Midwinter Sacrifice

22

‘Do you think he’s expecting us?’

Johan Jakobsson leaves the words hanging limply in the air as they pull into the drive.

‘Bound to be,’ Börje Svärd says, flaring his nostrils in a way that makes the brown hairs of his moustache vibrate. ‘He knows we’re coming.’

Three grey stone buildings in the middle of the Östgöta plain, a few kilometres outside a sleepy Maspelösa. The buildings seem almost suffocated by the snow piled in drifts against the already inadequate windows. The thatched roofs are pressed down by the weight of all the white. There are lights in the building to the left. A newly built garage, with shrubs planted all round it, has been squeezed in between two large oaks.

Only one problem: Maspelösa never wakes up, Johan thinks.

A few farms, some detached houses built in the fifties, a few council houses scattered across the open landscape: one of those settlements on the plain that life seems to have left behind.

They stop, get out, knock.

From the building opposite comes the sound of mooing. Then the sound of something banging on metal. Börje turns round.

The low, crooked door opens.

A head almost entirely covered in hair peers out of the darkness inside.

‘And who the hell are you?’

The beard shaggy, seeming to cover the whole of his face. But his blue eyes are as sharp as his nose.

‘Johan Jakobsson and Börje Svärd, Linköping Police. Can we come in? I presume you’re Rickard Skoglöf.’

The man nods. ‘ID first.’

They hunt through their pockets, have to take off their gloves and undo their coats to find their ID.

‘Happy now?’ Börje asks.

Rickard Skoglöf gestures with one hand as he pushes the door open with the other.

‘We’re born with the gift. It arrives in our flesh the moment we arrive in this dimension.’ Rickard Skoglöf’s voice is as clear as ice.

Johan rubs his eyes and looks round the kitchen. Low ceiling. The draining-board full of dirty plates, pizza boxes. Pictures of Stonehenge on the walls, Old Norse symbols, rune-stones. And Skoglöf’s clothes: obviously home-made trousers of black-dyed canvas and an even blacker kaftan-like affair hanging loosely over a fat stomach.

‘Gift?’

Johan can hear how sceptical Börje sounds.

‘Yes, the power to see, to influence.’

‘Soothsaying?’

The house is cold. An old eighteenth-century farmhouse that Rickard Skoglöf has renovated himself: ‘Got it cheap, but it’s bloody draughty.’

‘Soothsaying is the word for it. But you have to be careful about using the power. It takes as much life as it gives.’

‘So why a website about your sooth?’

‘My soothsaying. In our culture we’ve lost track of our roots. But I have comrades.’

Rickard Skoglöf crouches down and goes into the next room. They follow him.

A worn sofa against one wall, and a huge computer screen, switched off, set up on a shiny desk with a glass top, two whirring hard drives on the floor, a modern black leather office chair behind the desk.

‘Comrades?’

‘Some people who are interested in soothsaying and in our Old Norse forebears.’

‘And you have meetings?’

‘A few times a year. Most of the time we communicate on discussion forums and by email.’

‘How many of you are there?’

Rickard Skoglöf sighs. He stops and looks at them. ‘If you want to carry on talking you’ll have to come out to the barn with me. I have to feed Sæhrimnir and the others.’

Cackling hens run to and fro in an even colder space with badly plastered walls. There is a pair of new cross-country skis leaning in one corner.

‘You like skiing?’ Johan asks.

‘No, I don’t.’

‘But you’ve got a new pair of skis.’

Rickard Skoglöf doesn’t reply, just carries on towards the animals.

‘Bloody hell, it’s below freezing in here,’ Börje says. ‘Your livestock could freeze to death.’

‘No chance,’ Rickard Skoglöf says as he scatters food for the hens from a bucket.

Two pens along one wall.

A fat black pig in one, a brown and white cow in the other. They are both eating, the pig grunting happily at the winter apples he has just been given.

‘If you think I’m going to give you the names of the comrades who usually come to our meetings, you’re mistaken. You’ll have to find them yourselves. But it won’t do you any good.’

‘How do you know that?’ Johan asks.

‘Only harmless kids and old folk with no lives of their own are interested in this sort of thing.’

‘What about you? Haven’t you got a life of your own?’

Rickard Skoglöf gestures towards the animals. ‘The farm and these beasts are probably more of a life than most people have.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘I’ve got the gift,’ Rickard Skoglöf says.

‘So what is this gift, Rickard? In purely concrete terms?’ Börje is staring intently at the canvas-clad figure in front of them.

Rickard Skoglöf puts down the bucket of feed. When he looks up at them his face is contorted with derision. He waves the question away with his hand.

‘So the power of soothsaying gives and takes life,’ Johan says. ‘Is that why you make sacrifices?’

The look in Rickard Skoglöf’s eyes gets even more weary.

‘Oh,’ he says. ‘You think I’m the one who strung up Bengt Andersson in a tree. Not even that journalist who was here before you thought that.’

‘You didn’t answer my question.’

‘If I make sacrifices? Yes, I do. But not like you think.’

‘And what do we think?’

‘That I kill animals. And maybe people. But it’s the gesture that matters. The willingness to give. Time, labour. The unity of bodies.’

‘The unity of bodies?’

‘Yes, the act can be a sacrifice. If one is open.’

Like my wife and I do every third week? Johan thinks. Is that what you mean? Instead he asks, ‘And what were you doing on the night between Wednesday and Thursday last week?’

‘You’ll have to ask my girlfriend,’ Rickard Skoglöf says. ‘Right, the animals will be okay for a while now. They can stand a bit of cold. They’re not as feeble as other creatures.’

When they come out into the yard a young woman is standing barefoot in the snow with her arms raised away from her body. The cold doesn’t seem to bother her, she’s wearing just pants and a vest, and she has her eyes closed, her head raised to the sky, her black hair a long shadow down the white skin of her back.

‘This is Valkyria,’ Rickard Skoglöf says. ‘Valkyria Karlsson. Morning meditation.’

Johan can see Börje losing his temper.

‘Valkyria,’ he yells. ‘Valkyria. Time to stop the mumbo-jumbo. We want to talk to you.’

‘Börje, for God’s sake.’

‘Oh, shout away,’ Rickard Skoglöf says. ‘It won’t help. She’ll be done in ten minutes. There’s no point trying to disturb her. We can wait in the kitchen.’

They walk past Valkyria.

Her brown eyes are open. But they see nothing. She’s millions of miles away, Johan thinks. Then he thinks about the act, of opening yourself to someone else, something else.

Valkyria Karlsson’s skin is pink with cold, her fingers somehow crystal clear. She is holding a cup of hot tea in front of her nose, inhaling the aroma.

Rickard Skoglöf is sitting at the table, grinning happily, evidently pleased that he is making things difficult for them.

‘What were you doing yesterday evening?’ Börje asks.

‘We went to the cinema,’ Rickard Skoglöf says.

Valkyria Karlsson puts down her cup.

‘The new Harry Potter,’ she says in a soft voice. ‘Entertaining nonsense.’

‘Did either of you know Bengt Andersson?’

Valkyria shakes her head, then looks at Rickard.

‘I’d never heard of him until I read about him in the paper. I have a gift. That’s all.’

‘What about last Wednesday evening? What were you doing then?’

‘We made a sacrifice.’

‘We opened ourselves at home,’ Valkyria whispers, and Johan looks at her breasts, heavy and light at the same time, breaking the law of gravity, floating under her vest.

‘So you don’t know of anyone in your circles who could have done this?’ Börje asks. ‘For heathen reasons, so to speak.’

Rickard Skoglöf laughs. ‘I think it’s time for you to leave now.’