Little Star (43 page)

‘Yes,’ said Teresa. ‘That’s what we’re going to do now.’

‘Why?’

‘Because that’s the way it has to be.’

A few of the girls came forward and touched the coffin, imagining themselves enclosed in the narrow space, between the unforgiving planks of wood. Some took out their pieces of wolf skin, clutching them tightly in their hands or sucking them unthinkingly as they plucked up courage. A long time passed without anyone volunteering. Then Linn stepped forward. ‘I’ll do it.’

A faint sigh of relief ran through the group. Teresa gestured towards the coffin. Linn climbed in and sat with her arms wrapped around her knees. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘We’re going to nail down the lid,’ said Teresa. ‘We’re going to lower you into the grave and shovel earth on top. And there you are.’

‘How long for?’

Theres had yet to speak. She went up to Linn and said in that strange, dark voice, ‘Until you are dead.’

Linn hugged her knees more tightly to her chest. ‘But I don’t know if I want to die. At the moment.’

‘Until you are dead but can scream,’ said Theres. ‘Then you scream.’

‘But what if you can’t hear me?’

‘I will hear you.’

Linn was so small that there were several centimetres to spare on either side of her and six centimetres above her head when she lay down in the coffin, crossed her arms over her chest and closed her eyes. The others stood there at a loss as Teresa lowered the lid and hammered a nail into each corner. Then she cut two five-metre lengths of rope and threw them to Caroline and Miranda.

‘Thread those through the loops. Lower her down.’

They did as they were told, but when they had threaded the rope through, made another loop and begun to lift the coffin towards the hole, Anna L started wringing her hands and looking around anxiously, ‘Is this OK? Can we do this? This isn’t a good thing to do, is it?’

‘It’s good,’ said Theres. ‘It’s very good.’

Anna L nodded and fell silent, but her hands continued to twist around one another like two small tormented animals as Caroline and Miranda lowered the coffin into the grave. When it reached the bottom, they stood holding the loops of rope in their hands. Teresa indicated that they should lay them over the edge of the hole.

Theres picked up a spade and started throwing the soil on top of the coffin. The lumps hit the coffin with dull thuds. After eight shovelfuls the lid was no longer visible, and Anna L said, ‘That’s OK, isn’t it? Surely that’s enough now?’

‘Get in your car,’ said Theres, ‘and go away.’ She continued shovelling earth into the hole. Anna L didn’t move, and Teresa grabbed the second spade to help out. Then Sofie took the third. In a couple of minutes the grave was half-filled in.

Theres gave her spade to Malin and said, ‘Everybody must help. Everybody must join in.’

Miranda dropped to her knees and picked up one of the trowels, while Cecilia took the other. Those who had no tools shovelled the
earth in with their hands, several weeping as they did so.

The coffin wasn’t big enough to fill the space left by the stones and turf they had removed. When they had shovelled in all the earth, it was still a few centimetres below the surface. Theres went to the end of the grave and crouched down, staring at the black rectangle.

‘Linn has become dead,’ she said. ‘Linn was a little girl. A nice little girl. Now she is dead.’

The sobbing increased in intensity and several of the girls covered their faces with their hands. The sky was now deep violet with a single blood-red cloud drifting across the lake from one shore to the other. Slowly, slowly as if it wanted to make time pass even more sluggishly than it already was. A loon cried out, making them all shudder. If death had a call, then it sounded exactly like that. If death had a shape, then it was that black rectangle gaping in the ground. Linn’s grave.

The atmosphere was so petrifying that none of them could even get out their mobiles to check how much time had passed. It might have been five minutes, it might have been fifteen when Theres lowered her head, as if she were listening to a sound from the grave, then said, ‘Now.’

Teresa wasn’t sure, but she thought she had heard it too. It was more of a squeak than a scream; it was impossible to work out where it came from, and it was barely even human. But it had been there, and as soon as Theres said, ‘Now,’ they all grabbed spades and trowels and crowded around the grave to remove the soil as quickly as possible.

There were still a few centimetres of soil left when Ronja grabbed one loop of rope, Anna L the other, and both of them pulled. The coffin was lifted out of the hole along with a layer of earth which trickled over the lid when it almost tipped over the edge.

‘Linn?’ Anna L called out, banging the end of the coffin with her hand. No response; Teresa pushed her aside so that she could use the other side of the hammer to jemmy out the nails, while Anna babbled away, ‘Linn, Linn, little Linn, Linn?’

The lid came off. Linn was lying just as they had left her, apart from the fact that the arms crossed over her chest now ended in two
clenched fists. Her face bore an expression of exalted peace. The girls were standing just as still as Linn was lying, and they were all as silent as Linn, apart from Anna L who was babbling again: ‘We’ve killed her, what have we done, we’ve killed little Linn.’

Theres went over to the coffin and stroked Linn’s hair, caressed her cheek and whispered in her ear, ‘You must stop being dead. You must live.’

Someone screamed as Linn’s eyes opened. For a moment time stood still as she and Theres looked deep into one another; then Theres grabbed her hand and pulled her into a sitting position. Linn looked at the others, wide-eyed. Then she got up and moved her hands slowly, floating over her body.

The loon called again, and Linn turned her head in the direction of the sound. Then she looked up at the first star of the evening as she took a breath so deep it seemed it would never end.

Someone asked, ‘How…how are you feeling?’

Linn turned to the others. She opened and closed her hands a couple of times, looked at her palms. Her face was just as peaceful as when she lay dead.

‘Empty,’ she said. ‘Completely empty.’

‘Is it terrible?’ Teresa asked.

Linn frowned as if she didn’t understand the question. Then she said, ‘It’s empty. It’s nothing.’ She went over to Theres and put her arms around her. Theres allowed it to happen, but did not return the embrace, and they all heard as Linn whispered, ‘Thank you. Thank you so much.’

The sun had risen above the tree tops on the other side of the lake by the time it was Teresa’s turn. She had waited until last because she wanted to see the others before she herself was transformed.

About half the girls had reacted like Linn when they died and were restored to life. Several were now sitting gazing out over the lake, or moving slowly and dreamily like the morning mist drifting across the water. They were all exhausted. None of them wanted to sleep.

An outside observer, a friend or relative or parent—especially a parent—would surely have been afraid, would have asked what terrible thing had happened. Because something terrible had happened, after all. Each and every one of them had been part of something dreadful.

But was it evil?

It would depend who you asked. Teresa couldn’t imagine a single person, institution or authority who would give their blessing to what they had been doing for the past five hours.

Except Theres.

Theres said it was good, and they all followed Theres’ star. Therefore it was good.

Not all of them had succeeded. Both Malin and Cecilia had started screaming as soon as the coffin was lowered, and continued to scream as the earth was shovelled into the hole. It was no more than half-full before those at the top had to start digging it up again. Both were hysterical and completely unreachable when they got out, collapsing in a heap and sobbing, sobbing.

Cecilia’s large body had consumed the oxygen much too quickly, and she was almost unconscious by the time four of them hauled the coffin up. When she came round she was inconsolable. She had wanted to stay much longer, and counted this as yet another of her failures.

Anna L stayed down as long as anyone else, but when the coffin came up and Theres leaned over her, she pushed her aside and said she was going for a walk. She was away for a good hour, and when she came back she had picked a bunch of flowers. She went down to the jetty and threw them in the water, one by one.

Ronja hadn’t screamed. When perhaps twenty minutes had passed, those who had already been down started talking quietly about how long the air might last. Then, without any particular hurry, they dug up the coffin, still without any signal from Ronja. When the lid was lifted she acted more or less the same as Linn, except that it took longer to wake her. By this stage everyone except Miranda and Teresa had been down, so the fact that Ronja appeared to be dead didn’t cause any panic.

Ronja explained her behaviour by saying that she had completely forgotten she was supposed to scream; it had never occurred to her. As soon as the coffin reached the bottom she had accepted that she was dead, and that there was nothing more to be done. The others nodded in recognition despite the fact that, unlike Ronja, they had managed to hang on to some small instinct for self-preservation.

Teresa stretched out in the bottom of the coffin. They had rinsed it out after Caroline threw up, but there was still a sour smell lurking not far from Teresa’s nose. She folded her arms over her chest and made an effort to shut down her senses as Linn and Melinda closed the lid, but the blows of the hammer still echoed through her head like thunderclaps, amplified in the enclosed space.

She opened her eyes and saw a tiny amount of light coming through a crack near her feet. Then she could feel in her stomach that the coffin was being lifted. And lowered. After an unfeasibly long time, bumps along her back told her that she was now at the bottom of the hole. She heard the first thud as earth hit the lid; she closed her eyes, her breathing slow and shallow.

She could hear the spades being driven into the pile of earth, then immediately afterwards a couple of thuds. Spades in, thud, thud. Spades in, thud, thud. There was a rhythm to it, and she counted the blows. When she got to thirty she noticed that she could no longer hear the spades, and that the thuds were growing fainter. She managed to count another thirty, then there was silence. Complete silence. She didn’t know how much earth there was left to shovel in, but inside her chest she could feel the weight already lying on top of her.

The space between her chest and the lid was no more than six centimetres. There was no way she would be able to get out, however much she might want to. If she tried to force out the nails, the weight of the earth would make it impossible. She had been deserted. She had been given up. She kept her breathing slow and shallow.

No light through the crack, no voices, no spades, no thuds of earth. Nothing. She had already lost all concept of time. She knew she
hadn’t been lying there for half an hour. But she had no idea whether it was three minutes or ten, because there were no reference points.

She started to count inside her head. When she got to a hundred, she gave up. She was usually good at counting in seconds, but even the concept ‘second’ had lost its meaning. Perhaps she had been counting far too slowly; or far too quickly, she didn’t know.

So she let go. Although she hadn’t been aware of it, her whole body had been tense; she only realised this when she relaxed. She let go and gave herself up to the darkness and the silence and the absence of everything that she was.

Another incalculable period of time passed. Her breathing was slow and shallow. Something moved. A faint noise. At first she thought it was an insect or worm that had ended up in the coffin with her, and she tried to pinpoint the sound. Her hands moved over the sides of the coffin. A rough, mute nothingness.

But the sound. The movement.

The space just about allowed her to roll over onto her side. Her shoulder pressed against the lid as she turned her back on the direction she thought the sound was coming from. She put her hands over her ears. She could still hear it. Something was moving through the earth. Digging. Getting closer.

Her heart began to beat faster, and she was no longer able to control her breathing. The air was forced out of her in panting, jerky breaths as the thing that was moving through the earth slid along the side of the coffin. She could hear it, she could feel it right through her body.

It was getting warmer. Sweat broke out along her hairline, and the air had ceased to contain what she needed. She twitched as if she had been given an electric shock, twitched again, and panic wasn’t far away. She was surrounded by earth on all sides, lying in complete darkness, had no air, and something had dug its way through to her and was working its way in. She was going to scream. Despite the fact that she hadn’t reached that point, she was going to scream.

She drew thin air into her lungs and at the same time the other
thing pushed its way in, crept in behind her back and lay behind her, spooning.

Urd.

She exhaled without screaming. She felt herself being embraced by the soft, forgiving, no-longer-frightening darkness. Urd was lying beside her. Urd was her. Urd did not scream.

Teresa?

Not there anymore. Never had been.

Out of the darkness pictures emerged, her life.

She saw herself being buried in the ground, but the coffin was empty. She saw her computer, saw herself sitting at the computer, keys pressed down like a self-playing piano. No one was there. A hammer struck, blood spurted over a cement floor, vomit spewed over another cement floor, but the fluids came out of the empty air and the film speeded up.

Theres sitting alone on the subway, talking to someone who didn’t exist, Göran waving off a train with no passengers on it, a bicycle without a rider moving along a gravel track, Johannes playing Tekken by himself, being kissed by an invisible ghost, dry leaves whirling around in the cave between the rocks where no one had ever been. Clothes collapsing in heaps in the garden, in rooms, on the streets. Collapsing as the person who had worn them disappeared.