The Shapeshifters (52 page)

He knew the snowdrifts would become shallower as they came down into the valley, and they would also be able to hide there. But for now they were on a slope covered with spruce trees. Visible between the trees were the contours of the mountains, like immovable clouds on the lower rim of the sky. He thought he could make out Varåive.

With Amina in the back seat he had driven towards Jillesnåle at breakneck speed. If Börje was still asleep, they could pretend they had forgotten to lock the cellar door. It would not have been impossible for the boy to escape and make his way to the main road, not now the hide was empty. Or else they could blame the foxshifter.

At the top of the hill after Grannäs a pair of tail lights had appeared out of the darkness and he had stamped on the accelerator to pass, but it was not until he had swung out into the
oncoming lane that the glint of the aluminium ladder caught his eye. Now there was no going back. His only hope was to pass the camper van so quickly that Lennart would not be able make out the model of the car in the cloud of snow. The old man's eyesight was not the best, so it might work.

He had driven past the road to the house and not until he reached Kraddsele had he dared to stop. He had pulled into a lay-by and waited, convinced the headlights would appear in his rear-view mirror any minute. But they had not and that meant Lennart had not seen him. He had stared into the mirror for ten minutes before finally switching off the engine. His breathing had been quick and shallow and he had not been able to think clearly. For a brief moment he had thought about returning to the hotel and saying he was responsible for taking the boy. But who knew where that might lead? He realised he would be hated and the thought of all those hostile looks scared him more than anything. And what would happen to Börje?

He hoped Lennart would set off the minute he found out what had happened. When he discovered they were gone he would be fuming, but also afraid, inasmuch as he could be afraid. Sooner or later the police would turn up, and Seved was sure they wouldn't just take a quick look around as they had done at Torsten and Elna's. That ought to force Lennart to flee pretty much straight away. But Seved had no desire to sit in the car and wait. He wanted to get off the road, so he decided to walk to the house, hide nearby and wait until Lennart had left.

But it was further than he thought. They had been walking for two hours, much of it uphill. Luckily there was no wind. They had scooped up snow and eaten it. That made them cold on the inside, of course, but they had no choice. Amina lagged
behind, standing still for long periods, and he could see she wanted to sit down. But it was too cold. There was a risk he would never get her back on her feet. They could rest when they reached the forest. He told her that and she struggled on with drooping shoulders and mittens that ploughed furrows in the snow.

He should have parked closer to the road leading to the house and walked from there. Or they could have simply sat on the other side of the road, hidden among the trees, and waited for Lennart to leave. In agony from all the effort he reproached himself for the way he had rushed up into the trees, full of the energy the fear had pumped around his body and the desire to get far away from the road as quickly as possible.

Now they had to rest for a while. He broke off some spruce branches, snapped them into pieces and made a lining for a crater they had trampled in the snow. They sat down. He scraped with the heel of his boot and uncovered a frozen black crowberry bush in the powdery snow. He uprooted the bedraggled little bush and stripped it of its berries.

‘Here,' he said, tipping a few black globes into Amina's glove, which was covered in clumps of snow.

When he dug in his pocket for his gloves he found something warm and soft. Alarmed, he pulled back his hand, and in the split second before he realised what it was the mouseshifter emerged. After sticking out its nose and looking around, it crawled out and sat on his knee, where it turned round a few times, its long tail whipping around behind it. Irritated, Seved brushed it aside and watched as it sat perfectly still on the spruce branches, as tiny and grey as a pine cone.

‘What's the matter with it?' Amina said after a while. ‘Is it cold?'

‘I don't think it likes the needles,' Seved said. ‘They're sticking into it.'

Together they watched the mouseshifter.

‘Why has it got such a long tail?' she asked.

‘It's a birch mouse. That's what they look like.'

Unexpectedly the little creature started to make a sound, an intermittent razor-sharp squeak. Seved kicked the branches to make it stop but that had no effect. It carried on squeaking with increasing strength.

‘Cut it out,' he said.

‘Perhaps he's wondering where Mattias is?' Amina said.

Seved nodded distractedly, looking towards the trees. It was light now and he knew more or less where they were. The RÃ¥vojaure shack was only a few hundred metres away.

Soon the forest thickened on all sides. It was as if the spruce trees were coming forwards to greet them. Before long the shack came into view, a section of a greying timber wall not enveloped in snow. Grimacing with exertion, Seved turned round and watched Amina labouring towards him, followed by her shadow. Her lips were moving silently.

The door opened inwards so getting into the shack was no problem, but of course it was freezing inside. The frost had etched so many white roses on the windowpane that it was impossible to look out except through a thin strip around the edges.

There were whisky bottles on the table, holding candles. A radio hung from a beam, its antenna extended. The battery compartment was empty and its lid was missing.

Seved looked at the logs and wondered if he could risk it. The smoke would be noticed from far away, and the smell too, but
sometimes trekkers stayed overnight in the shack. Mainly in the summer, of course, but even so. They needed to get warm. Amina had found an old blanket and wrapped it around herself, but still she looked blue with cold and was slow to reply when he spoke to her. He picked up the axe, gripping it high on the shaft, and kneeled down to split a few smaller logs, then rolled up some sheets of newspaper, pink ones from the sports supplement, and pushed them into the stove. Beside the log basket was a box of matches, and he took out a match, struck it and put it to the paper. Then he sank down and felt the warmth from the stove spread across his face.

He must have fallen asleep because all of a sudden he threw out his arm and shouted something. He did not know what, only that he had shouted out loud because he was afraid. The fire had almost gone out and Amina was sleeping. Her eyelids were swollen and her mouth looked cross. The birch mouse was running around in the wan light that filtered through the frosty window onto the tabletop, its long tail trailing behind it. It looked demented and Seved did not understand how it had so much energy. He put more logs in the stove and looked at his watch.

He did not feel thirsty but he knew he ought to drink, so he found a blackened saucepan and opened the door. After he had filled it to the top with snow he stayed where he was, bent over.

The wolverine was standing between the branches of a fallen spruce. At first Seved thought it was a bear because of its shaggy pelt, but then he saw the wide bushy tail, the greying, almost white forehead and the curved claws buried in the bark.

He had never seen a wolverine before, but Ejvor had once shown him a chain of tracks outside Hybblet. She had spread her
fingers and laid her hand over one of the prints, but had only just been able to cover it.

But this one was smaller than a real wolverine, and because it was in animal disguise they still had a chance to escape. But Seved wanted to know why it had come. Perhaps the mouse had led it here?

He soon found out.

The splutter of an engine reached him from behind the shack. He peered around the corner and saw that a snowmobile had cut a line in the slope on the fell and was on its way down to them. It was his own snowmobile and in front of it ran a cluster of hares. He counted five. But it was not Börje coming towards him. It was Jola.

It was pointless trying to run away, so Seved waited with the saucepan in his hand.

The mobile came up to the shack, and when Jola stopped he immediately shrugged off the rifle he had been carrying over his back. He rested the butt over his thighs, switched off the engine and looked at Seved. His cheeks and the edges of his ears were bright red, and he was breathing heavily through his open mouth. A snus pouch, damp and dark, was showing beneath his lip.

‘Bring the boy out,' he said.

Seved did not answer.

The hares had spread out in front of the shack, round-eyed and silent, and Seved felt all his resistance leave him, to be replaced by a paralysing nausea. All he wanted to do was lie down. Numbly he backed to the door and spotted two other shapes detaching themselves from the darkness surrounding the fallen spruce tree.

One of them sat partly concealed by the tree. It was an owl. At least, that is what Seved thought until it occurred to him that
the wolverine shapeshifter had taken the head of an eagle owl and made it into a mask. The hooked beak hung down like a claw in the wide-open jaws of the predator, and the tufts projecting from the crown of its head looked frozen and rigid.

The other one was standing upright on bowed, dark furry legs and was jutting out the bony lines of his ribs as if it wanted to flaunt its unnatural manifestation. The slimy lump of gristle that bulged above the groove that was its mouth was not a nose or even a snout, and with every breath a fleshy flap of skin on each side of it flapped. It was trembling and panting with excitement. Around its neck was a strap with something metallic dangling from it that clinked as the creature expanded, and Seved realised they were ring pulls from old aluminium cans.

‘Bring him out!' Jola roared.

By now he had raised the barrel and was aiming the black dot of its mouth directly at Seved.

‘He's not here . . .'

‘Bollocks!'

‘He's in Sorsele,' Seved blurted out. He took a step backwards and one leg sank into the snow, forcing him to sit. ‘We dropped him off there. At the hotel.'

Jola spat. Then he climbed off the snowmobile and lowered his head to walk into the shack and take a look. Amina was sitting up and staring at him, still half asleep. There were not many places to hide so he soon came out again and asked when they had left the boy.

‘Early this morning,' Seved mumbled. ‘About four, I think. I'm not sure . . .'

Jola put down the rifle and rooted around under his jacket. There was a rasping sound as he ripped open the cover of his
mobile. He pressed the keys hard with his left thumb and it was clear he was agitated. Through his tight little mouth he drew sharp intakes of breath, and when the call went through he turned his back and in a tense voice said he had found them but they had let the boy go.

‘In Sorsele,' he said. ‘This morning.'

Jola pointed the rifle at them and ordered them to start walking, and Seved thought, Now, now he is going to shoot us. He even closed his eyes and stopped breathing for a few seconds, to prepare himself. I'll hear a bang, he thought, or I'll hear nothing, and everything will go black.

But there was no shot. They tramped through the snow, its surface rippled from the tread of the snowmobile. The engine spluttered at a low speed behind them. Amina walked in front, wrapped in the blanket she had taken from the shack. Occasionally one of her legs sank deep into the snow and a couple of times she fell over. The hares kept disappearing behind the trees but they never strayed too far from the procession.

Seved wondered what had happened to the wolverines and whether they were following at a distance, padding on their large paws. But he did not turn round to look. He did not want to know.

 

 

They had left the E4 at Luleå and driven in the direction of Boden, travelling south along the 356 towards Älvsbyn. The road was a narrow corridor through forests made dim by clouds of snow sweeping off the fir trees. Up ahead glowed the rear lights of a car and every time there was a bend in the road the red dots disappeared from view only to reappear almost immediately.

They were travelling on a straight stretch when Torbjörn braked so violently the seat belts jerked and Gudrun, now sitting in the back, cried out.

The car in front of them was stationary.

As they drew closer they saw it was inching forwards and then stopping again.

‘What's going on . . . ?' Susso sighed.

Torbjörn was craning his neck.

‘A reindeer,' he said.

In the headlights they saw the animal's pale-grey rump as it ran in front of the car, its legs pumping and its hoofs slipping.

‘You can't just bloody well stop like that!' Susso said, leaning across and honking the horn. ‘You'd think they'd use their hazard lights!'

The reindeer had bounded into the deep snow at the side of the road and was leaping off into the birch trees, but the car in front didn't pick up speed. Instead, the engine was switched off.
The exhaust fumes drifted like a veil through the headlights of the Passat. Torbjörn was about to pull out and pass it when the driver's door opened and a man stepped out. His dark beard circled his mouth and he was squinting. The next second the door on the passenger side flashed as a second man got out. He was older and also had a beard, but his was longer and stuck out in a wiry grey frizz.

‘Thanks for that,' Torbjörn said to Susso through gritted teeth.

The driver stood for a while looking in at them, before knocking on the window with the knuckle of his index finger. Torbjörn pressed the button and lowered the window. The man bent forwards but before he could open his mouth Susso leaned across Torbjörn's legs.

‘You know that button with the red triangle?' she said. ‘If you've got to stop on a road with a ninety speed limit, you might like to use it!'