I Am Behind You (37 page)

‘I found them,' Majvor says, pointing. ‘Spread out over there. The wedding ring is from 1904.'

They all look over at the spot where Majvor's caravan used to be, as if that might somehow help them.

‘Could I have a look?' Stefan says, and Majvor hands over the items with a certain amount of reluctance. As Stefan examines the rings, Majvor says: ‘I think the small lumps are fillings.'

‘Why are they here?' Emil wonders, standing on tiptoe so that he can see what is in his father's hand.

Everyone else looks enquiringly at Stefan and Carina to check what they think about discussing such matters in front of Emil.

‘Well,' Lennart begins, ‘the obvious explanation is that they used to belong to people who are no longer with us. But…' He turns to Majvor. ‘You didn't find any bones?' When she shakes her head, he frowns. ‘Not even
teeth
?'

‘No,' Majvor replies. ‘I did look, but I couldn't find anything else.'

Lennart thinks about the deer skull nailed to the wall at the back of the old brewery. It was hung up by his great-grandfather, and because it has been there for so long, it has just been left. Exposed to wind and weather, it is still intact, and if there is one thing that the passage of time has barely touched, it is the teeth.

Then again, it doesn't take a genius or any knowledge of his ancestor's macabre idea of what constitutes a decorative object to be aware that skeletons and teeth have a tendency to stay around when everything else has gone. At least after a relatively short period such as a hundred and ten years. And of course there is nothing to say that it happened then, whatever it might have been. It could have been considerably later.

‘Erik,' Stefan says, reading the inscription. ‘His name was Erik.'

The group falls silent. At some point long ago there was a person called Erik who also ended up in this place, together with some other people. Something befell Erik and his companions, and as a result all that was left of them was their jewellery and the fillings from their teeth. That is the first thing that occurs to everyone; it creates a moment of reverence, hence the silence.

But it doesn't stop there. The reverence metamorphoses into something far less pleasant as they all draw the obvious conclusion: whatever happened to those other people could also happen to us. Or even worse: whatever happened to those other people is
going
to happen to us.

They all look at one another, then out towards the field.

The crossroads
, Lennart thinks.
Just like us, they were at the crossroads. And that's where they stayed.

*

Isabelle is lying on her back on the double bed, her arms by her sides. Her face is swollen, her tongue is throbbing, and the pain in her forearms feels like an army of vicious, biting ants. She is a piece of meat
wrapped in plastic, but fortunately she is not here in the moment and she is not in her body.

She is in the past. She is ten minutes ago, running towards the white figures with the knife in her hand. She knows they want blood, and she intends to give them blood. Her guts are so full of black, surging shame

I kicked my daughter, I wanted to kill my daughter

that she feels nothing but relief when the blade slices into her skin and lets out some of the

bloodshame

the pressure that grows and grows, threatening to make her explode from the inside. She falls to her knees, holding out her arm to the white figures, offering them the blood gushing out of her body. She wants them to take her, embrace her, carry her away and suck her dry. But they simply look down at the ground where her blood is staining the grass dark red.

She changes hands and cuts open the other arm. The relief is diminished this time. It is merely a task, a series of movements which must be carried out to get this out of the way. The white figures do not deign to look at her. Their dark eyes are focused on the grass, where the blood…

Isabelle sways, down on her knees with her arms outstretched. She doesn't understand. The blood is vanishing. As it spurts out of her arms, it is absorbed by the ground the second it lands. There is blood on the grass, but only a fraction of the amount she has already sacrificed and

More. More.

continues to sacrifice.

More.

Clearly it is not enough. The arteries in her arms are too thin, she must give them more

All of it.

and she raises the knife to slice open her jugular vein. As she tilts her head to one side to get a better angle, two things happen
in rapid succession.

She looks up at the white figures hoping for confirmation before she makes the ultimate sacrifice, but suddenly her attention is caught by a movement in her peripheral vision.

Up and down. Up and down.

Someone is bouncing. A child. Bouncing on a trampoline. And right alongside is an overweight guy in a Hawaiian shirt, raising his arms in triumph as his long putt rolls into the hole on one of the mini-golf courses. The smell of fried food from the kiosk wafts past Isabelle's nostrils, and she hears someone say something in Finnish from a nearby mobile home.

For a second she is able to grasp that she is back on the campsite, the place she hated so much, then something enormous comes flying towards her and crashes into her. She falls backwards, drops the knife, and she sees nothing but blue sky. Then everything goes dark as her consciousness gives up.

Isabelle opens her eyes a fraction, lets in a glimmer of light. Molly is sitting cross-legged beside her on the double bed, singing as she strokes Isabelle's fingers, her bitten nails.

Isabelle feels dizzy, and she is falling back into the memory that is playing on a loop inside her head. The fat man on the mini-golf course appears. The bottom buttons on his brightly coloured shirt are undone, and when he raises his arms a pale, hairy belly is revealed, spilling over the waistband of his trousers.

Ugly people. All these ugly people. Where do all these ugly people come from? From Finland. Fat ugly Finns. Fat ugly Finns from Finland.

A shudder runs through her body. She is shaking and her teeth are chattering as she picks up the smell of that hairy belly; she can taste the salty tang of sweat mixed with beer fumes just as strongly as if she had licked that belly and felt the curly hairs against the papillae.

Molly's voice brings her back to the caravan. Isabelle opens her eyes a little wider and sees that Molly is smiling at her, wagging her head from side to side. Isabelle is finding it difficult to focus. Molly's face is blurred, like a pencil drawing that someone has gone over halfheartedly with an eraser. The memory of a face.

Isabelle assumes she is having a problem with her vision because of her dazed state, but in that case how come the princess on Molly's T-shirt is crystal clear?

Molly leans closer, but her face remains blurred. More so, in fact. What Isabelle had thought was her mouth looks more like a dirty mark that disintegrates when Isabelle looks at it.

‘Mummy,' Molly says. ‘Do you remember the tunnel? It was dark in there. Really, really dark.'

*

Peter was once responsible for Lazio losing a vital league match against Milan. In the final minute of play he raced towards the left post just as a perfectly executed lob curved over the goalie's head. A gentle tap and the matter would have been resolved. Instead Peter caught the ball with his shin, and it landed just outside the goal. Thirty seconds later the game was over. He had to put up with a lot of ribbing from his teammates, but it didn't really affect his position within the squad. These things happen; it was just unfortunate that it came at such a critical moment.

The newspapers had a different view. It was all Peter's fault, and they borrowed the Spanish expression
hacerse el sueco
, which means to act like an idiot.

A few of Lazio's more fanatical supporters read the articles and took the criticism very seriously. One evening when Peter was on the way home to his apartment, he heard a drunken yell from a bar: ‘Lo svedese! Guardate lo svedese!' Seconds later four guys were running towards him. Nobody had told them that ‘these things happen', and they intended to teach lo svedese a lesson.

The memory flickers through Peter's mind as he sits in the car watching the distorted figures approach. For a moment he had stopped dead in the middle of the piazza. There was something hypnotic about the sight of the four men coming at him with the intention of beating him up. To be the quarry, alone and exposed to the hunters' thirst for blood.

The paralysis soon passed, and Peter turned and fled. He had no difficulty in getting away from four drunken louts, and he suffered no lasting damage, apart from the unpleasant feelings that the incident aroused: the sense of being the focal point to which violence is drawn with the aim of smashing him to pieces, crushing him.

Something of that same fascination has gripped Peter now, and all he can do is stare open-mouthed. The figures are running, but not particularly fast, since every step seems to cause them pain. The screams Peter can hear are coming out of mouths that have been robbed of their lips, white teeth gleaming in charred faces. When they are close enough for him to see that the reason why their eyes are wide open is because they have no eyelids, he comes to his senses and lurches towards the passenger door to lock it, but there doesn't seem to be a button.

The blackened figures are now only a couple of metres from the car, and their screams slice through Peter's chest like ice-cold knives.

Central locking! Central locking!

Donald's car is fairly new, as is Peter's, and somewhere there must be a button that locks all the doors from the inside. In case of
carjacking. In case of a zombie attack. Peter's fingers flutter over the instrument panel, desperately seeking the right symbol. He glances outside; this isn't the time to consult the manual. The expression on the face of the figure whose hand is already on the car bonnet lacks any vestige of human sanity. Those eyes convey only one thing: hunger.

The thin, claw-like hand scrapes across the metal; the creature's hip catches the wing mirror and bends it inwards as it reaches for the door handle.

Two buttons. One with an open padlock, one with a closed padlock. Peter presses the closed padlock and hears a reassuring clunk from all four doors in unison. The creature tugs at the door, but to no avail.

Peter has been so preoccupied with what has been going on in front of him and inside his head that he has forgotten a pretty vital fact: he is sitting in a car. A car that can be started up. A car that can be driven. Away from the creatures who are now surrounding him, trying to find a way in.

And yet he doesn't move. Now that the immediate danger has passed and the wave of panic in his belly has receded, he can see that even though the creatures look terrifying, they are not strong. Their dried-up, burnt fingers scrabble at the car or clench into fists, banging feebly at the windows as they scream and scream.

Are they…people?

One of them clambers up onto the bonnet and leans towards Peter, who instinctively recoils. They look at one another.

The creature has no more individuality than a skull. Everything that would confer personality has been burnt away. The ears and nose are no more than charred remains, and the parchment-like skin is stretched over the cheekbones. It looks at Peter. And screams.

When it opens its mouth Peter can see that one single muscle is more or less intact: the tongue, obscenely pink among the black and brown as the creature leans closer and screams. Most people go through life without ever hearing such a scream, fortunately, but in its expression of bottomless pain it is nonetheless human.

‘What do you want?' Peter shouts. ‘What do you want?'

It is obvious what they want. They want to get into the car. Peter has no intention of allowing that to happen, but he has to say something, something that will establish…human contact. He doesn't get an answer, but suddenly the creature stiffens and looks over its shoulder. The banging and scraping noises stop.

It quickly grows dark as the cloud comes closer, and through the windscreen Peter can see that the black wall in front of him has become diffuse and hazy. Twenty metres ahead of the car the grass seems to be moving in his direction. The creature jumps down from the bonnet and its screams change character, from pain to fear. Through the rear-view mirror Peter sees all four figures running away from the car.

Only when the movement in the grass has reached the car and the haze has become a fog does Peter realise what it is. Rain. A heavy shower of rain is falling from the black cloud, which now covers the sky so that it is as dark as night. A second later the drops begin to spatter on the bodywork of the car.

The screams grow fainter, and Peter runs his fingers through his hair, scratches his head. Rain. At least that explains how the grass can grow, but why are those creatures so afraid of it? Surely it would bring welcome relief, cool them down?

It is pitch black now, and Peter starts the engine so that he can switch on the headlights, but the water pouring down the windscreen still makes it difficult to see anything. He switches on the wipers, and now he can make out something that the flat light from the sky had not revealed. There is a track. A track running from the wall of darkness out across the field, following the route that the creatures took when they ran away.

Steam rises from the windscreen as some kind of sticky substance appears to vaporise. The next sweep of the wiper blades brings more goo; there is a terrible smell coming through the air conditioning, and now the wipers begin to make a screeching noise as they sweep back and forth.