Vendela stays at the kitchen table and hears them open the door of his room, then close it. Aunt Margit’s voice sounds shriller and more spirited than ever as she talks to the Invalid and wishes him Merry Christmas.
Vendela doesn’t hear any response.
The door is open only once when Vendela walks past, a few months after the Invalid moved in. It is standing ajar. She slows down, stops and cranes her neck to look inside. It is dark, but she is aware of a sour, closed-in smell, and she can see a cramped room with a bed and a small table. And an old blanket on the floor.
Someone is sitting on the blanket: a thin, shrunken person with uncombed grey or white hair sticking out in all directions. The figure is sitting there motionless, in a stooping position. Suddenly the shadow straightens up. It turns its head towards her and opens its mouth. And it begins to giggle.
Vendela hurries quickly past the room, as if the Invalid does not exist. She dashes down the stairs and straight out on to the grass.
She understands why the Invalid closes the door – of course you can’t let people see you when you are so old, and so ill. But still. Spending all your time in a room upstairs, never coming out into the sunlight? She can’t imagine what that would be like.
The winter passes and it is March, and the snow is melting out on the alvar. For a few weeks big pools form on the yellow grass, spring lakes, and when school is over and the cows have been shut in, Vendela sometimes sets off to explore. She sees the water reflecting the clouds in the vast, open sky, and she feels free, far away from the farm.
One sunny afternoon on the alvar she suddenly sees a large, unusual object among the juniper bushes on the horizon. It is a block of stone. It looks like an altar, leaning slightly to one side, and it is perhaps two or three kilometres from the farm. It is tall and wide, and it can be seen from some distance away. The juniper bushes stand in a circle around the stone, but seem to be keeping their distance.
Vendela doesn’t actually go up to it, because she is further out on the alvar than ever and is afraid of getting lost among the spring lakes. She turns around and runs home.
Spring passes and the school year ends, and Vendela doesn’t go back to the isolated stone out on the alvar. But one summer evening she mentions it to her father and asks if he has ever seen it.
‘The elf stone?’ Henry is sitting at the kitchen table polishing a round lamp stand. He has carved it from a piece of limestone, and as his emery cloth moves across the surface, it shines like polished marble. ‘The one on the way to Marnas? Is that the one you mean?’
Vendela nods.
‘It’s from the Ice Age,’ says Henry. ‘It’s always been there. And people have always gone there to leave offerings.’
‘Who for?’
‘For the elves,’ says Henry. ‘It’s called the elf mill. Back in the old days, people believed the hollows in the stone were formed when the elves milled their grain to make flour. But these days, people go there to ask for things … you leave a gift for the elves and make a wish.’
‘What do you wish for?’
‘Anything you like. If you’ve lost something you can ask the elves to help you find it …’ Henry says, glancing out of the window towards the barn, ‘… or maybe you can ask for a bit more good fortune in life.’
‘Have you ever done it, Dad?’
‘Done what?’
‘Have you ever left a gift for the elves?’
Henry shakes his head and carries on polishing the limestone. ‘You shouldn’t wish for things you don’t deserve.’
16
Vendela weighed the cow stick in her hand. Was it really the same one? It looked shorter now than when she was little, but it was still unpleasantly long. She thought she could hear the faint sound of cow bells in the distance.
After forty years she can still remember the swishing sound of the stick, but not why she had hit the cows so hard. Was she a sadistic child?
She put the stick back in the shed and walked through the empty garden, in amongst the trees next to the house.
A narrow path led to an open space. Now she was standing in the pasture where the cows used to graze in the summer, but it was no longer a meadow; it was overgrown with tangled bushes. There were no cowpats in the grass. No cows had grazed here for many years.
The alvar began beyond the stone wall on the other side of the pasture. It had been almost completely devoid of trees and bushes when Vendela was little, but now she could see low-growing birches and spindly hawthorns in front of her. The bushes were in the way, but she managed to maintain as straight a line as possible as she moved across the flat ground.
When she could no longer see the farm behind her, she focused on a bush straight ahead and kept on running, increasing her speed. The sun would not remain in the sky for more than a couple of hours now, and she had no wish to be out on the alvar in the dark.
Ten minutes later she was out in the wilds – the distance seemed shorter than in her childhood. A couple of hundred metres ahead of her she could see a tall, dense group of juniper bushes and slowed her pace. Her legs were shaking; she inhaled the cold air and concentrated. Then she made her way through the thicket and stopped in the little glade inside. Any visitor was completely hidden from view in here.
The stone was still there.
It was rough and unpolished, just as she remembered from childhood.
She moved slowly closer to the rectangular stone. It was solid, sunken firmly in the ground.
The elf mill, where the elves once milled their grain in the twilight. The gateway to their kingdom.
The stone seemed a little smaller now; perhaps it had sunk further down over the past forty years. But it was probably just that Vendela had grown up.
There were things in the hollows.
No, not things, money. Old coins.
Made of bronze or gold? She wasn’t brave enough to pick them up and take a closer look, but now she knew that other islanders believed in the power of the elves too.
She remained a few feet away from the stone, listening. The wind soughed in the trees, and far away she could hear the faint roar of traffic from the main road.
But there were no rustling noises. No footsteps.
Vendela walked up and placed her hand on the stone. It was just as cool as she remembered, even though the sun was shining.
She lay down behind the elf stone, where it was less windy. The ground was cold but not damp, and she closed her eyes. She could feel the big stone beside her, emanating solidity and a protective sense of calm.
When Vendela was thirty she had travelled to Iceland, where people still believed in elves. She had met elderly people who said they had seen them, and had accompanied a group of tourists up to Snaefjellsjokull, the glacier north of Reykjavik where the elves evidently appeared from time to time. She had spent one bitterly cold night sitting waiting in a cave by the glacier, but she hadn’t seen them.
Five years earlier she had seen an advertisement in a magazine about a course on the island of Gotland, where you could learn to see and communicate with elves. Vendela secretly booked a place on the course, and flew to Visby one sunny Friday at the beginning of May. (She told Max she was going to do a pottery course.)
The course leader was about thirty, and had long brown hair in a pony tail. His name was Adam Luft, and he
