was seeing in a different way. For a fraction of a second he managed to think: I am seeing through my eyes, and then he was no longer a part of himself.
A creaking sound brought him back to his body. He didn't know how much time had passed, but he found himself sitting on the floor with the Bamse comic in front of him and the pen in his hand. The quilt was in a heap on the bed.
The comic was open at a short story, just two pages, which was called 'Brumma's Secret Friends'. Brumma hid in the cupboard under the sink and made friends with the brush and shovel. When Mummy shouted for Brumma, the brush was terrified; it said, 'We are secret, secret', and turned back into an ordinary brush.
There were drawings on the pages. Lines and shapes on every available surface. No letters. The only thing Anders could in any way interpret as meaningful was a zigzag line across several frames, which looked more like a temple than anything else.
Was there a reason why this particular story had been chosen, or was it just a coincidence, like the story of the haunted hotel? Had Maja just been reading and drawing, as she used to do sometimes?
The creaking sound came again, this time just outside the door. Anders gave a start and pulled the quilt towards him, threw it over his head and curled up, lay as still as still could be. The handle was pushed down tentatively and the door opened. Anders stuck his thumb in his mouth.
Anders?' Simon's voice was no more than a whisper. The door closed behind him. 'What are you doing?'
Simon was standing in front of him in his dressing gown as Anders crawled out from under the quilt. 'I was scared.'
'Can I come in?'
Anders waved in the direction of the bed, but stayed where he was on the floor with the quilt round his shoulders. Simon sat down on the bed and looked at the comic. 'Have you been drawing?'
'I don't know anything,' said Anders. 'I don't know anything about anything.'
Simon linked his hands together and leaned forward. He took a deep breath. 'It's like this,' he said. 'I've been thinking things over. There's a lot to say, but I'll start with a question. Would you like Spiritus?'
'The insect? In the matchbox?'
'Yes. I thought it might protect you. The thing is, Anna-Greta and I are going away tomorrow. I don't like the idea of you being… unprotected.'
'Didn't you say it involved some kind of pact?'
Simon took the matchbox out of his dressing-gown pocket. 'Yes. And I don't know what that really means. But I think something pretty awful happens when you die.'
'And you want to give it to me.'
Simon turned the box over in his hands. A faint sound of scraping and ticking could be heard from inside as the larva shifted its position.
'I have been afraid. You enter into some form of pact with what is deep and dark in the world. I have regretted doing so. But I couldn't help myself. I was stupid, to put it mildly.'
Simon fingered the unfamiliar wedding ring and went on, 'But I wouldn't suggest this if I didn't believe it could help you. Whatever is after you has something to do with water, and this…can tame water.'
Anders looked at the box in Simon's hand; his eyes moved up over the green towelling of the dressing gown and stopped at Simon's face, which suddenly looked immensely old and tired. The hand holding the box was almost touching the floor, as if the insect weighed a hundred times more than its appearance suggested.
'What shall I do?' asked Anders.
Simon drew the hand holding the box towards him and shook his head. 'Do you know what you're getting into?'
'No,' said Anders. 'But it doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. At all.'
Now Simon had got what he wanted, he seemed to be struck by remorse. Perhaps he didn't want to expose Anders to the risks involved after all. Perhaps he didn't want to be parted from his magical Spiritus. He ran his thumb distractedly over the boy on the box.
'You have to spit,' he said eventually. 'Into the box. You have to give it saliva. And you have to keep on doing that every single day for as long as you live. Or until you…pass it on.'
Anders gathered saliva in his mouth. After a while he nodded to Simon and took the box from him, pushed it open. Anders allowed the gob of saliva to emerge from his lips, to drip down…
'No, wait!' said Simon. 'Let's not-'
But it was too late. The tear-shaped, bubbling gob had already left Anders' mouth and fell straight on to the insect's leathery skin just as Simon's hand reached out.
Anders had thought nothing could taste more disgusting than the wormwood concentrate. He was wrong. Whatever penetrated his mouth now and spread throughout his body had a non-physical dimension that a taste could never match. As if he had bitten into a piece of rotten meat and at the same moment become the meat.
He opened and closed his mouth in a series of dry retches and his body shook in small convulsions, causing the box to fall from his grasp. Simon sat on the bed with his hands covering his face as Anders slumped sideways, clutching his stomach. He vomited and vomited without anything coming out of him.
The box was lying roughly twenty centimetres in front of him. A round black shape appeared over the edge, and the next moment the whole insect was out of the box. It had grown. Its skin was shiny and its body was moving smoothly across the floor, heading for Anders' lips. It wanted more of this manna, directly from the source.
Even though he felt so ill, Anders managed to sit up so that the insect couldn't find its way into his mouth. With trembling hands he placed the box over it and slid it shut without harming the insect.
There was a great deal of activity inside the box, and it moved across the floor in jerks and thrusts. Anders swallowed a bubble of vileness and asked, 'Is it angry?'
'No,' said Simon. 'Just the opposite, I should think.'
He looked into Anders' eyes. For a long time. Something happened between them, and Anders nodded.
Before Simon left the room he said, 'Take care of yourself.' He pointed at Anders, at the matchbox. 'That only happens the first time. The taste.'
Anders sat on the floor watching Spiritus bounce around in his little prison like some kind of morbid toy.
He still didn't know what he was going to do or how he was going to do it, but one thing he did know: during that long look, Simon had given his approval. Do what you have to do.
Anders conquered his revulsion and cupped his hand over the box. The insect calmed down as it felt the warmth of his body, his presence, and he became aware of everything that flowed.
His body was an immense system of larger and smaller channels, where water ran in the form of plasma. He had learned about this in school: the plasma carried corpuscles, thrombocytes, but he could neither see nor feel those, he could see only cloudy water being pumped around by the heart, out into his arteries, and he saw and knew that he was a tree, all the way out to the most fragile twigs. A tree made of water.
He was also able to feel very clearly all the water flowing or standing still in the house, although this feeling did not have the same intensity of revelation. The network of water pipes was visible through the walls, just like an X-ray, and the bottles of water he had brought with him…
He curled his hand around one of the bottles on the floor as he held his other hand over the matchbox. Yes, he could feel the water in the bottle. But nothing else. It was just the same as with his blood: he could feel only the water, but he felt that all the more strongly.
He looked at the hand cupped over the box and a couple of lines by the poet Tomas Transtromer came into his mind. He didn't really read much poetry, but he had made a start on Transtromer's collected poems so many times that he knew the first one by heart.
That was exactly how it was, with the reservation that the world his consciousness grasped was the part that consisted of water. He could follow it through the cold-water pipes, feel the drips from the leaking kitchen tap where he lost contact with it for half a second until it joined the thin film of water finding its way into the waste pipe and continuing downwards, out and eventually into a larger body of water that lay outside his range.
