That was it. He wouldn't go to school today.
He recovered his jacket and sneaked out through the
door.
To make sure nobody would see him, he crouched
down below window level until he had turned the
corner.
When he emerged into the street, he felt well and truly
relieved. He had made a good decision. He could afford
to be off school for one day. Stomachache could strike
very quickly. He could have got it after Samuel had gone
to work. He'd been stricken by the gripes while he was
finishing his breakfast. Nothing serious. But bad enough
for him not to go to school.
Now he had a whole day to himself. The first thing he
would do was to collect his bike. Then he could do
whatever he liked until two o'clock. School finished
then, and there was a risk that he might bump into Miss
Nederström after two. But until then, he could do
whatever he wanted.
He felt the ten-kronor note he had in his pocket.
He suddenly had an idea. He wasn't sure that it would
work, but it could be worth trying.
Old Man Johanson was opening his newsagent's. Joel
watched him removing the shutters from the display
windows. There was a parcel of newspapers on the
pavement.
Old Man Johanson spotted Joel and pointed to the
parcel.
'The placards,' he said. 'Pin 'em up.'
Joel squatted down and started untying the knot in
the string round the newspapers. It was a granny knot
and almost impossible to unravel. He noticed a rusty
nail almost hidden by some stones. He stuck the nail
into the knot and twisted and prodded until it came
loose and he could remove the yellow placards. As he
was pinning them onto the display boards he read the
headlines. It said in big, black letters that an agreement
had been reached.
Who had agreed, about what?
You had to read the newspaper in order to find out.
It could have said instead: '
Joel Gustafson's Miracle'
.
'
Joel Gustafson's struggle to do his good deed.'
'Rolf not up to it, Gustafson decides.'
'Will the Caviar Man come up to scratch?'
'Who will be Gertrud's man? Watch this space!'
Joel lifted up the parcel and put it on the counter. Old
Man Johanson gave him a bottle of Coke for his efforts.
'Can you change this for me?' he asked, holding out
the ten-kronor note. 'I need a five-kronor note, and five
one-krona coins.'
Old Man Johanson opened the cash register and
counted out the money.
'Why aren't you at school today?' he asked.
'Our teacher's ill,' said Joel.
That was a good answer. It could easily be true, and it
was difficult to check.
But no doubt Old Man Johanson had forgotten all
about it already. He was busy sorting out the newspapers.
Joel hurried off to the cycle shop.
It would be exciting to see if his idea worked.
The bell rang as Joel opened the door. The owner
came out from the workshop.
'I've come to collect my bike,' said Joel. 'The red one
with the broken chain.'
The man disappeared into the workshop, then came
back with Joel's bike.
There was a sheet of paper fastened to the saddle.
'That'll be ten kronor, please,' he said.
'But I've only got eight kronor,' said Joel, trying to
sound devastated. His voice was little more than a squeak.
'It costs ten kronor,' said the man. 'That's what it says
here, on the note. I wrote it myself.'
Joel tried to look as if he were about to burst out crying.
It worked.
'All right, give me eight kronor. But it should be ten.
I wrote it myself on this note.'
Joel gave him eight kronor, and wheeled his bike out
of the shop.
Two kronor wasn't bad.
The day had started well. He'd pulled off a good deal,
and he didn't have a bad conscience about not going to
school.
He mounted his bike, and tried a few test skids on the
gravel road leading down to the river. The chain felt
good. Now he could try to track down the Caviar Man.
He pulled up next to a round iron lid in the middle of the
street. Maybe the Caviar Man was down there in the
Underworld, with all his rats? Joel would lift up the
manhole cover and shout down to him.
Everything suddenly became very exciting.
Joel had never imagined that there was an Underworld
even in this dump. Underground tunnels and great
big pipes and enormous rats hissing through their
whiskers.
He would be able to clamber down into a hole and
disappear. All the buildings and streets and people
would be up above him. Perhaps there would even be a
tunnel running underneath his school? Under Miss
Nederström's feet?
He looked round. Would he dare to open the lid and
climb down?
There were too many people around who could see
him. You only visited the Underworld when there was
nobody to see what you were doing.
Joel got back onto his bike and cycled to the red-painted
Municipal Offices on the other side of the
vicarage, on a slope down to the river. He parked his
bike in a stand labelled '
Visitors to the Municipal
Offices
'. He opened the front door and went in.
He found himself in a large entrance hall with a stone
floor. A broad staircase led to the first floor. The walls
were lined with pictures of stern gentlemen, all of them
frowning at him. He listened. Not a sound. Behind a
glass panel was a little room, and he could see a
telephone receiver hanging down, and swinging slowly
from side to side. Joel went to investigate and realised
that it was a switchboard.
The receiver was still swinging back and forth.
Joel had the feeling that he was on a ghost ship. Somebody
had let go of the handset and jumped overboard.
He listened again. Still not a sound. When he walked
over the stone floor all he could hear was a faint squeaking
noise from his wellingtons. He came to a corridor. A door
was standing ajar – it had a sign saying '
Head Clerk'
. Joel
peeped inside, but the office was empty. He continued
down the corridor. The next door was closed. And the next.
Then came a door that was wide open. A sign said
'
Municipal Engineer'
. Joel stepped inside. The walls were
covered by bookshelves and map racks. There was a large
map opened out on the desk, looking like a sea chart. Joel
took a closer look. It was the plan of a house.
Joel turned round to leave the room, but found there
was a man standing in the doorway.
Joel gave a start.
The man was wearing a dark blue overall. Joel
noticed that he was in his bare feet.
'Is the engineer not here?' asked the man.
'No, there's only me,' said Joel. 'I'm lost.'
The man in the dark blue overalls suddenly slapped
himself on the forehead.
Joel gave another start.
'Of course,' said the man. 'They have a meeting. All
the local council bosses. I'd forgotten.'
The Barefooted Man looked at Joel. He didn't seem in
the least unfriendly.
'Did you say you were lost?' he asked. 'Who are you
looking for?'
'David,' said Joel.
'David?' said the Barefooted Man. 'You certainly are
lost. You'd better come with me. What do you want
him for?'
What could Joel say to that?
Now he was in a right mess. The Barefooted Man was
blocking the doorway. Joel would never be able to
squeeze past him.
The Barefooted Man suddenly smiled broadly. Joel
noticed that there were lots of gaps where teeth should
have been.
'Of course,' said the Barefooted Man. 'You're
David's kid brother.'
'No I'm not,' said Joel.
The Barefooted Man didn't hear.
'David's kid brother,' he said. 'Come with me.'
He took hold of Joel's arm and led him away. His grip
was not hard and unfriendly. Even so, Joel couldn't
wriggle free.
Joel was starting to feel frightened. The Caviar Man
might not be at all pleased to find that somebody had
turned up claiming to be his younger brother.
'I think he's in here,' said the Barefooted Man.
They had descended into a dark basement room, and
came to a halt in front of a steel door. Joel could hear a
roaring sound behind the door.
The Barefooted Man turned what looked like a motor
car's steering wheel, and the door slid slowly open.
The roaring sound grew louder.
Joel was now beginning to feel scared stiff. Now was
the time to run away. But he didn't do so. It was as if he
were stuck fast in his own fear.
The Barefooted Man opened the steel door even
wider. The noise was overpowering now.
'I think your brother's in here,' he yelled, trying to
make himself heard above the roaring sound.
Joel suddenly felt very hot. The air flowing out
through the steel door was as hot as a summer's day.
'Come on,' said the Barefooted Man, propelling Joel
in front of him.
Joel stopped dead on the threshold.
The room in front of him was on fire.
Enormous flames were roaring and thundering.
The Barefooted Man was pushing Joel in front of him,
straight at the flames.
Joel suddenly remembered his dream.
The dream in which he'd burnt up.
The flames in front of him grew bigger and bigger.
Soon he would be swallowed up by the Underworld
. . .
Afterwards, Joel felt a bit silly.
The Barefooted Man no doubt thought that Joel was a
relative of Simon Windstorm. The Loonies.
'What the hell do you think you're doing?' the Barefooted
Man had shouted. 'You're heading straight for
the furnace.'
Then he'd grabbed Joel by the collar and lifted him to
one side.
'If you fall into the furnace, you're a gonner,' said the
Barefooted Man. 'Couldn't you see that the doors were
open?'
Of course Joel had seen that the doors to the
enormous furnace were open. Even so, it felt like standing
in front of a hungry beast of prey that had opened its
mouth wide and displayed thousands of burning
tongues. And Joel had been lured towards them.
'What's the matter with you, lad?' said the Barefooted
Man, looking worried. 'Has nobody told you that fire is
dangerous?'
'Why do you go around in your bare feet?' asked Joel.
Sometimes it was best to answer a question by asking
a new one.
'It's so hot here in the boiler room,' said the
Barefooted Man. 'My feet swell up inside my shoes.
So I prefer to be barefoot. What's your name by the
way?'
'Samuel,' said Joel.
The Barefooted Man smiled.
'David and Samuel,' he said. 'That really does sound
like two brothers.'
Joel looked round in the Underworld. The big furnace
was in the middle of a gigantic room. Smoke and steam
were hissing out of pipes and ventilators.
The beast of the underworld, Joel thought.
He was being held prisoner here.
'Where does all this heat go to?' he asked. He was
forced to shout, in order to be heard. The Barefooted
Man was busy throwing big lumps of firewood into the
beast's mouth.
'To the hospital and the vicarage and the old people's
home and the municipal offices, and lots of other
buildings as well,' he yelled.
'What's it called?' Joel shouted.
The Barefooted Man straightened his back and wiped
the sweat from his brow.
'Called?' he said. 'I'm called Nilson.'
'I meant the furnace,' said Joel.
'Furnaces don't have names,' said the Barefooted
Man. Then he changed his mind.
'Perhaps you have a suggestion for what we should
call it?'
Joel thought for a moment.
The furnace was a sort of dragon. A beast of prey
spitting fire.
'Lord of the Fires,' he said.
The Barefooted Man nodded.
'A good name,' he said. 'Lord of the Fires.'
Then he threw in some more logs, and closed the
big doors. He beckoned Joel to follow him. He led
him along winding corridors that followed big pipes,
and came to another steel door that he opened by
rotating a thick iron handle. The door led into another
long corridor, lit up by lamps hanging from the
ceiling. It was raw and damp, and Joel wondered why
the Barefooted Man's feet didn't seem to be cold.
He stopped.
'Do you know where we are now?' he asked.
Joel shook his head.
'We're underneath the church,' said the Barefooted
Man. 'Right in the middle of the church.'
Joel stared up at the ceiling of the stone corridor.
Could that really be possible?
Was the whole church really over his head?
What if the roof fell in?
That would mean he wasn't buried in the churchyard,
but in the church itself.
'You don't need to be afraid,' said the Barefooted
Man. 'This corridor isn't going to cave in.'
They continued along the corridor, which seemed to
be endless. It kept turning at right-angles, sometimes
sloped downwards, sometimes upwards.
Where are we going? Joel thought.
The Barefooted Man eventually came to a stop at yet
another steel door.
'
Sewer No. 1
', it said on a notice board.
The Barefooted Man opened the door. Joel stepped
into a room full of tools and dismantled engines.
'He's not here,' said the Barefooted Man.
'That's a pity,' said Joel, but he thought it was just as
well. It meant his pretending to be the younger brother
wouldn't be discovered,
'I expect he's out mending broken pipes,' said the
Barefooted Man. 'But if you like, you can wait in my
cabin.'
Cabin!
Were there cabins in the Underworld?
Joel had never heard of cabins being anywhere except
on a boat.
He followed the Barefooted Man back to where
they'd set out from.
'Where are we now?' asked Joel as they turned a
corner in the long corridor.
The Barefooted Man smiled.
'Halfway between the shoe shop and Leander's Café,'
he said.
He pointed to an iron ladder fixed to the stone wall.
'If you climb up there and open the hatch, you'll find
yourself outside the café,' he said.
This is great, being in the Underworld, Joel thought.
Having all those buildings and streets and cars and feet
over your head.
David the Caviar Man, who worked down here, must
be a good man for Gertrud. Not just for her, but for Joel
as well. Joel didn't know anybody else who'd been
down here in the underground.
It struck him that he'd have to change the name of his
Secret Society.
Now that he was no longer looking for the dog, he
ought to give it a different name.
Lords of the Underworld
, he thought.
That could be the Caviar Man and me . . .
'Here's the cabin,' said the Barefooted Man, coming
to a halt.
They were close to the beast of prey again. Joel could
hear the roar.
'I must throw some more wood in,' said the Barefooted
Man. 'You can wait in there for the time being.'
Joel entered the Barefooted Man's cabin. It wasn't a
big room, no bigger than an average cellar in a small
house. A naked bulb was dangling from a wire in the
ceiling. There was a wobbly table and a few ramshackle
chairs. The walls were covered in photographs of semi-naked
ladies torn out of newspapers and magazines. Joel
thought one of them reminded him of Sara. At least, her
breasts were as big as Sara's. Joel sat down on one of the
chairs. As he made himself comfortable, one of the arms
fell off. He hurriedly replaced it and moved to another
chair. It creaked and squeaked so much that he didn't
dare stay on it. Instead he sat down on an upturned beer
crate in a corner.
It was very quiet. You couldn't hear the beast through
the thick walls and the closed door.
The silence of the Underworld was a new silence
for him.
Joel listened. He imagined that the house he lived in
with Samuel was directly above his head.
The house that was really a ship straining at its
anchor, waiting for wind.
But if the house was a ship, the underground was the
bottom of the sea. And Joel was sitting there on an
upturned beer crate . . .
It was difficult to keep all his thoughts apart.
Joel felt the two one-krona coins in his pocket.
As he fingered them, all the thoughts about anchors
and the bottom of the sea faded away.
He stood up and walked round the room. The seminaked
ladies in the torn-out pictures stared at him.
Why hadn't the Barefooted Man come back?
Had the Lord of the Fire gobbled him up?
Joel threw himself at the door like a leopard pouncing on
its prey. Perhaps the Barefooted Man had locked him in?
The door was not locked.
Joel opened it slowly and peered out into the corridor.
The steel door to the beast of prey's big hall was ajar.
Joel decided to leave. He didn't need to wait for the
Barefooted Man or David any longer. He knew already
that David was the right man for Gertrud. He would
offer her the Lord of the Underworld as his good deed.
How could she possibly object to such a gift?
But perhaps the Barefooted Man would start to wonder
if Joel simply vanished? And David might start asking
himself who this unknown younger brother of his was?
Joel opened the door to the Hall of the Beast of Prey.
There was a roaring and thundering, and the heat hit him
in the face. In the far distance among all the pipes he
could see the Barefooted Man throwing logs into the
beast's opened mouth.
Just as Joel reached him, the Barefooted Man had
thrown in the last of his logs and straightened his back.
'I have to go now,' said Joel. 'But say hello to David
for me. I might come back tomorrow.'
The Barefooted Man wiped the sweat off his brow
with a snuff-stained handkerchief.
'I didn't know David had a kid brother,' he said.
I didn't know I had a big brother either, Joel thought.
'Can you find your own way out?' asked the
Barefooted Man.
Joel nodded.
The Barefooted Man opened the heavy door for him.
Then he ruffled Joel's hair.
'I can't say you look all that much alike,' he said.
'David has a mop of fair hair, but your hair is as brown
as an old fox's.'
'We don't have the same mum,' said Joel. 'I have to
go now.'
When he came back to the big entrance hall, it was
still empty.
The telephone receiver was still swinging back and
forth.
'Bye bye!' shouted Joel, as loudly as he could.
The sound echoed round the walls.
Then he hurried out to his bicycle.
When he came to Leander's Café, he paused and took
a close look at the manhole cover in the street.
He'd been down there. Deep down in the Underworld.
He cycled as fast as he could to the newsstand at the
railway station. You could buy packs of pastilles with
football pictures in lots of places, but he had more luck
when he bought them at the railway station than
anywhere else. He hardly ever ended up with flabby
wrestlers there.
He bought eight packs of pastilles. He'd never had so
many in his hand before. He went into the waiting room
and sat down on a bench in a corner. He kept an eye on
the ticket window. Stationmaster Knif didn't like people
sitting in his waiting room unless they were on their way
to somewhere. If you weren't careful, he would sneak up
and grab you by the ear.
There was only one other person in the waiting room,
apart from Joel. It was an old lady, fast asleep in another
corner. Joel was afraid she might start snoring so loudly
that Knif would hear her and come to investigate.
Joel opened the first pack. He started by popping a
pastille into his mouth. It was yellow, and tasted bitter.
Then he carefully extracted the picture card.
A handball player. Gösta Blomgren.
That wasn't anything worth having. Not as bad as a
wrestler, but pretty bad even so. Joel only knew two
boys who collected handball players.
He stayed calm. He had seven more boxes to open.
One handball player wasn't enough to put him into a bad
mood. He glanced at the ticket window, then opened the
next pack. He swallowed the last of the yellow pastille,
and put two new ones into his mouth. There was no need
to ration himself. There were at least twenty pastilles in
every box. Sometimes there were twenty-two. Once,
he'd bought a box containing twenty-four. But there was
never less than twenty. He'd been counting and keeping
records for several years.
Next picture. An ice hockey player. Anders '
Acka'
Anderson. He was staring wide-eyed at Joel. Skellefteå
ice hockey team, way up north – centre forward in the so-called
'
Mosquito Strikers'
. Joel giggled at the thought of
the giant '
Acka'
shrinking and now popping out of a box
of pastilles. He'd been flattened out. Flat Head.
Ice hockey players were OK. It was easy to exchange
them for something else. If you had three or four good ice
hockey players, you could get a rare footballer. If you had
Tumba, you could exchange him for anything you liked –
but then, Tumba was probably the most famous ice
hockey player ever in Sweden, so that was only fair.
Perhaps box number three would produce the footballer
he so badly wanted. Joel's hands were trembling as
he opened it. But no! Another ice hockey player, and not
only that, but one he'd hardly heard of. This was no good!
Still, the next one was bound to contain a footballer. He
picked out a red pastille: that was sure to bring him good
luck.
As Joel took the picture out of the next box, he held his
breath and closed his eyes – but when he opened them he
threw the card away in disgust. He didn't even read the
name under the pop-eyed face with big ears, it was
enough to see that he was a bandy player. Bandy! A sort
of poor man's ice hockey! Nobody would want to
exchange a footballer for a bandy player.
Things could only get better.
When Joel opened box number five, he got a wrestler.
A really flabby wrestler by the name of Arne Turnäs.
Turnip, Joel decided angrily, and popped four
pastilles into his mouth.
Still no footballer. His luck had run out. A handball
player, two ice hockey players, a bandy-playing idiot,
and now a wrestler.
Only three boxes left. He ripped open the lids of all
three at the same time. Another wrestler! The same
wrestler yet again! Turnip! How the hell was that
possible? How on earth did they divide up these boxes?
Joel shoved a full box of pastilles into his mouth at once,
in order to get his own back. Eight boxes and not a
single footballer!
The last two were a cyclist and a female fencer. A
woman wielding a sword? How could it ever occur to
anybody to stuff a woman into a pack of pastilles?
Joel was furious.
He looked at the old woman, fast asleep in the far
corner. Her mouth was wide open and her tongue was
hanging out.
He tiptoed over to her and put the picture of the
female fencer on the old lady's tongue.
Then he ran off and slammed the waiting room door
as hard as he could.
On the way to his bike, he glared at the newsstand. If
only he could, he'd have ordered the earth to open up
and allow the beast of prey down there to swallow up the
whole of the stand in one gulp.