Little Star

THE DEAD GIRLS

The album that was released in the middle of May was a bit of a hotch-potch. Because they wanted to surf the wave created by ‘Fly’, the producer, the musicians and the studio techs had only a couple of weeks to create a finished product from the bare MP3 files.

Max Hansen tried both the carrot and the stick to get Theres into the studio so that her singing could be professionally recorded. He promised five- and six-figure sums, he threatened her with the police, psychiatric care and throwing her to the ravening dogs of the media, but it was no use. Either his threats were transparent, or she was incapable of grasping the misery he could unleash on her head.

He thought it was probably the former. Either Theres or the freak realised he couldn’t reveal what he knew without implicating himself. Oh, he was ready to do that, but he wanted to wait for the right moment. The moment when he was a long way away from Stockholm, and his only problem was where the money would get the best return.

Despite the fact that the album had been a rush job, it was enthusiastically received. Not one reviewer failed to comment on the poor sound quality; but on the other hand Tesla’s voice had a tone and a timbre that made up for the defects. The production also left a great deal to be desired, but there too the technical aspects were counterbalanced by the quality of the songs. There was no doubt whatsoever that this Tesla, whoever she might be, was a new artist to be reckoned with.

Given what Max Hansen had found out about Theres, he dared not meet her without other people present, but he couldn’t get hold of her by phone or email. Therefore it was impossible to arrange any interviews or photo shoots.

However, just a few days after the album had been released, he came to realise that what he had thought was a weakness was in fact a strength. There was a huge appetite for information about this new star in the Swedish music firmament, but none was forthcoming. Just when Max Hansen had begun to draw up strategies to create fake quotes and interviews, he noticed the change of tone in what was being written about Tesla.

Her silence was interpreted as seriousness, and her absence from the public arena was seen as enigmatic. After an article in Aftonbladet which interwove acclaim for Tesla as the great new hope for Swedish music with unabashed speculation about her, other newspapers jumped on the bandwagon. The clips from Idol were analysed and pronounced magical, Tora Larsson’s terse responses were interpreted and commented upon. Journalists turned and twisted what they knew, and got nowhere; and the result was a genuine mystique surrounding Tesla. Something exciting.

Max Hansen couldn’t have timed the whole thing any better if he had planned it. It was a three-stage rocket. First the speculation, then Sing Along at Skansen, then…the bomb. A week or so after Sing Along he would drop the bomb, and if that didn’t boost the already-high sales figures, then he didn’t know what would.

But there was a defect in the rocket’s construction.

Tesla’s appearance at Skansen was set for June 26; she was appearing on the same bill as The Ark. Everything was poised for success, and Max Hansen had emailed her all the information. All sorted except for one small point: he had no idea whether she was intending to turn up.

Swedish Television had been after him for her details so that they could contact her directly, but Max Hansen had referred to the girl’s well-known shyness, and said that all communication was to go through him, and that he could guarantee that she would be there for both the rehearsals and the show, no problem.

But in fact: mucho problem.

The uncertainty gnawed away at him, and Max Hansen began to consider desperate measures.

Insofar as it is possible to become a different person from the one we are born, Jerry came home from the USA a different person. His focus on the future had changed, his view of the past had changed, and for once he had not been kicked in a new direction, but had taken the step himself.

It happened on the third day of his visit. Paris’ parents lived in a small house on the outskirts of Miami, and Jerry, Paris and Malcolm had gone shopping at a Wal-Mart that made the Flygfyren complex in Norrtälje look like a sausage stall. If the car park had been emptied of vehicles, it would probably have been possible to land a plane on it.

It was unusually humid for April. Paris had told him this was nothing compared to summer, but for Jerry it felt positively tropical. A pressure grew in his skull as they pushed their way among the crowds in the air-conditioned shopping mall, and when they emerged into the car park with their over-stuffed bags and the heat hit them, Jerry was overcome by dizziness.

The car was parked several hundred metres from the entrance, and as they walked across the vast expanse beneath the blazing sun, his legs gave way. The bags landed on the asphalt and he fell to his knees. He bent down, clutching his head with his hands as the sweat poured down his back. He was embarrassed, but he just couldn’t get up. It felt like a failure, a confirmation of what a pathetic specimen he was.

Paris’ parents had welcomed him, and he had almost managed to forget that he had let Theres down in order to make the trip possible. He felt bad about leaving her alone, but there had been no alternative. He just had to go with Paris. Now, down on his knees on the burning asphalt, it was as if God had punished him. Struck him over the head with his sun club in order to bring him to his knees and make him realise what a shit he was.

He felt Malcolm’s arms around him, the weight of the child’s body against his back as the boy embraced him from behind and shouted, ‘Jerry, Jerry, what’s the matter? Please get up Jerry, please!’

The thin, anxious voice cooled him down a little and he looked up in time to see Paris bend down and caress his cheek. The sun was directly behind her head, and made her black hair shine like a halo as she said, ‘Darling, what happened? Are you OK?’

Jerry straightened up. He was still on his knees squinting into the sun as he looked into Paris’ eyes. The words that came out of his mouth needed no thought:

‘Paris, will you marry me?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did you…what?’

‘Yes. When you get up off your knees we can go find the priest, if that’s what you want.’

Jerry gradually managed to get to his feet, but Paris hadn’t been serious about going to find the priest right away. Yes, she wanted to marry him, but she wanted a proper wedding. If she had said she only wanted to marry him as long as it was on top of Mount Everest dressed in deep sea diving gear, Jerry would have started investigating the possibilities. A proper wedding was a piece of cake.

When they got back to Sweden they started making plans, and they decided to get married in Miami in the middle of July, because Paris was the one who had family. It was fun to think about, but basically it was nothing more than a technicality. The key thing had happened in the car park outside Wal-Mart.

Jerry had been down for the count several times in his life; he knew what it meant to be on his knees in both a physical and mental sense. But no one had ever put their arms around him and said Please get up Jerry, please with genuine anxiety in their voice. And no one had ever caressed his cheek, called him darling and asked him if he was OK. No one had ever actually cared whether he got up or not.

But the miracle had happened in that blazing car park, and how could it not change him? There was a future that looked bright, and when he thought about his murky past, there was a point to it after all, because it had led him to now.

If Ingemar Stenmark’s race hadn’t interrupted his performance on the guitar, perhaps he wouldn’t have got so lost in his teens, and then perhaps he wouldn’t have been interested in Theres. If Theres hadn’t been found and hadn’t killed his parents, then she wouldn’t have been living with him. If he hadn’t played the guitar, if he hadn’t found that wallet, if Theres hadn’t been so violent…in the end everything had led to Paris and his collapse in the car park. And so it was all good.

Perhaps his new-found happiness made him take the difficulties with Theres less than seriously, but it seemed as if she too had sorted herself out. She was communicating with her friends, and seemed to be adapting to a more normal life.

The only cloud on Jerry’s horizon was Max Hansen. A week or so after Jerry got back from the USA, Hansen was on him like a leech, trying to force Theres into the studio. Jerry discovered that Max Hansen was aware of Theres’ background, because he used it as a threat. Jerry asked Theres if she wanted to sing in the studio again, and she said no. Max Hansen refused to take no for an answer, and Jerry changed to an unlisted phone number.

The album still came out, and Jerry entertained many evil thoughts about Max Hansen when the telephone started to ring despite the unlisted number. Journalists asked about Tesla or Tora Larsson, and Jerry said he had no idea what they were talking about. After five calls he unplugged the phone, threw it in the bin and got himself a mobile with a pre-paid card.

At the end of May Jerry received an envelope. It contained ten one-thousand-kronor notes, and a letter which explained in an aggressive tone that he would get another twenty thousand if he could just guarantee that Theres would turn up at Skansen on the morning of June 26. It would be in his best interests to contact Max Hansen immediately to confirm that he would take care of the matter, otherwise things could get very nasty indeed.

Jerry put the ten thousand kronor away for the wedding, and asked Theres what she wanted to do. She said she didn’t know, and he had to be satisfied with that. What else was he supposed to do? Shove Theres in a sack and carry her off to Skansen? The only thing he could do was keep his fingers crossed, say a prayer and hope for the best.

These days his contact with Theres was mostly limited to practical matters. She had her own life and he had his. He made sure there was baby food in the fridge, and he paid the bills. Apart from that she had to look after herself, while he spent more and more time at home with Paris and Malcolm.

Jerry was so far gone in his new, positive attitude to the world that he didn’t even think twice when he heard by chance at the end of May that the man who used to run the local shop had been robbed and murdered. It was just a tragic story that for once had nothing to do with him.

Just about a week after the album was released, Teresa got an email from Max Hansen. The message said, ‘Read these and think carefully. June 26. Confirm.’

Attached were a number of newspaper articles about Lennart and Laila, a copy of the estate inventory showing Jerry as the heir, the ID information on Angelika Tora Larsson, and a copy of Theres’ application form for Idol.

Max Hansen wanted to show that he had everything stitched up, and even though it didn’t come as a surprise that he knew what he knew, it had the desired effect. The very thought that he could ruin their entire lives with one click of the mouse was abhorrent, and for the first time Teresa was really frightened. She sent a long message to Theres, going through various scenarios and weighing up their options, and came to the conclusion that it would probably be best if Theres said that she would perform at Skansen. At least that would buy them the time until then to come up with something.

The something was a given. The problem was how they could get close enough to Max Hansen to carry it out, then get away without being discovered. Teresa was filled with longing. The man in the shop had been thrown into her path, she had done what she had done and hadn’t felt good about it until afterwards. Max Hansen was a different matter altogether. She was looking forward to it, and this time she was going to enjoy it from beginning to end. If she got the chance.

Her fingers had begun to itch in an unpleasant way, and from time to time she had a hungry feeling in her stomach. Her awareness of life had begun to be sullied by images forcing themselves on her unannounced. She could become fixated by the back of someone’s head on the bus, imagining a tool in her hand, yearning to strike a blow. When she was alone in the library with the librarian one afternoon, she worked out ways of killing her. Ask for some unusual book, follow her down to the storeroom. A brick, a length of pipe. Bang on the head, bang again. Again. Open. And then the red smoke, to taste it, to get close again.

She had continued to throw away three Fontex tablets a day, picked up a new prescription and carried on throwing them away. She had been for follow-up meetings at the psychiatric unit and had played her role effectively; they felt she was so well she ought to be able to come off her medication by the summer.

But she knew that her normal behaviour was nothing to do with being ‘well’ in the usual sense of the word. She was secure and harmonious, yes. She was happy with both herself and her life, yes. So far so good, ticking the boxes on the psychiatrist’s list. But the reason for her excellent results was something only she and Theres knew about. The fact that she was a murderer, that she was a wolf, that she had cast normal human considerations aside.

If she had explained all this in the doctor’s pleasant office, she would have been locked up for the foreseeable future rather than being pronounced more or less fit and well. Teresa knew that she was not well in the conventional meaning of the word, but she was perfectly fine on her own terms, and that was what mattered.

The problem was…the abstinence.

It got so bad that she could sit at the kitchen table watching Olof shovelling down sandwiches as he read some games magazine, and she would find herself studying the back of his neck, glancing from his hairline to the marble rolling pin and back again. One day when Maria wasn’t very well and spent the day at home on the sofa listening to old Dean Martin records, Teresa stood gazing at her mother, lying there with her eyes closed, as her fingers caressed the knob on the end of the poker.

That kind of thing.

Regardless of how good Teresa was feeling these days, and regardless of the fact that Dean Martin was singing that you couldn’t go to jail for what you were thinking, she would have liked to pass on these particular fantasies. But they forced their way in, and she couldn’t shake them off.

When Teresa picked Theres up in Svedmyra four days after Max Hansen’s message, they still hadn’t come to any decisions. It was just two weeks until June 26, and Teresa had checked the news on the internet every morning, fearing that Max Hansen would have gone public with what he knew. It hadn’t happened yet, but the feeling in Teresa’s stomach told her it wouldn’t be much longer.

They talked on the subway and they talked on the bus to Djurgården. Whispering, because there were a lot more people now than when they had come out here the first time. Their conclusion was that they would say yes to Max Hansen. Whether Theres would actually turn up on the day was another matter. Teresa certainly had no intention of being Max Hansen’s mouthpiece and trying to persuade her.

As usual they had turned up a while before the others, and as they approached the place near the wolf enclosure they could see three men sitting there. On previous occasions other people had got there before them, and the entire group would then use the simple and effective method of staring at the intruders until they moved away.

The men were in their twenties, and had no blankets, beer or musical equipment with them, so Teresa presumed it wouldn’t be too long before they left. For the time being she and Theres spread the blankets out a little further up, sat down and carried on talking.

Three shadows fell over their spot. They had been so absorbed in their conversation that they hadn’t noticed the three men coming over. As soon as Teresa looked up at them she could see that something was wrong, in spite of the fact that the light was behind them, and immediately afterwards came the scent, clear and unmistakable: threat.

All three men were standing with their hands in the pockets of baggy tracksuit tops, and they had arranged themselves so that Theres and Teresa were trapped between them and the fence.

The one in the middle crouched down. Beneath his thin trousers Teresa could see the contours of pumped-up leg muscles; his upper arms were as thick as her thighs.

‘Hi,’ he said, nodding at Theres. ‘You’re Tesla, aren’t you?’

Theres, who appeared completely unmoved by the attitude of the men, nodded and came out with her usual response, ‘We. I sing. Teresa writes the words.’

‘Yeah, right.’ said the man. ‘Because you’re such a pretty girl.’ He nudged Teresa’s shoulder, as if she were something in his way. ‘Why would you bother with a bag of spanners like her otherwise?’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Theres.

‘No. It does look that way, like you don’t really get it.’

‘What do you want?’ said Teresa. ‘Get lost. We haven’t done anything to you.’

The man pointed at Teresa. ‘You. Shut the fuck up. It’s her I’m talking to.’ He gestured to one of the other men, who came and crouched down next to Teresa, while the first man went over to Theres.

The man who was now so close to Teresa that she could smell the mouthwash on his breath held up his big hands, showing her the weapons at his disposal. He looked less than intelligent, bordering on mentally challenged, and Teresa had no doubt that he did exactly as he was told. Out of the corner of her eye she could see some of the other girls approaching, but they were some distance away.

‘You sing well,’ said the first man, towering over Theres. He pointed into Skansen. ‘And you’re going to sing here in a couple of weeks, aren’t you?’ When Theres didn’t reply, he said it again, but with greater emphasis. ‘Aren’t you?’

When the men first came over Teresa had quickly considered the possibility that they had something to do with Max Hansen, then dismissed the idea as being too over the top. But it was actually true. He had found himself some muscle to carry out what his written threats had failed to achieve.

When Theres still didn’t reply, the man grabbed her under the arms and lifted her with no effort, pinning her up against the fence with her face on a level with his, her feet dangling several centimetres off the ground. Teresa tried to get up, but her gorilla placed his heavy hands on her shoulders, pressing her down while snorting as if he were calming a horse. The girls had broken into a run, but they were still at least a hundred metres away.

The first man pulled Theres closer, then thrust her back against the fence, making the wire netting rattle. ‘Aren’t you?’ Theres drew back her lips, exposing her gums, and the man laughed. ‘Growl as much as you want-are you going to do as you’re told, or what? I need an answer!’

He shook Theres so that her head banged against the fence. Tears of rage scalded Teresa’s eyes as she scratched the gorilla’s arms: she was making no more impression than a swarm of midges. She would have kicked, screamed, fought to the very last drop of blood, and she couldn’t even get to her feet. It was unbearable.

‘Yes!’ she yelled. ‘Yes! She’ll be there! Leave her alone! Let go of her!’

The man who was holding Theres nodded. ‘I want to hear it from you, little girl. I’m asking you nicely-now are you going to do what you’ve been asked to do?’

The two Annas, Miranda, Cecilia and Ronja had arrived. The third man walked towards them, his arms raised. ‘OK, OK. Let’s just stay here girls, nice and calm now.’

Ronja aimed a kick at his kneecap, but he kept his balance, grabbed hold of her and threw her down on the grass. The other four stood irresolute, staring at Theres who nodded and said, ‘Yes. I’ll sing.’ Two seconds later her teeth had closed on her attacker’s eyebrow.

His roar brought everything to a stop. His friends, completely paralysed, followed what was happening over by the fence with their mouths agape. The man spun around as if he were dancing with Theres, at the same time trying to push her away. When he succeeded it was at the expense of a few grams of body weight. Theres spat something out of her mouth and blood poured down into the man’s eye as he held her at arm’s length.

He bellowed like an injured animal, and hurled Theres at the fence with all his strength. She bounced against the wire and fell head first on the ground. As the man gathered himself to deliver a kick to her stomach, the one who had been holding on to Teresa shouted, ‘We weren’t supposed to hurt her!’

The man came to his senses, pressed one hand to his injured eyebrow and contented himself with tipping Theres over onto her back with the toe of his shoe, whereupon he grabbed hold of her crotch with his other hand and hissed, ‘You need to be bloody careful from now on. I might come back and play with you again one of these days!’

Then they left. They were followed by curses and empty threats, mainly from Ronja and Teresa, but they left. All the girls gathered around Theres, whose lip had split. Her mouth was smeared with a mixture of blood and saliva, and no matter how she struggled, a billowing mass of arms and hands covered her, stroking and wiping and supporting. Only when she put her arms over her head and shouted, ‘Stop touching me!’ were the helpful limbs withdrawn, and the girls stood with their hands empty, not knowing what to do with them.

‘Fuck!’ said Ronja. ‘Fucking hell, fuck fuck fuck! There were more of us!’

She ripped off a low-hanging branch and started whipping the tree trunk as curses poured from her lips and her body jerked as if she were having a fit. Teresa thought she might flip into real hysteria, but after a minute or so she threw down the branch, hit herself on the head with clenched fists a few times, then lowered her hands and exhaled.

The rest of the girls had arrived, and they all stood around with their heads lowered during Ronja’s outburst, some of them stroking their piece of wolf skin as if to console something within themselves, to apologise. When Ronja came and sat down on the blanket, her hands still shaking, Teresa said, ‘OK?’

Several times they had discussed spending a whole weekend together, and now it had become absolutely essential. They could talk and identify themselves with wolves as much as they liked, but when it really mattered they had not acted as a pack, but had splintered into individual, frightened little people. It could not be allowed to happen again.

Beata’s parents had a little place in the forest outside Åkersberga. They wouldn’t be going out there until July, and Beata knew where the key was. The problem was that it was a good five kilometres from the nearest bus stop. However, it turned out that both Anna L and Ronja had passed their driving test, and that Anna actually had a car.

None of the others had thought of themselves as the kind of group where someone had a driver’s licence, but when it turned out to be the case, a heady feeling of liberation quickly took hold. They had a place to be, they had a way of getting there. Together they had resources and opportunities which they lacked when they were alone.

Teresa was sitting as close to Theres as possible without touching her while the others made plans for the coming weekend. Times, food, sleeping bags and so on. Theres seemed unmoved by the incident with the men, and only her swollen lower lip bore witness to the fact that something had happened. She didn’t join in the discussion until the question of food came up. The girls were discussing pasta and yoghurt when Theres said, ‘I don’t eat that kind of food.’

As usual, the slightest utterance from Theres brought all conversation to a halt. Everyone turned to her, some with an embarrassed expression as if they were ashamed of having forgotten about her for a few minutes.

Cecilia asked, ‘So…what do you eat, then?’

‘Stuff in jars. It’s called Semper. And Nestlé.’

‘You mean like…baby food? Why do you eat baby food?’

‘I’m little.’

‘We’ll sort it,’ said Teresa. ‘No problem.’

There was a brief silence as the group digested this new information. Then Linn looked around and stated with unusual firmness, ‘In that case, we’ll all eat the same thing.’

Some laughed with relief at this elegant way of slicing through a knotty problem, and the planning took another direction. What flavours, what size jars, how many, and who could do the shopping?

By the time they parted, everything was decided. The following Friday afternoon they would take the subway, the Roslagen line, then the number 621 bus to Grandalsvägen in Åkersberga. Then Anna L would run a shuttle service in her car to transport them to the cottage next to Lake Trastsjön. They would bring sleeping bags and bedrolls, they were going to eat baby food for two days and they were going to become a real pack.

The other girls waved as they headed for the bus stop, leaving Theres and Teresa sitting on the blankets. Teresa went for a little walk, found the lump of flesh Theres had bitten out of the man’s eyebrow, and ground it into the soil with the sole of her boot. Then she sat down again.

‘Will it be OK?’ she asked. ‘Next weekend?’

‘Yes,’ said Theres. ‘It’s good. They will stop being afraid. Like you.’

Teresa had to wait for a long time before Theres turned to look at the wolf enclosure, and couldn’t see what she was doing. She quickly leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’

Everyone is actually called something else.

On the Tuesday evening before school broke up, Teresa stood in front of the bathroom mirror trying to find her other name. She had grown up as Teresa, heard people say it to her thousands of times. But was that really her name?

She had thought about it before, but it had come back to her when Johannes rang a couple of hours earlier. Once again he maintained that she was behaving very strangely, that he could tell something was wrong, and couldn’t they meet? He had used the name Teresa over and over again until Teresa felt as if the person he was talking to was a complete stranger. It was no longer her. However, she put the phone down with a horrible feeling that he was right. That she had lost herself, gone astray. Or rather: that this Teresa he was talking to had lost herself. But was she actually Teresa any more? Was that her name?

Those were her thoughts as she stood in front of the mirror, studying her face and searching for a clue. She thought her eyes had hardened, literally. As if the eyeball was no longer a jelly-like lump filled with fluid, but was made of glass, hard and impenetrable.

‘You are weird,’ she said to herself. ‘You are hard. You are weird. And hard.’

She liked the words. She wanted to be those words, wanted them to fit her like her boots, to wrap themselves tightly around her like her boots and become her.

‘My words. Weird. Hard. Words. Hard. Weird.’

Urd. Urd.

Her body said yes, in spite of the fact that she didn’t remember. Where had she heard the word before? Was it a name? She went to the computer and opened Wikipedia.

Urd. The original and possibly the only goddess of fate in Norse mythology. One of the three Norns. With her sisters she would spin and cut the threads of life, and her name came from the Icelandic word for unlucky fate.

Everyone is actually called something else. I am called Urd.

This wasn’t something she intended to tell other people, and she wasn’t going to try to get them to use it. But within herself she would know. Just as the boots fitted themselves to her feet and enabled her to walk firmly and steadily, so the name would anchor her inside, and would consume all her uncertainty.

‘Urd!’

On Wednesday she got through the end-of-term celebrations with her eyes wide open, and yet firmly closed. The summer dresses and chirruping voices, the off-key singing, the odd tear at the thought of saying goodbye for the summer-none of it had anything to do with her.

It had nothing to do with Urd, and she did not see it. Her thoughts were with the pack.

On Friday afternoon Teresa went over to Svedmyra to collect Theres. Some of the others joined them on the subway, and more of the girls were waiting at the bus stop. By the time they got on the 621 only Malin and Cecilia were missing.

After they had exchanged a few texts, everything went according to plan. Anna L came and picked them up a few at a time. Her little car was so rusty it was almost impossible to talk while they were travelling, because there were holes in both the silencer and the floor. Anna yelled that she had bought it on the internet for three thousand.

What Teresa had imagined when Beata said her parents had a little place in the forest couldn’t have been further removed from reality. The house, tucked in among fir trees, might once have been a cottage but it had been renovated and extended so many times that it was more like a mansion-albeit an oddly proportioned and over-decorated one. The closest neighbour was half a kilometre away, and on the slope leading down to the lake all the trees had been felled and the stumps removed to create a lake view thirty metres wide, leading down to a jetty.

While Ronja took the car to pick up Malin and Cecilia, who had come on the next bus, the others went exploring with Beata. An old garage had been converted into a workshop with two carpentry benches, and Beata explained that her father spent most of his time there in the summer. Hence the over-the-top ornate carving on the outside of the house. Her father could devote an entire week to making a spectacularly ugly frieze just to avoid spending time with her mother.

When they came out of the workshop Teresa spotted a half-rotten door that seemed to have been thrown away on a slope, and to be disappearing gradually into the ground. She went over and saw that although there was moss growing around the rusty handle, it actually was a door, because it was surrounded by a frame.

‘The root cellar,’ said Beata. ‘Spooky.’

Theres had come over, and when Teresa started to tug at the handle, she helped. They had to struggle to rip out the grass that had taken root in the rotting wood, but eventually they managed to open the door and a chilly breath of earth, iron and decay came at them from underground. Without any hesitation Theres walked down three steps and disappeared in the darkness.

‘Theres?’ shouted Teresa. ‘What are you doing?’

There was no reply, so Teresa swallowed and went down the steps through an opening that was so low she had to crouch. The temperature dropped by several degrees, and when she had got through the opening and her eyes had begun to grow accustomed to the gloom, she saw that she was in a surprisingly large room. She could stand up straight, and each wall was at least two metres away.

From the darkest corner she heard Theres say, ‘This is good.’

Teresa took a step in the direction of the voice, and eventually she was able to make out Theres, sitting on a low wooden box with her back to the wall. The box was rectangular; Teresa sat down next to her, looking over towards the opening and the world outside, which suddenly seemed far away.

‘What do you mean, good?’ she asked.

‘You know.’

They could hear the voices of the others in the other world as one by one they descended into the cold, musty room. As soon as they were in they started speaking in whispers. Sofie had a small LED on her keyring, and swept the blue light slowly around the space.

The stone walls were damp and a few rotting tools lay in a heap in the corner nearest the door, their iron parts rusting. The earth floor had been flattened and here and there some kind of white sprouts were sticking up, which Teresa found disgusting. Apart from that, she thought the room was…good. Very good.

When Sofie shone the light on the box Theres was sitting on, Teresa noticed that the entire front was covered in faded red letters that said, WARNING! EXPLOSIVE MATERIAL! Her stomach flipped and she asked Beata, ‘Is there dynamite or something in here?’

‘No,’ said Beata, ‘unfortunately. It used to have potatoes in it. Ages ago. Before that, I don’t know.’

Teresa wrinkled her nose. A minor disappointment. Not that she had any definite plans, but the very thought of having explosives at her disposal was appealing. Miranda seemed to share her feelings because she said, ‘Shit, that’s a shame. Just imagine if we’d had some dynamite.’

There was silence for a while, and they stood together in the darkness surrounded by the smell of mould, each thinking privately of the use they could make of something that could blow everything to kingdom come. Then they heard Ronja’s voice from up above.

‘Hey, where is everybody?’

A minute or so later, Ronja, Malin and Cecilia were down in the cellar as well. They had all arrived. Teresa closed her eyes, feeling the presence of the others’ bodies around her, the breathing and the small noises, the beat of their pulses and the shared scent that drove the musty smell away. She took a deep breath through her nose and straightened her back. Theres said, ‘Close the door.’

Teresa expected protests. Cold, horrible, scared of the dark and so on, but none came. She didn’t know whether it was because they had all been seized by that same feeling of immediacy and togetherness, or because Theres had said it. But nobody raised any objections as Anna S and Malin pooled their strength to pull the heavy door shut, and suddenly it was pitch dark. Teresa opened and closed her eyes, but there was no difference.

Yes. There was one difference. When they had been sitting in total darkness for a minute or so, it was as if the others’ bodies moved even closer, so close that they began to dissolve and flow through her. She could hear them, she could feel them, she could taste them, and in the enclosed darkness they became like one body, several hundred kilos of flesh waiting, breathing.

‘We are the dead,’ said Theres, and an almost inaudible gasp went through the mass as every heart stopped and listened. She had said it. Now it was true.

‘We are in the darkness. We are beneath the earth. No one can see us. We do not exist. Little One is here. Little One came from the earth. Little One was given eyes. And a mouth. Little One could sing. Little One became dead. And lived again. Little One is here. Death is not here.’

When Theres had uttered the final words everyone let out a long breath together. Teresa got up and made her way through the bodies. When she reached the door she had to brace her back against it to push it open. Sunlight poured in.

One by one the girls emerged, blinking in the gentle evening light. They looked at each other, saying nothing, drifting off in different directions or gathering in small groups. Five minutes or so passed.

Then it was as if a slow, rolling wave moved through the air, reaching them one by one. Happiness. Linn found some early wild strawberries and started threading them on a blade of grass. Soon several of the others began to do the same thing. Ronja found a football that was virtually deflated, and she, Anna L and Sofie started to play, passing it to one another. And so on.

Teresa sat on a chopping block watching them. She had almost forgotten Theres until she saw her come up from the cellar and peer across at the others. Teresa went over.

‘Hi.’

Theres didn’t respond. Her eyes were dark, and she was not squinting because of the light; her eyes were narrowed in disapproval.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Teresa.

‘They don’t understand.’

‘What is it they don’t understand?’

‘You know.’

Teresa nodded slowly. She was standing beside Theres. She was the one who had the knowledge. That was the way it should be. Unfortunately it wasn’t true.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t know, actually. I thought it was terrific when we were down in the cellar together. You did something. Something happened.’

‘Yes,’ said Theres, looking at the other girls as they raced around. ‘Together. Not now. Not Cecilia. Not Ronja. Not Linn. Not Malin…’ She kept going until she had listed every single name, and finished off with, ‘Not you.’

‘So what do you think we should do now, then?’

‘Come with me.’

Theres turned and went back down into the cellar. Teresa followed her.

When they went into the house a while later, the others had unpacked the baby food and sorted the jars into groups according to content. Vegetable puree was the most popular, but nobody was very keen on meat with dill, and they pretended to quarrel over the jars as spoons criss-crossed so that everyone could try the different flavours.

They were sitting in a circle on the floor and Teresa joined them, while Theres went and sat alone at the kitchen table, opened a jar of beef stew and stuck her spoon in it without a word. The cheerful atmosphere ebbed away and everybody kept glancing at Theres, who shovelled down the khaki coloured slop until she had emptied two jars, her face completely expressionless.

Even Teresa, who had sat with Theres in the cellar and talked until they shared the same conviction, couldn’t understand her behaviour. She had never seen Theres like this in the group, and was just about to pass on what she had said when Theres exploded.

She got to her feet, picked up a baby-food jar in each hand, and hurled them at the wall. When Beata said, ‘Hey-’ Theres screamed, letting out one single, piercingly clear note. It was like having a dentist’s drill thrust into your ears, and everyone curled up, their arms over their heads. Theres’ voice jumped up an octave until the frequency sliced through flesh and made the bones vibrate. The girls just sat there, curled up, rigid with tension as they waited for it to stop.

The scream broke off abruptly, and the silence that followed was almost as unpleasant. The girls lowered their arms and saw Theres sitting at the kitchen table once more, staring at them as silent tears rolled down her cheeks. None of them dared go over to comfort her.

Slowly Theres got up from the table, pulled open a drawer containing tools, and selected an awl. She stood in front of them and drove it into her right arm with such force that it stuck fast. She pulled it out and blood welled up. When she put the awl in her right hand and squeezed it, her palm was already sticky and red. She drove the awl into her left arm, showed it to them and pulled it out again. At no point did her expression change. Only the tears continued to flow.

Perhaps her vocal cords had been damaged by that high-pitched scream. When she spoke her voice seemed impossibly deep for her slender body.

‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I can’t feel it.’

She put down the awl and went outside.

The girls stayed where they were on the floor. Someone picked up a jar that had fallen over, someone dropped a spoon, and those who had started crying because Theres was crying gently dried their tears. Teresa picked up their scent, and the scent was shame. They were all ashamed and did not know why, did not understand what they had done wrong.

Teresa put her jar of apricot puree down on the floor and got up. ‘I’ll go and help her.’

Someone in the group whispered, ‘But how?’

‘There’s something we’re going to do.’

When she got outside Theres was already on her way back from the garden shed with a spade. They passed one another without speaking, and in the shed Teresa found another spade, which she took round to the front of the house, to the grassy slope leading down to the water.

The sun had set but was resting just below the horizon, and the sky was pale violet as they drove their spades into the ground and began to dig. Theres’ arms and hands were bright with half-dried blood; there was a sticky sound as she let go of the spade and grabbed hold of it again, and the effort made the blood start welling up once more from the small, deep wounds. If she was in pain, she gave no indication of it.

Beata’s father had done a good job, and it was easy to scrape away the top layer of turf and soil until they had a rectangle thirty centimetres deep and two metres by one metre wide. Then they hit rocks. By this time the other girls had come out. Erika found another spade in the garage, and Caroline and Malin found two trowels. Everyone helped, without asking what they were doing. When they reached bigger stones, Beata fetched a crowbar which she and Malin used to loosen them, then they lifted them out. The hole grew quickly.

Theres worked with her eyes fixed on the ground. Her lips moved as if she were talking to herself, silently. When they had reached a depth of one and a half metres, Teresa rested her arms on the handle of the spade. ‘Well?’

Theres nodded, threw the spade out of the hole and swung herself up. Teresa had to drive the spade deep into the ground and use the handle as a step to climb out.

When they were all gathered around the hole, no one could avoid seeing what they had created together. A grave. They stood close together looking down into the hole as if they were taking part in a funeral where only the crucial element was missing.

Ronja smiled and said, ‘Who are we burying?’

The twilight had deepened, and as Sofie was the only one with a torch, Teresa turned to her. ‘Fetch the box. From the cellar.’ When Sofie had gone off with Cecilia, others were sent to fetch a hammer, nails and some rope.

The box that used to contain explosives had the same dimensions as a small coffin, and at each end there was a loop of rope attached to an iron mounting so it could be lifted. Teresa opened the lid and tipped out a few shrivelled potatoes and some soil. She banged on the sides with her fists and discovered that the rough planks were sound. It would hold. The hammer, nails and rope had been found.

Teresa looked around the group. Several of the girls were shuffling on the spot and their faces, wearing an expression of deep concentration, glowed pale and white in the darkness of the twilight.

‘Who wants to go first?’

Some of them had perhaps thought that it was a game, some had expected something else, some might have understood exactly what was going to happen, but when the words were spoken the pale ovals turned toward Teresa, eyes opened wide with fear and several shook their heads. ‘Noooo…’

‘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.

It stopped at a yellow bead. A child’s fingers holding a little yellow bead. If I didn’t exist, then nobody would be holding this bead. The yellow bead was there, half a metre above the surface of the table. Then the fingers holding it disappeared and the bead dropped through the air, bounced a couple of times and lay still.

The only thing that remained of all of this was that single yellow point. No. The only thing that remained was that single yellow point and the eyes that saw it. Then the eyes disappeared, the bead disappeared and everything went white. Chalk white. Searing, burning phosphorus-white. A whiteness so dazzling and painful that it was an ear-splitting scream.

They stood together on the jetty in the dawn light, fourteen girls. It was five o’clock in the morning, but the sun was already high in the sky, pouring its light down upon them. The morning mist had dispersed, and the lake was dead calm.

The jetty was small, and the girls stood close together like a flock of birds, sharing each other’s warmth, allowing a new kind of energy to flow between their bodies. Their eyes were empty, their senses wide open.

Teresa’s throat was still hurting from the scream she hadn’t even known she’d let out, but like the other girls she was still, drinking in the soft light of the morning, the smell of mud, reeds and water coming from the lake, the long sustained explosion of birdsong in the trees, the closeness she felt with the other girls, and the space all around her.

Teresa moved away from the group and went to stand at the very edge of the jetty. She picked up a rusty nail, looked at it and threw it in the water, following it with her eyes as it sank. Then she turned to the group and said, ‘We were the dead. We need life.’

Things had changed for the better for Max Hansen following the success of Tesla. He had even begun to rethink his plan to burn all his bridges and head for the tropics.

The incident he had arranged outside Skansen had produced the desired result. The boys had reported back that Tora now said yes, and the following day he had received an email confirmation. Perhaps it no longer made good business sense to make her infamous with all those revelations. Time would tell if it was enough just to make her famous. That would allow him to remain in the country.

Because the country, or rather the city, had begun to show him its most friendly face; it was almost like the ’80s all over again. People wanted to talk to him, discuss future projects or offer their services. Max Hansen-last chance-had rapidly and amusingly become a player again.

He wasn’t a fool. He knew that popularity like this was temporary and could vanish overnight, but as long as it lasted he was enjoying being back in the warmth, lapping up the strained smiles and good wishes, relishing every dutiful pat on the back.

He had started going out again. Café Opera, Riche, Spy Bar. Many of the musicians had been replaced by the suits who called the shots, or young men in scooped T-shirts who called themselves producers just because they could handle Autotune. It wasn’t like the good old days, but there were still plenty of people who wanted to hang out with the powerful, and Max Hansen was once again someone who counted.

This particular Saturday he had started at Café Opera. Two girls who called themselves Divinity and played electroclash were throwing a release party for their new album in one of the side rooms, and Max had been invited. He thought the music was close to unbearable, so after knocking back a couple of free mojitos, he discreetly slipped back into the main room.

It was no more than half full, which would have been unthinkable on a Saturday night twenty years ago. Max said hello to a producer with EMI, an art director with Sony, and a session guitarist who was a little too eager to chat to him, so he excused himself and went over to the bar, where he ordered a glass of white wine. He stood there with his back to the counter, the ice-cold glass in his hand, enjoying the satisfying feeling of being, if not king, then at least a little prince in this particular kingdom. He’d missed it.

‘What are you drinking?’

A young girl had appeared beside him. Max raised his glass and gave a casual shrug. ‘Just white wine. The night is young.’

‘I prefer bubbly,’ said the girl.

Max Hansen looked at her more carefully. She was in her twenties; probably a bit young to have even got in. Not exactly stunning but reasonably pretty, and dressed in a tracksuit top that could be regarded as hip hop at a push. Straight, medium-length hair and a narrow face. She reminded him a little of Tora Larsson, in fact, but without the baggage. So Max Hansen beamed at her and said, ‘Well, I’m sure we can do something about that. What’s your name?’

‘Alice.’

‘As in Wonderland?’

‘Yes. As in Wonderland. That’s where I come from.’

There was something dangerous in Alice’s eyes that Max Hansen liked. She was probably not one of those girls who lay motionless on their backs staring at the ceiling like they were sending up a prayer to God and their mother. She looked like the kind of girl who might be up for all kinds of things.

Max Hansen ordered a bottle of sparkling wine and as the girl sipped at her glass and looked at him through half-closed eyes, he suddenly felt suspicious. This was going a little too well. He was under no illusions about his own attractiveness, so how come this girl was so obviously flirting with him?

‘Do you know who I am?’ he asked.

‘Of course,’ said Alice. ‘You’re Max Hansen. Tesla’s manager. Isn’t that right?’

‘Yes. Do we know each other?’

‘No. But I’m a singer too. Among other things.’

OK. So now they knew where they stood. It was that glint in her eye that had made him misjudge the situation. Alice was simply one of those girls. They had started to circle again recently.

When Alice asked, ‘Have you got any tips on how to make it as a singer?’ he no longer had any doubts. This was where they started, almost without exception. So Max Hansen poured himself another glass of bubbly and launched his usual routine.

It took Alice quarter of an hour to empty her glass, and when Max Hansen made a move to pour her the last of the wine, she placed her hand over the top and said, ‘No thanks. I’m driving.’

‘And where is it you’re driving to?’

‘Home.’ Her gaze swept up and down his body in a way that made his balls tingle. ‘Do you want to come with me?’

The Ford Fiesta parked behind the national theatre was one of the scruffiest cars he had ever seen, and certainly the scruffiest he had ever sat in. When Alice turned the key in the ignition, it sounded like an entire Formula One starting grid, and there was a faint whiff of petrol fumes, as if there might be a hole somewhere.

Alice drove along Birger Jarlsgatan towards Roslagstull, and as they passed Stureplan Max bent down and pretended to adjust his shoelaces. His taste for young girls was no secret, but a young girl in a roaring heap of metal like this was a step too far, and he didn’t want to be seen. Only when Alice turned onto Roslagsvägen did he relax, leaning back as best he could on the hard seat.

He glanced over at Alice, whose gaze was fixed firmly on the road. Nice profile. Well-defined chin and jaw line, but the shape of her nose softened what could have been an angular look. He was attracted, no two ways about it.

But there was a problem, of course. Just a couple of evenings ago he had brought home a lady he had known for quite some time for a couple of drinks. They had never got past the drinks. As soon as they sat down next to each other on the sofa Max realised nothing was going to happen, because his body made not the slightest response to her tight top and slit skirt. He had had to pretend that he’d never had anything else in mind, just a couple of drinks with an old friend.

However, that woman had been almost twice as old as Alice. He was hoping things would go better now he was back on home territory, so to speak.

To scope out the lie of the land, both hers and his own, he placed a hand on Alice’s thigh and squeezed tentatively. She let it happen-so far, so good. But what about Max? The engine screamed and the car rattled so much that it wasn’t easy to tell. He searched for the tingle in his crotch he had felt when she looked at him; he squeezed harder and checked again.

Nothing. It wasn’t there.

The car was clattering past the lights of Mörby Centrum as Max Hansen’s heart sank. This whole noisy, smelly, uncomfortable journey was pointless, and was about to end in embarrassment and a lonely taxi ride home.

He felt a sudden pain in his forearm as Alice pinched him, and he removed his hand from her thigh. She reached out her hand and pinched him again, harder this time. Max laughed and said loudly, almost yelling to be heard over the engine, ‘Do you like that sort of game?’

‘Absolutely,’ said Alice. ‘That’s the best kind.’

Max Hansen settled back in his seat. Maybe the evening wouldn’t end up so badly after all.

He had expected Alice to live in a small apartment somewhere like Täby, but when they passed that turn-off as well, he asked her where they were heading.

‘To Wonderland,’ she said, and he had to be content with that. It was often the way with young girls. They liked to appear a little mysterious, and he had nothing against that; quite the reverse, in fact. Particularly if they played the role as well as Alice. It gave the whole thing the feeling of an adventure, of heading out into the unknown.

When they turned off in Åkersberga and drove through an enormous housing estate, Max started to worry that it would be one of those occasions. Perhaps she lived with her parents, and he would have to sit and make conversation. If that was the case, he wasn’t setting foot through the door.

But they left the houses and set off along a smaller road leading into the forest. Every time he thought they had arrived there was another bend, and the car’s feeble headlights would have struggled to show them the way through the tunnel of trees if there hadn’t still been light in the sky.

But this was unknown territory, and no mistake. He hadn’t seen a house for several minutes, and was beginning to feel uncomfortable when Alice turned into a narrow driveway at long last, and switched off the engine.

‘Here we are!’ she said, clapping her hands.

When he stepped out of the car, Max Hansen’s ears were still buzzing as if he’d just come out of a concert, and the petrol fumes had made him feel slightly nauseous. He just had time to think this had better be fucking worth it when he sensed a movement and a rustling sound behind him. The next moment a black plastic bag was slipped over his head, and his legs were kicked from underneath him. He went down, hitting the back of his head so hard on a stone that he was seeing stars as he was lifted by many hands.

While Ronja was in Stockholm, the others got the garage ready. They had spread plastic sheeting over the floor, and the two carpentry benches stood side by side in the centre. It was fortunate that Beata’s father was so interested in woodwork, because it meant that a wide selection of tools was neatly displayed along the wall.

Teresa chose from the awls, chisels and knives, and left aside the pliers and saws. After all, this wasn’t about torture. Not primarily. She cut thirteen pieces of paper from two sheets of A4, and wrote a name on each.

At about ten o’clock those who were going to collect Max Hansen went and hid behind the woodshed. It was quarter to eleven before they heard the unmistakable sound of the car engine coming along the track. The members of the group waiting in the garage stood listening in the darkness; they heard the sound of the engine being switched off, a car door opening, then not much else. They had expected yelling and a struggle, perhaps even an attempt to escape, and had prepared for all these eventualities. But all they heard was a rustling sound, then silence.

They had talked through the whole thing during the day. They had slept for a few hours, close together in their sleeping bags on the kitchen floor, and eaten some baby food, then Teresa told them about what had happened in the shop. What she had done and how she had felt afterwards.

She didn’t even consider whether or not telling them was a risk. She was going to tell them now, and she told them. The whole story, from the moment when she and Theres were standing in the loading bay right up to the purchase of the red boots the following day, and how they had come in handy at school.

Then she put forward her suggestion, which was no longer a suggestion but more an explanation of what they must do now. Theres supported her, and there was never any discussion as to whether they should do it, only how they should do it.

Ideas were quietly put forward and rejected or accepted in the same simple way as they had planned the whole weekend. At an early stage Ronja had offered to act as bait, and once that was sorted out, the rest was largely a matter of technicalities. The woodshed, the plastic sheeting, the tools. Not even when the details were settled and the whole thing began to seem real did anyone react with revulsion or reluctance to take part. This was what they had to do, end of story.

As Teresa stood listening in the garage, she wondered if it had gone wrong from the start. Hadn’t Ronja even managed to get hold of Max Hansen? Teresa had brought some newspaper articles so that Ronja could see what he looked like, and he had mentioned that he usually frequented Café Opera. But that didn’t mean he had been there tonight, of course.

Teresa had begun to consider other options when she heard the sound of running footsteps, and Sofie pulled open the garage door. Behind her came Ronja, Caroline, Anna S and Melinda carrying a limp body wrapped in black plastic, which they dumped on the workbenches. Teresa switched on the fluorescent light and set to work.

She had expected more resistance from Max Hansen, but the man was just feebly moving his legs, and all Ronja had to do was press down on his shoulders to keep him in place. Teresa freed his arms from the plastic and fastened his hands in the clamps on the workbench. Only when she made the final adjustments to tighten the clamp around his right hand did she hear a muted scream from inside the sack. Meanwhile Cecilia had grabbed hold of his legs; she and Linn bent them over the edge of the benches and tied his feet to the base with thin rope.

They all took a step back, arranged themselves in a circle around the benches, and contemplated their treasure. Max Hansen was gradually coming round. His body jolted back and forth as best it could, fettered at every corner. The sack rustled as he jerked his head, billowing in and out as he screamed, inhaled, then screamed again.

‘Let me go, what’s going on, who are you, what are you doing?’

Teresa picked up a Stanley knife and sliced through the bag over his face. His skin was bright red with exertion and fear. His eyes opened even wider when he caught sight of Teresa.

‘Hi,’ she said. Theres passed her a wide strip of gaffer tape and Teresa placed it over his mouth. She thought it was a shame she wouldn’t be able to hear him scream, but it wasn’t worth the risk. Three of the others cut off his clothes, then stepped back.

Everything had gone according to plan-slightly better than expected, actually. The fact that Max Hansen had banged his head might well have saved those charged with bringing him in a split lip or a black eye. Now he was lying in the correct position. Ready for use.

Teresa found his naked body just as repulsive as when she had seen it on film. A flabby, calloused lump of pale flesh. Seeing him lying there now, it was difficult to imagine that he had been a real threat to them for a while. She couldn’t help smiling. Then giggling.

She was still giggling when she fetched the pieces of paper with names on, and a staple gun. Max Hansen jerked and squealed like…yes, like a stuck pig when she stapled ‘Melinda’ to his shoulder. Teresa said, ‘Lie still.’

Human beings are strange. They always struggle, to the bitter end-no matter how hopeless the situation is. With the tiny, tiny amount of movement Max Hansen had with his fettered arms and legs, he kept on trying to twist out of the way as Teresa rapidly stapled ‘Linn’ and ‘Cecilia’ to his thighs. There was the sound of splashing on the plastic covering the floor as he wet himself, and Teresa had to walk around the puddle as she moved across to fix ‘Anna S’ to his other shoulder.

She continued until all the names were stapled to his body, like a blanket made of pieces of paper. Ronja had to help hold his head so that she could finally fix her own name to his temple. Theres fetched the tools laid out on the bench at the side, and handed them out to the girls.

With their weapons in their hands they closed the circle around Max Hansen more tightly. His eyes darted from their faces to the tools, back and forth, back and forth until something happened. His body, which had been tensed in an arc, as far as he could manage it, suddenly relaxed. The expression in his eyes altered, and his head sank back.

Teresa couldn’t believe what she was seeing, but obviously the others could see it too, because they stopped dead and just stared, like her. Slowly, slowly Max Hansen’s cock began to rise. His eyes were looking up at the ceiling. The expression in them was hard to read because the tape over his mouth distorted his features, but Teresa thought she could see…yes, peace.

She looked from his stiff cock to his face. She shook her head and said, ‘Do you understand what’s going to happen?’

Max Hansen nodded faintly, his eyes still fixed on the ceiling, without losing that expression of tortured bliss.

Teresa thought it was best to start with a safe bet, so she nodded to Ronja, who had a small, sharpened screwdriver and whose name was fastened just above Max Hansen’s right hip bone. Ronja stepped forward, pulled a face at the defiant erection, and without further ado drove the screwdriver straight through her piece of paper, all the way to the handle.

Max Hansen screamed through his nose, snot spurted out, sweat poured down his forehead and his body quivered for a few seconds before becoming still once more. The erection didn’t subside, but remained sticking up about three centimetres below the handle of the screwdriver; it was about the same thickness.

It was Linn’s turn next. She had to stand on tiptoe to stab through the label below the right collarbone with her slender chisel. Max Hansen’s back squelched sweatily against the bench as he reared up and fell back down. Blood was trickling out of his wounds and dripping slowly onto the plastic.

Teresa had worked out that if they left the tools in place, it would take longer for him to bleed to death. She had also made sure she chose thin, short spikes and blades. He wasn’t going to die until everyone had done what they had to do and played their part.

Caroline was the sixth in line, and when she drove her knife through the label in the inside of his right thigh, Max Hansen let out a completely different kind of groan as he ejaculated with such force that the semen spurted into his face and over his head. Miranda, who had been standing behind the bench, squeaked in disgust and wiped her top with a cloth.

By this stage a fairly large pool of blood had begun to gather on the floor, and Teresa waved the girls forward more quickly so that they would all have their turn before it was over. Max Hansen’s penis finally collapsed and he was hardly even twitching as he was stabbed now.

In the end only Anna L, Cecilia and Teresa remained. Theres had said that she would prefer to watch, and was following the procedure curled up on the workbench at the side, humming ‘Thank You for the Music’.

Anna L stepped forward. She had been given a fine awl, because her label was dangerously close to the heart. She frowned, raised the awl and looked at Max Hansen’s eyes; only the whites were visible now. Then she shook her head and lowered her hand. With tears in her voice she said, ‘I can’t. This is crazy. It’s wrong. You can’t.’

Theres jumped down and went over to her. ‘Do you want to sit in your car?’ she asked. Anna L shook her head as tears welled up in her eyes, and she said, ‘I just can’t.’

‘You can,’ said Theres. ‘You have to.’

‘But this is crazy.’

‘It isn’t crazy,’ said Theres as she gripped her wrist, moved the hand holding the awl to the correct position, ‘it isn’t crazy at all’, then she thrust Anna’s hand down so that the awl went in halfway. Theres banged it with the palm of her hand, hammering it all the way in, then climbed back onto the workbench. Anna L crouched down by the wall with her hands over her head as Cecilia drove in a long nail.

Max Hansen’s body was limp, perforated in thirteen places and white from loss of blood. Shafts and handles stuck up through sticky pieces of paper, moving in time with his shallow breathing. A film covered his eyes as the pupils rolled back into place, and his gaze fixed on Teresa. He moved his head as if he wanted to say something, and since Teresa didn’t think he could possibly have any strength left to scream, she pulled off the tape. He looked at her and whispered, ‘Teresa…’ She leaned closer to his marble-grey face. ‘Yes?’

Max Hansen’s lips didn’t move and the consonants were no more than faint puffs of air. ‘That was fantastic. That was fantastic…that was fantastic…that was fantastic…’

‘Just one thing,’ said Teresa. ‘That stuff you’ve got on Theres. Is it going to get out?’

Max Hansen made a movement with his head, the hint of a shake, a no, then he carried on whispering, ‘That was fantastic…that was fantastic…’

Teresa shrugged her shoulders. ‘Glad you thought so. Bit of a shame, though. You might change your mind now.’

She picked up the drill that had been charging all day, pressed the button. The bit, which was the thickness of a little finger, was spinning around at twenty revolutions per second. She showed it to Max Hansen, revved the motor a couple of times then pushed it into the label attached to his temple.

And at long last came the scream she had longed for.

The girls gathered around the body, which was twitching like a landed fish as the blood spurted, with dwindling force, from the hole in the temple. Theres stood at the top and stroked the sticky hair from Max Hansen’s forehead. She said, ‘Come closer.’

They moved right in, fourteen girls. A rattling came from Max Hansen’s throat, then the body lay still. The blood stopped flowing from the temple, and as if that little black hole were a point of higher gravity, they were all drawn closer, as close as possible, as thin wisps of smoke extended like cobwebs.

They breathed in collectively, inhaling the essence that had been Max Hansen and incorporating it with the circulation of their own blood. But it was so little, much too little. Several of them moved their lips closer to the hole to force out something that was no longer there, almost kissing Max Hansen’s lacerated skull in order to lap up the very last bit.

They straightened up and the light in the garage was so bright, the iron-rich smell of blood so strong, and the sound as their feet stuck to the plastic and pulled free sliced through their ears. Their breathing was uneven as they returned to their wide-open bodies.

‘We are here,’ said Theres. ‘Now we are here.’

Many spent the night crying. Their senses were open wounds, their perceptions too powerful. They consoled and held one another, shared sleeping bags or lay caressing each other’s faces without speaking.

But in spite of the tears and the need for comfort, the underlying feeling was one of happiness. A different kind of happiness. A happiness so great, so piercing, that it had something of grief in it. Because it couldn’t last forever, it was far too intense for that. They could keep it alive together through the closeness of their bodies and their shared experience, but at some point it must fade and die. So: the grief.

It was yet another sleepless night, and before dawn they went out under cover of darkness to clean up. A group of them carried Max Hansen’s plastic-wrapped body down to the grave and threw it in along with his clothes, then filled the hole with earth and stones before carefully replacing the turf and stamping it down. Within a couple of weeks the turf would have grown into the surrounding grass. The others tidied up the garage, washed all the tools and scrubbed the work benches.

When dawn came and they had restored everything to its original state, they gathered on the jetty to watch the sun rise. Linn still had tears in her eyes, but not for the reason the others thought. When they had allowed the first rays of the sun to warm their faces for a while, Linn folded her arms, turned to Teresa and said, ‘Next time I want to use the drill.’

It was perhaps not quite the last thing Teresa had expected, but almost. Linn’s little face looked so sulky that Teresa burst out laughing, and soon several of the girls were laughing. Linn looked around, her expression furious.

‘What are you laughing at? I got practically nothing!’

The laughter quickly died down and there was silence as they looked at each other. They no longer needed to talk as much in order to communicate, and it appeared that several of them had been thinking along the same lines as Linn.

Next time. There was going to be a next time.

At about twelve o’clock the shuttle service to the bus stop began. Theres had had a long conversation with Anna L, and Anna said she did want to be involved in the future, but that she would need the others’ help. She would get it; that was the whole point of being a pack rather than fourteen girls. They gathered around her, they held her and shared their strength with her. Ronja offered to drive her car to Mörby so that she could travel on the bus with the others.

This turned out to be a valuable experience, because it was only on the bus that the experience finally seemed to settle within her, as they took up the whole of the back of the bus together and Anna found herself in a familiar environment, but no longer defenceless and afraid. No, she was sitting here now with her family-who had been buried and risen again, the hungry sharp-toothed ones, her sisters in the pack who would defend her. Then at last happiness came to her.

‘You all kind of belong to me, don’t you? And I belong to you. We’re together in this. Seriously together. We can do anything at all, and we’ll never let each other down, will we.’

It wasn’t a question, it was a statement, and Anna took a deep breath and flung her arms wide, as if she had only just fully risen from the grave.

They parted company at different places along the way, having decided to meet again the following Sunday in the usual place. Teresa went on to Svedmyra with Theres. In spite of the fact that they were alone for the first time in over twenty-four hours, they didn’t say much, didn’t discuss what had happened or the others’ reactions. It wasn’t possible, because the others no longer were the others. It was not possible to talk about them as if they weren’t there.

They went their separate ways at the front door of Theres’ apartment block. As Teresa turned to head back towards the subway station, Theres said, ‘It was good.’

‘Yes,’ said Teresa. ‘It was very good.’

On the subway and then on the train home, there was just one word going round and round in Teresa’s head, jerking and bumping about like a fish in a bowl that was far too small.

Urd. Urd. Urd.

Voices under the ground. On one level she knew that it was an image created by her oxygen-starved brain as she lay buried. On another it was real and true. Urd had come to her, lain down behind her and then put on her thin skin like a close-fitting suit. Urd was no longer merely her name. Urd was her.

Teresa woke up in her own bed at six o’clock on Monday morning feeling like a calf about to be turned out to pasture. The barn door had been opened after the long winter, and before her lay green meadows, flowers and the bright summer. There was a word for it: joyfulness. As she stood at her window wide awake, gazing out over the garden, she felt full of joy, and her whole body, not just her legs, was full of energy.

When the household began to wake up an hour later she lay down on her bed and pretended to be half-dead. She rubbed her eyes hard for a long time to make them look terrible, and when Maria came in Teresa explained that she felt awful and just couldn’t get up, couldn’t do anything. This was accepted with a sigh and a shrug, and Teresa was left in peace.

It was like that poem by Bob Hansson she had read a year or so earlier. The man who phones work and explains that he can’t come in. Why not? Is he ill? No, he’s far too healthy, but he might be in the following day if he feels worse.

She lay in bed impatiently waiting for the others to go off to work or to see friends so that she could be alone. When the house was finally empty, she got up. The first thing she did was to go down to the kitchen and pour herself a glass of water.

She sat for a long time looking at the clear liquid in the glass, enjoying the play of the surface and the spectrum of colours on the tablecloth when she tilted the glass and allowed the light to break up. Then she raised the glass to her lips.

A shudder ran through her body as the water slipped into her mouth. It was smooth and cool and crept over her tongue and palate like a caress. And they say water doesn’t taste of anything! It tasted of earth and iron and grass. Saltiness and sweetness in thin layers, the taste of depth and eternity. When she swallowed it was like receiving a gift, being able to taste something so delicious. And she still had plenty left in her glass.

It took her five minutes to finish the water, and when she went out into the garden afterwards she was so overwhelmed with the happiness bubbling up from the impressions flooding into her body that she had to sit down on the steps for a while. She closed her eyes, put her hands over her ears and concentrated only on the scents, the scents of early summer.

To think that people can walk around on this earth and not be aware of what is around them. What a waste. They might just as well be robots, soulless automata moving between work, the bank, the shop and the TV until their batteries run down.

Teresa had been just the same, but that person now lay crumpled in a grave. She was a goddess, and perceived things with the senses of a goddess. She was Urd, the primitive one.

And so her day passed. She wandered through the trees, gently running her hands over leaves and stones; she walked like Eve through Paradise, knowing that everything was hers, and everything was good.

She woke up feeling happy on Tuesday as well, and another day passed in a state of joyful awareness that might have burst her chest open if she hadn’t divided it into manageable parts, one or two senses at a time. Towards evening it slowly began to slip away from her.

She could hear the voices of her parents and her brothers again. Of course they were no longer her parents or her brothers: her family was thirteen people who were not present. But she knew what they were called, these people sitting around the dinner table with her.

Their inane babble about trivialities was a grating distraction and the food did not taste as good as it had done the previous day, when she had eaten very little and had had to conceal how much she was enjoying each bite of potato-the poor appetite fitted nicely with the impression of illness she wanted to maintain.

Tuesday evening was different. She pretended to feel weak and exhausted, closed her eyes and tried to recapture the feeling. It was there, but much fainter. She excused herself and went up to her room.

When she woke up on Wednesday another little bit had disappeared, and by Thursday morning she was being honest when she said she didn’t feel well. She told herself her senses were still stronger, but she was beginning to feel pretty much like an ordinary person. And that felt like an illness compared with the way things had been at the beginning of the week.

Friday and Saturday were the direct opposite of Monday and Tuesday. She felt ill, as if she was constantly quivering inside, but she had to pretend to the family that she was feeling much better so they wouldn’t stop her going to Stockholm on Sunday. It was stressful and difficult, and she collapsed at night into uneasy sleep filled with nightmares.

They would have had to bind her hand and foot to stop her going. She would have run away, hitch-hiked, caught the train without a ticket if necessary, but it was simpler if the others believed she was feeling OK. So at night she lay there tossing and turning, and during the day she walked around with arms folded or fists clenched in her pockets to hide her shaking hands, and all the time she smiled, smiled, smiled and spoke nicely.

Only when she was sitting on the train on Sunday was she able, at last, to drop the act. She slumped in her seat, flowing like jelly over the rough upholstery. When an elderly lady leaned forward to ask if she was all right, she went and shut herself in the toilet.

She looked at herself in the mirror. She looked every bit as sick as she had pretended to be on Monday: cold sweat, pallor; lank, greasy hair. She splashed her face a few times with cold water, dried herself with paper towels, then sat on the toilet and breathed deeply until some of the weight inside her chest disappeared.

She looked at her hands and forced them to stop shaking. Soon everything would be better. Soon she would be with her pack.

Just being with Theres on the subway, then the bus, made Teresa feel better; by the time they were lying on the blankets outside the wolf enclosure, her body was able to soak up the warmth of the sun. The shivering that had gripped her over the last few days diminished, and she was able to talk without having to control the shake in her voice. She could do it. With Theres beside her, she could do it.

She lay on her stomach gazing into the enclosure, but couldn’t see any of the wolves. She took her piece of wolf skin out of her pocket, waved it around and stroked it like a talisman.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Theres.

‘I want them to come. The wolves.’

‘Why?’

‘I want to see them.’

There was silence for a while, then Theres said, ‘Here they come.’

Teresa peered among the tree trunks and rocks, but there was no sign of any grey shape. When she turned to Theres to ask her where they were, she saw that Theres was looking over towards the far end of the fence, where the rest of the girls were approaching in a group.

‘I thought you meant the wolves,’ said Teresa.

‘We are the wolves. That’s what you said.’

Yes. That’s what she’d said. But the pack creeping along the narrow track was no more wolf-like than she was right now. They came and sat down, shuffling close to each other on the blankets with Theres at the centre. An inaudible whimper hung in the air along with a scent indistinguishable, to Teresa, from her own. The scent of exhaustion and nagging pain.

It turned out that the others had felt much the same over the course of the week. To begin with, a joyous, crackling proximity to life that felt indestructible, as if it would last forever, then the slow change to fever and despair as the feeling dissolved.

Like Teresa, the others found consolation in the group, relief in simply being close to one another, but the voices echoing between them were weak; empty in a ghostly way.

‘…I thought that now, at long last…and then when it disappeared, I saw myself…I mean, you’re like, nothing…I haven’t done anything, I’m never going to do anything…as if I was invisible…nobody’s going to remember me…everything will disappear…it’s as if you’re too small to be heard…when it disappeared, all I had left was empty hands…’

This went on for a good five minutes, a low whimpering made verbal, until Theres yelled, ‘Quiet!’

The voices broke off abruptly. Theres was holding both hands up in front of her, the palms facing outwards as if she was stopping a runaway train, and she shouted again, ‘Quiet! Quiet!’

If they could have pricked up their ears, they would have done so now. They were sitting in a huddle around Theres, who straightened up and looked from one to the other. They were focussed on her lips, waiting for a few words that could free them. A suggestion, an order, a telling-off. Anything.

When Theres opened her mouth, they were so intently anticipating some pithy, vital truth that it took them a couple of seconds to realise that she was singing.

I’m nothing special, in fact I’m a bit of a bore

If I tell a joke, you’ve probably heard it before

But I have a talent, a wonderful thing

’cause everyone listens when I start to sing

I’m so grateful and proud

All I want is to sing it out loud…

By the time she had got that far most of them had recognised the song, and even if they didn’t know the words to the verse, they knew the chorus. Theres’ pure, clear voice, so perfectly pitched, resonated through their bodies like a giant tuning fork, guiding them to the right note as they joined in.

So I say thank you for the music, the songs I’m singing

Thanks for all the joy they’re bringing…

Theres sang the song all the way through, the others helped out in the choruses, and the music was like morphine. The pain in their bodies eased, flowed out through the notes, and as long as the song went on there was nothing to fear. In the silence after the final words died away, they heard distant applause. People walking their dogs had stopped in various places and one of them shouted, ‘Yay! Sing Along at Skansen!’ before moving on.

Theres pointed towards Skansen and said, ‘That’s what I’m going to sing. There. The day after tomorrow. You will all come. Then it will be over. It will be good.’ She got up and went over to the fence, leaned against the wire and let out a low growl, trying to entice the wolves without success.

‘What do you mean, over?’ said Caroline. ‘What does she mean, it’ll be over? I don’t understand what she’s talking about.’

Teresa looked towards Skansen, imagining the Solliden stage somewhere far beyond the trees, just as she had seen it on TV. The crowds, the singers, the camera cranes and ‘Stockholm in My Heart’. The wall of young girls, just like them and very different from them, pressed against the barriers right at the front as they sang along. Theres standing on the stage. The rest of them in the audience. Among all those people.

‘Ronja?’ said Teresa. ‘Do you remember asking me where we were actually going, what we were going to do?’

Ronja nodded and shrugged her shoulders. ‘We’ve done stuff.’

‘No,’ said Teresa. ‘We haven’t done anything. We have only prepared ourselves.’ She glanced at the sign on the wolf enclosure: Do not feed the animals, then waved her hand towards it, towards Skansen. ‘But we are going to do something. We are going to feel good forever. And no bastard is ever going to forget us.’

Hitachi DS14DFL.

Weight 1.6 kg. Total length 210mm. Ergonomic, rubber-coated handle. 13mm chuck capacity. 1,200 revolutions per minute.

Teresa had searched for over an hour to find the right tool. It had to be battery operated, and have a slender handle which would suit small hands. It mustn’t be too big or heavy, but must be able to run a reasonably thick drill bit. It had to be available to buy all over the place. And it had to look good.

Behind the nondescript name Hitachi DS14DFL she found the answer. A slender tool with a long-lasting heavy duty lithium-ion battery. The handle looked inviting: she longed to hold it, to extend her arm with a sharp, whirling point.

She clicked on the group containing the other girls’ email addresses and forwarded the product information along with details of a number of different shops where the machine could be bought. They could improvise when it came to other tools or weapons, but their claws would be the same.

Sunday had become Monday while she sat at the computer searching for this: for the tool that would free them, at long last, from these lives in which they had never asked to be imprisoned. The moon was high in the sky outside her window, and soon she would be gone.

The itch in her body would not let her be. She paced the strip of moonlight on the floor of her bedroom, thinking about her mother and father asleep in their beds, thinking about the drill, thinking about the axe in the cellar. The only thing that stopped her was her reluctance to start a chain of events that would prevent her from being there on Tuesday.

Her fingers were tingling, the soles of her feet were burning and she was panting like a starving animal as she forced herself to quit the pacing before she woke everybody up; a knock on the door, a curious head poked into her room, and this particular night could end in disaster.

She sat on the bed and did something she hadn’t done for several months: she took her medication. She stuffed three tablets in her mouth and swallowed them without water. Then she sat still, hands resting on her knees, breathing and waiting for something to happen.

When there was no change after half an hour and her body was still being torn apart, she sat down at the computer and wrote a letter. She used the language Theres would use, because it helped her gather and simplify her thoughts. When the letter was finished she printed out four copies and placed them in envelopes on which she wrote addresses she had looked up on the internet.

Then she stood by the window looking at the moon, hugging herself and trying to survive the night.

On Monday she caught the bus to Rimsta and bought the chosen drill with the last of her savings. On the bus back she sat there holding the box close like a lifebuoy, and when she got home she unpacked the drill and placed it in the charger.

She planned and visualised, tried to think herself into the situation. She watched clips from Sing Along at Skansen on the net to see how the audience was deployed, the big tree in the middle, where the cameras were. She was afraid.

Afraid that her courage would fail when it came to the crunch, afraid that she would miss her opportunity because of the cowardice and the human frailty that still chafed away somewhere inside her.

That evening, Johannes rang.

The voices of her parents and her brothers had been reduced to meaningless background noise, whether they were speaking to her or not. She had nothing to do with them. So how come Johannes’ voice could still be heard?

‘Hi Teresa.’

Teresa. That name. She did remember it, she knew that in some way it meant her. Yes. When Johannes said it she could remember that other girl. Before Theres, before ‘Fly’, before Max Hansen and before Urd. Poor little Teresa with her poor little poems and her poor little life.

She spoke in Teresa’s voice. It was still there. In a way it was pleasant to speak in that voice. Teresa wasn’t suffering from this tearing hunger, Teresa didn’t have a bloody task to carry out. Teresa was Johannes’ friend, and always would be.

‘Hi Johannes.’

She lay down on the bed, closed her eyes and had a perfectly normal conversation with Johannes. They talked about Agnes, about people in school, about the alterations to the library. For a while Teresa pretended that these things were important, and it was nice.

After a while they slipped into talking about memories. Teresa allowed herself to be led, without resisting, to their cave, their bike rides, the places where they went swimming, the sheep. They talked for over two hours, and when Teresa picked up the drill and weighed it in her hand after saying goodbye, the whole thing seemed impossible.

She lunged, raced the motor and simulated resistance, her limbs flailing as she screamed, ‘Urd!’

Urd.

She managed to get a few hours’ sleep that night, lying in bed with the drill and squeezing the wonderful, soft grip that fitted her hand as if it had been made for her.

A person can think murderous thoughts and hide them behind a smile, she can fantasise about blood flowing and brain matter splattering as she eats her muesli, humming quietly to herself. But even if nothing concrete shows on the outside, people around her will notice something sooner or later. It leaks out like radiation or osmosis, seeping out of her very being.

Teresa’s parents had started to be afraid of her. You couldn’t put your finger on anything definite that she said or did, but there was a kind of shimmer around her, a black aura that made them feel uncomfortable as soon as she walked into a room.

When Teresa asked for a lift to Österyd more than an hour before the train was due to leave, no one asked any questions. They knew she was going to Stockholm to meet that friend of hers, but that was all they knew. If she wanted to go to Österyd first, then she could go to Österyd.

Teresa’s rucksack looked heavy, but when Göran offered to help her carry it she just looked at him in a way that made him lower his hands. They got in the car in silence, and they drove into Österyd in silence. When Teresa told him where she wanted to be dropped off, Göran said, ‘Isn’t that where Johannes lives?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you going to see him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh good! It might…brighten you up a bit.’

‘I hope so.’

Teresa got out of the car and grabbed her rucksack, then stood there with her head lowered. She didn’t close the door. When she looked at Göran a flash of pain passed through her eyes. He leaned over the passenger seat and held out his hand. ‘Sweetheart…’

Teresa backed away from his touch and said, ‘I’m not sure if I’m going to Stockholm. It depends. I’ll ring you if I don’t go.’ Then she slammed the door shut, turned away and walked towards the door of Johannes’ apartment block.

Göran sat there with his hands resting on the wheel. When Teresa had disappeared inside he let out a sob and lowered his head. His forehead hit one of the horn buttons, and the sound made him jump and look around. A man of about his own age with two supermarket carrier bags in his hands was standing looking at him. He waved, started the car and drove off.

Teresa hesitated before ringing the doorbell. This could be very, very painful. She hadn’t even turned around when she left her father, but before she could do anything else she just had to say goodbye to Johannes. Then whatever was going to happen could happen.

Her thumb hovered over the white plastic button as if it was wired to those Cruise missiles that could start a world war. The worst thing was that she didn’t know which action would start the chain of events: to push or not to push.

She pushed the button. No roar of engines going through twelve litres of rocket fuel per second, no terrified screams from the entire population of the world. Just a quiet ding dong, then footsteps in the hallway.

Johannes opened the door looking exactly the same as Teresa thought he had looked ever since his transformation. A pink T-shirt and khaki shorts, and he already had a tan even though the summer had hardly started. His eyes sparkled, and before Teresa could stop him he had flung his arms around her.

‘Teresa! It’s so good to see you!’

‘You too,’ she mumbled into his shoulder.

He took a step back, still holding onto her arms, and looked her up and down.

‘How are you? You don’t look too good, actually.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Oh, you know what I mean. Come in.’

Teresa took her rucksack with her into the living room and sat down in an armchair. The apartment looked like it had been decorated by several different people, all with appalling taste. Nothing matched anything else, and a standard lamp that looked like a valuable antique was standing next to a huge plastic flower on a Perspex box.

Johannes had mentioned how busy his mother was these days, how she didn’t have time to bother about what the apartment looked like.

Teresa looked around and asked, ‘Has Agnes’ mother been here?’

Johannes laughed out loud and told her a long story about how Clara, Agnes’ mother, had reacted the first time she came to dinner, how she had paused in front of a picture of a weeping child and eventually said, ‘Well, that’s certainly…a classic.’

When Teresa didn’t even smile at his anecdotes, he sighed and sat down on the sofa, tucked his hands between his knees and waited. Teresa shuffled forward to the edge of the armchair, as close to him as possible. Then she said, ‘I’ve killed people.’

Johannes grinned. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’ve killed two people. One by myself, and one with other people.’

His smile grew rigid then disappeared as he looked her in the eye. ‘You can’t be serious.’

‘I am serious. And today I’m going to kill some more.’

Johannes frowned as if she were telling him a joke he just didn’t get, then he snorted. ‘Why are you saying this? Of course you’re not going to kill people. Of course you haven’t already killed people. What’s going on, Teresa?’

She opened her rucksack. On the dark brown coffee table she placed the drill, a hammer, a carving knife and a small pair of bolt cutters. ‘These are the tools we’re going to use. The others have got the same. More or less.’

‘What others?’

‘The others who are going to be with me. My pack.’

Johannes got up and walked around the room, rubbing his scalp. Then he came and stood next to Teresa. He looked at the tools, then at her. ‘What are you talking about? Stop it, Teresa. What’s the matter with you?’

‘I can’t stop it. But I’m scared.’

‘I’m not fucking surprised. What are you scared of?’

‘That I won’t be able to do it. I’m the one that has to go first.’

Johannes stroked her hair, shaking his head at the same time. Then he knelt down in front of her and said, ‘Come on. Come on,’ and put his arms around her again, holding her tight as he whispered, ‘Listen, Teresa. You haven’t killed anyone and you’re not going to kill anyone and you have to stop talking like this. Why would you kill anyone?’

Teresa pushed him away and said, ‘Because I can. Because I want to. Because it makes me alive.’

‘You want to kill people?’

‘Yes. I really, really want to. I long to do it. But I don’t know if I dare. I don’t know if I’m…ready.’

Johannes sighed and raised his eyebrows, then said in a tone which suggested he was prepared to play along a little bit, ‘So how will you know if you’re ready, then?’

‘By killing you.’

‘You’re going to kill me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Er…when?’

‘Now.’

A shadow passed over Johannes’ face as he tired of the game. With a swift movement he picked up the hammer and held it out to Teresa, still kneeling in front of her. ‘Go on then, kill me. Do it.’

‘You don’t believe me?’

‘No.’

Teresa raised the hammer and said, ‘Are you brave enough to close your eyes?’

He looked her in the eyes. For a long time. Then he closed his eyes. His eyelids were thin, delicate and completely relaxed. He wasn’t screwing his eyes up at all, his breathing was calm and even, and there was the hint of a smile on his lips. His cheeks were covered in fine, downy hairs and he was her best friend and the only boy she had perhaps actually loved. She said, ‘Bye then,’ and slammed the hammer into his temple.

She kept on hitting him until only a tiny bit of life remained. Then she picked up the drill and opened him up. The battery was fully charged, and it took her only a couple of seconds to drill through the skull. Johannes’ legs jerked in a series of final cramps, kicking over the plastic flower. Then she bent over him and took what had been the essence of him.

When she got up her path was clearly marked, and she knew she had the strength to follow it. There was nothing left. No further considerations, nothing to return to. She was entirely happy as she closed the door behind her and walked down the stairs, through the odours of frying food, cleaning products and dust warmed by the sun, tickling her nostrils.

In the box outside the railway station she posted the letters addressed to the four main national newspapers: Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet, Expressen and Aftonbladet. The letters were all exactly the same, and she had written them because she could.

Hi,

Today at Sing Along at Skansen we are going to kill a lot of people. We might die too. You never know.

You will ask why. Why, why, why. On the news placards. In the papers. Big thick letters. WHY? A sea of lighted candles. Pieces of paper with messages. People weeping. And over and above everything: WHY?

And this is our answer (wait for it now): BECAUSE!!!!

Because the tide of death is rising. Do you realise the tide of death is rising? In our schools. On Idol. In H & M. It is rising. Everyone knows. Everyone feels. No one realises.

Today it will overflow.

We were the nice little girls down at the front. We screamed and wept on cue. We worshipped ourselves when you made us into stars. We bought ourselves from you. ‘High five,’ you said. ‘Congratulations!’

The tide of death is rising. Thanks to you. It’s all thanks to you. You have deserved it all.

Goodbye

The wolves of Skansen

There wasn’t really anything she wanted to say. She had made up a reason because it felt appropriate. If you’re going to do something magnificent then you might as well come up with a magnificent reason, it makes things tidier. She had sat at the computer and put herself in her own position. If a group of girls were about to do what they were about to do, what might a nice farewell letter look like?

Then she had written it. If everything went the way she had planned it, the letter would be examined to the point of exhaustion, and every single word would be analysed. But she didn’t mean anything. She imagined herself and made things up. When she read through what she had written, she found it was all true. But it wasn’t about her. Nothing had ever been about her. Perhaps that was the reason.