At first it sounds like no more than the echo of my own breaths on the walls, but then I hear that slight, oh-so slight, disparity; the other’s breaths are shallower and slightly faster, falling out of step with mine until the rhythm becomes something dissonant.
My feet have started to fall asleep in the awkward position I’m in, but I don’t dare move. It’s all in my head. I know it’s all in my head.
My body is acting without me.
I hold my breath.
Still I hear them, those scratchy, shallow breaths.
I feel a tiny thread of urine run down my thigh and wet my jeans.
Slowly but surely my eyes start to adjust to the darkness. There’s too little light to be able to see anything clearly, but some contours start to emerge. Something lies by the broken doors. Something with soft, elongated lines that isn’t a camera tripod or a generator or a cooler.
Something moving.
“Tone?” I whisper.
And then I hear it—there, in the darkness.
A short, muffled laugh that whisks against my eardrum.
An icy, blazing shock of survival instinct runs through my body like a tornado, snapping me out of my paralysis. It tears out of me as a bellow and pushes me backward, fumbling, scrabbling, beating, as I fight and kick my way out, away, back to the driver’s seat, struggling with a desperation I’ve never felt before. I’m senseless, frantic, an animal fleeing for its life, and there’s not a single thought in my mind, only the mortal fear that has commandeered my instincts and is threatening to burst from my skull.
I squeeze my way through the hole between the seats and pull myself up out of the door with a strength that makes my muscles strain and burst, a strength I didn’t know myself capable of. I shuffle and slide off the edge of the van and onto the ground, landing on the cobblestones with a jolt I feel right up my spine. I shouldn’t be able to move—I can’t, really—but somehow I scramble back to my feet and start running.
I only make it a few feet before I’m grabbed from behind.
NOW
“Alice! What are you doing?”
I try to wrest back my hand, but the grip around my wrist is tight. Slowly my pulse starts to calm. I turn to see Emmy staring at me.
“Alice?” I hear Max call from by the Volvo.
The world begins to fall into place around me again.
“Alice, what is it?” Emmy asks, letting go of my wrist. She studies me, her eyebrows slightly furrowed.
“What happened?”
I swallow and look at the van. It’s lying exactly where it was, a sooty, wounded giant. I realize that my foot hurts; I must have landed badly when I jumped off the van.
“There…” I begin, my voice thin and distant.
There’s someone in there.
The words are on the tip of my tongue, but they don’t want to be articulated.
I heard something in there. Someone.
That wasn’t Tone.
I did, didn’t I?
My courage flails in my throat, then deserts me.
I swallow.
“I … couldn’t find the generator,” I splutter. “But everything was in pieces. I think it must be broken.”
Emmy curses under her breath, then looks at me, hesitates.
“Are you OK?” she asks. Her eyes feel like they’re grilling me.
What will they say if I tell them I heard someone in there? Someone laughing? Someone who isn’t Tone?
Or …
Was it all in my head?
I’ve never experienced psychosis, not like Tone. But her symptoms started as depression, and that I have had. I’ve been severely depressed. And Emmy didn’t listen to me then, either.
There are no sounds coming from the van.
I could ask them to check; to open the doors, crawl inside, and take a look for themselves. But I can just picture Emmy coming out again and saying, in her usual, measured tone:
“There was nothing there. She was just seeing things. Hysterical.”
I swallow.
“I … got stuck,” I say. “Upside down. It was horrible. I didn’t think I’d get out.”
“How did it go?” Robert asks behind me. By now he has also reached us. When I turn my head I see that he’s holding a long, white charger cable.
“She says it looked like the generator didn’t make it,” Emmy says.
He purses his lips.
“Shit,” he says.
“We should set up camp somewhere,” says Emmy. “Somewhere stable, sheltered. Then we can figure out what to do.”
“Somewhere with doors,” Robert adds.
Doors to shut out. And in.
He doesn’t need to say it.
Emmy squints up at the midday sun, then looks out over the village. The rays catch and gleam on the church’s cross, Silvertjärn’s highest point and polestar.
“The church,” she says. “Let’s go to the church.”
NOW
“We have to barricade the doors,” Emmy says to Max and Robert. She doesn’t just say it, but walks up to one of the pews and takes hold of one end. She can hardly shift it—it looks like it’s solid oak—but Robert adds his weight, and together they manage to get it all the way over to the doors, with a horrible screech that echoes off the high ceiling.
Robert takes a few steps back and looks at it.
“Should be enough,” he says.
“So what now?” Max asks.
It’s Robert who answers.
“If your mom was going to call the police after forty-eight hours, and you called her a few hours ago, they should be here in the morning of the day after tomorrow,” he says.
“But that’s two days,” says Max. “And we have no food, or water…”
“We can get water,” says Emmy. “From the river. At this time of year it’ll be meltwater, so it should be clean.”
“We could try to walk,” says Robert, some doubt in his voice. “But we have no compass, no proper shoes … we can try to follow the road, but it’s at least twenty-five, thirty miles to the nearest busy road. Further still to the nearest town.”
“What about gas stations?”
“The one we stopped at was a few hours away by car,” says Robert.
Max isn’t looking at Robert. He’s looking at the oak pew barricading the church doors.
My eyes are drawn to the carved Jesus
