Rites of Spring

28

She is in a forest. Conifers, anthills, self-seeded birch. Their house is in a dip right at the bottom of the slope. She, her big brother and his friends are playing up among the trees.

They’ve built two dens near the top, one for Ronny and one for her. It’s Ronny who’s made all the decisions, helped her to put up the frame and fix the poles. Inside she’s made a little pen out of four branches, filled it with pine-cone animals that she and Ronny have made together. The wooden doll her daddy whittled for her is sitting beside the pen. He carved eyes, a nose and a mouth into a sturdy branch, with four protruding twigs forming arms and legs. She’s called it Stubby. She has prettier dolls at home – two Sindys with lots of different outfits, but still she likes Stubby best. Likes sitting in her den with him in her arms, listening to the older boys outside. She feels safe, secure.

Then suddenly it’s evening. Blue lights flashing down by their house, doors slamming, agitated voices.

Ronny and his friends have disappeared, but someone else is running up the slope towards her. Daddy. His face is white, he’s carrying something. An object wrapped in a Konsum carrier bag. He takes Stubby off her, pushes the bag into her hands.

‘Jenny – take this and run and hide it. Quickly! Good girl!’

She gets to her feet and runs as fast as she can. Behind her she can hear more shouting, dogs barking.

In the forest she falls over. Hurts her knee, but doesn’t cry. She has to help Daddy. Has to be a good girl.

She scrabbles with her fingers, digs a hole in the ground, pushes the plastic bag into the hole. Presses a piece of turf down on top and covers the whole thing with dry branches. Then she goes back to her den and hides right at the back with her eyes tightly closed.

Afterwards, when Daddy comes back, he praises her. Says she’s his best girl. Promises to buy her something nice. But when he asks her to show him where she buried the bag, she can’t remember. Everything looks so different in the dark, and she can’t find the right spot.

Daddy goes crazy, he smashes up both dens, stamps all over the pine-cone animals. He shouts horrible words at her, at Mummy, at Ronny. Grabs her by the arm, it hurts, puts his face close to hers and hisses that the bag doesn’t belong to him, that this is a fucking disaster. Says he’s going to lock her in the cellar and throw away the key if the bag doesn’t come to light.

She is crying now. So is Ronny.

Daddy isn’t listening. He makes them spend the whole of the next day searching in the forest.

In the afternoon Ronny finds the bag at long last, which makes Daddy calm down. She is spared the cellar this time, but Daddy barely looks at her for weeks. She never sees Stubby again. Maybe Daddy threw him on the fire, like he said?

Ronny and his friends rebuild the dens, bigger and better. They help her to make new pine-cone animals and carve a new wooden doll for her. But it’s never the same again.

Thea wakes in the early hours again. The nightlight glows faintly, keeping the darkness at bay, slowing her pulse.

The dream echoes inside her. How many years since she last had it? She can’t remember.

Emee is awake, gazing at her with those pale eyes as if she understands exactly what thoughts are going around in Thea’s head.

Thea gets up, gets dressed. Checks that she has her cigarettes and lighter, fetches the dog lead from the hallway.

David’s bedroom door is closed. Her first instinct is to creep out as quietly as possible so as not to wake him, then she changes her mind, opens the door a fraction.

The bed is unmade, the clothes valet where David usually hangs his shirt and trousers is empty.

Thea closes the door. Has a cup of coffee before pulling on her jacket and boots. She tucks the Polaroid in her pocket and steps outside. The sun is rising, so she doesn’t need a torch.

She cuts across to the path leading to the back of the castle. David’s car isn’t in its usual place. When he mentioned an early meeting last night, she’d assumed it was an excuse to avoid staying in her room, but maybe she was wrong. Then again, who has a meeting at this hour?

It’s just before six. The morning mist covers the moat like a woollen blanket. She crosses the bridge, lets Emee go in the forest as usual. Lights a cigarette. It’s her last.

She stops at the signpost. The stone circle lies straight ahead in the forest; she can just make out the contours of an almost overgrown path. She follows it through the trees. To begin with, it’s easy. The deciduous trees are tall, the ground is covered only in wood anemones and moss. But as the terrain starts to slope downwards, the vegetation becomes wilder. The moss is wet, the wood anemones give way to bracken, and time and time again she is forced to take a detour around thick, impenetrable brambles.

She thinks about what Little Stefan told her: that Svartgården was boarded up and the track destroyed. An attempt to obliterate all memories of Elita Svart and her family. To wash away the stain on the village’s reputation.

The morning sun is low in the sky, penetrating the leafy canopy only occasionally. It is no longer possible to make out the path, and Thea is worried that she’s lost her way in the gloom. Has she gone too far to the west and missed her target? She stops, checks her watch and tries to work out which direction she’s going in. It’s ten minutes since she left the signpost.

She hears rustling behind her, then the sharp crack of a branch breaking. Emee, probably. She calls her name, but there’s no sign of the dog.

Thea turns slightly to the east and sets off again. She thinks she can smell the marsh, which ought to mean that she’s going the right way.

She circumvents another patch of brambles and finds herself in a glade. Six standing stones, each approximately one metre in diameter, are arranged in a circle, with a seventh flat stone in the centre.

The glade is surrounded by gnarled old trees of a completely different type from the rest of the forest. Each one consists of several slender trunks leaning outwards in different directions until they form the crown. In the dim morning light it looks as if these trunks are actually tall human beings whose feet have become part of the trees’ roots, their hands part of the crown. The veils of mist slowly swirling over the wet grass add to the sense of unreality.

There is a pole beside Thea which reminds her of the one next to the Gallows Oak. The information board is lying on the ground, overgrown with grass. With a little effort she manages to lift it. The first part of the text is barely legible, but she manages to work out that the strange, humanoid trees are hawthorn. She remembers what Dr Andersson told her the other day – that Tornaby got its name from the hawthorn, once regarded as a sacred tree.

The rest of the text is easier to read.

The stone circle probably dates from the sixth century, marking a grave or possibly a meeting place of some kind. At this time the castle forest was an island, surrounded by extensive marshlands, which made it suitable for religious ceremonies.

The central stone is older than the rest. On the top there is a small bowl-shaped hollow, common during the Bronze Age. It was probably used during fertility rites, when grains of corn or small figures made of twigs were ‘sacrificed’ in the hollow to ensure a good harvest. The custom lived on in the area until the mid-nineteenth century. The stone is still referred to locally as the sacrificial stone.

The smooth surface of the stone is dark with dampness. The hollow is about ten centimetres wide and maybe half as deep. The dew has formed a small puddle in the bottom.

Thea takes out the Polaroid. Steps back. The background in the photograph looks slightly different. The trees aren’t so tall or overgrown. The stone, however, is exactly the same. She moves around until she finds the precise angle from which the photograph was taken. She half-closes her eyes, pictures Elita standing on the stone, David and his three friends on either side of her. The spring sacrifice and her four attendants. Five people in total.

But there must have been a sixth person present – the photographer. Unless the camera had some kind of automatic timer, of course.

She looks closely at the picture, trying to see if there’s a shadow from the person behind the camera, but the image is too pale, the colours faded.

A sound interrupts her train of thought, another branch snapping, but this time she can tell where it’s come from. Among the trees, more or less opposite the point where she emerged into the glade. She is just about to call Emee when she hears more noises, branches scraping against clothing, a faint metallic click.

She sees a movement among the hawthorns and realises she’s holding her breath. A dark silhouette appears through the mist. A man pushing a bicycle. He is on his way into the glade, eyes fixed on the sacrificial stone. He doesn’t seem to have noticed her, not until he’s almost there. He stops dead, drops the bicycle. The colour drains from his face, his eyelids flicker, and for a second she thinks he’s going to faint.

‘Hi, Bertil,’ she says. ‘What are you doing here?’