Creaking, it swayed suddenly as the hinges came loose from their
attachments. As it fell it swirled up a cloud of mud, and the water turned brown.
He pushed himself forward, but didn’t see the stairs that rose behind the iron door and when his forehead hit the bottom steps, the diving mask was wrenched off and the regulator torn out of his mouth. The sudden cold gave him such a shock that he immediately swallowed water in a choking gulp. He started to fumble blindly for his backup hose, but couldn’t find it. With his eyes shut tight, Erik flailed about and his lungs burned for air.
Air—
He desperately raised his head up and was suddenly above the surface of the water again. Snorting, spitting, and when he instinctively inhaled through his mouth and nose: that nauseating stench.
He hyperventilated so that he wouldn’t fall forward and immediately throw up, and then crawled up the last few steps of the stairs and collapsed; just breathe through your mouth, just through your mouth now …
W
hen his breathing calmed, he rolled over on his back and rested, until he slowly managed to sit up.
Erik noticed that he had dropped the lifeline that indicated the path back to the original shaft. He had no energy to return. The water must clear up first.
The smell of rotting made it hard to think.
He pulled off his fins and the mask, which had ended up hanging around his neck. The continuation of the mine tunnel ran away into a nightlike darkness, narrow and damp. He stood up on his reinforced-rubber dive shoes and started to walk.
The ore was even and regular where the tunnel had been burned out of the rock. The tunnel branched off suddenly, and he went to the right. Then there was another branch, but here the right side was filled with rocks. Left this time, then, and then right again when it branched into three. But it was a dead end, so back out to the fork. Which
tunnel had he actually come from? At a loss, he stood in the smell of decay and death.
He moved, bent forward, farther and farther into the labyrinth. There were no longer any signs of mining in the tunnel, only clusters of stalactites that hung down from the tunnel’s low ceiling. It was cold, a bitter cold that penetrated even the three-layer laminate of the dry suit.
What if he never made it up again? How long would it take before someone wondered where he was? Would anyone start looking for him? Erik Hall hit the tunnel wall with his glove and the beam of light wavered.
Mom had been gone for a long time, and for some reason it struck him to think about what he would leave behind in the lonely cottage. The extent of his fame: three old newspaper clippings.
One of the blurbs, a few inches long, said that he had scored eleven points for his school basketball team in a game long ago. The second was a picture from when the local paper had visited Dala Electric, although he was a little bit hidden from sight in that one. Then there was the achievement itself: a short quote from the big evening paper, when they had done a summer report on the mine in Falun. In that one he’d actually gotten his whole face in. He suddenly remembered: Dyke Divers; he couldn’t forget why he was here.
Erik stopped.
This really must be the end. He looked at his depth gauge, which showed an inconceivable depth of 696 feet. Over 150 feet farther down than the girls, and he had done it without help from anyone.
He took out the spray can with stiff, frozen fingers and shakily sprayed another set of initials:
E-H,
212 METERS
. Then he thought for a second and added:
AD EXTREMUM
—at the limit.
He took a few pictures with his underwater camera and then let the light of his headlamp sweep over the tunnel walls. There was something there—
He took a step closer.
Another door? He really ought to turn back.
Yes, it was another iron door, the same kind, the same bolt, this one on the inside, too. The same … chalk?
NÁSTRÖNDU
The thick air streamed into his lungs. Náströndu?
He gave the door a light push.
It immediately gave way, swinging wide open on screeching hinges.
When Erik got control of his breathing again, he finally dared to move forward and peek in.
A stairway wound steeply downward, just behind the door.
Ten extra minutes.
He set the timer on his dive watch and his rubber shoes squeaked as he took a first step.
The stairway formed a tight spiral, as coil after coil led him deeper and deeper. At the opening at the end was a large cave, surely sixty feet high.
There was a slow drip of water that fell down into an overflowing pool. In the middle of this pool rose a stone, and on top of the stone was something that resembled a sack.
The air was heavy to breathe; it flowed like mud and the smell was worse than ever.
Just a quick lap around, and some pictures.
He tried to move as silently as possible, but the scraping of the gravel echoed through the cave. He stopped to calm himself down and listened to the drops that were falling.
The light from his forehead swept over the walls. A vein of copper glimmered to the right, all the way up to the ceiling of the cave.
Erik gave a start when he saw something that resembled an arch-shaped opening to the left. But when he came closer and let his glove glide over the hard surface of the rock, he realized that he had only been tricked by the play of shadows. He shone the light to the left
once more and then … but there
was
something there! The same shaky lines of chalk—but this time whoever had written them had striven for more than isolated words.
Erik could barely decipher the writing. He took out his camera. It flashed, and he looked disbelievingly at its screen.
O
n his way back to the stairs, it occurred to him that perhaps he could take a souvenir with him. Something from that sack, maybe, the one sitting over there on the rock in the pool … ? He waded out into the waist-high water. When he finally reached the sack he saw that it was covered with something that looked like a moldy net.
Erik took off his gloves in order to get hold of it.
The net was a wet, slippery tangle of gray and black strings. He tried to lift them away and caught sight of an entangled object. He grasped its shaft of shining white metal.
But he couldn’t get the shaft loose; it seemed to be attached. He felt farther up along the sleek surface and encountered three tied ropes.
Erik took out the titanium knife and cut through the first rope fastening. It snapped. Snapped? Was the rope so old that it had become petrified?
He took hold of the second tie and made another cut. Another sharp snap, and now the whole sack started to move. Despite the cold, Erik felt a wave of feverish warmth. He cut off the third tie and let out his breath.
When the shaft came loose, he thought at first that it looked like an unusually long key. But when the light from his headlamp ran along the object, he realized that it was actually some sort of cross. It had a shaft and a crossbar, but above the crossbar there was an eye. It shone white in the darkness and had the oval shape of a noose.
With his bare hand, Erik grasped the mess of strings and tried to pull them aside to get to the contents of the sack. The strings seemed to be sewn on, so he got a solid grasp and pulled.
It was too late by the time he realized he had used too much force. With his tug, the whole sack came up into his arms, and he fell over under its weight. His head disappeared under the icy water of the pool. When he finally managed to sit up again, a twisted face stared at him in the light from his headlamp.
Paper-thin skin was drawn tight around the dead eyes of a woman, and above the bridge of her nose, in her forehead, gaped a hole as large as a coin.
Then he felt the three cut-off stumps under the water. Those weren’t ties he had cut off, they were the fingers of the woman’s hand. He instinctively tried to move backward, but her head followed him as though she were a rag doll. He pulled back again and realized that the strings he was holding were the corpse’s hair.
And when he breathed in through his nose, the odor of the body was apparent through the stench. The woman smelled like blood and iron and the summer warmth of barn walls. A smell that Erik could place at once. She smelled like Falu red paint.
D
alakuriren
was a newspaper with hearty feature columnists and caustic political columnists, but when it came to news, it definitely did not have the leading editorial team in the country. Still, the news director had some degree of lingering aptitude: He could answer the telephone.
The tip had come in at three thirty on Sunday afternoon, just when writing fluff articles from the towns of Gagnef and Hedemora felt most hopeless.
The crackling cell phone line had made it difficult to understand details, but the main message from the freelance photographer calling in the tip had been simple: This was the story of a lifetime. In broad terms, the story was about—at least as the news director understood it—some girl (
a teenager?
) who had been found dead (
a sex murder?
) in a mine shaft (
a spectacular sex murder?
).
The person who had found the body and called the police—apparently some sort of diver, according to the freelance photographer—had managed to rattle off a whole series of numbers before the connection was broken, numbers that the operators had finally been able to interpret as GPS coordinates. And now the better
part of Dalarna’s rescue teams were set in motion, out toward the location in the forest: three police patrols, a command car, two ambulances, plus the fire department, and with any luck, also some officials from the Mining Inspectorate, who knew all that stuff about mines.
After a frustrated lap through the Sunday-empty editorial office to find a reporter who could go, the news director found
Dalakuriren
’s extra resource—a lanky intern from Stockholm.
Two minutes of conversation later, the intern had tumbled away down the stairs with the yellowed newsbills, out to the staff cars in the courtyard.
The news director said a silent prayer and then set a course back to his desk. Which other papers had received the tip? He half ran past the rows of pale gray editing screens where tomorrow’s paper had already begun to take shape. Which pages would need to be redone? The front page, of course—but after that: Was this just a Falun thing, or would it turn out to be something really big that made it onto the national pages?
He began to write the short text for the Web edition of
Dalakuriren
. This would be snatched up right away by TT, the Swedish news agency, he knew it. The red TT flash would then set all the other papers in motion, and at first, people everywhere would cite
Dalakuriren
’s report:
BREAKING NEWS OUTSIDE FALUN:
MURDER VICTIM FOUND 700 FEET UNDERGROUND
*
W
ith the phone clamped between his shoulder and cheek, the intern skidded onto the forest road just south of Falun. The gravel from the freelance photographer’s car sprayed up in front of him. It was hard to drive and listen at the same time, but soon the intern understood the photographer’s directions; their destination was apparently some sort of rest stop.
Finally a straight stretch opened out, and when he saw the flashing lights far ahead, he realized that he had found the right place.
Several picnic tables had been turned over into the ditch and lay there with their built-in benches, looking like upside-down beetles. The police must have cleared them away to make room for all the rescue vehicles. The rows of vehicles had been forced to park so tightly that the hoods of the ambulances almost blocked the forest road. A bit farther on, the fire department’s ladder trucks stood tilting down into the shoulder, and only after the intern had turned past them did he find a place to park.
The intern yelled and waved to the freelance photographer to get out of his car, and with squelching shoes they entered the gloom of the spruce forest. Soon they could hear the police German shepherds just ahead of them, and all they had to do was follow the barking through the thick fog.
The mine shaft was already cordoned off; thin fluttering plastic tape blocked off the better part of the clearing around it. At the edge of the shaft stood half a dozen policemen and a few firemen, engaged in what seemed to be a muddled discussion about what should be done next.
Behind them sat a lone figure on a boulder. The floodlights that the rescue crew had aimed at the shaft made the black dry suit shine. His diving hood was off; his rough, craggy face was red; his eyes were swollen when he looked in the intern’s direction.
The freelance photographer nudged the intern in the side, and the intern gathered his courage, bent down, and slid under the plastic tape.
“You’re the one who found her, huh?”
At first it didn’t seem as though the diver understood the question. He just sat quietly for a moment and looked down at his big hands, but then he nodded stiffly.
“What happened down there?” the intern whispered, as he sneaked a look over at a nearby policeman.
“Something … something completely hellish, I think,” the diver answered.
The intern imagined a pale, naked body, a girl sprawled in claustrophobic darkness. He couldn’t help breathing a little faster. “So … how old was she?”
“How old? Well, I don’t know.”
The diver squinted uncertainly as their eyes met.
“The body was like a little girl’s. Completely soft, just as if she were still alive. And she didn’t actually weigh much. It was just that I slipped as I was lifting her, so she ended up on top of me. She had something in …”
“What did she look like, did she have any injuries?”
“Long hair …”
The diver waved, an attempt to explain with his hand.
“It was like a tangle in front of her face. I grabbed it, because I thought it was a bunch of loose strings.”