A Darker Shade of Sweden (32 page)

Laboriously they made their way north and saw the Blue Virgin grow in front of them, immobile and heedless of the storm.

Gerlof was always amazed that the strangely round island cliff rose here, just a few nautical miles from the coast of Öland. The Blue Virgin was older than Öland, millions of years older.

The island of witches
. And indeed the waters around it looked like a boiling cauldron.

It was to this island the witches came at Easter, according to popular belief, to revel with Satan himself. The place had been in bad repute for centuries. In fact it had another name, an older name than the Blue Virgin, but saying it out loud meant bad luck. Gerlof didn't intend taking any such risk, for out here on the waves he was more superstitious than ashore.

He turned the tiller to make the gig run parallel to the steep rock, dancing in the water. John stayed on the seat, fighting the oars.

“Can we make landfall in this wind?”

“Not here!” Gerlof said. “The east side is better.”

There were no natural harbors on the Virgin, just rocks plunging into the sea—but on the opposite side of the island the wind was less hard. The sea was calmer there as well, though choppy and foaming close to shore.

Gerlof had taken the oars and both steered and paddled, closer and closer to the granite. The gig rolled back and forth in the water, but John was used to waves and managed to jump from the prow at the right moment. He landed, kept his balance by the heels of his boots and was ashore, almost dry-shod and with a rope to make fast the boat.

Shortly after him the Mossbergs' boat reached the shore thirty-five feet away and its outboard fell silent. Now there was only the deep rumble of the storm above the cliffs.

Well ashore, Gerlof blinked against the wind and looked searchingly up at the spruce growing on top of the island. No people were to be seen. Had the abandoned boat in the strait come from here? That's what he suspected. But who would have picked the island as their goal on a day like this? In bad weather, nobody willingly set off for the Virgin.

“Give me a hand.”

The four fishermen managed to get their boats higher up on the rocky beach, then lifted out their nets and their catch and turned the hulls on their side against the wind, supported by a few driftwood planks.

They sat down in the lee of their boats to take a breather.

“Fine,” was all Gerlof managed to say.

Before darkness fell, he realized, they would have to get up to the forest to get some spruce twigs in order to be able to sleep comfortably on the rock under their boats. Unless the wind fell.

After a while John got up to untangle the nets and take care of their catch. There were matches in the boat, as well as salt and ground coffee and a can of drinking water, so surviving on the island wouldn't be a problem.

At least not for the first week
, Gerlof thought. He remembered an old legend he'd heard about three shepherds who hundreds of years ago had spent a summer on the Virgin, but who had been trapped there by a prolonged storm in the strait. First they had slaughtered their animals to survive, and when all the sheep had been eaten two of the shepherds had dined on the third.

He walked over to the cousins who were already picking the fish from the nets. They had let the abandoned rowboat remain bobbing in the water, tied by a piece of rope in its prow. The boat was too heavy to drag out of the sea while the pile of rocks remained in it, but if the wind turned the waves would quickly slam it to pieces.

“Should we bring the boat home?” Gerlof said.

“Sure, it could come in handy,” Erik said. “But the stones should remain here.”

“They make fine ballast.”

“True,” Erik said, “but they bring bad luck. The weather will never improve as long as they're still in the boat.”

Gerlof sighed at the superstition.

“I guess I'll have to empty it, then.”

He pulled the rowboat to a small cove and jumped down in it. Then he folded back the tarpaulin and began lifting out the stones. They were round and quite beautiful, pale gray and polished to large egg shapes by the water. He became even more convinced that they actually had come from the Virgin. Just as when he'd pulled up the flounders earlier in the morning he counted the stones before throwing them ashore:
one
,
two
,
three
. . .

Stone followed stone over the railing, back to all the others.

Twenty-nine
,
thirty
,
thirty-one
. . .

He had put his hand out to the thirty-second stone when he stopped himself. It was round and grayish white, but didn't quite look like the others. He turned it over and froze.

“Erik,” he called into the wind. “Come take a look at this.”

Both the cousins stopped gutting flounders and walked down to the water's edge.

“What?”

“Look at this,” Gerlof said again.

What he held up to them wasn't a round granite rock.

It was a skull. A human skull, pale gray and with deep, black sockets. The lower jaw had fallen off, but the upper smiled broadly with white teeth.

Nobody on the beach said a word.

Gerlof carefully handed the skull to Erik Mossberg and looked down at the pile of stones in the boat.

“There's another one down there under the rocks,” he said quietly. “And bones.”

The cousins looked but said nothing. Erik silently accepted the second skull and put both of them on the flat rock, out of reach of the waves. Then he and Torsten and Gerlof together picked all the bones out of the boat and put them beside the skulls.

When they were done, two almost complete skeletons were laid out on the rock. Tall enough to have been adults, Gerlof saw. They had been dressed when they died, since there were pieces of pant fabric around their hips.

The mood on the beach was even more subdued than before.

“How old can they be?” Erik said.

“Difficult to say,” Gerlof said. “What's left of their clothes looks modern
. . .
but I don't think they're really fresh.”

“What should we do with them?” Torsten said.

Gerlof had no answer. He looked out across the empty sea, then glanced back at the island. He sniffed the wind and thought that he caught a whiff of smoke. And hadn't he seen something move as well, at the corner of his eye?

Now he saw nothing. He slowly walked over to John Hagman, who had quickly turned his back on the dead and gone to deal with the nets. Gerlof knew that John had a thing about dead bodies, as who hadn't?

“Are you okay?” he asked.

John nodded. Gerlof glanced back up the the Virgin and opened his mouth.

“I thought I caught a smell of . . .”

Then something clicked up on the cliffs and he heard a brief, whistling sound a few feet over his head.

“Down!” he yelled.

He made John duck. A second later another shot rang out from the cliffs—it really was a gunshot, no doubt about it. Gerlof even imagined seeing the second bullet hit the water not far from the shore, like a white strip of bubbles.

He also saw that the Mossbergs had heard the shots. They were lying down behind the hull of their boat now, while he and John were entirely unprotected on the cliffs. Gerlof quickly slid away towards a couple of mulberry bushes. Unworthy but wise. John followed him, and they stayed down.

“Someone's moving up there,” Gerlof said in a low voice.

John stayed pressed to the ground behind him but tried to look.

“Can you see who it is?”

Gerlof shook his head.

“Stay here,” he said softly. “I'll move a bit.”

The bushes grew closer together there and, hidden by them, he slowly crept a couple of hundred feet north along the edge of the water. From there he went on, behind pines and boulders.

From a distance, the Virgin looked round and smooth, but close up the granite was full of cracks and steep rock faces. Gerlof certainly didn't mind; they gave him protection.

The wind blew cold and the island felt more dangerous than ever. There were no more shots, but Gerlof didn't relax. He moved in a wide circle towards the western side of the Virgin.

There he found an unknown rowboat pulled ashore. He saw it near the water from a long way off—it was made from pinewood and couldn't be missed. But no owner was in sight.

Gerlof went on at a crouch. A hundred feet above the boat he came to a precipice, and on top of it he found trampled-down lyme grass and a fresh cigarette butt.

He looked up at the forest and saw, or believed that he saw, a dark flow of hair billowing in the wind and disappearing among the firs.

A woman?

He thought of the mythological sea warden of the Blue Virgin, she who ruled the waters and the winds and who punished those who mocked her. That legend was older than those about cursed stones and witches' revels, but of course Gerlof believed in none of them. The sea warden would hardly sit on the grass smoking cigarettes.

He went faster, but tried to move as quietly as possible.

Then he was inside the forest, a labyrinth of boulders and twisted firs. Here were both tangled hazel shrubs and deep crevices, and it was easy to lose your way.

He stopped again to listen. Then he moved quickly, stepped around a thick maple—and almost collided with the person hiding behind the trunk. A woman in dark clothes. She sat looking down, and Gerlof was able to sneak up very closely behind her.

“How do you do?” Gerlof said calmly.

The woman gave a scream. She twisted round, saw that she had been found and threw herself forward, fists raised.

“Easy!”

Gerlof roared and stood his ground on the cliff, but didn't hit back. He just raised his palms.

“Take it easy!” he shouted again. “I won't hurt you.”

Finally the woman lowered her arms, stopped fighting. Gerlof could ease his breath and take a step back. He saw that she was around thirty-five and dressed for a visit on the Virgin, in a warm woolen sweater and heavy boots. Her eyes were tense and nervous—but at least she didn't hold a rifle in her hands.

“What are you doing here?” he said. “Why are you sneaking around on us?”

She stared back at him.

“Who are you?”

“I'm from there,” Gerlof said, pointing across his shoulder at the coast of Öland. “We've been out fishing and came here to get away from the storm . . . we're harmless.”

The woman slowly relaxed her tense shoulders.

“I'm Gerlof Davidsson,” he went on. “Do you have a name?”

She gave a short nod.

“Ragnhild,” she said. “Ragnhild MÃ¥nsson. I'm from Oskarshamn.”

“Good, Ragnhild . . . How about us joining the others?”

She nodded without speaking, and Gerlof led her around the island close to the water's edge. He kept looking up at the top, watching for movement. If Ragnhild wasn't armed, someone else had fired the shots. But he couldn't see anyone up there.

When they got back to the eastern side, John and the Mossberg cousins had sat up behind the boats. They were smoking again, throwing nervous glances at Gerlof.

The woman looked at them without speaking, then at the bones and skulls placed on the cliff. Her eyes were still worried, but Gerlof saw no surprise in her face.

“We found those in the strait. At the bottom of a rowboat.”

“An empty rowboat?” Ragnhild said.

Gerlof nodded.

“Have you seen them before?”

“I don't know who they are,” she said finally.

Gerlof realized that she hadn't denied anything.

“And the rowboat?” he said, nodding towards the water. “Do you recognize it?”

Ragnhild MÃ¥nsson looked at the boat bobbing by the beach and paused for a while before answering.

“It's Kristoffer's,” she said at last. “My brother. It's his boat.”

“And where is your brother?”

“I don't know.”

The woman sighed, sat down on a boulder, then suddenly became more talkative.

“I came here for his sake . . . we were supposed to meet here today. I took my own motorboat from Oskarshamn and landed on the western side. Kristoffer was supposed to come from the opposite direction. He lives on Öland.”

“The rowboat was out in the storm when we found it,” Gerlof said. “Did he have a life belt, or a life vest?”

“I don't think so.”

The cliff was silent.

“I think we could get our spirit stove going and make some coffee,” Gerlof said. “Then we can talk.”

Fifteen minutes later they had newly brewed coffee with biscuits. Gerlof handed a cup to Ragnhild and met her eyes.

“I think you should tell us more now, Ragnhild,” he said. “My guess is that you know some things about the bones and the stones in your brother's boat. Or don't you?”

“Some,” she said.

“Fine. We'll be happy to listen.”

Ragnhild looked down into her coffee mug and drew a breath. Then she began talking in a low voice.

“My elder brother Kristoffer was a bird-watcher when he was young, or rather a bird lover. Back in the thirties, when we were teenagers, our family lived on Öland, near Byarum . . . closer to the Virgin than anyone else, I believe. So Kristoffer used to row out here to the island to look at the eiders and guillemots and all the other kinds of birds. Autumns and springs there was almost never anyone here. But when Kristoffer got here one morning he found traces of other visitors . . . And they were horrible traces, trampled nests and broken bird eggs on the rocks. People who hated birds had come to the island.”

She fell silent, drank some coffee and went on.

“We didn't know who they were, but Kristoffer wanted to stop them. He brought me with him. That autumn we came often to the island, wanting to watch over the birds. It was a kind of an adventure. But one Sunday when we got here there was a strange boat moored by the old quarry. Kristoffer put ours beside it and then we sneaked up on the island. We heard loud screams from the birds . . . that wasn't a good sign.”