The Darkest Room (3 page)

“Houses often have a nickname,” said Joakim. “We called our place in Bromma the Apple House.”

“This doesn’t have a name, at least not that I’ve heard.” Nyberg stepped down from the bottom stair and added, “On the other hand, there are plenty of stories about this place.”

“Stories?”

“I’ve heard a few … They say the wind increases off Eel Point when someone sneezes in the manor house.”

Both Katrine and Joakim laughed out loud.

“We’d better make sure we dust often, then,” said Katrine.

“And then, of course, there are some old ghost stories as well,” said Nyberg.

Silence fell.

“Ghost stories?” said Joakim. “The agent should have told us.”

He was just about to smile and shake his head, but Katrine got there first:

“I did hear a few stories when I was over at the Carlssons’ having coffee … our neighbors. But they told me not to believe them.”

“We haven’t really got much time for ghosts,” said Joakim.

Nyberg nodded and took a few steps toward the hall.

“No, but when a house is empty for a while, people start talking,” he said. “Shall we go outside and take a few pictures while it’s still light?”

Bengt Nyberg ended his visit
by walking across the grass and the stone paths in the inner courtyard and quickly inspecting both wings of the house—on one side the enormous barn, with the ground-floor walls made of limestone and the upper story of timber painted red, and across the courtyard the smaller, whitewashed outhouse.

“I assume you’re going to renovate this as well?” said Nyberg after peeping into the outhouse through a dusty window.

“Of course,” said Joakim. “We’re taking one building at a time.”

“And then you can rent it out to summer visitors!”

“Maybe. We’ve thought about opening a bed-and-breakfast, in a few years.”

“A lot of people here on the island have had the same idea,” said Nyberg.

Finally the reporter took a couple of dozen pictures of the Westin family on the yellowing grassy slope below the house.

Katrine and Joakim stood beside each other, squinting into the cold wind and the two lighthouses out at sea. Joakim straightened his back as the camera started clicking, and thought about the fact that their neighbors’ house in Stockholm had merited a spread of three double pages in the glossy monthly
Beautiful Homes the
previous year. The Westin family had to make do with an article in the local paper.

Gabriel was perched on Joakim’s shoulders, dressed in a green padded jacket that was slightly too big. Livia was standing between her parents, her white crocheted hat pulled well down over her forehead. She was looking suspiciously into the camera.

The manor house at Eel Point rose up behind them like a fortress made of wood and stone, silently watching.

Afterward, when Nyberg had left
, the whole family went down to the shore. The wind was colder than it had been, and the sun was already low in the sky, just above the roof of the house behind them. The smell of seaweed that had been washed ashore was in the air.

Walking down to the water at Eel Point felt like arriving at the end of the world, the end of a long journey away from everyone. Joakim liked that feeling.

Northeastern Öland seemed to consist of a vast sky above a small strip of yellowish-brown land. The tiny islands looked like grass-covered reefs out in the water. The island’s flat coastline, with its deep inlets and narrow points, slipped almost imperceptibly into the water and became a shallow, even seabed of sand and mud, which gradually sank deeper, down into the Baltic Sea.

A hundred yards or so away from them, the white towers of the lighthouses rose up toward the dark blue sky.

Eel Point’s twin lighthouses. Joakim thought the islands on which they were standing looked as if they were somehow man-made, as if someone had made two piles of stone and gravel out in the water and bound them together with bigger rocks and concrete. Fifty yards to the north of them a breakwater ran out from the shore—a slightly curved jetty made of large blocks of stone, doubtless constructed in order to protect the lighthouses from the winter storms.

Livia had Foreman under her arm, and she suddenly set off toward the wide jetty leading out to the lighthouses.

“Me too! Me too!” shouted Gabriel, but Joakim held him tightly by the hand.

“We’ll go together,” he said.

The jetty split in two a dozen or so yards out into the water, like a big letter Y with two narrower arms leading out to the islands where the lighthouses stood. Katrine shouted:

“Don’t run, Livia! Be careful of the water!”

Livia stopped, pointed to the southern lighthouse, and shouted in a voice that was only just audible above the wind, “That one’s mine!”

“Mine too!” shouted Gabriel behind her.

“End of story!” shouted Livia.

That was her new favorite expression this fall, something she had learned in preschool. Katrine hurried over to her and nodded toward the northern lighthouse.

“In that case, this one’s mine!”

“Okay, then I’ll take care of the house,” said Joakim. “It’ll be as easy as pie, if you all just pitch in and help a little bit.”

“We will,” said Livia. “End of story!”

Livia laughed and nodded, but of course for Joakim it was no joke. But he was still looking forward to all the work that was waiting during the course of the winter. He and Katrine were both going to try to find a teaching post on the island, but they would renovate the manor house together in the evenings and on weekends. She had already started, after all.

He stopped in the grass by the shore and took a long look at the buildings behind them.

Isolated and private location
, as it had said in the ad.

Joakim still found it difficult to get used to the size of the main house; with its white gables and red wooden walls, it rose up at the top of the sloping grassy plain. Two beautiful chimneys sat on top of the tiled roof like towers, black as soot. A warm yellow light glowed in the kitchen window and on the veranda; the rest of the house was pitch black.

So many families who had lived there, toiling away at the walls, doorways, and floors over the years—master lighthouse
keepers and lighthouse keepers and lighthouse assistants and whatever they were called. They had all left their mark on the manor house.

Remember, when you take over an old house, the house takes you over at the same time
, Joakim had read in a book about renovating wooden houses. For him and Katrine this was not the case—they had had no problem leaving the house in Bromma, after all—but over the years they had met a number of families who looked after their houses like children.

“Shall we go out to the lighthouses?” asked Katrine.

“Yes!” shouted Livia. “End of story!”

“The stones could be slippery,” said Joakim.

He didn’t want Livia and Gabriel to lose their respect for the sea and go down to the water alone. Livia could swim only a few yards, and Gabriel couldn’t swim at all.

But Katrine and Livia had already set off along the stone jetty, hand in hand. Joakim picked Gabriel up, held him in the crook of his right arm, and followed them dubiously out onto the uneven blocks of stone.

They weren’t as slippery as he had thought, just rough and uneven. In some places the blocks had been eroded by the waves and had broken away from the concrete holding them together. There was only a slight wind today, but Joakim could sense the power of nature. Winter after winter of drift ice and waves and harsh storms on Eel Point—and still the lighthouses stood firm.

“How tall are they?” wondered Katrine, looking toward the towers.

“Well, I don’t have a ruler with me—but maybe sixty feet or so?” said Joakim.

Livia tipped her head back to look up at the top of her lighthouse.

“Why is there no light?”

“I expect it’ll come on when it gets dark,” said Katrine.

“Does that one never come on?” asked Joakim, leaning back to look up at the north tower.

“I don’t think so,” said Katrine. “It hasn’t done since we’ve been here.”

When they reached the point where the breakwater divided, Livia chose the left path, toward her mother’s lighthouse.

“Careful, Livia,” said Joakim, looking down into the black water below the stone track.

It might only be five or six feet deep, but he still didn’t like the shadows and the chill down there. He was a decent swimmer, but he had never been the type to leap eagerly into the waves in summer, not even on really hot days.

Katrine had reached the island and walked over to the water’s edge. She looked in both directions along the coastline. To the north, only empty beaches and clumps of trees were visible; to the south, meadows and in the distance a few small boathouses.

“Not a soul in sight,” she said. “I thought we might see a few neighboring houses, at least.”

“There are too many little islands and headlands in the way,” said Joakim. He pointed to the north shore with his free hand. “Look over there. Have you seen that?”

It was the wreck of a ship, lying on the stony strip of shore half a mile or so away—so old that all that was left was a battered hull made of sun-bleached planks of wood. Long ago the ship had drifted toward the shore in a winter storm; it had been hurled high up onto the shore, where it had remained. The wreck lay to starboard among the stones, and Joakim thought the framework sticking up looked like a giant’s rib cage.

“The wreck, yes,” said Katrine.

“Didn’t they see the beams from the lighthouses?” said Joakim.

“I think the lighthouses just don’t help sometimes … not in a storm,” said Katrine. “Livia and I went over to the wreck a few weeks ago. We were looking for some nice pieces of wood, but everything had been taken.”

The entrance to the lighthouse was a stone archway some three feet deep, leading to a sturdy door of thick steel, very rusty and with only a few traces of the original white color. There was no keyhole, just a crossbar with a rusty padlock, and when Joakim got hold of the side of the door and pulled, it didn’t move an inch.

“I saw a bunch of old keys in one of the kitchen cupboards,” he said. “We’ll have to try them out sometime.”

“Otherwise we can contact the Maritime Board,” said Katrine.

Joakim nodded and took a step away from the door. The lighthouses weren’t part of the deal, after all.

“Don’t the lighthouses belong to us, Mommy?” said Livia as they made their way back to the shore.

She sounded disappointed.

“Well, yes,” said Katrine. “Kind of. But we don’t have to look after them, do we, Kim?”

She smiled at Joakim, and he nodded.

“The house will be quite enough.”

Katrine had turned over
in the double bed while Joakim was with Livia, and as he crept beneath the covers she reached out for him in her sleep. He breathed in the scent of her, and closed his eyes.

All of this, only this
.

It felt as if they had drawn a line under life in the city. Stockholm had shrunk to a gray mark on the horizon, and the memories of searching for Ethel had faded away.

Peace.

Then he heard the faint whimpering from Livia’s room again, and held his breath.

“Mom-mee?”

Her drawn-out cries echoing through the house were louder this time. Joakim breathed out with a tired sigh.

Beside him Katrine raised her head and listened.

“What?” she said groggily.

“Mom-mee?” Livia called again.

Katrine sat up. Unlike Joakim, she could go from deep sleep to wide awake in a couple of seconds.

“I’ve already tried,” said Joakim quietly. “I thought she’d gone back to sleep, but …”

“I’ll go.”

Katrine got out of bed without hesitating, slid her feet into her slippers, and quickly pulled on her dressing gown.

“Mommy?”

“I’m coming, brat,” she muttered.

This wasn’t good, thought Joakim. It wasn’t good that Livia wanted to sleep with her mother beside her every night. But it was a habit that had started the previous year, when Livia had begun to have disturbed nights—perhaps because of Ethel. She found it difficult to fall asleep, and only slept calmly with Katrine lying beside her in her bed. So far they hadn’t managed to get Livia to spend a whole night on her own.

“See you, lover boy,” said Katrine, slipping out of the room.

The duties of a parent. Joakim lay there in bed; there was no longer a sound from Livia’s room. Katrine had taken over the responsibility, and he relaxed and closed his eyes. Slowly he felt sleep stealing over him once more.

All was silent in the manor house.

His life in the country had begun.

The ship inside the bottle
was a little work of art, in Henrik’s opinion: a three-masted frigate with sails made out of scraps of white fabric, almost six inches long and carved from a single piece of wood. Each sail had ropes made of black thread, knotted and secured to small blocks of balsa wood. With the masts down, the ship had been carefully inserted into the old bottle using steel thread and tweezers, then pressed down into a sea of blue-colored putty. Then the masts had been raised and the sails unfurled with the help of bent sock needles. Finally the bottle had been fastened with a sealed cork.

The ship in the bottle must have taken several weeks to make, but the Serelius brothers destroyed it in a couple of seconds.

Tommy Serelius swept the bottle off the bookshelf, the glass exploding into tiny shards on the new parquet flooring of the cottage. The ship itself survived the fall, but bounced
across the floor for a couple of yards before it was stopped by little brother Freddy’s boot. He shone his flashlight on it with curiosity for a few seconds, then lifted his foot and smashed the ship to pieces with three hard stamps.

“Teamwork!” crowed Freddy.

“I hate things like that, fucking handicraft stuff,” said Tommy, scratching his cheek and kicking the remains of the ship across the floor.

Henrik, the third man in the cottage, emerged from one of the bedrooms where he had been searching for anything of value in the closets. He saw what was left of the ship and shook his head.

“Don’t smash anything else up, okay?” he said quietly.

Tommy and Freddy liked the sound of breaking glass, of splintering wood—Henrik had realized that the first night they worked together, when they broke into half a dozen closed-up cottages south of Byxelkrok. The brothers liked smashing things; on the way north Tommy had run over a black-and-white cat that was standing by the side of the road, its eyes glittering. There was a dull thud from the right-hand tire as the van drove over the cat, and the next second the brothers were laughing out loud.

Henrik never broke anything; he removed the windows carefully so they could get into the cottages. But once the brothers had clambered in, they turned into vandals. They upended cocktail cabinets and hurled glass and china to the floor. They also smashed mirrors, but hand-blown vases from Småland survived, because they could be sold.

At least they weren’t targeting the residents of the island. From the start Henrik had decided to select only houses owned by those who lived on the mainland.

Henrik wasn’t keen
on the Serelius brothers, but he was stuck with them—like a couple of relatives who come to call one evening and then refuse to leave.

But Tommy and Freddy weren’t from the island, and were neither his friends nor his relatives. They were friends of Morgan Berglund.

They had rung the doorbell of Henrik’s little apartment in Borgholm at the end of September, at around ten o’clock when he was just thinking of going to bed. He had opened the door to find two men of about his own age standing outside, broad-shouldered and with more or less shaven heads. They had nodded and walked into the hallway without asking permission. They stank of sweat and oil and dirty car seats, and the stench spread through the apartment.

“Hubba bubba, Henke,” said one of them.

He was wearing big sunglasses. It should have looked comical, but this was not a person to be laughed at. He had long red marks on his cheeks and chin, as if someone had scratched him.

“How’s it goin’?”

“Okay, I guess,” said Henrik slowly. “Who are you?”

“Tommy and Freddy. The Serelius brothers. Hell, you must have heard of us, Henrik. … You must know who we are?”

Tommy adjusted his glasses and scratched his cheek with long, raking strokes. Henrik realized where the marks on his face had come from—he hadn’t been in a fight, he had caused them himself.

Then the brothers had taken a quick tour of his one-bedroom apartment and slumped down on the sofa in front of the TV.

“Got any chips?” said Freddy.

He rested his boots on Henrik’s glass table. When he unbuttoned his padded jacket, his beer belly protruded in a pale blue T-shirt with the slogan
SOLDIER OF FORTUNE FOREVER
.

“Your pal Mogge says hi,” said big brother Tommy, removing the sunglasses. He was slightly slimmer than Freddy and was staring at Henrik with a little smile playing at the corners of his mouth and a black leather bag in his hand. “It was Mogge who thought we should come here.”

“To Siberia,” said Freddy, pulling the bowl of chips Henrik had provided toward him.

“Mogge? Morgan Berglund?”

“Sure thing,” said Tommy, sitting down on the sofa next to his brother. “You’re pals, right?”

“We
were
,” said Henrik. “Mogge’s moved away.”

“We know, he’s in Denmark. He was working in a casino in Copenhagen, illegally.”

“Dirty dealing,” said Freddy.

“We’ve been in Europe,” said Tommy. “For almost a year. Makes you realize how fucking small Sweden is.”

“Fucking backwater,” said Freddy.

“First of all we were in Germany—Hamburg and Düsseldorf, that was fucking brilliant. Then we went to Copenhagen, and that was pretty cool too.” Tommy looked around again. “And now we’re here.”

He nodded and put a cigarette in the corner of his mouth.

“Don’t smoke in here,” said Henrik.

He had been wondering why the Serelius brothers had left the big cities of Europe—if things had indeed been going so bloody well down there—and traveled up to the isolation of small-town Sweden. Had they quarreled with the wrong people? Probably.

“You can’t stay here,” said Henrik, looking around his one-bedroom apartment. “I haven’t got room. You can see that.”

Tommy had put the cigarette away. He didn’t appear to be listening.

“We’re Satanists,” he said. “Did we mention that?”

“Satanists?” said Henrik.

Tommy and Freddy nodded.

“You mean devil worshippers?” said Henrik with a smile.

Tommy wasn’t smiling.

“We don’t worship anyone,” he said. “Satan stands for the strength within human beings, that’s what we believe in.”

“The force
,” said Freddy, finishing off the chips.

“Exactly,” said Tommy. “‘Might makes right’—that’s our motto. We take what we want. Have you heard of Aleister Crowley?”

“No.”

“A great philosopher,” said Tommy. “Crowley saw life as a constant battle between the strong and the weak. Between the clever and the stupid. Where the strongest and cleverest always win.”

“Well, that’s logical,” said Henrik, who had never been religious. He had no intention of becoming religious now, either.

Tommy carried on looking around the apartment.

“When did she cut and run?” he asked.

“Who?”

“Your girl. The one who put up curtains and dried flowers and all that crap. You didn’t do it, did you?”

“She moved out last spring,” said Henrik.

A memory of Camilla sprang unbidden into his mind, lying reading on the sofa where the Serelius brothers were now sitting. He realized that Tommy was a bit smarter than he looked—he noticed details.

“What was her name?”

“Camilla.”

“Do you miss her?”

“Like dog shit,” he said quickly. “Anyway, like I said, you can’t stay …”

“Chill out, we’re staying in Kalmar,” said Tommy. “That’s all sorted, but we’re thinking of working here on Öland. So we need a bit of help.”

“With what?”

“Mogge told us what you and he used to do in the winter. He told us about the summer cottages …”

“I see.”

“He said you’d be happy to start up again.”

Thanks for that, Mogge
, thought Henrik. They had quarreled about the division of the money before Morgan left—perhaps this was his revenge.

“That was a long time ago,” he said. “Four years … and we only did it for two winters, really.”

“And? Mogge said it went well.”

“It went okay,” said Henrik.

Virtually all the break-ins had been problem free, but a couple of times he and Mogge had been spotted by the people next door and had to make their escape over stone walls, like kids stealing apples. They had always worked out at least two escape routes in advance, one on foot and one in the car.

He went on: “Sometimes there wasn’t anything of value … but once we found a cupboard, it was really old. A seventeenth-century German cabinet, we got thirty-five thousand kronor for that in Kalmar.”

Henrik had become more animated as he was talking, almost nostalgic. He had actually had quite a talent for getting in through locked veranda doors and windows without smashing them. His grandfather had been a carpenter in Marnäs and had been equally proud of his expertise.

But he also remembered how stressful it had been, driving around northern Öland night after night. It was bitterly cold up there in the winter, both in the wind outdoors and inside the closed-up houses. And the holiday villages were empty and silent.

“Old houses are real treasure troves,” said Tommy. “So you’re in? We need you to find our way around up there.”

Henrik didn’t say anything. He was thinking that a person who has a miserable, predictable life must be miserable and predictable themselves. He didn’t want to be like that.

“So we’re agreed, then,” said Tommy. “Okay?”

“Maybe,” said Henrik.

“That sounds like a yes.”

“Maybe.”

“Hubba bubba,” said Tommy.

Henrik nodded, hesitantly.

He wanted to be exciting, to have an exciting life. Now that Camilla had moved out, the evenings were miserable and the nights were empty, but still he hesitated. It wasn’t the risk of being caught that had made Henrik give up the break-ins before, it was a different kind of fear.

“It’s dark out in the country,” he said.

“Sounds good,” said Tommy.

“It’s
bloody
dark,” said Henrik. “There are no streetlights in the villages, and the power in the cottages is usually switched off. You can hardly see a thing.”

“No problem,” said Tommy. “We pocketed some flashlights at a gas station yesterday.”

Henrik nodded slowly. Flashlights got rid of the darkness, of course, but only to a certain extent.

“I’ve got a boathouse we can use,” he said. “For storage, until we find the right buyer.”

“Great,” said Tommy. “Then all we have to do is find the right houses. Mogge said you know some good places.”

“Some,” said Henrik. “It goes with the job.”

“Give us the addresses, then we can check if they’re safe.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We’ll ask Aleister.”

“What?”

“We usually chat with Aleister Crowley,” said Tommy, placing his bag on the table. He opened it and took out a narrow, flat box, made of dark wood. “We contact him using this.”

Henrik looked on in silence as Tommy unfolded the box and placed it on the table. Letters, words, and numbers were seared into the wood on the inside of the box. The entire alphabet was there, plus numbers from zero to ten and the words
YES
and
NO
. Then Tommy took a small glass out of his bag.

“I tried this out when I was a kid,” said Henrik. “The spirit in the glass, isn’t it?”

“Like fuck it is, this is serious.” Tommy placed the glass on the unfolded box. “This is a Ouija board.”

“A Ouija board?”

“That’s what it’s called,” said Tommy. “The wood is from the lid of an old coffin. Can you turn the lights down a little?”

Henrik smiled to himself, but went over to the light switch anyway.

All three sat around the table. Tommy placed his little finger on the glass and closed his eyes.

The room fell silent. He scratched his throat slowly and seemed to be listening for something.

“Who’s there?” he asked. “Is Aleister there?”

Nothing happened for a few seconds. Then the glass began to move beneath Tommy’s finger.

Henrik had gone out
to his grandfather’s boathouse the very next evening, at twilight, to get it ready.

The little wooden hut was painted red and stood in a meadow a dozen or so yards from the shore, close to two other small cottages owned by summer visitors; no one came near them after the middle of August. You could be left in peace here.

He had inherited the boathouse from his grandfather, Algot. When he was alive, they would both go out to sea several times every summer to put out nets, then spend the night in the boathouse and get up at five to check them.

Out here on the Baltic shore he missed those days, and thought it was sad that his grandfather was no longer around. Algot had carried on with his carpentry and little bits of building after his retirement, and had seemed perfectly content with his life right up until the last heart attack, despite the fact that he had left the island only a few times.

Henrik undid the padlock and peered into the darkness
inside. Everything looked more or less as it had done when his grandfather passed away six years earlier. Nets hung along the walls, the workbench was still standing on the floor, and the iron stove was rusting away in one corner. Camilla had wanted to clear everything out and paint the inside walls white, but Henrik thought it was just fine the way it was.

He cleared away oilcans, toolboxes, and other things that were on the wooden floor and spread out a tarpaulin ready for the stolen goods. Then he went out onto the jetty on the point and breathed in the smell of seaweed and brackish salt water. To the north he could see the twin lighthouses at Eel Point rising up out at sea.

Down below the jetty was his motorboat, an open launch, and when he looked down into it he could see that the floor was covered in rainwater. He climbed down into the boat and began baling out.

As he was working he thought back over what had happened the previous evening, when he and the Serelius brothers had sat down in the kitchen and held a séance. Or whatever it might have been.

The glass had moved constantly across the board, providing answers to every question—but of course it was Tommy himself who had been moving it. He had closed his eyes, but he must have been peeping to make sure the glass ended up in the right place.