Echoes From the Dead

7

On Öland the dawn comes along the straight line of the horizon like a silent, dazzling light, but Julia slept right through the sunrise this October morning.

There were small roller blinds at each of the three windows in Gerlof’s boathouse; once upon a time they had been dark red, but over the years they had been faded by the sun to a pale pink. Just before half past eight the blind next to Julia’s bed suddenly flew up, rolling itself up with a bang that sounded like a thunderclap in the silence.

Julia opened her eyes. It wasn’t the bang that had woken her but the sunshine suddenly pouring in through the east-facing window. She blinked and raised her head from the warm pillow. She could see autumn-yellow grass swaying in the wind outside the window, and remembered where she was. Strong wind and bright air.

Stenvik, she thought.

She blinked again and tried to keep her head up, but quickly sank back into the hollow in the pillow. She was always slow in the mornings, she had been all her life, and for the past twenty years the oblivion of sleep had often been very tempting. Her bouts of depression after that day had led her to sleep away far more of her adult life than she should have. But getting up in the morning was hard when there didn’t seem to be any particular reason to do so.

Getting up in Stenvik was also made more difficult by the fact that there was no nice warm bathroom to stagger to. All there was below the boathouse was a stony shore and ice-cold water.

Julia had a vague memory of heavy rain rattling on the roof during the night, but all she could hear now was the sound of the waves below the boathouse. The rhythmic rushing made her think about jumping out of bed, throwing off her clothes, and dashing down to leap into the sea, but the thought passed.

She stayed in the narrow bed for a few more minutes, then got up.

The air was damp and chilly, and it was still windy outside, but the Stenvik she saw when she had put on her jacket and finally opened the boathouse door wasn’t the same ghostly landscape she’d seen the night before.

The heavy overnight rain seemed to have washed away all the grayness; the sun was shining again, and the rocky Öland coast was clean and austere and beautiful. The inlet that had given the village its name wasn’t deep, curving out on either side of the boathouse, carved out of the glittering waters of the sound. A few hundred yards from the shore, gulls were bobbing on top of the waves, their wings outstretched, screaming or laughing shrilly at each other through the wind.

Within the sunlight there was a sense of sorrow that not everything was as beautiful as it seemed to be, but Julia tried to suppress it. She just wanted to feel good. She didn’t want to think about fragments of bone or talk to the memory of Jens this morning.

She heard a cheerful bark. When she turned her head, she saw a white-haired woman in a red padded jacket walking from the coast road with a little light brown dog; it wasn’t on a lead, and it was running backwards and forward, snuffling at the road. With their backs toward Julia they turned off and walked quickly into one of the houses on the other side of the road.

Ernst wasn’t the only person living in Stenvik, Julia realized.

Her drowsiness disappeared, and she was filled with energy. She picked up a plastic container and walked quickly up to Gerlof’s house to fill it with drinking water from the tap in the garden. In the sunshine the cottage looked really welcoming, despite the overgrown grass surrounding it, but Gerlof hadn’t given her a key, so she couldn’t go in to look at her own childhood bedroom.

As she was running the water she realized she could actually stay on Öland for longer than just one day. If there was anything useful to be done — if Gerlof could pull himself together and come up with some suggestions as to what she should do, or look for — she could stay for another two days, or three.

Then she looked around the empty garden and decided. No. She would go home to Gothenburg today, but not until later.

On the way back to the boathouse, holding the water container tightly, she stopped to look at the yellow house behind the hawthorn hedge below the cottage. It was surrounded by tall, spreading ash trees and was barely visible behind the hedge, but what could be seen wasn’t attractive. The house wasn’t just empty, it was completely abandoned. Virginia creeper had spread all over the walls and begun to cover the cracked windows.

Julia had a vague memory of an old woman living there, a woman who never went out or mixed with anyone else in the village.

It was strange that the house had been left to decay; it was a fine house beneath all the cracks. Somebody ought to do up the whole place.

Julia hurried back down to the boathouse to make a cup of tea and some breakfast.

Forty-five minutes later she locked the door of the boathouse, one bag over her shoulder and the other in her hand. Inside, the bed had been made, the electricity switched off, and the blinds pulled down. The boathouse was empty again.

Julia walked across the ridge to the car, looked around without seeing a single person along the coast, and got in. She started the engine and took one last look at the boathouse. She looked at the ridge, the decaying windmill, and all the glittering water below her, and felt the sorrow return.

She quickly turned the car toward the main road.

She drove past the farm that was now a summer cottage, past the deserted yellow house, and past the gate to Gerlof’s cottage. Goodbye, goodbye.

Goodbye, Jens.

To the left of the village road was another road leading to another group of summer cottages, and there was also a rectangular piece of limestone embedded in the ground with the words CRAFT WORK IN STONE 1 KM painted on it in white. On an iron post above it was a sign showing the symbol indicating that there was no through road.

Julia saw the sign and remembered what she’d been thinking of doing this morning before she went to say goodbye to Gerlof: stopping off at the old quarry to have a look at Ernst Adolfsson’s sculptures.

She didn’t really have any money to buy that sort of thing, but she thought she would like to see his work. And perhaps she might try and ask some more questions about Jens, if Ernst remembered his disappearance and if he might be willing to tell her where he himself had been that day. It couldn’t do any harm.

She turned off onto the narrow track, and the little Ford immediately began to bounce and list from one side to the other. It was the worst road Julia had driven on so far on Öland, largely because of the cloudburst. The rainwater was still lying in the wheel tracks in long narrow pools; she slowed and crept forward in first gear, but the car still slipped and slid in the muddy hollows.

She left the summer cottages behind and drove along the edge of the alvar. The track curved slowly off toward the quarry along the coast road, then straightened as it approached Ernst Adolfsson’s low cottage. It stopped in front of the house at a circular turning area, where Ernst’s old white Volvo was still parked.

There was no sign of life, but another flat, polished stone with black lettering had been erected in the middle of the turning area: CRAFT WORK IN STONE — WELCOME.

Julia pulled in behind the Volvo and turned off the engine. She got out of the car and took her thin wallet out of her purse.

The wind was sighing in the long grass, and the landscape was almost completely bare of trees. On one side of the garden was the enormous wound in the hillside that was the quarry, on the other side there was only grass and isolated juniper bushes as far as the eye could see. The alvar.

She turned and looked at the house.

It was closed up and silent.

“Hello?” she called.

The wind muted her cry, and no one replied.

A broad path made of crushed limestone led to the door at the side of the house, where there was a bell.

Julia went over and rang it.

Still no reply. But the car was here, so where was Ernst?

She rang again, keeping her finger pressed on the bell. Nothing happened.

An impulse made her try the door. It was unlocked and swung open, like an invitation.

She poked her head in.

“Hello?”

No one replied. The light was off and the hallway was dark. She listened for the sounds of heavy footsteps and a cane tapping along the floor, but there was only silence.

He’s not at home — go and see Gerlof, urged her inner voice. But she was too curious. Didn’t people on Öland lock their doors when they went out? Did they still trust each other so much?

WELCOME, it said on a green plastic mat by the door. Julia wiped her feet a couple of times and walked in.

“Hello?” she said. “Ernst? It’s Julia. Gerlof’s daughter...”

From the ceiling in the hallway hung a mobile of small wooden ships, sailing around in the draft. To the right lay a kitchen; it was clean and tidy, with a small table and two wooden chairs. To the left was a bedroom with a narrow bed, which was made.

The hallway led into a living room with a sofa, a television, and a big picture window overlooking the quarry and the blue sound beyond. There were piles of newspapers and books on the table, but the living room was empty too. On one wall was a hexagonal clock made of polished limestone, with the hands made of slate.

The only remarkable thing about the house was the fact that the clock appeared to be the only thing made of stone. Did Ernst get enough of it when he was outdoors?

She moved back into the hallway and looked around a couple of times, as if some unknown attacker might leap out of a crack in the walls. She went back outside and closed the door carefully.

Julia stood there motionless in the sunshine, unsure of what to do next. Ernst Adolfsson was bound to be around somewhere out here: he had merely forgotten to lock his door.

She looked over toward the stone sculptures on the quarry’s edge. Beside them was a small shed painted red and surrounded by birch trees; in a pile outside the shed lay several blocks of stone and rocks of different sizes. Some bore the signs of having been worked on, but looked incomplete. Some resembled misshapen human beings, Julia thought. She could see deformed faces and black eye sockets in the stone, and it made her think of trolls who stole away human children and took them inside the mountain forever. Gerlof had told her that when the quarry workers’ tools went missing in times gone by, they always blamed the troll. It was unthinkable that any of their fellow workers might have stolen them.

She tore her gaze away from the stones and again looked over toward the completed, polished works of art by the sheer cliff edge above the quarry. Small lighthouses, round well lids, tall sundials, and a couple of broad gravestones. The nameplates on the gravestones were still empty.

Something was missing. There was a wide space in the long row of sculptures, and Julia moved closer. She had seen something from the other side of the quarry the previous evening: the tall church tower that resembled the one up in Marnäs was gone. A small shallow depression gaped in the gravel by the cliff edge above the quarry.

Julia slowly walked forward between the polished stones, and the quarry opened up in front of her like an enormous empty pool.

The quarry wasn’t deep here, just a few yards, but the drop was sheer. She stood by the edge, looking silently out across the barren, stony landscape, and suddenly caught sight of the tall church tower immediately below her. It had fallen from the edge, straight down into the quarry, and landed on its side. The top of the tower was pointing westward, toward the water.

The church tower hadn’t smashed to pieces.

But beneath the oblong stone sculpture, Ernst Adolfsson lay outstretched. He was staring up at the sky from the bottom of the quarry, his mouth bleeding and his body shattered.