Юхан Теорин - Echoes From the Dead

She was in a corridor, just as narrow as the hallway downstairs, and with a closed door at either end.

Fear and indecisiveness made her stop once more.

Right or left? If she stood still for long, it would be impossible to move, so she chose the left side of the corridor. It seemed less dark, somehow. She kept going, moving through yet more balls of fluff and the black corpses of flies.

Paler rectangles were visible on the walls — the traces of pictures that had once hung there.

She had reached the end of the corridor. She pushed open the door, holding the lamp in front of her.

The room inside was small and unfurnished, like the rest. But it wasn’t completely empty. Julia stepped inside and stopped when she saw a dark figure lying by the wall next to the room’s only window.

No. It wasn’t a person lying there, she could see that now. It was a sleeping bag, unrolled like a black cocoon. It was lying below a collection of newspaper cuttings stuck up on the wall.

Julia took another step forward. She saw that the cuttings were old and yellow, attached to the wallpaper with pins.

GERMAN SOLDIERS FOUND DEAD — EXECUTED WITH SHOTGUN was printed in black on one of them. On another:

POLICE KILLER HUNTED NATIONWIDE

And on a third, slightly less yellow:

BOY VANISHES IN STENVIK

In the slightly blurry picture beside the headline, a little boy smiled his carefree smile at her, and Julia was seized by the same feeling of despair that overwhelmed her every time she saw her son. There were more cuttings, but she didn’t stay to read them. She quickly looked away and backed out of the room.

Then she stopped. In the light of the paraffin lamp she saw that the door at the other end of the corridor was now open.

It had been closed before, she was certain of it, but now the threshold leading into the darkness of the room beyond was visible. This room wasn’t just dark, it was pitch-black.

And it wasn’t empty. Julia could feel that there was someone waiting in there. An old woman. She was sitting on a chair by the window.

This was her bedroom. A cold bedroom, full of loneliness and waiting and bitterness.

The woman was waiting for company, but Julia stood there in the corridor, rooted to the spot.

She heard a scraping noise from within the darkness. The woman had got up. She was moving slowly toward the door. Dragging footsteps were moving closer...

Julia had to get away. She had to get back downstairs.

Julia ran.

Onto the landing and then down.

She thought she could hear footsteps above her, and she felt the old woman’s cold presence behind her.

He deceived me!

Julia felt the hatred like a hard push in her back. She ran blindly forward in the darkness, missed the next step, and lost her balance, three or four yards above the stone floor.

Her arms flailed in the air, both the cell phone and the paraffin lamp went flying.

The lamp and the cell phone smashed onto the kitchen floor down below. Flames shot up from the paraffin — and Julia knew that she too would very soon land on the stone floor down below.

She gritted her teeth against the pain.

On the day that Ernst Adolfsson was to be buried, Gerlof woke up in the cold, gray dawn feeling as if he’d been hurled onto the floor from a great height. The pain in his arms and knees was agonizing.

It was stress: Sjögren’s syndrome had come calling again — it was such a bloody nuisance. He was going to need a wheelchair to be able to get to the church at all.

The rheumatic condition Sjögren’s syndrome was a companion, not a friend — despite the fact that Gerlof had tried to welcome and disarm him many times, simply by relaxing and trying to be pleasant when he turned up. Sjögren had open access to his body, just help yourself, but it was no use. The syndrome was always equally merciless when it came, hurling itself at him and burrowing deep into his joints, tugging and pulling at his nerves, making his mouth dry and his eyes sore.

Gerlof allowed the pain to continue until it grew tired. He laughed in Sjögren’s face.

“I’m back in the pram,” he stated after breakfast.

“You’ll soon be back on your feet, Gerlof.”

Marie, his helper for the day, placed a small cushion behind his back for support and folded down the wheelchair’s footplates beneath his best shoes.

With Marie’s help, Gerlof had laboriously put on his only black suit, which was shiny and much cleaned. He had bought it for his wife’s funeral, then worn it to twenty or so since then: a long series of friends’ and relatives’ funerals in Marnäs church. Sooner or later he would be wearing the suit to his own funeral.

Over the suit he put on his gray overcoat, with a thick woolen scarf around his neck and a fedora pulled well down over his ears. The temperature had dropped to near freezing on this gloomy day in the middle of October.

“Ready?” said Boel when she came out of the office. “How long will you be away?”

Always the same old question.

“That depends on how inspired Pastor Högström is today,” replied Gerlof.

“We can warm up your lunch in the microwave,” said Boel, “if need be.”

“Thank you,” said Gerlof, who doubted if he would be particularly hungry after Ernst’s funeral.

He thought Boel should be happy now that Sjögren had forced him into a wheelchair and made it easy to keep an eye on him; she liked to be in control of things. But he would soon be back on his feet again, when the syndrome subsided. Once he could walk again, he would find the person who murdered Ernst.

Marie pulled on a pair of gloves and grabbed hold of the wheelchair’s handles.

Off they went. Into the elevator, slowly down, then out into the bright cold air, down the ramp, and onto the turning area for cars. The frosty gravel crunched beneath the wheels of the chair as they set off along the empty track to the church.

Gerlof gritted his teeth. He hated feeling so helpless in the wheelchair, but he tried to relax and let go of the responsibility.

“Are we late?” he asked.

It had taken far too long to get into his suit.

“Not much,” said Marie. “A bit, but that’s my fault... Good thing the church is nearby.”

“I don’t think we’ll get a detention,” said Gerlof, and Marie laughed politely.

He was pleased about that — not all the helpers at the Marnäs home realized it was the duty of the young to laugh at the wit of the old.

They rolled along toward the church, and Gerlof leaned forward slightly in an attempt to protect his face from the biting wind blowing in off Kalmar Sound. He could tell it was a strong, steady southwesterly, which would have made it possible to sail a ketch close-hauled straight up the Swedish coast, all the way up north to Stockholm — but he had no desire to be out at sea on a day like this. The wind would have been whipping the waves up over the gunwale, and the cold would have covered the thwarts with ice. After more than thirty years ashore, Gerlof still felt like a seaman, and no sailor wants to go to sea in the winter.

The bell started to toll as they passed the bus stop by the church and turned in along the track. The sound was desolate and long drawn out, echoing over the flat countryside, and it made Marie walk faster.

Gerlof was in no hurry to get to the funeral — he regarded it mostly as a ritual for other mourners. He himself had said his goodbyes to Ernst the week before, down at the quarry. The sense of loss he felt for his friend had mingled with his sorrow over Ella, and that would remain with him for as long as he lived. And at the same time he had an unpleasant feeling that Ernst wasn’t resting in peace; his old friend was waiting impatiently for Gerlof to put together all the pieces of the puzzle he’d left behind.