The Darkest Room

WINTER 1916

Alma Ljunggren, the wife of the master lighthouse keeper, is sitting at her loom in the room at the back of the house. A wall clock is ticking behind her. Alma cannot see the sea from here, and that suits her very well. She doesn’t want to see what her husband, Georg, and the other lighthouse keepers are doing down by the shore.

There are no voices to be heard in the house; all the other women are down on the shore. Alma knows that she too should be there to support the men, but she dare not go. She hasn’t the strength to be any kind of support; she barely has the courage to breathe.

The wall clock continues to tick.

A sea monster has drifted ashore at Eel Point this winter morning, in the third year of the Great War. The monster was discovered after last night’s fierce snowstorm: a black monster with pointed steel spikes all over its round body.

Sweden is a neutral country as far as the Great War on the Continent is concerned, but is still affected by it.

The monster on the shore is a mine. Presumably Russian, dropped the previous year in order to stop the Germans from transporting ore across the Baltic. But of course it doesn’t

matter what country it comes from, it is just as dangerous anyway.

The ticking in the room suddenly stops.

Alma turns her head.

The wall clock behind her has stopped. The pendulum is hanging straight down.

Alma picks up a pair of black sheep shears from a basket beside her loom, gets up, and goes out of the room. She throws a shawl around her shoulders and walks out onto the veranda, at the front of the manor house. She still refuses to look down toward the shore.

The waves must have torn the mine free of its mooring out at sea during the blizzard over the past few days, and slowly washed it toward the land. Now it is stuck fast in the sandy seabed and the slushy ice only fifty yards or so from the southern lighthouse.

The year before, a German torpedo drifted ashore just north of Marnäs. It was shot to pieces, and the naval authorities now insist that mines be dealt with in the same way. The Russian mine must be destroyed, but it is not possible to blow it up so close to the lighthouses. It must be towed away. The lighthouse keepers are going to place a rope around the mine and then carefully tow it away from the lighthouses.

Master lighthouse keeper Georg Ljunggren is leading the work at sea. He is standing in the prow of an open motorboat, and up on the veranda Alma can hear her husband’s booming orders echoing out across the shore, all the way up to the house.

When she opens the door, she can hear him very clearly.

Alma goes out into the cold and walks across the courtyard, recently cleared of snow, toward the barn, without looking down toward the shore.

There is no one in the barn, but when she opens the heavy door and walks in, the cows and horses start to move in the darkness. The storm makes them uneasy.

Alma slowly walks up the steps to the hayloft. There is no one here either.

The hay reaches almost to the roof, but there is a small passageway along the wall so that she can make her way across the wooden floor.

She walks over to the far wall and stops. She has stood here several times over the past few years, but now she reads the names once again.

Then she takes the sheep shears, places the point against one of the planks of wood, and begins to carve today’s date: December 7, 1916. And a name.

The shouts from the shore fall silent.

Everything is quite still, and up in the loft Alma drops the shears. She clasps her hands together by the wall and prays to God.

Everything is silent at Eel Point.

Then comes the explosion.

It is as if the air all around the manor house is compressed, and at the same time the thundering roar from the shore rolls inland. The blast wave comes a second later; it cracks several windowpanes in the barn and deafens Alma. She closes her eyes, sinks back into the hay.

The mine has exploded too soon. Alma knows it.

When the blast wave has passed, she gets to her feet in the hayloft.

After a few frozen seconds the cows begin to bellow down in the barn. Then comes the sound of loud voices from the meadow by the shore. They are getting closer to the house very quickly.

Alma hurries down the steps.

Both lighthouses are still standing, she sees; they haven’t been touched. But the mine is gone; all that is left is gray, murky water where it lay. And there is no sign of the lighthouse keepers’ boat.

Alma sees the other women coming: Ragnhild and Eivor,

the wives of the lighthouse keepers. They stare at her, their expression numb.

“The master?” asks Alma.

Ragnhild shakes her head stiffly, and now Alma can see that her pinafore is wet with blood.

“My Albert… was standing in the prow.”

Her knees give way. Alma rushes toward her along the stone path and catches her as she falls.