other big houses on the same street, but only one of them was visible through the trees.

The Apple House was a tall, airy wooden house that had been built for the director of a bank at the beginning of the twentieth century. But before Joakim and Katrine bought the house, it had been lived in for many years by a collective of New Age individuals, young relatives of the owner who had allowed people to rent rooms and had clearly been more interested in meditating than in painting or general maintenance.

No one in the collective had shown any kind of staying power or respect for the house, and the neighbors in the houses around them had fought for many years to get rid of them. When Joakim and Katrine finally took it on, the house was dilapidated and the garden almost completely overgrown-but both of them had tackled the renovation of the Apple House with the same energy as they had devoted to their first shared apartment, on Rörstrandsgatan, where a crazy eighty-two-year-old had lived with her seven cats.

Joakim had been working as a craft teacher and had devoted himself to the house in the evenings and on weekends; Katrine had still been working part-time as an art teacher, and had spent the rest of the time on the house.

They had celebrated Livia’s second birthday along with Ethel and Ingrid in a chaotic mess of ripped-up floorboards, tins of paint, rolls of wallpaper, and various power tools-with only cold water because the hot water system had broken down that same weekend.

By the time Livia turned three, however, they had been able to have a proper old-fashioned children’s party on newly stripped wooden floors, with walls that had been smoothed down and papered, and staircases and banisters that had been repaired and oiled. And when Gabriel celebrated his first birthday, the house had been more or less finished.

These days the place looked like a turn-of-the-century house again, and could be handed over in good order, apart from the leaves in the garden and the lawn that needed mowing. It was waiting for its new owners, the Stenbergs, a couple in their thirties with no children, who both worked in the city center but wanted to live on the outskirts.

Joakim pulled up by the gravel driveway and reversed so that the trailer ended up by the garage. Then he got out and took a look around.

Everything was quiet. The only neighbors whose house was in sight were the Hesslins, Lisa and Michael, and they had become good friends with Katrine and Joakim-but there were no cars in their driveway this afternoon. They had repainted their house last summer, this time in yellow. When the magazine Beautiful Homes had done a feature about it the previous year, it had been white.

Joakim turned to look over at the wooden gate and the gravel path leading to the Apple House.

His thoughts turned involuntarily to Ethel. Almost a year had passed, but he could still remember her calling out.

Beside the fence a narrow track led through a grove of trees. No one had seen Ethel walking down the track that evening, but it was the shortest route down to the water.

He started to walk up to the house, and looked up at the white façade. The luster was still there, and he remembered all those long brushstrokes when he had gone over it with linseed oil two summers ago.

He unlocked the door, opened it up, and walked in. When he had closed the door behind him, he stopped again.

He had cleaned up over the last few weeks in preparation for the move, and the floors still looked free of dust. All the furniture, rugs, and pictures from the hallway and the rooms were gone-but the memories remained. There were so many of them. For more than three years he and Katrine had put their souls into this house.

You could have heard a pin drop in the rooms around Joakim, but inside his head he could hear all the hammering and sawing. He took off his shoes and moved into the hallway, where a faint smell of cleaning fluid still hung in the air.

He wandered through the rooms, perhaps for the very last time. Upstairs he stopped in the doorway of one of the two guest bedrooms for a few seconds. A small room, with just one window. Plain white wallpaper and an empty floor. Ethel had slept here when she was living with them.

Some of their things were still down in the cellar, those there hadn’t been room for on the moving van. Joakim went down the narrow, steep staircase and started gathering them together: an armchair, a few chairs, a couple of mattresses, a small ladder, and a dusty birdcage-a souvenir of William the budgerigar, who had died several years ago. They hadn’t managed to finish cleaning properly down here, but one of their vacuum cleaners was still there. He plugged it in and quickly vacuumed the painted cement floor, then wiped down the cupboards and ledges.

The house was empty and clean.

Then he collected up the cleaning equipment-the vacuum

cleaner, buckets, cleaning fluid and cloths-and placed them at the foot of the cellar stairs.

In the carpentry workshop on the left, many of his spare tools were still hanging. Joakim started packing them into a cardboard box. Hammers, files, pliers, drills, squares, screwdrivers. Modern screwdrivers might be better, but they weren’t as solid as the old-fashioned ones.

Brushes, handsaws, spirit level, folding rule…

Joakim was holding a plane in his hand when he suddenly heard the front door opening on the floor above. He straightened up and listened.

“Hello?” came a woman’s voice. “Kim?”

It was Katrine, and she sounded anxious. He heard her close the front door behind her and walk into the hallway.

“Down here!” he shouted. “In the cellar!”

He listened, but there was no reply.

He took a step toward the cellar stairs, still listening. When everything remained deathly silent up above, he quickly went upstairs, realizing at the same time how improbable it was that he would see Katrine standing there in the hallway.

And of course she wasn’t there. The hallway was just as empty as when he had come into the house half an hour before. And the front door was closed.

He went over and tried the handle. It was unlocked.

“Hello?” he shouted into the house.

No reply.

Joakim spent the next ten minutes going through the entire house, room by room-despite the fact that he knew he wasn’t going to find Katrine anywhere. It was impossible, she was still on Öland.

Why would she have taken her car and driven after him all the way to Stockholm, without even calling him first?

He’d misheard. He must have misheard.

Joakim looked at the clock. Ten past four. It was almost dark outside the window.

He took out his cell phone and keyed in the number for Eel Point. Katrine should have picked up Livia and Gabriel and be back home by now.

The phone rang out six times, seven, eight. No reply.

He rang her cell phone. No reply.

Joakim tried not to worry as he packed the last of his tools and carried them out to the trailer along with the furniture. But when everything was done and he’d turned out all the lights in the house and locked up, he took out his cell phone again and rang a local number.