The Darkest Room

WINTER 1900

It is the first year of the new century. There is not a breath of wind on this sunny Wednesday, the last in January, but Eel Point is completely cut off from the outside world.

The blizzard moved in across Öland the previous week, and for twelve hours the entire coast was covered in snow. Now the wind has died away, but the temperature outside is minus fifteen degrees. The road has disappeared under great mounds of snow several feet deep, and the families at the manor have received neither mail nor visitors for six days. The animals still have plenty of fodder in the barn, but there aren’t many potatoes left and as usual there isn’t much wood.

Brother and sister Petter and Ebba Lind have gone out to chop up blocks of ice, which will be buried in the food cellar at the manor to keep the food cool when the spring comes. They clambered over the white ramparts of ice and snow down by the shore at Eel Point after breakfast. The sun was just coming up, shining over an unbroken sea of ice covered in snow. They went past the last island at about nine o’clock,

out into a sparkling world of great expanses of snow and sunbeams.

They are walking on the water now, just as Jesus did. The snow that covers the ice crunches beneath their boots.

Petter is fifteen, two years older than Ebba. He leads the way, but stops and looks back from time to time.

“Okay?” he asks.

“Fine,” says Ebba.

“Are you warm enough?”

She nods, almost too out of breath to talk.

“Do you think we’ll be able to see southern Gotland out there?” she asks.

Petter shakes his head. “I think it’s too flat… and a bit too far away.”

After another half hour or so they can finally see open water beyond the ice. The crests of the waves glitter in the sun, but the sea is coal black.

There are many birds out here. Flocks of long-tailed ducks have gathered out at sea, and closer to the ice a pair of swans are swimming. A sea eagle is circling above the line dividing the water and the ice. Ebba thinks it is watching something, perhaps the ducks-but suddenly the eagle swoops and soars upward again with something slender and black in its talons. She shouts to Petter:

“Look at that!”

Eels, there are lots and lots of shiny eels wriggling on the ice. Hundreds of eels that have crawled up out of the sea and can’t get back. Petter hurries over to them and puts his ice saw down in the snow.

“We’ll catch some,” he calls, bending down and opening his rucksack. The eels slither away from him, try to wriggle away, but he follows them and grabs hold of one. Then he picks up more, half a dozen, and his rucksack comes to life and starts writhing around as the eels wind themselves around one another trying to find a way out.

Ebba moves further north and starts to collect some eels

of her own. She picks them up by their flat tails to avoid their sharp little teeth, but they are slimy and difficult to get hold of. But there is plenty of meat on them; every female weighs several pounds.

She pushes two into her rucksack and chases a third, which she also manages to catch eventually.

The air has grown colder. She looks up and sees that the feathery cirrus clouds have drifted west from the horizon and settled like a veil over the sun. Lower, darker rain clouds have followed them, and the wind has gotten up once again.

Ebba has not noticed that the wind has increased, but now she hears the sound of breaking waves out in the open sea.

“Petter!” she shouts. “Petter, we have to go back!”

He is over a hundred yards away among the eels on the ice, and doesn’t seem to hear her.

The waves are getting higher and higher, they are beginning to swirl in across the white edge, making the ice cover slowly begin to rise and fall. Ebba can feel it swaying.

She lets go of the eel she has caught and begins to run toward Petter. But then she hears a terrible sound. Cracks like thunder-not from the clouds in the sky, but from the ice beneath her feet.

It is the deep roar that comes when the waves and the wind make the ice cover break apart.

“Petter!” she shouts again, more afraid than ever.

He has stopped catching eels now and turned around. But he is still almost a hundred yards away from her.

Then Ebba hears a sharp explosion like a shot from a cannon very close by, and she sees the ice opening up. A black crack has appeared in all that whiteness, a dozen or so yards closer inland.

The water is pushing the ice apart. The crack is widening rapidly.

Instinctively Ebba forgets everything else and begins to run. When she stops at the crack, it is almost three feet wide, and it is growing all the time.

Ebba cannot swim, and is afraid of water. She looks at the crack and turns around in despair.

Petter is on his way to her; he is running with his hand over his rucksack but is still more than fifty steps away. He waves toward the land.

“Jump, Ebba!”

She leaps, straight over the black water.

She just manages to land on the far edge of the ice, stumbles and rolls over.

Petter is left alone on the big ice floe. He reaches the edge just thirty seconds or so after Ebba, but by now the crack is several yards wide. He stops and hesitates, and it grows even wider.

The brother and sister stare at each other in terror. Petter shakes his head and points toward the shore.

“You have to fetch help, Ebba! They need to get a boat out!”

Ebba nods and turns away. She races off across the ice.

The wind and the waves continue to break up the ice, and the cracks pursue her. Twice new abysses open up in front of her, but she manages to leap across.

She turns around and sees Petter one last time. He is standing alone on a gigantic ice floe beyond a black gulf that is growing all the time.

Then she has to start running again. The thundering roar as the ice breaks up echoes along the coastline.

Ebba runs and runs with the increasing wind at her back, and now finally she can see the manor between the lighthouses-her home. But the big estate is just a little dark red clump on the land; she is still far out on the ice. She prays to God, for Petter and for herself, and prays to Him to forgive them for going so far out.

She leaps across a fresh crack, slips, but carries on running.

Eventually she reaches the ramparts of ice at the edge of the sea. She gets down on all fours and scrambles over them, sniveling and sobbing. She’s safe now.

Ebba gets up and looks back. The horizon has disappeared behind a veil of fog.

The ice floes have gone too. They have drifted east, off toward Finland and Russia.

Ebba carries on up the shore, sobbing. She knows she must hurry back to the house now and get the lighthouse keepers to put out to sea in their boats. But where are they to look for Petter?

The last of her strength gives out, and she falls to her knees in the snow.

Up on the hill the house at Eel Point looks down on her. The roof of the manor house is white with snow, but the windows are as black as coal.

As black as holes in the ice, or as black as angry eyes. Ebba imagines that God has eyes like that.