Юхан Теорин - Echoes From the Dead

Julia opened her eyes. It wasn’t the bang that had woken her but the sunshine suddenly pouring in through the east-facing window. She blinked and raised her head from the warm pillow. She could see autumn-yellow grass swaying in the wind outside the window, and remembered where she was. Strong wind and bright air.

Stenvik, she thought.

She blinked again and tried to keep her head up, but quickly sank back into the hollow in the pillow. She was always slow in the mornings, she had been all her life, and for the past twenty years the oblivion of sleep had often been very tempting. Her bouts of depression after that day had led her to sleep away far more of her adult life than she should have. But getting up in the morning was hard when there didn’t seem to be any particular reason to do so.

Getting up in Stenvik was also made more difficult by the fact that there was no nice warm bathroom to stagger to. All there was below the boathouse was a stony shore and ice-cold water.

Julia had a vague memory of heavy rain rattling on the roof during the night, but all she could hear now was the sound of the waves below the boathouse. The rhythmic rushing made her think about jumping out of bed, throwing off her clothes, and dashing down to leap into the sea, but the thought passed.

She stayed in the narrow bed for a few more minutes, then got up.

The air was damp and chilly, and it was still windy outside, but the Stenvik she saw when she had put on her jacket and finally opened the boathouse door wasn’t the same ghostly landscape she’d seen the night before.

The heavy overnight rain seemed to have washed away all the grayness; the sun was shining again, and the rocky Öland coast was clean and austere and beautiful. The inlet that had given the village its name wasn’t deep, curving out on either side of the boathouse, carved out of the glittering waters of the sound. A few hundred yards from the shore, gulls were bobbing on top of the waves, their wings outstretched, screaming or laughing shrilly at each other through the wind.

Within the sunlight there was a sense of sorrow that not everything was as beautiful as it seemed to be, but Julia tried to suppress it. She just wanted to feel good. She didn’t want to think about fragments of bone or talk to the memory of Jens this morning.

She heard a cheerful bark. When she turned her head, she saw a white-haired woman in a red padded jacket walking from the coast road with a little light brown dog; it wasn’t on a lead, and it was running backwards and forward, snuffling at the road. With their backs toward Julia they turned off and walked quickly into one of the houses on the other side of the road.

Ernst wasn’t the only person living in Stenvik, Julia realized.

Her drowsiness disappeared, and she was filled with energy. She picked up a plastic container and walked quickly up to Gerlof’s house to fill it with drinking water from the tap in the garden. In the sunshine the cottage looked really welcoming, despite the overgrown grass surrounding it, but Gerlof hadn’t given her a key, so she couldn’t go in to look at her own childhood bedroom.

As she was running the water she realized she could actually stay on Öland for longer than just one day. If there was anything useful to be done — if Gerlof could pull himself together and come up with some suggestions as to what she should do, or look for — she could stay for another two days, or three.

Then she looked around the empty garden and decided. No. She would go home to Gothenburg today, but not until later.

On the way back to the boathouse, holding the water container tightly, she stopped to look at the yellow house behind the hawthorn hedge below the cottage. It was surrounded by tall, spreading ash trees and was barely visible behind the hedge, but what could be seen wasn’t attractive. The house wasn’t just empty, it was completely abandoned. Virginia creeper had spread all over the walls and begun to cover the cracked windows.

Julia had a vague memory of an old woman living there, a woman who never went out or mixed with anyone else in the village.

It was strange that the house had been left to decay; it was a fine house beneath all the cracks. Somebody ought to do up the whole place.

Julia hurried back down to the boathouse to make a cup of tea and some breakfast.

Forty-five minutes later she locked the door of the boathouse, one bag over her shoulder and the other in her hand. Inside, the bed had been made, the electricity switched off, and the blinds pulled down. The boathouse was empty again.

Julia walked across the ridge to the car, looked around without seeing a single person along the coast, and got in. She started the engine and took one last look at the boathouse. She looked at the ridge, the decaying windmill, and all the glittering water below her, and felt the sorrow return.

She quickly turned the car toward the main road.

She drove past the farm that was now a summer cottage, past the deserted yellow house, and past the gate to Gerlof’s cottage. Goodbye, goodbye.

Goodbye, Jens.

To the left of the village road was another road leading to another group of summer cottages, and there was also a rectangular piece of limestone embedded in the ground with the words CRAFT WORK IN STONE 1 KM painted on it in white. On an iron post above it was a sign showing the symbol indicating that there was no through road.

Julia saw the sign and remembered what she’d been thinking of doing this morning before she went to say goodbye to Gerlof: stopping off at the old quarry to have a look at Ernst Adolfsson’s sculptures.

She didn’t really have any money to buy that sort of thing, but she thought she would like to see his work. And perhaps she might try and ask some more questions about Jens, if Ernst remembered his disappearance and if he might be willing to tell her where he himself had been that day. It couldn’t do any harm.

She turned off onto the narrow track, and the little Ford immediately began to bounce and list from one side to the other. It was the worst road Julia had driven on so far on Öland, largely because of the cloudburst. The rainwater was still lying in the wheel tracks in long narrow pools; she slowed and crept forward in first gear, but the car still slipped and slid in the muddy hollows.

She left the summer cottages behind and drove along the edge of the alvar. The track curved slowly off toward the quarry along the coast road, then straightened as it approached Ernst Adolfsson’s low cottage. It stopped in front of the house at a circular turning area, where Ernst’s old white Volvo was still parked.

There was no sign of life, but another flat, polished stone with black lettering had been erected in the middle of the turning area: CRAFT WORK IN STONE — WELCOME.

Julia pulled in behind the Volvo and turned off the engine. She got out of the car and took her thin wallet out of her purse.

The wind was sighing in the long grass, and the landscape was almost completely bare of trees. On one side of the garden was the enormous wound in the hillside that was the quarry, on the other side there was only grass and isolated juniper bushes as far as the eye could see. The alvar.

She turned and looked at the house.

It was closed up and silent.

“Hello?” she called.

The wind muted her cry, and no one replied.

A broad path made of crushed limestone led to the door at the side of the house, where there was a bell.

Julia went over and rang it.

Still no reply. But the car was here, so where was Ernst?

She rang again, keeping her finger pressed on the bell. Nothing happened.

An impulse made her try the door. It was unlocked and swung open, like an invitation.

She poked her head in.