John Lindqvist - Handling The Undead

If it… comes back…

He clapped a hand over his mouth, forcing his face not to contOrt in howls of laughter, as he imagined the headless rabbit digging itself up and crawling zombie-like back to their apartment, dragging itself up the stairs.

Sture helped Magnus put the tufts of grass back, pat them in place and bang the cross into the ground with the shovel. He looked at David and they nodded at each other. It was doubtful whether the grave would stay intact for long, but it was done.

Everyone stood up. Magnus started to sing, 'The world is a sorrow-island… ' like he had seen them do in All of us on Saltkrakan and David thought:

This is the bottom. Now We have reached rock bottom. We have to have reached the bottom.

David and Sture laid one hand each on Magnus' shoulders and David -could not shake the feeling that it was really Eva's funeral they were enacting.

The bottom. It has to be…

Magnus crossed his arms over his chest and David felt his shoulders draw together, shrinking, as he said, 'It was my fault.'

'No,' David said. 'It was certainly not your fault.'

Magnus nodded. 'I was the one who did it.'

'No, little one, it was… '

'Yes, it was. I was the one who thought, so Mum did it.'

David and Sture exchanged looks. Sture bent down and asked, 'What do you mean?'

Magnus wrapped his arms around David's hips and said into his stomach, 'I thought bad things about Mummy and that was why she got angry.'

'My darling boy… ' David crouched down and scooped Magnus into his arms. 'We were the ones who should have known… it is not your fault.'

Magnus body was wracked with sobs and the words gushed out of him.

'Yes, because I thought…I thoughtthat 1… because she was only talking so strange like that because she didn't care about… and I was thinking that I didn't like her, I was thinking that she was ugly and that I hated her even though I didn't want to because I thought she was going to be like normal and then she was like that and that's why I thought it and when I thought it… when I thought it, that was when she did it.'

Magnus was still talking as David carried him back to the apartment, did not stop until he lay in his bed, his eyes red and his eyelids heavy.

His birthday…

After a while his eyes closed and he fell asleep. David tucked him in and went out to Sture in the kitchen, collapsing onto a chair.

'He's finished,' David said. 'He's completely finished. These past few days… he hasn't slept much at night and today… it's too much for him. He can't… how's he supposed to handle this?'

Sture didn't answer. After a period of silence he said, 'I think he'll manage. If you do. Then he will too.'

David's gaze travelled across the kitchen and fixed on a bottle of wine. Sture looked in the same direction, then back at David, who shook his head.

'No,' David said. 'But it's… hard.'

'Yes,' Sture said. 'I know.'

Haltingly, with long pauses, they talked about what had happened at the Heath but reached no conclusions. The area had been in uproar since they left. It seemed unlikely that visiting would' be reinstituted for a long time. David went and checked on Magnus. He was sleeping deeply. When he came back to the kitchen Sture said, 'This thing that the doctor asked about. The Fisher.'

'Yes?'

'It's…' Sture pulled a finger along the table top as if he was tracing

back along a timeline, 'pretty strange. Or completely natural. I don', know which.'

'What is it, then?'

'Well, you know her books. Bruno Beaver. Do you have one here?'

They had a little box with gratis copies of each and David picked

out the two books, laying them side by side. Sture turned to a page in Bruno the Beaver Finds His Way Home and pointed to! the place where Bruno finally found the spot where he was going to build his house, only to discover that the Waterman also lived, in the lake.

'This Waterman,' Sture said and pointed at the blurry figure, down in the water. 'She met him. I started telling you about it out there, but…' He raised and dropped his shoulders. 'When she almost', drowned. Later… quite a few days later she told us that there had been… well, that there had been some kind of creature down there with her.'

David nodded. 'She's told me about that. That it was like that was the thing that had come to take her. The Waterman.'

'Yes,' Sture said. 'But then…I don't know if she remembers, she's told you, but when she was little… she called that creature the Fisher.'

'No,' David said. 'She never said that.'

Sture idly turned the pages of the book. 'Whenever we've talked about it since she grew up she's always called it the Waterman or just That Thing, so I was wondering if she'd…forgotten.'

'But now she says the Fisher.'

'Yes. I remember that she… We encouraged her, thinking it might be good for her, that she drew a lot of pictures of the Fisher at the time, after it had happened. She was quite an artist even then.'

David went to the hall closet and brought back a box of old papers, magazines, drawings; the objects that Eva had chosen to keep from her childhood. It felt good to have something to do, something to investigate. He placed the box on the kitchen table and they hauled out text books, photographs, beautiful rocks, school year books and drawings. Sture lingered over certain items, sighing deeply at a snapshot of Eva, maybe ten years old, with a large pike in her arms.

'She was the one who got him,' he said. 'All by herself. I just helped her with the net.' He wiped his eyes. 'It was a… nice day.'

They continued through piles. Many of the sketches were dated and it was not hard to see that Eva would one day become an artist. Even as a nine-year-old she was drawing animals and people much better than David would ever be able to.

And then they found what they were looking for.

A single drawing, dated July 1975. Sture quickly checked the papers underneath but there were no others.

'There used to be more,' he said. 'She must have thrown the others out.'

The other papers were pushed aside and David walked around to Sture's side to study the single sketch in the middle of the table.

Eva's style was still childlike, of course. The fish were drawn with a single line, and the little girl who was supposed to be Eva had a disproportionally large head in relation to her body. You could tell

she was under water from the wavy line toward the upper edge of the page.

'She's smiling,' David said.

'Yes,' Sture said. 'She is smiling.'

The mouth drawn on the girl's face was so happy as to flout accepted childhood standards of how to represent people. The smile covered half her face. This was a happy child.

Not easy to understand, in view of the character who was right next to her. The Waterman, the Fisher. It was at least three times as big as she was. It did not have a face, there was just an empty oval where the face should be. Outlines of arms, legs and body were drawn with trembling, wavering lines as if the figure was electric or dissolving.

Sture said, 'It wasn't clearly defined, she said. As if it was changing all the time.'

David did not answer. There was a detail in the picture he could not tear his eyes away from. The rest of the body was deliberately drawn to be indistinct, but there was one exception: the hands. The hands had clearly defined fingers, and at the tip of each was a large hook. The hooks were stretched out toward the smiling girl.

'The hooks,' David said. 'What are they?'

'We fished a lot when she was little,'

Sture said. 'So…' 'What?'

'Well, at the time she said that it had those hooks to catch her. But it wasn't fast enough.' He pointed to the Fisher's fingers. 'They were not as