Юнас Юнассон - The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man

‘It can’t be that hard to see the past,’ said Allan. ‘I could, before my memory got too bad. And isn’t the present the present?’

It wasn’t quite that simple. The past was made up of parallel events that together created an individual’s now and would do the same with said individual’s future.

‘Without the proper knowledge of the guardian angels, you are spiritually lost. With the wrong energies in the room, it’s still worse.’

Julius had known for a long time that Sabine was as spiritually lost as he was. Not to mention Allan. But business was business. What sort of focus did Sabine think they should have, in this clairvoyant muddle?

Well, that was the thing. The reasonably good news in all of this was that few of the mediums focused on ghosts, driving out ghosts, or conversations with the other side. Sabine saw potential market success in what had once been her mother’s speciality.

Allan delivered the good news that the ranks of those on the other side had recently increased by one. He read from the tablet about the hundred-and-seventeen-year-old Uzbek farmer’s wife who had just passed away after her only cow happened to sit on her.

Sabine was growing more tired of the old man with each passing day. Perhaps on his hundred-and-second birthday they could buy him a cow, and hope for the best.

The day after the terror attack in Stockholm, Eskilstuna-Kuriren revealed evidence of surprising incompetence at the local police station a hundred kilometres away. In the hysterical hunt for the terrorist, they had not hesitated to terrorize the most innocent of citizens. Not even the dead were spared (Bella Hansson chose not to mention that there had been no dead person in the coffin, and the fact that there had been a living corpse within it was beyond her knowledge).

The individual inspectors and police leadership were portrayed, in her article, as a bunch of nitwits who didn’t understand the concept of prioritizing. Cracking down on an innocent hearse! What next?

The article was sharp, even if it did peter out a bit towards the end. It was also rather long. Thus, at the last second, Bella cut the sections in which the police assured her that the crackdown, which incidentally was not a crackdown, had occurred due to suspicion that there actually was a link to the terrorist act in question.

Foolish police make good local-paper reading.

Foolish police make good national-paper reading too.

In no time, the Stockholm papers’ online editions had cranked out a recap of the hearse story.

As a result, two things happened.

One was that a clearly not-so-foolish police officer in Märsta noticed a possible connection. He was investigating a reckless shooting in a coffin shop from the day before, and this new clue might move the investigation forwards. He would just have to make a phone call or two.

The other was that the membership of Aryan Alliance – that was, Johnny Engvall – now knew for certain that those who must die at any cost were on a trip through Sweden.

‘You’re heading south, you pigs,’ he said to himself. ‘On back roads?’

At first he smiled at his own great intelligence. Then he realized that there were many back roads to choose from in southern Sweden. And the trail had already gone cold.

Johnny needed to know more than the article’s reporter had given him.

The concept development continued. While Allan, aged a hundred and one, showed Julius, aged sixty-six, how to maximize one’s reach to the proper target group via Facebook ads, Sabine drove around in the hearse to obtain pendulums, crystals, divining rods and nasty-smelling myrrh. She respected the group’s limited budget. For a pendulum she used a plumb line she found on sale at Byggmax. She whittled her own divining rod with the help of a stick stolen from the pension’s garden. Ordinary sea salt would do for crystals. And she produced myrrh with the help of an oil lamp, whose fuel consisted of one part shrimp soup and nine parts oil. The rest of the secret was double wicks: one to burn and one that just glowed, spreading smoke and smell.

The pension manager looked curiously at Sabine’s many tools of the trade and cautiously asked what Mrs Undertaker planned to use all that for. Sabine told it like it almost was: they weren’t only undertakers but had an additional speciality in which they established contact with those they had just helped send into the ground. At this Mrs Lundblad’s enthusiasm was set aflame. Did Mrs Undertaker mean to say she could establish contact with Börje?

The old woman had brought up her deceased spouse time and again in the short period they’d been in her company. In under twenty-four hours Sabine knew everything worth knowing about the spouse’s previous doings, like, for example, that he had been dead for fifteen years. Background knowledge was, after all, everything in the field of clairvoyance.

Why not? A dress rehearsal could only be an advantage before they started their operation for real.

The performance that followed made quite an impression on Allan and Julius. If they hadn’t known better they would have believed that the dead man really was talking to his widow from the other side, via Sabine. The husband swore his eternal love to his widow and sounded distressed when he learned that the cat had died eight years earlier at the age of sixteen. When asked point-blank, he promised he had stopped smoking.

It would have been a resounding success if only the manager had avoided being struck with heart failure when her deceased husband said he pined for her so badly that he cried himself to sleep each night.

‘Oh, my,’ said Julius, as the old woman pitched forward and landed with her nose on the table.

Sabine jumped out of her séance chair in horror and turned on the ceiling light as Julius took a closer look at the old woman.

‘Is she dead?’ Sabine asked.

‘I think so,’ said Julius.

The only one who remained calm was Allan.

‘Then they’ll soon be together again,’ he said. ‘If the old man was lying about his smoking, he’d better snuff it out soon.’

Sabine snapped at Allan and his lack of respect, saying that now she was sure there was something wrong with him. Then she gathered up her things and called an urgent crisis meeting in the kitchen. For the time being they would leave the old woman where she was.

They sat down at the kitchen table, Sabine, with creases on her forehead, Julius, with pen and paper, and Allan, with a ban on speaking.

‘We can’t stay here,’ said Sabine. ‘But where will we go, and why?’

Julius praised her for the brilliant performance she’d just given; he imagined they could rake in some good money from it. Somewhere the customer base was sufficiently large. Time for a snap decision. He wrote ‘Stockholm’ on his paper. Under that ‘Gothenburg’. And under that, ‘Malmö’.

Stockholm was ruled out immediately: there were far too many Nazis there. Julius wrote No .

What about Gothenburg? Sweden’s second-biggest city. Hmm .

Or Malmö? With its proximity to Copenhagen. Almost four million people lived there, if you counted both sides of the bridge.

Julius wrote Yes . Their destination was determined by a vote of two to nil, with one vote declared invalid. All that was left was to decide what to do with the dead woman.

‘Not call the police,’ said Julius.

No, presenting a dead elder to the police the day after they’d found a living one in a coffin seemed like asking for trouble.

Julius took a peek at the woman’s ledger. Two guests from Greece were booked two days later. The woman wouldn’t have to be alone for longer than that.