Midwinter Sacrifice

25

Hultsjön Forest, late autumn 2001

What are you doing in the forest all on your own?

This late, little girl?

No mushrooms at this time of year, and too late for berries.

Dusk is falling.

Tree trunks, undergrowth, branches, treetops, leaves, moss and worms. They’re all getting ready for the most intimate abuse.

Child-killers. Rapists. Is it one man? Or several? A woman, women?

They creep up on you as you walk through the forest, whistling. The eyes. They see you. But you don’t see them.

Or are they waiting further on, the eyes?

Darkness is falling fast now, but you aren’t scared, you could walk this track with your eyes blindfolded, getting your bearings by smell alone.

The snakes, spiders, everything that decays.

An elk?

A deer?

You turn round, still, silence falls over the forest.

Walk on. Your car is waiting by the road; soon you’ll see Hultsjön lazing in the last of the evening light.

Then everything gets dark.

Footsteps on the track behind you.

Someone pulling your legs from under you, pressing you down on to the damp ground, hot and sweet breath on your neck. So many hands, so much force.

It doesn’t matter what you do. Snake-fingers, spider-legs, they eat through your clothes, the black roots of the trees stifle your screams, tying you for ever to the silence of the earth.

The worms crawl up the inside of your thighs, sticking out their claws, tearing your skin, your insides.

How coarse, how hard is a tree trunk?

Flesh and skin and blood. How hard?

No.

Not like that.

No one hears your screams in the black vegetation. And if they heard your screams, would they come?

No one is listening.

There is no salvation.

Only the damp, the cold and the pain, the relentless harshness that burns in you, tearing apart everything that is you.

For ever silent.

Sleep, dream, wake.

The sweet breath in the air you are breathing in the forest night. Naked body, bleeding body, doomed to wander the edge of the forest around Hultsjön.

You must have walked a long way.

You were breathing. The night-chill fled in panic when you crept out on to the road. The car headlights.

You had walked so far.

The lights grow, blind, corrode.

Is it death that is coming? Evil?

Again?

It came yesterday, didn’t it, with quick steps it ran up, from where it lay hidden behind scarred bushes.