The Circle (45 page)

The street looks just as it did before. Yet everything has changed.

Anna-Karin can’t sleep. She’s lying on her side, staring into the room. The blinds aren’t pulled down and she can see the stars through the window. Tonight they seem more distant than ever.

Tomorrow it begins, she thinks. Tomorrow I have to go to school and be Anna-Karin Nieminen without magic. The girl everyone hates or, if she’s lucky, doesn’t notice.

That must be my true self, she thinks. That must be my lot in life. Why else would it have gone so wrong when I tried to change it?

Deep down she had known all along that what she was doing was wrong. It was just that she’d felt it was worth it so she had ignored the warnings, turned a blind eye to the signs. But what good had it done her? Is she happier? No.

Anna-Karin closes her eyes, but her brain keeps whirring, like a crashing computer. She opens her eyes again. There’s no point.

Anna-Karin
.

She recognises the voice from the vision on Lucia night. It belongs to Rebecka and Elias’s murderer.

Life isn’t worth living. You’re going to suffer. Every day you’re going to suffer
.

A great calm spreads through Anna-Karin. She feels her body go numb as it climbs out of bed. Her feet walk on to the landing. One step down the stairs, then another.

Anna-Karin allows herself to be guided into the kitchen. She doesn’t resist. What the voice is saying is true. If anyone knows that life is suffering, it’s Anna-Karin. The BO Ho. The fat kid. The peasant. The girl who had to use magic to make her own mother care about her.

She feels relieved. She doesn’t need to be afraid any more. Soon it will all be over.

The voice says no more. It knows that Anna-Karin doesn’t need convincing.

There’s a faint smell of cigarette smoke in the kitchen. The wall clock is ticking away the seconds. Her feet move across the floor to the knife stand next to the stove. Her hand reaches out and takes a firm grip on the biggest knife. It feels strange to see her hand like that, see it grab something even though she can’t feel it. As if it belongs to someone else.

Don’t worry. You won’t feel any pain
.

Her hand angles, turning the blade towards her throat.

She catches sight of Grandpa’s house outside the window.

Grandpa loves her.

And if Grandpa loves her, she can’t be completely worthless. She doesn’t deserve this.

Nobody does.

Suddenly Anna-Karin is afraid. That can mean only one thing. She wants to live. She doesn’t want to die.

The edge of the blade brushes against the soft skin of her throat.

Anna-Karin starts to resist. The other tries to press the knife into her neck. She can feel her carotid artery beating against the blade. Her skin is so thin there. All it will take is a little slit and her blood will spurt all over the kitchen. It’s as if an iron hand is clenched around her wrist. Her arms are shaking from the strain as she struggles to resist. The line separating life and death is so fine.

You’re alone, Anna-Karin. Alone. Why should you go on living? You’re worth more. Maybe you’ll get another chance after death
.

But she’s not listening now. She can’t leave Grandpa. And she can’t abandon the other Chosen Ones in the battle against evil.

She isn’t weak any more. She’s no victim. She controlled the entire school. This is nothing. She’s got more power than this cowardly bastard who hasn’t even the guts to show himself to the one he’s killing.

Let go!

Her power surges through her body and the knife falls to the floor. Anna-Karin slumps down and stares at it. She’s breathing heavily.

A familiar squeaking sound comes from outside.

Anna-Karin gets up, sweat pouring off her. She goes to the window. The barn door is wide open, like a gaping mouth in the red-painted wall. She has the feeling that whatever had tried to take control of her body is playing with her.

She goes out into the hall, pulls on a pair of fur-lined
shoes
and her thickest winter jacket, then opens the door.

It’s strangely quiet outside and there’s no wind. All the windows are dark in Grandpa’s house. She knows she should call the other Chosen Ones. She knows she shouldn’t do this alone. She knows it could be a trap – it’s likely that it is. But she’s tired of running away, tired of being afraid.

She feels as if she could face down anyone. She’ll bring the killer to his knees and force the truth out of him. And then she’ll call the others. After the threat has been neutralised. Then perhaps she’ll have atoned her crimes. Even in the eyes of the Council.

She stops at the barn door. A familiar smell wafts towards her. She can hear the cows moving in their stalls.

‘Show yourself,’ Anna-Karin says.

A cow moos softly. Another snorts. Anna-Karin takes a step inside and switches on the light.

All she sees are rows of cows looking at her with their big brown eyes. Anna-Karin walks further inside.

The crash comes so suddenly that she screams. She spins around. The barn door is closed. As if it had blown shut. On a windless night.

She goes to the door and pulls at it. It’s locked. Bolted from the outside. And that’s when she smells the smoke.

‘No!’ she shouts. ‘No! Let me out!’

The cows moo and kick in their stalls. They’ve also smelt the smoke and know what it means.

The smoke grows thicker with every second. A loud crackling rises quickly to a deafening roar.

Fire.

Anna-Karin looks for something to smash down the door. The smoke stings her eyes. She realises the fire is spreading faster than should be possible. It’s coming from every direction. It becomes unbearably hot.

‘Anna-Karin!’

Grandpa has managed to get in and is rushing forward as fast as his old legs can carry him. When he reaches her he shoves her towards the door.

‘Run!’ he shouts.

But she can’t leave him. He hurries along the row of stalls, opening them. The cows race out in a wild panic, pushing and bunching together, mooing loudly in their desperate flight. A few jostle past Anna-Karin and she falls headlong on to the concrete floor. Her ankle twists beneath her. All around her the heavy bodies gallop past in a frenzy and she shields her head with her arms.

But she doesn’t have time to call for help before Grandpa is at her side. He’s there with his rough, powerful hands and helps her up, letting her lean on him. They’re only a few metres from the door now, a few steps from safety. Anna-Karin doesn’t see the falling beam until it hits him. He crumples to the floor.

‘Grandpa!’

She doesn’t feel her own pain now. She has to get Grandpa out. She pulls and drags at him and suddenly they’re in the snow, but Anna-Karin keeps going, moving away from the barn until she can go no further.

The fire engulfs the old wooden building with a roar. She hears her mother scream inside their house. But Anna-Karin
has
eyes only for Grandpa. He looks at her. Grandpa, dear, sweet Grandpa.

‘Anna-Karin …’ he says faintly. ‘I should …’

And then his words give out
.

IV

46

THE CRYSTAL CAVE’S
sign is midnight blue set with gold curlicue lettering and a sprinkling of little stars and half-moons. Vanessa had hoped that Mona Moonbeam’s shop would be closed. Yet another forgotten victim of the City Mall, a.k.a. the final resting place of failed businesses. But she had caught a whiff of cigarettes and incense as soon as she’d opened the door to the mall. And now she can see through the shop window that three people are waiting to be served in the Crystal Cave. Mona is wearing the same denim outfit as last time, and is receiving a wad of banknotes from an old man who looks to be somewhere between eighty and death.

Vanessa spits out her chewing gum so violently that it bounces against the floor.

Why was she so stupid as to bring up the Crystal Cave? Why had she let herself be talked into coming here?

She knows the answer, of course. They’re desperate.

The
Book of Patterns
has shown them they need ectoplasm but, of course, refused to tell them how to get it.

Vanessa has started to hate that book. It behaves like a grumpy old hag. She’s shaken her own copy viciously,
threatened
to rip out every single page if it doesn’t show her how to solve the mystery of Gustaf and his doppelganger. But nothing appears to her through the Pattern Finder.

Ida is still the only one who can read the
Book of Patterns
. But in front of the principal, whom they still see on Saturdays, she pretends it’s not showing her anything. What Ida finds in the book they discuss at Nicolaus’s house.

When the book wanted them to practise detecting each other’s energies, it had taken Ida a quarter of an hour to explain what they should do. But it had offered no insight as to the point of the exercise.

‘Don’t blame me,’ Ida said. ‘I’m just reading what it says.’

Minoo had tried to put a positive spin on things. She said that the
Book of Patterns
probably knew what they needed, that there must be a really important reason why they had to learn this.

They had no alternative than to put their trust in the grumpy old hag of a book and try the exercises it recommended, no matter how meaningless they seemed. They took turns to sit blindfolded on a chair in Nicolaus’s living room and concentrate on where the others were standing.

Minoo was the first to sit in the chair but she couldn’t find anyone. When she took off the blindfold, she looked devastated. ‘Put through a meat grinder,’ as Vanessa’s mother sometimes said. Vanessa felt sorry for her.

Ida had pulled it off perfectly on the first try and was almost bursting with smugness. She would have loved to
give
herself a round of wild applause and do cartwheels across the room.

Linnéa had done pretty well, too. When it was Vanessa’s turn to sit in the chair, she’d been more nervous than expected. The soft blindfold – actually one of Nicolaus’s old, musty scarves – was fastened behind her head. It was unpleasant knowing that everyone was looking at her yet she couldn’t see them.

Her senses had played tricks on her the whole time. At one moment she thought she’d heard someone giggle, at the next it was so quiet she was sure everyone had left.

It was only after Nicolaus had urged her to relax that it started to work.

Then she could feel the others, faintly at first, but the more she trusted the feeling, the stronger it became. Eventually there was no hesitation: she could point out where they were standing, one by one, in quick succession.

Vanessa would never be able to explain how she did it. It was as if she could detect the other Chosen Ones using a sense she hadn’t been aware she possessed. Not smell or taste, not hearing, touch or sight. It was something else altogether.

The book also taught them a magical version of hide-and-seek, or ‘pendulation’ –that was the word Ida had used when she’d tried to explain the procedure. A Chosen One would stand in Nicolaus’s living room while the others would go into the kitchen, shut the door between the two rooms and sit at the kitchen table. Then they would spread a diagram of the apartment on the table. The one doing the exercise
would
take Ida’s silver necklace and let it hang like a pendulum above the diagram.

Vanessa was the first to try. She took Ida’s necklace while Linnéa waited in the living room. At first the little silver heart just hung there without anything happening. But when she started moving it back and forth over the diagram and concentrated on Linnéa, it swung faster and faster in a clockwise motion over a certain point.

‘Linnéa is standing to the left of the coffee-table,’ Vanessa said.

Nicolaus opened the door, looked into the living room and reported that Vanessa was right. ‘Pendulation’ doesn’t always work for Vanessa, but she manages to find Linnéa each time.

It was strange in the beginning, but the novelty soon wore off. The book insisted they should practise this over and over again, but never provided them with anything new. Minoo’s constant babble about how the book was both a transmitter and a receiver, and that whatever it showed them had to be important, was sounding more and more hollow with every passing week.

But now, after two months, the transmitter finally changed frequencies. They’ve finally learnt something that could help them find out the truth about Gustaf and his doppelganger.

A bell jangles when Vanessa opens the door to the Crystal Cave. The plucked harp strings, burbling water and birdsong are filtering out of the speakers. Vanessa feels as if someone is plucking directly at her nerves.

She almost bumps into Monika of Café Monique, who smiles so widely that her eyes almost disappear behind her cheeks. It’s the first time Vanessa has ever seen her smile. She’s carrying a big, rustling plastic bag in her arms with ‘Crystal Cave’ written on the side in the same curlicue lettering as the sign outside.

‘Vanessa! How nice to see you!’ she says, and adds, in a conspiratorial whisper, ‘Isn’t she amazing?’