The Darkest Room

“Your girl. The one who put up curtains and dried flowers and all that crap. You didn’t do it, did you?”

“She moved out last spring,” said Henrik.

A memory of Camilla sprang unbidden into his mind, lying reading on the sofa where the Serelius brothers were now sitting. He realized that Tommy was a bit smarter than he looked-he noticed details.

“What was her name?”

“Camilla.”

“Do you miss her?”

“Like dog shit,” he said quickly. “Anyway, like I said, you can’t stay…”

“Chill out, we’re staying in Kalmar,” said Tommy. “That’s all sorted, but we’re thinking of working here on Oland. So we need a bit of help.”

“With what?”

“Mogge told us what you and he used to do in the winter. He told us about the summer cottages…”

“I see.”

“He said you’d be happy to start up again.”

Thanks for that, Mogge, thought Henrik. They had quarreled about the division of the money before Morgan left-perhaps this was his revenge.

“That was a long time ago,” he said. “Four years… and we only did it for two winters, really.”

“And? Mogge said it went well.”

“It went okay,” said Henrik.

Virtually all the break-ins had been problem free, but a couple of times he and Mogge had been spotted by the people next door and had to make their escape over stone walls, like kids stealing apples. They had always worked out at least two escape routes in advance, one on foot and one in the car.

He went on: “Sometimes there wasn’t anything of value… but once we found a cupboard, it was really old. A seventeenth-century German cabinet, we got thirty-five thousand kronor for that in Kalmar.”

Henrik had become more animated as he was talking, almost nostalgic. He had actually had quite a talent for getting in through locked veranda doors and windows without smashing them. His grandfather had been a carpenter in Marnas and had been equally proud of his expertise.

But he also remembered how stressful it had been, driving around northern Oland night after night. It was bitterly cold up there in the winter, both in the wind outdoors and inside the closed-up houses. And the holiday villages were empty and silent.

“Old houses are real treasure troves,” said Tommy. “So you’re in? We need you to find our way around up there.”

Henrik didn’t say anything. He was thinking that a person who has a miserable, predictable life must be miserable and predictable themselves. He didn’t want to be like that.

“So we’re agreed, then,” said Tommy. “Okay?”

“Maybe,” said Henrik.

“That sounds like a yes.”

“Maybe.”

“Hubba bubba,” said Tommy.

Henrik nodded, hesitantly.

He wanted to be exciting, to have an exciting life. Now that Camilla had moved out, the evenings were miserable and the nights were empty, but still he hesitated. It wasn’t the risk of being caught that had made Henrik give up the break-ins before, it was a different kind of fear.

“It’s dark out in the country,” he said.

“Sounds good,” said Tommy.

“It’s bloody dark,” said Henrik. “There are no streetlights in the villages, and the power in the cottages is usually switched off. You can hardly see a thing.”

“No problem,” said Tommy. “We pocketed some flashlights at a gas station yesterday.”

Henrik nodded slowly. Flashlights got rid of the darkness, of course, but only to a certain extent.

“I’ve got a boathouse we can use,” he said. “For storage, until we find the right buyer.”

“Great,” said Tommy. “Then all we have to do is find the right houses. Mogge said you know some good places.”

“Some,” said Henrik. “It goes with the job.”

“Give us the addresses, then we can check if they’re safe.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We’ll ask Aleister.”

“What?”

“We usually chat with Aleister Crowley,” said Tommy, placing his bag on the table. He opened it and took out a narrow, flat box, made of dark wood. “We contact him using this.”

Henrik looked on in silence as Tommy unfolded the box and placed it on the table. Letters, words, and numbers were seared into the wood on the inside of the box. The entire alphabet was there, plus numbers from zero to ten and the words YES and NO. Then Tommy took a small glass out of his bag.

“I tried this out when I was a kid,” said Henrik. “The spirit in the glass, isn’t it?”

“Like fuck it is, this is serious.” Tommy placed the glass on the unfolded box. “This is a Ouija board.”

“A Ouija board?”

“That’s what it’s called,” said Tommy. “The wood is from the lid of an old coffin. Can you turn the lights down a little?”

Henrik smiled to himself, but went over to the light switch anyway.

All three sat around the table. Tommy placed his little finger on the glass and closed his eyes.

The room fell silent. He scratched his throat slowly and seemed to be listening for something.

“Who’s there?” he asked. “Is Aleister there?”

Nothing happened for a few seconds. Then the glass began to move beneath Tommy’s finger.

Henrik had gone out to his grandfather’s boathouse the very next evening, at twilight, to get it ready.

The little wooden hut was painted red and stood in a meadow a dozen or so yards from the shore, close to two other small cottages owned by summer visitors; no one came near them after the middle of August. You could be left in peace here.

He had inherited the boathouse from his grandfather, Algot. When he was alive, they would both go out to sea several times every summer to put out nets, then spend the night in the boathouse and get up at five to check them.

Out here on the Baltic shore he missed those days, and thought it was sad that his grandfather was no longer around. Algot had carried on with his carpentry and little bits of building after his retirement, and had seemed perfectly content with his life right up until the last heart attack, despite the fact that he had left the island only a few times.

Henrik undid the padlock and peered into the darkness

inside. Everything looked more or less as it had done when his grandfather passed away six years earlier. Nets hung along the walls, the workbench was still standing on the floor, and the iron stove was rusting away in one corner. Camilla had wanted to clear everything out and paint the inside walls white, but Henrik thought it was just fine the way it was.

He cleared away oilcans, toolboxes, and other things that were on the wooden floor and spread out a tarpaulin ready for the stolen goods. Then he went out onto the jetty on the point and breathed in the smell of seaweed and brackish salt water. To the north he could see the twin lighthouses at Eel Point rising up out at sea.

Down below the jetty was his motorboat, an open launch, and when he looked down into it he could see that the floor was covered in rainwater. He climbed down into the boat and began baling out.

As he was working he thought back over what had happened the previous evening, when he and the Serelius brothers had sat down in the kitchen and held a seance. Or whatever it might have been.

The glass had moved constantly across the board, providing answers to every question-but of course it was Tommy himself who had been moving it. He had closed his eyes, but he must have been peeping to make sure the glass ended up in the right place.

At any rate, it had turned out that the spirit of Aleister wholeheartedly supported their plans to break into