one of them had been part of something dreadful.
But was it evil?
It would depend who you asked. Teresa couldn’t imagine a single person, institution or authority who would give their blessing to what they had been doing for the past five hours.
Except Theres.
Theres said it was good, and they all followed Theres’ star. Therefore it was good.
Not all of them had succeeded. Both Malin and Cecilia had started screaming as soon as the coffin was lowered, and continued to scream as the earth was shovelled into the hole. It was no more than half-full before those at the top had to start digging it up again. Both were hysterical and completely unreachable when they got out, collapsing in a heap and sobbing, sobbing.
Cecilia’s large body had consumed the oxygen much too quickly, and she was almost unconscious by the time four of them hauled the coffin up. When she came round she was inconsolable. She had wanted to stay much longer, and counted this as yet another of her failures.
Anna L stayed down as long as anyone else, but when the coffin came up and Theres leaned over her, she pushed her aside and said she was going for a walk. She was away for a good hour, and when she came back she had picked a bunch of flowers. She went down to the jetty and threw them in the water, one by one.
Ronja hadn’t screamed. When perhaps twenty minutes had passed, those who had already been down started talking quietly about how long the air might last. Then, without any particular hurry, they dug up the coffin, still without any signal from Ronja. When the lid was lifted she acted more or less the same as Linn, except that it took longer to wake her. By this stage everyone except Miranda and Teresa had been down, so the fact that Ronja appeared to be dead didn’t cause any panic.
Ronja explained her behaviour by saying that she had completely forgotten she was supposed to scream; it had never occurred to her. As soon as the coffin reached the bottom she had accepted that she was dead, and that there was nothing more to be done. The others nodded in recognition despite the fact that, unlike Ronja, they had managed to hang on to some small instinct for self-preservation.
Teresa stretched out in the bottom of the coffin. They had rinsed it out after Caroline threw up, but there was still a sour smell lurking not far from Teresa’s nose. She folded her arms over her chest and made an effort to shut down her senses as Linn and Melinda closed the lid, but the blows of the hammer still echoed through her head like thunderclaps, amplified in the enclosed space.
She opened her eyes and saw a tiny amount of light coming through a crack near her feet. Then she could feel in her stomach that the coffin was being lifted. And lowered. After an unfeasibly long time, bumps along her back told her that she was now at the bottom of the hole. She heard the first thud as earth hit the lid; she closed her eyes, her breathing slow and shallow.
She could hear the spades being driven into the pile of earth, then immediately afterwards a couple of thuds. Spades in, thud, thud. Spades in, thud, thud. There was a rhythm to it, and she counted the blows. When she got to thirty she noticed that she could no longer hear the spades, and that the thuds were growing fainter. She managed to count another thirty, then there was silence. Complete silence. She didn’t know how much earth there was left to shovel in, but inside her chest she could feel the weight already lying on top of her.
The space between her chest and the lid was no more than six centimetres. There was no way she would be able to get out, however much she might want to. If she tried to force out the nails, the weight of the earth would make it impossible. She had been deserted. She had been given up. She kept her breathing slow and shallow.
No light through the crack, no voices, no spades, no thuds of earth. Nothing. She had already lost all concept of time. She knew she hadn’t been lying there for half an hour. But she had no idea whether it was three minutes or ten, because there were no reference points.
She started to count inside her head. When she got to a hundred, she gave up. She was usually good at counting in seconds, but even the concept ‘second’ had lost its meaning. Perhaps she had been counting far too slowly; or far too quickly, she didn’t know.
So she let go. Although she hadn’t been aware of it, her whole body had been tense; she only realised this when she relaxed. She let go and gave herself up to the darkness and the silence and the absence of everything that she was.
Another incalculable period of time passed. Her breathing was slow and shallow. Something moved. A faint noise. At first she thought it was an insect or worm that had ended up in the coffin with her, and she tried to pinpoint the sound. Her hands moved over the sides of the coffin. A rough, mute nothingness.
But the sound. The movement.
The space just about allowed her to roll over onto her side. Her shoulder pressed against the lid as she turned her back on the direction she thought the sound was coming from. She put her hands over her ears. She could still hear it. Something was moving through the earth. Digging. Getting closer.
Her heart began to beat faster, and she was no longer able to control her breathing. The air was forced out of her in panting, jerky breaths as the thing that was moving through the earth slid along the side of the coffin. She could hear it, she could feel it right through her body.
It was getting warmer. Sweat broke out along her hairline, and the air had ceased to contain what she needed. She twitched as if she had been given an electric shock, twitched again, and panic wasn’t far away. She was surrounded by earth on all sides, lying in complete darkness, had no air, and something had dug its way through to her and was working its way in. She was going to scream. Despite the fact that she hadn’t reached that point, she was going to scream.
She drew thin air into her lungs and at the same time the other thing pushed its way in, crept in behind her back and lay behind her, spooning.
She exhaled without screaming. She felt herself being embraced by the soft, forgiving, no-longer-frightening darkness. Urd was lying beside her. Urd was her. Urd did not scream.
Not there anymore. Never had been.
Out of the darkness pictures emerged, her life.
She saw herself being buried in the ground, but the coffin was empty. She saw her computer, saw herself sitting at the computer, keys pressed down like a self-playing piano. No one was there. A hammer struck, blood spurted over a cement floor, vomit spewed over another cement floor, but the fluids came out of the empty air and the film speeded up.
Theres sitting alone on the subway, talking to someone who didn’t exist, Goran waving off a train with no passengers on it, a bicycle without a rider moving along a gravel track, Johannes playing Tekken by himself, being kissed by an invisible ghost, dry leaves whirling around in the cave between the rocks where no one had ever been. Clothes collapsing in heaps in the garden, in rooms, on the streets. Collapsing as the person who had worn them disappeared.
It stopped at a yellow bead. A child’s fingers holding a little yellow bead.
The only thing that remained of all of this was that single yellow point. No. The only thing that remained was that single yellow point
They stood together on the jetty in the dawn light, fourteen girls. It was five o’clock in the morning, but the sun was already high in the sky, pouring its light down upon them. The morning mist had dispersed, and the lake was dead calm.
The jetty was small, and the girls stood close together like a flock of birds, sharing each other’s warmth, allowing a new kind of energy to flow between their bodies. Their eyes were empty, their senses wide open.
Teresa’s throat was still hurting from the scream she hadn’t even known she’d let out, but like the other girls she was still, drinking in the soft light of the morning, the smell of mud, reeds and water coming from the lake, the long sustained explosion of birdsong in the trees, the closeness she felt with the other girls, and the space all
