A chill autumn night.
Damp-dripping world.
Ball-Bengt in the tree.
The cold of the plain.
Branches like snakes, leaves and rotting mushrooms like spiders, and then the worms under your feet, sharp thorns that cut into the soles of your feet. Who’s that hanging there in the tree? Bats, owls, some fresh evil?
Is the geography of evil small outcrops of rock and shallow hollows? Half-grown forest, a woman with the tatters of black clothing hanging from her body, dragging herself along a deserted forest road at dawn.
Is the beast here in the forest?
Malin has time to think all this as she and Zeke pad through the snow towards the Murvall brothers’ cabin. They light up the trees with their pocket torches, the reflecting patches shine, making the black trees tremble in the utterly silent night, making the snow crystals on the ground twinkle like countless watchful lemmings’ eyes, little beacons for navigating through the unknown.
‘How far, Fors? It’s got to be at least minus fifteen and I’m still dripping with sweat.’
Zeke is walking ahead, heaving his way through the snow; no one has been this way since the last fall of snow, even if there are still earlier tracks to follow. Snowmobile tracks alongside.
The animals, Malin thinks. That must be how they get them out, by snowmobile.
‘Pretty tough going,’ Malin says, trying to instil a bit of courage in Zeke by showing that she shares his pain. ‘We must have trudged a good kilometre by now.’
‘How far was it supposed to be?’
‘They wouldn’t say.’
They stop next to each other, breathing out silently.
‘Maybe we should have waited?’ Malin says.
‘Let’s go on,’ Zeke says.
After thirty minutes of struggling against the snow and the cold the forest opens out into a small clearing in front of them, and at its centre stands a small house, probably several hundred years old, with drifts of snow up to the eaves.
They train their torches on the cabin; long shadows fall from the beams of light and the trees in the forest become a curtain of dark nuances behind the snow-covered roof.
‘Okay, let’s go in,’ Zeke says.
The key is hanging where the brothers said, on a hook under the soffit. The lock creaks in the cold.
‘I don’t suppose there’s any electricity,’ Zeke says as the door opens. ‘No point looking for a light switch.’
Cones of light dance across a single, frozen room. Neat, Malin thinks. Rag rugs on the floor, a gas stove on a simple wooden worktop, a camping table in the middle of the room, four chairs, candles, no lamps, and three double beds along the windowless end walls.
Malin goes over to the table.
Its top is stained with light oil.
‘Gun grease,’ she says, and Zeke mutters in agreement.
On a dresser beside the kitchen worktop stand tins of pea soup and ravioli and meatballs, and in a box alongside are bottles of spirits.
‘It reminds me somehow of a changing room,’ Zeke says.
‘Yes, it’s very neutral. No feeling.’
‘What were you expecting, Fors? They let us come out here precisely because we wouldn’t find anything.’
‘I don’t know. Just a feeling.’
A room without feelings. What is there beyond that?
If you have wicked hearts, deep down inside, you Murvalls, then what sort of damage have you done?
Then Zeke hushes her and Malin turns round, sees him put a glove to his lips and then point out through the door as they simultaneously put their hands over the beams of their torches.
The resulting darkness is unshakable.
‘Did you hear something?’ Malin whispers.
Zeke says, ‘Hmm,’ and they stand there in silence and listen. A dragging sound coming towards them: a limping animal? Wounded by a misplaced shot? Dragging its way into the clearing? Then it is quiet once more. Has the animal stopped? The Murvall brothers are in custody. The old woman? Not here, not now. Maybe she can change her shape? The bullies? But what would they be doing here?
Malin and Zeke creep towards the open door, lean out carefully from either side, look at each other, then the noise starts up again, but further away now, and they leap out, training their torches in the direction the sound is coming from.
Something black drifts quickly towards the edge of the forest; a meditative movement. A person?
A woman?
