Echoes From the Dead

Öland, September 1972

Gunnar has an iron pick and two shovels in the trunk of the Volvo. He lifts out the tools, gives one shovel to Martin, then looks at Nils.

“Okay,” he says. “Where are we going?”

Nils stands there in the cold, looking around him in the fog on the alvar. He picks up the familiar scent of grass and herbs and poor soil, and he sees juniper bushes and rocks and faintly marked pathways, just as it was in his youth — but he doesn’t know where he is. All his landmarks have disappeared in the fog.

“We’re going to the memorial cairn,” he says quietly.

“I know that, you said that last night,” says Gunnar irritably. “But where exactly is it?”

“Here... somewhere near here.”

Nils looks around again, and begins to walk away from the Volvo.

Martin, who has hardly said a word all the way here, quickly catches up with him. He had lit a fresh cigarette as soon as he got out of the car, and he’s sucking on it now, his lips thin and tense. Gunnar joins them and walks alongside him.

Nils slows down, as if he were in no hurry. He wants both men in front of him, so he can keep an eye on them.

The fog is thicker than Nils can ever remember; actually, all he can recall is constant sunshine on the alvar when he used to go walking out here as a teenager. Now it feels as if he’s walking along the seabed in a pocket of air. He stops. Ten yards away the landscape has already been obliterated, the only color is grayish white, and every sound is muted. He is wearing only a thin sweater, a dark leather jacket, and jeans, and he’s freezing in the chilly air.

“Are you coming, Nils?”

Gunnar has stopped, too, and turned round. He’s just a big gray shape ahead of Nils, the outlines blurred like a charcoal drawing. His expression is difficult to read and impossible to interpret.

“We don’t want to lose you,” Gunnar says, but before Nils has caught up with him, he turns and sets off again, without waiting, striding out across the cowering grass.

Twilight is slowly falling across the alvar. It will be late before Nils gets home to his mother. Does she know he’s coming today?

Nils walks past a flat stone with uneven edges in the grass; it’s almost like a triangle, and all at once he recognizes it. Now he knows where he is.

“It’s more to the left,” he says.

Gunnar changes direction without saying a word.

Nils thinks he can hear a faint sound in the fog; he stops again and listens. A car on the village road? He listens hard, but hears nothing more.

They’re close now, but when Gunnar and Martin finally stop at a fairly big mound of grass, Nils still doesn’t think they’ve arrived. He can’t see the stones of the cairn anywhere.

“Here it is,” says Gunnar tersely.

“No,” says Nils.

“Yes.”

Gunnar kicks at the grass a few times, revealing the edge of a stone.

Only then does Nils realize that the memorial cairn doesn’t exist anymore. It’s been forgotten. No traveler has placed a stone on it to honor the dead for decades, and the yellow grass of the alvar has swallowed it.

Nils thinks about the last time he was here, when he hid the treasure. He was so young then, young and almost proud of having shot the soldiers out on the alvar.

Nothing has been right since then. Everything has gone wrong.

Nils points. “Here... somewhere here,” he says. “Dig here.”

He looks at Martin, standing there with the shovel in his hand, fumbling as he tries to get yet another cigarette into his mouth. Why is he so nervous?

“Get digging,” says Nils. “If you want the treasure.”

He steps aside and walks round to the other side of the cairn. Behind him he can hear a shovel being driven into the ground. The digging begins.

Nils gazes out into the fog, but nothing is moving. Everything is silent.

Behind him Martin has begun to dig a deep trench in the ground. His shovel has already struck several rocks, which Gunnar has had to remove with the pick, and he is red in the face. He is breathing heavily and looking nastily at Nils.

“There’s nothing down here,” he snarls. “Just rocks.”

“There must be,” says Nils, looking down into the hole. “This is where I hid it.”

But the hole is empty, he can see that — just as Martin says.

“Give me that,” says Nils crossly, reaching for the other shovel.

Then he begins to dig himself, with rapid, deep thrusts.

After a minute or so he sees the flat slabs of limestone he took off the cairn so long ago — the slabs he placed around the metal box to protect it.

They’re still there, blackened by the earth now, but the treasure is gone.

Nils looks up at Martin.

“You’ve taken the treasure,” he says quietly, taking a step closer to him. “Where is it?”