The Shapeshifters (54 page)

‘Seved!' she hissed.

‘What is it?'

‘Something's shining down here.'

Surely not. Or was there a source of light down there he knew nothing about? Mystified, he stood up and crept down the stairs.

‘Where are you?' he whispered.

‘Here,' she said, and soon he caught hold of her thin, cold hand.

Seved stared out into the darkness. A light flashed. Once. Twice. He twisted his head and could hear that each flash was followed by a faint clicking sound.

Someone was playing with a light, switching it on and off every few seconds. And it was far away. Clearly the hide was not nearly as confined as he had thought and the unanticipated size of the cellar frightened him more than the strange light signals in its depths.

‘Let's go up,' he said, grabbing Amina's jacket.

‘But I've got to pee,' she said.

‘Do it then, but come up afterwards. We'll sit up there, it's safest.'

‘I can't! I'm scared! You've got to stay here!'

‘Well, hurry up then.'

He heard her fumbling with her clothes.

‘Promise you won't go!'

‘I promise.'

‘You mustn't go!'

‘Here,' he said.

She felt for his hand and grasped it hard, and shortly afterwards he heard a splashing against the wood. When she had
finished they crawled up to the door and sat down. Seved looked at his watch. The hands were pale but he thought it was seven fifteen. He shut his eyes. Then the stench returned. It had been lying there, in wait.

 

 

Inger and Yngve Fredén told them the troll had been with them since 1982.

‘And during all that time you never saw the bear in him?' Susso asked.

She was standing in the garage, waiting for her eyes to get used to the gloom. There was a sofa covered in grey floral fabric, and blankets and fir-tree branches on the concrete floor, which was brown with old pine needles. Empty plastic bottles lay everywhere. Sheets of cardboard were tacked over the window and there was a smell of dog and rotting food.

Yngve shook his head.

‘It came as a complete surprise. I mean, he was like a bear, I admit that, but we never imagined he could
turn into
a bear. I know it sounds strange. And I think it's strange, now he's no longer with us, that we never really talked about him.'

After sitting down in the kitchen Inger explained in a trembling voice that they had lost their son. They had moved to Kramfors to start again, and that is when the troll came to them. He had been sitting naked in the forest beyond their garden, looking at their house with small moist eyes. In his hand he held a birch twig that he slowly waved about him to keep the mosquitoes away, but also perhaps to wave at them. They had never been afraid of him, despite his appearance. It had seemed obvious from the
very beginning that they would look after him. There had been no discussion about it either, and as the years passed they hardly mentioned him. He had simply been there, and they accepted him as he was. They had given him food and cleaned up after him, but never even tried to talk to him. It was not until now, after he had gone, that they realised how peculiar that was. They had not even given him a name!

‘Can you understand that? Over twenty years and not even a name!'

They had no idea what he did all day because the windows were always covered. Presumably he slept a lot, on the floor on top of a heap of blankets and branches that he carried in. Roughly every third day he came out and lumbered up to the forest to answer a call of nature, leaving behind a huge stinking pile of faeces, and they were only too grateful he was house-trained, so to speak. Sometimes the radio would be on for an hour or so, always very quietly. They heard him sing sometimes too, but never any words, only a low humming as if he was trying to lull himself to sleep.

Occasionally he came into the house and sat for a while on the sofa and fell asleep, but they were never very comfortable with that because he smelled, and even if they were not exactly afraid of him, they never dared get too close. Some days he wanted to play. Couronne, for example. At those times he would appear at the window and tap on the glass with a stick that looked so tiny in his hand. They used to take turns playing with him. He knew he had to get the rings into the holes in the corners, but he never realised he had to shoot with the red ring, or that the rings had to be knocked into the holes. Instead he either pushed them with the stick or threaded them onto the stick and moved them slowly to the holes. Taking turns did not seem to bother him and it was
never clear who had won, nor was it important. That is what he was like: quiet, sleepy and incomprehensible.

‘Are you sure it wasn't him who took Magnus Brodin?' Gudrun asked.

No, they knew nothing about what he had done before he came to them. He had never said a word.

‘We know for certain there are at least two of these giants,' Gudrun said. ‘And there might be even more. So it wasn't necessarily him.'

‘Have you got a picture of him?' Susso asked.

Inger shook her head.

‘Take a photo of him? That was out of the question.'

Yngve agreed.

‘The very thought of getting out a camera would never have occurred to us. That's probably hard to understand unless you have met him.'

Yngve asked about the giant they had shot in Stockholm and the circumstances surrounding his death. Gudrun explained what had happened on Färingsö and she told them about her father and the website and the photograph of the Vaikijaur man, about John Bauer's Lapland journey and his meeting with the stallo folk. Finally Susso was obliged to show them the squirrel. The sight of the animal curled up in Susso's pocket left them speechless and Yngve had to stand and walk up and down the kitchen because he did not know what to do with himself.

‘All this,' he said. ‘All this . . .'

They had let Torbjörn use their laptop and he sat with it at a kidney-shaped coffee table in the sitting room. He clicked on the trackpad and stared intently at the screen.

‘Here,' he said suddenly, and started reading: ‘“The police are
giving out a warning about an aggressive bear. A man was attacked by a bear when he was out walking in Storuman on Tuesday morning. He was scratched and bitten and now the police are warning the public not to go out in that area. The thirty-nine-year-old man was alone when, according to the information he has provided, he was subject to an unprovoked attack by a bear in Stensele, south of Storuman. The bear hit the man and bit him before he could get free, run away and climb a tree. The bear chased him as far as the tree but then ran off. The man climbed down, went home and raised the alarm, says Tomas Wretling of the Västerbotten police's communication centre.”'

Susso and Gudrun had walked up behind him and were reading over his shoulder.

Torbjörn continued: ‘“Västerbotten police have sent a specially trained bear-tracking unit to the area. They advise the public not to go out of doors in Stensele for the time being. The man was taken to hospital to receive treatment for his wounds, which are not life threatening. Are they shooting to kill? ‘Yes, they will destroy the bear,' says Wretling. ‘That decision was made by the police authority and is based on the fact that the bear has injured someone and therefore constitutes a danger to the general public. We are presently waiting for our dog handlers and then we will set off.' When asked how common it is for a human to be attacked unprovoked, Wretling explained: ‘This bear has quite literally woken up on the wrong side of bed. And you don't mess around with a fractious bear.'”'

‘Where does it say that?' asked Inger. ‘In
Västerbottens-Kuriren?'

Torbjörn shook his head.

‘
Dagens Nyheter
. Posted two hours ago.'

They carried on searching and it was not long before Gudrun
placed a hand on Torbjörn's shoulder and pointed. In the ‘LATEST LOCAL NEWS' column on the
Norrbottens-Kuriren
site was an item with the heading: ‘Let Sleeping Bears Lie? Not in Glottje.'

Torbjörn clicked on it and read:

‘“A roused bear”—that's what it says—“has been sighted in a forest clearing beside the Västra Kikkejaure lake about five kilometres northwest of the village of Glottje in the municipality of Arvidsjaur.”'

‘Glottje,' Susso said. ‘How far away is that?'

‘It's just over a hundred and twenty kilometres to Arvidsjaur,' Yngve replied.

‘And to Storuman?'

‘I don't know. Maybe three hundred, by car. But the 94 runs in a straight line westwards and so does the 45, so it is more or less the same for a bear. Say two hundred and fifty then, as a bear travels.'

‘The
Kuriren
article was posted at 15.09,' said Torbjörn, ‘so it can't possibly be the same bear.'

‘There are more of them, Torbjörn,' Susso said. ‘I
know
there are more.'

Torbjörn kept his mouth shut when he saw the look Susso gave him.

‘Right,' was all he said.

‘There are four,' Susso said, looking down at the floor. ‘Or rather, there
were
four.'

‘Four?' said Yngve. ‘How do you know there are four?'

Susso looked down at her pocket.

‘Four bears,' she said slowly, looking the squirrel in the eyes. ‘There have always been four bears, but now there are only three. And . . . that's not good.'

 

 

He could not sleep, of course, but it was not the fear of being woken by hefty footsteps on the veranda that kept him awake. It was the painful position he was sitting in and the fear that he would tumble down the steep staircase in his sleep. And then there was the cold. It was so cold he was shivering. Amina was not asleep either, he could tell, because from time to time she sniffed loudly.

She had asked him if he thought that Mattias was with his parents by now, and he had nodded and said yes. She had more questions but he was too tired to answer. Or rather, he did not want to, because he had picked up muted whisperings from down in the darkness. It was a shifter of some kind that could form words and was imitating them in a thin, hollow pitch.

Promise. Prrromise. We'll sit up there. It's safest. Promise you won't go. Promise, promise, promise. It's safest. Pee. I've got to pee. Pee, pee, pee. Where are you, where are you. Where aaare you.

After it had gone on for a couple of minutes Seved had been close to shouting at it to shut up, but he controlled himself. Shouting was guaranteed to make things worse, and it could also be dangerous. He had no idea who was down there. The little creatures mainly, he thought, but he could not be sure. At least one of them was big enough to use a torch.

They had been sitting in the darkness for several hours and he thought it was odd that Börje had not persuaded Lennart to let
them out. Börje went along with most things but Seved knew he could refuse orders if he had to.

They must have locked them in the hide because they had discovered that Seved had chained the escape hatch shut.

There was a certain psychology to it. He had locked himself in. What he did not know was whether they had detected the smell of petrol he had poured on the floor of the jumping room, or whether they had worked out why he had blocked the emergency exit. There could not have been many reasons for doing that. Lennart had understood what was going on, without a doubt, and that was a double betrayal by Seved. He had not only let the boy go, he had also been working on a plan to burn Skabram to death. Attacking the old-timers was like attacking Lennart himself, or even worse. He must be beside himself with fury, and the more Seved thought about it, the more intense the fear inside him grew as he sat blinking in the darkness.

Finally he could not sit still any longer.

‘We've got to get out,' he said, standing up.

Amina only sniffed in answer. He knew she was playing with the little mouseshifter she had slipped into her pocket unnoticed when Jola had fetched them from the shack.

‘Can I borrow your scarf?'

She passed him the scarf, and after he had tied it over his nose and mouth he went slowly down. He used his hand to feel his way on the rough steps. The wool soon became warm and damp over his lips.

The entrance to the hide was a heavy fire door and he knew it would be almost impossible to break it down. Unless against all expectations he found a crowbar down there he did not stand a chance of getting it open.

He did not want to fumble around blindly but he thought he might start by borrowing the torch from whoever was playing with it. With the help of the torch he would be able to find his way to the tunnel.

In his pocket he had the key to the padlock. He had been sitting holding it so tightly in his hand that it had cut into his palm. It had probably not even occurred to Lennart that he might have the key on him. With a little luck he might be able to push up the two halves of the hatch enough to reach the padlock. And if that failed he could at least get an iron bar or something similar through the gap and manipulate it until the chain or the hinges gave way. It was certain to be impossible but he had to try. He could no longer sit there and wait. Too much time had passed and with every minute his suspicion was growing that Lennart and Jola had not locked them in simply to scare them.

When he reached the bottom and had taken a few steps along the cluttered concrete floor, hunched over, he stopped. It was a strain not being able to see anything. His eyes almost hurt. It was all the staring, he supposed.

He waited. Presumably the thing that had been holding the torch had fallen asleep. But he had a rough idea where the light had been coming from so he moved in that direction with one hand held out in front of him like an antenna.

Things crunched and scraped under his boots but he did not want to know what he was treading on. All he could do was try to breathe through his mouth, but it was as if his nose was curious because occasionally it drew in a breath of its own accord. Instantly the convulsions rose up and he had to turn his head away and cough into the scarf. It was the sweet, pungent smell of bloated, maggot-filled decomposition.