Experiment in Terror 05.5 Old Blood (2 page)

I shook such foolish thoughts out of my head and tried not to think about the giant fish woman my mother told me lived in the lake. I faced the trees that bordered the grassy yard and watched as they swayed against each other, their bright leaves glinting in the soft light.

The giggle resounded again. This time it was coming from behind the house where my mother kept a vegetable garden and a small root cellar for preserving over the winter.

I crept along the side of the house, grateful that my tiny leather shoes were worn and didn’t squeak. When I reached the edge of the building, I slowly inched my head around and looked at the garden.

I didn’t move but my breath left me.

In the garden, behind the tomato plants that were snaking up a knotted wood plank, was a girl. She was maybe a year older than me, about the same height. She had the blondest hair I had ever seen, a sharp contrast to my mass of dark waves. She was wearing a red dress that fell in a straight line, free of the bunching I was used to wearing, and shiny white shoes.

She was hiding behind that plant. And she was watching me.

There was no use in me ducking behind the wall. I had been seen and from the strange look in the girls aqua eyes, it looked like I had been expected.

I cleared my throat and tried to speak but all speech had left me. I tried again, worried that something bad would happen if I didn’t say something and finally my tongue worked.

“
I’m Pippa Lindstrom,” I said, keeping most of my body out of her sight. “What’s your name?”

I expected a response. Even for a little girl, it was a straight forward question. But the blonde one just lifted her finger to lips, a skinny pale thing I glimpsed through the tomatoes. Her eyes flashed wide and shot to a place over my head.

I followed her gaze.

Behind me, near the start of the path that led into the woods, was a tall, dark man. He was only darkness. I know this doesn’t make much sense but I could barely make out any of his features, anything that made him human. Everything about him was shadows and black and emptiness. He was dressed in a black cloak, black shoes and pants and his bare skin, his neck and face, looked as if he was standing in the shade of a dense tree.

Only he wasn’t. The sun was directly on him but it didn’t…reach him. It was if the light couldn’t even illuminate a single cell on his body.

My blood froze like a winter lake. I looked back at the girl behind the tomato plant and she was still there with her finger to her mouth, her eyes pleading with me not to say anything.

So I didn’t. I didn’t even nod in fear of giving her away. I just calmly looked back at the man as if he was the only person I saw outside my house.

The man stared at me. I don’t know how I knew this because I couldn’t see his eyes, even if he had eyes. But he was staring and in that way the owl does before he decides to bite the head off a mouse. It was predatory.

Then he turned and walked into the woods. Maybe he floated, my memory is a bit fuzzy. If I recall correctly, I think he just disappeared into the bark of the trees. But he was there one minute and the next he was gone.

Sure that the black man had vanished, I stepped around the house and walked toward the girl. She stumbled back a few feet, looking scared. I noticed how white her shoes stayed, despite the layer of mud in the garden from yesterday’s rain. It was strange. But what wasn’t?

“
Who are you?” I asked, wanting an answer this time. “Where do you live?”

“
I live in the lake,” she said.

I giggled and put my hands on my hips. “You’re a liar. No one lives in the lake.”

Not even monsters
, I thought.
That was make believe
.

She shook her head and began to walk through the mud. Her feet never left any footprints.

Was this make believe too?

“
Where do you live?” I asked again as she skirted past me and walked faster, heading for the side of the house. I followed after her, my eyes glued to her feet that never got dirty, that never made a mark.

“
I live in the lake,” she said again, as if I didn’t hear her.

As she reached the front and the lake loomed before us, the water calmed instantaneously. Like there was a switch that made the currents move and stop.

I knew the girl didn’t live in the lake, but I also knew not to argue with her. She was the first girl my age that I had ever talked to. I wanted her to stay around and play with me. I wanted to give her licorice from the washbasin and ask her to stay for cake but I quickly realized the lake was the only thing she aware of now.

“
Don’t go,” I cried out after her, my long legs catching up. “Please.”

“
I have to go home now. He’ll find me here.”

“
Who?” I asked. I was walking beside her now and struggling to keep up. Though I was tall, she was a bit taller, older and more determined. Her fair hair bounced around her face and her aqua eyes were focused on the water. She didn’t blink at all.

“
Where are you going?” I asked, stopping just as my own shoes almost met the shoreline.

She didn’t answer and she didn’t stop. She walked straight into the lake, effortlessly, as if the water were just air. Her clothes didn’t even soak in the liquid. The water slid around her like a shiny curtain and within seconds her head disappeared. She was in the lake.

I took off my shoes and tossed them onto the grass behind me, thinking not to get them wet for whatever reason, and then I went in the lake too. It was cold as January and deeper than anything, not the warm shallow water it should have been. Within seconds my body had seized up from the temperature and my feet couldn’t find the muddy bottom. My head was above water, then my nose, then nothing at all. I sank and sank and sank until I found my blonde friend again.

At first I thought she was grabbing hold of my leg. Perhaps she was going to pull me up to the surface. My lungs hurt and my eyes were burning and I needed air more than anything.

But in the last moments before I lost consciousness I realized she wasn’t grabbing me.

She was bumping into me.

She was upright, swaying in the murky water like a reed in the current. Her hair floated around her like a golden net. At her feet, at her white shoes that were now muddled with scuffs and dirt, were thick, rusted chains. They wrapped around her slender ankles and thin socks and kept her down, anchored to the bottom.

She looked dead until she raised her head at me.

My own face looked back.

I screamed and a rush of water filled my lungs within seconds. The watery world became shadows.

The next thing I remembered was waking up in my own bed, covered in a thick quilt, a mug of hot tea beside me.

I was in my tiny bedroom. It was nighttime, but I didn’t know when. All I knew is that my mother was in the middle of speaking to me, as if I had been speaking to her too. It was boring stuff, something about a church and a minister.

Downstairs I heard cupboards slamming shut, a sure sign that papa was angry. Was he angry at me? What had happened?

My mother sensed my apprehension because she smoothed the hair off my head.

“
You musn’t talk about that girl anymore,” she whispered. She leaned in close and I caught a whiff of the perfume she only wore on Sundays. Had I been sleeping for a couple of days now?

And the girl. The girl with the blonde hair and the boxy dress and the white shoes that wouldn’t smudge until she was dead at the bottom of the lake. She had been real. She wasn’t a dream. I had seen her, hiding behind that tomato plant.

“
He’s being good not using the belt,” she continued. “You need to keep being good too.”

I wanted to say so much, but I couldn’t. I had no idea what I had been babbling about in my half-dead delirious state. There was no doubt my parents would have chalked any mentions of the girl to over-imagination, lies, and possibly the Devil’s work.

A few days later, when my parents deemed me as normal and no longer a threat to myself, we heard news from a local woodcutter who was passing through. Greta Lund, the young daughter of one of papa’s worshippers, had been found dead at the bottom of the lake. A man had been fishing and his hook got caught on her net of hair. There was no mention of chains but I knew what I had seen. I had seen her and I had seen what had really happened to her. She had been murdered. Was it the blackened man? I didn’t know at the time. But I knew then that what I saw was real and not real all at once. I was special. And not in a fortunate way.

CHAPTER TWO

The second time this sort of thing happened to me, I was a few years older and could no longer blame my mother’s stories for giving my gift fire. She had stopped telling them many years ago. It was the first time my special sight caused loss – I no longer had that closeness with my mother.

I had started going to school in Ullapa, the closest town and would get a ride in every morning with our neighbor Arstand and his son Stäva. As you may recall, Arstand was the goat farmer who found me, along with my mother, floating in the lake when I was six. That explained why Arstand was always a bit jumpy with me, as if I was going to pop up and say “boo!” at any moment.

But he tolerated me enough to fit me in his new vehicle and take me to school. My parents were still behind the times and my father shunned motor vehicles as being unnecessary idols and symbols of gluttony. I suppose he was right, but it was still a convenient way to get around.

Stäva had ended up being my only, and, by default, closest friend. He was a bit strange and funny to look at but strange suited me just fine. He was small for his age and had ears that stuck out. Arstand called him “elefant.” It didn’t seem to bother Stäva much though. He had a sunny personality and loved to listen to me prattle on about this and that. He was also quite the adventurer and when we first started playing together we would explore the farm he lived on, climbing up into the haylofts and jumping onto the piles below or feeding the baby goats (when we weren’t chasing them around). My parents weren’t too happy that I was spending so much of my time away from home, but I suppose my mother felt she was in debt to Arstand and after a while they didn’t seem to mind. Perhaps it was a relief to them that someone else was taking care of me.

It was at Stäva’s that I was introduced to more modern conveniences, aside from the car of course. Being a goat farmer was more profitable than being a minister and they had things such as a library and a radio. The library was a great place for me to sink my teeth, especially as I had learned to read at that point, but the radio trumped all. When I was there after school, his father, mother and two younger brothers would sit around the giant radio and listen to broadcasts coming out of Stockholm. I found the news to be boring, except when it touched on the troubles in Europe, but I lived for the plays and radio shows that played after. It was then that I fell in love with acting and the theatre. I couldn’t see the show of course, and I had never seen a performance in my life as church singing didn’t count to me, but I could envision it all in my head like I was there with the actors.

“
I’m going to be on the radio one day,” I remember whispering into Stäva’s funny ear. We were sitting on the braided rug in his living room, a place that smelled like a mix of manure, sour milk and home baked bread. It doesn’t sound like a winning combination but it’s funny now how that smell makes me think of home, even though it wasn’t my home. It’s not that Stäva’s parents were particularly nice to me. Like I noted, Arstand was always watching me carefully. His wife Else was a nice woman but she seemed lost in her head more often than not and spent most of her time working with the goat cheese or doting on Stäva’s younger siblings. I wasn’t a pest to them but I wasn’t loved either. Yet I still had a sense of freedom and hope in their peculiar-smelling place.

With the idea of being an actress in my head, I focused solely on that. I mentioned it once to my parents and ended up getting a belt across my thigh. It didn’t hurt. I was too angry for it to hurt. I was angry at my father for being so close-minded about his daughter’s dreams (for what were we without dreams) and at my mother for never sticking up for me. Ever since the lake incident, when she stopped with her stories, she stopped being my friend as well. It hurt more than anything, more than all the belts, more than the feeling of drowning in that ice cold lake.

So I never mentioned it to my parents again but that did me no good. I should have known they’d investigate where the sinful idea came from and when they found out I’d be listening to the radio I was banned from going to Stäva’s. They didn’t care enough to ban me from seeing him in particular, just that I couldn’t listen to the radio. My ears couldn’t be polluted by foreign ideas. They even had a talk with his parents and to keep peace as neighbors, they agreed. What was it to Stäva’s parents anyway? They didn’t care if I couldn’t listen to the radio. One less child crowding their house.