It was strange, somehow.
For the first time it felt as if the jacket was warming him. And it was no longer too big. It fitted. Perfectly.
Back to Gavasten
The cold nipped at Anders' cheeks and brought tears to his eyes. He had wrapped up as warmly as he could and was wearing a lifejacket under his padded jacket, but the headwind found its way into every nook and cranny and by the time he was halfway to Gavasten, he was frozen through.
At first he had thought there was something odd about his eyes, that he was seeing dots, but from this distance he could see that the dots swarming across the sky around Gavasten were actually birds. It was impossible to tell what kind they were, but it looked as if they were different sizes, and therefore different species.
Simon's twenty-horsepower engine hummed monotonously and the fibreglass hull slapped against the waves. Anders' face was so stiff with the cold that he no longer felt it when a few drops flew up and hit his cheeks or chin. He kept his eyes fixed on Gavasten and his left hand clenched around the throttle, turned up to maximum. He was an arrow fired from Domaro, heading straight for his target: the lighthouse.
And yet he couldn't prevent something from seeping in and eating away at his deep-frozen resolve. An unpleasant, jelly-like quivering was growing in his chest the closer he got to the lighthouse and the teeming birds. A feeling as familiar as an obnoxious relative: fear. Good old fear, causing the arrow to veer off-course and slow down.
The resonance of the engine deepened as he cut the speed and allowed the boat to chug along for the last hundred metres. The birds around the lighthouse really were a mixture of species. The wildly flapping wings of golden-eyes, the heavy bodies of the eider ducks and the elegance of the gulls, soaring along on the air currents. There were even a number of swans bobbing on the sea off the lighthouse.
Many of the birds were up in the air circling around the lighthouse, but even more were gathered on the surface of the water. Their behaviour didn't appear to have any purpose, other than to show a united front, to say: Here we are.
And yet it was unpleasant. Anders hadn't see The Birds, but he could well imagine what it would be like if such a large number of birds decided to attack. They were showing no inclination to do so at the moment, but perhaps when he stepped ashore?
When the boat slipped in among the first group of birds, they paddled quickly out of the way glaring at him aggressively, he thought. He decided to use the only weapon, or at least protection, to which he had access.
He let go of the throttle and allowed the engine to idle as he picked up the plastic bottle, took a deep breath then took a couple of swigs of the wormwood concentrate.
The nausea seared his mouth, his throat, his stomach, and the flames shot up into his head, licking around his brain. He fought back the urge to vomit, put the top back on and grasped the throttle. The birds swam away, leaving him a feather-free route up to the rock.
He hesitated for a few seconds before setting foot ashore. Then he climbed out of the boat and looked around. The birds were still whirling around in the air and it seemed to him that their screams were becoming more intense. But they weren't attacking. He pulled up the boat as far as he could and fastened the mooring rope to a rock.
And so he was standing on Gavasten once again.
The first and last time he had been here before, the rocks had been covered in snow. Now he could see that they had been polished by the sea, and that veins of pink and white ran through the grey rock, forming a pattern beneath the spatter of guano. He stood motionless, his arms dangling by his sides and his mouth open, as the pattern freed itself from its foundation and drifted together, forming itself into…an alphabet.
The lines running vertically and horizontally, the separate dots and curlicues were all characters, parts of a system of writing that was so complex his brain was unable to encompass it; he could only establish that it existed.
Like a baby who has picked up a bible and tosses it aside when it proves impossible to chew, Anders tore his gaze away from the writing on the rock and carried on up towards the eastern side of the island. It was not his language, it meant nothing to him.
He didn't know how to look because he didn't know what he was looking for, but his consciousness was sounding out the area as if it were a knot that must be untied. He needed to find the point where there was a little slack, where he could get his finger in and start to work it.
He couldn't find any such point. The world was impenetrably solid and filled with messages he was unable to interpret.
The formation of the rock was like a broken flight of steps leading down into the sea, the individual free- standing blocks of stone and the lines of gravel in the crevices formed new characters that wanted to say something. When he looked up it was to the disorienting sight of the flocks of birds creating figures against the sky, figures that continuously dissolved and reformed into new beings.
Anders crouched down and dipped his hands in a puddle of crystal clear rainwater, rubbed his face and eyes, closed his eyes for a while.
When he opened them a little of the visionary impression had left him, and he was able to walk up to the lighthouse, screwing up his eyes as he went. The door was unlocked, as it had been on the previous occasion. One thing he was grateful for: the hallucinatory effect of the wormwood blocked almost all his memories. In fact, what it actually did was to place him so powerfully in the here and now that it was painful. But it was still better than the alternative.
He opened the door and was welcomed by the little collection box and the request for money. He rummaged in his pockets but didn't find any, and walked past. He stopped and giggled.
No. As he walked up the stairs he could hear them outside, still screaming and clucking to one another. Did they understand each other's language, the different species? Probably not, but in that case how did they know they were supposed to gather like this?
He stroked the outside wall with his right hand as he climbed upwards. He passed the circular room and carried on up the stairs to the reflector.
The room looked just as he remembered it, nothing had changed. The big windows and the gleaming mirrors on the reflector bounced the daylight around so that the room seemed brighter than outdoors. He went and stood in the spot where Maja had asked him What's that? and looked out across the sea, waiting to see what he might feel.
At first there was nothing.
His eyes were unusually sensitive to the light, and despite the fact that the sky was covered in clouds, he was forced to squint in order to be able to see out across the slightly foaming water. He looked down at the sharp edges of the rocks, the congregating birds, and felt the poisonous liquid running through his body like a fluorescent green thread.
Then it came. Faintly at first, like the perception of another person's breathing in a darkened room. Then stronger. A knowledge that was hard to describe. Anders gasped and stumbled, leaned against the glass case surrounding the reflector.
The depths.
He was standing on nothing. The depths were everything.
It is said that only ten per cent of an iceberg protrudes above the surface of the water. What Anders perceived
