The Darkest Room

padded jacket was inaccurately buttoned, and he was looking up at Joakim with some curiosity.

“Hi,” said Joakim.

“Hi,” said the boy.

“It’s not a good idea to kick your ball around here,” said Joakim. “You could break a window if your aim isn’t great.”

“I’m aiming at the wall,” said the boy. “I always hit what I’m aiming at.”

“Good. What’s your name?”

“Andreas.”

The boy rubbed his nose, red with the cold, with the palm of his hand.

“Where do you live?”

“Over there.”

He pointed toward the farm. So Andreas was one of the Carlsson family’s children, out and about on his own this Saturday morning.

“Would you like to come in?” said Joakim.

“Why?”

“You can say hello to Livia and Gabriel,” said Joakim. “They’re my children…Livia’s the same age as you.”

“I’m seven,” said Andreas. “Is she seven?”

“No. But she’s almost the same age as you.”

Andreas nodded. He rubbed his nose again, then made a decision.

“For a little while. We’ll be eating soon.”

He picked up his ball and disappeared around the side of the house.

Joakim closed the window and went out of the room.

“Livia, Gabriel!” he shouted. “We’ve got a visitor.”

After a few seconds his daughter appeared, clutching Foreman in her hand.

“What?”

“There’s someone here who wants to meet you.”

“Who?”

“A boy.”

“A boy?” Livia opened her eyes wide. “I don’t want to meet him. What’s his name?”

“Andreas. He lives on the farm next door.”

“But Daddy, I don’t know him.”

There was panic in her voice, but before Joakim had the chance to say something sensible about the fact that meeting new people isn’t going to make you ill, the outside door opened and Andreas walked into the porch. He stopped on the doormat.

“Come on in, Andreas,” said Joakim. “Take off your cap and your jacket.”

“Okay.”

The boy took off his outdoor clothes and dropped them on the floor.

“Have you been in this house before?”

“No. It’s always locked.”

“Not now, it’s open now. We live here now.”

Andreas looked at Livia and she looked back, but neither of them said hello.

Gabriel was peeping out shyly from his room, but he didn’t say anything either.

“I helped bring our cows in,” said Andreas after a while, looking around the room. “From the enclosure out there.”

“Today?” said Joakim.

“No, last week. They have to stay in now. Otherwise they’d freeze to death.”

“That’s true, everybody needs heat in the wintertime,” said Joakim. “Cows and birds and people.”

Livia was still staring curiously at Andreas without joining in the conversation. Joakim had also been shy when he was little; it was a shame if she had inherited that particular characteristic.

“You could kick the soccer ball around for a while,” he said. “I know a great room you could use.”

He led the way into the house, with the children following along behind. They trooped into the large drawing room, which was still almost completely unfurnished; there were just a couple of dining chairs and few cardboard boxes on the floor.

“You can play in here,” said Joakim, stacking three of the boxes in front of the window to protect it.

Andreas dropped the ball, dribbled it tentatively, then kicked it across the wooden floor to Livia. Dust swirled up like a fine gray mist.

Livia kicked at the ball as it came speeding toward her. She missed. Gabriel scampered after it, but couldn’t catch up.

“Stop it with your foot first,” said Joakim to the children, “then you’ll be able to control it.”

Livia gave him a sour look, as if she could do without the good advice, thank you. Then she quickly turned and captured the ball between her feet in one corner of the room and kicked it back hard.

“Good shot,” said Andreas.

Little flirt, thought Joakim, but Livia was smiling contentedly.

“Go and stand over there,” said Andreas, pointing to the other doorway. “You can be in goal and we’ll shoot.”

Livia quickly ran over to the double doors, and Joakim left the room and went back along the corridor to his wallpapering. He could hear the ball bouncing across the floor behind him.

“Goal!” he heard Andreas shout, and Livia and Gabriel shrieked before all three of them started laughing.

Joakim loved the happy noises spreading through the house. Very good, he had sorted out a friend for his children.

He stuck his brush in the bucket of paste, stirred it around, and made a start on the long wall. Length after length of paper went up; the room changed color and gradually became lighter. Joakim smoothed out the bubbles and wiped away the excess paste with a damp sponge.

When only a couple of feet of the old wallpaper remained, he realized that the echoing children’s voices could no longer be heard from the drawing room.

The house was completely silent again.

Joakim climbed down from his ladder and listened.

“Livia?” he called. “Gabriel? Would you like some juice? And cookies?”

No reply.

He listened for a while longer, then went out of the room and along the corridor. But halfway to the drawing room he looked out of the window into the courtyard and stopped.

The door to the big barn was standing ajar.

It had been shut before, hadn’t it?

Then he saw that Andreas Carlsson’s outdoor clothes had gone from the floor.

Joakim pulled on a jacket and a pair of boots and went out into the courtyard.

The children must have pulled the heavy door open together. Maybe they had gone inside too, into the darkness.

Joakim went across and stopped in the doorway of the barn.

“Hello?”

No reply.

Were they playing hide-and-seek? He walked across the stone floor, breathing in the smell of old hay.

They had talked about turning the barn into a gallery, he and Katrine, sometime in the future when they had cleared out all the hay, the dung, and all the other traces of the animals who had lived there.

He was thinking about Katrine again, although he shouldn’t. But on the morning of the day she drowned, he had seen her coming out of the barn. She had looked embarrassed, as if he had caught her out.

Nothing was moving inside the barn, but Joakim thought he could hear a tapping or creaking noise from the hayloft up above, like footsteps.

A narrow, steep wooden staircase led up to the loft, and he grabbed hold of the sides and began to climb.

Coming into the loft from the dark passageways and stalls down below was almost like walking into a church,