The Darkest Room

31

Henrik Jansson was fighting his way through the blinding snow. He tucked his head down toward his chest in the roaring wind, and had only the vaguest idea of where he was.

He guessed that he had reached the meadows by the shore to the south of the lighthouses at Eel Point, but he couldn’t see them. The snow scratched at his eyes.

Idiot. He should have stayed inside. He had always stayed indoors when the blizzard came.

One January weekend when he was seven years old and staying in his grandparents’ cottage, he had had a nightmare: a pride of roaring lions had been stalking around in his room during the night.

When he woke up in the morning, the lions were gone. Everything was silent in the house, but when he got up and looked out, the ground between the buildings was sparkling white.

“There was a blizzard overnight,” his grandfather Algot had explained.

The undulating snow was almost as high as the window ledges-Henrik couldn’t open the front door.

“How can you tell, Grandfather… that it’s a blizzard?”

“You don’t know when the blizzard is coming,” Algot had said. “But you know when it arrives.”

And Henrik knew, there on the Baltic shore. This was the blizzard. The gales before it started had been nothing more than a premonition.

Algot’s scythe swung in the wind, weighing him down. He was forced to drop it in the snow, but hung onto the ax. He took three steps over the solid, frozen ground, hunkered down, and rested. Then three more steps.

After a while he had to rest after every other step.

The thin ice cover out at sea was smashed to pieces by the strengthening waves. Henrik heard the long drawn-out rumbling, but could no longer see the sea-he could see nothing in any direction.

The pains in his stomach had abated. It might have been the effects of the icy wind, reducing the bleeding, but at the same time he felt as if his entire body were slowly becoming numb.

His consciousness began to drift away-sometimes it was so far away that it felt as if he were hovering next to his body.

Henrik thought about Katrine, the woman who had drowned at Eel Point. He had enjoyed sanding and replacing the floors with her. She had been small and blonde, just like Camilla.

Camilla.

He remembered her warmth as they lay in bed. But that thought quickly disappeared in the wind.

It was too late to turn back toward to the boathouses at Enslunda, and he didn’t even know where they were any longer. And where were the fucking lighthouses? Henrik peered up into the wind and caught a brief glimpse of a faint

flashing light in the distance-so he was heading in the right direction.

Breathe in, move forward, breathe out.

Then came a hard shove from the direction of the sea that stopped him in the middle of a step. The wind had increased in strength yet again, although Henrik had thought that was impossible.

He sank to his knees. At the same time he dropped the ax in the snow, but managed to pick it up again with enormous difficulty, and tucked the shaft inside his jacket. The ax was meant for the Serelius brothers, and he mustn’t lose it.

He crept north, or at least in the direction he thought was north. There was nothing else he could do; if he stopped to rest in the storm, he would soon freeze to death.

Thieves deserve to be thrashed, he could hear his grandfather saying. They’re good for nothing but fertilizer and fish food.

Henrik shook his head.

No, his grandfather had always been able to trust him. The only people he had ever deceived were his teachers, some of his friends, his parents, and John, his boss at the flooring company. And the people who owned the houses. And Camilla, of course; he had sometimes lied to her when they were together, and in the end she had grown tired of him.

A screwdriver in the stomach, perhaps that was what he deserved.

Suddenly someone was clawing at him. Henrik panicked before he realized it was just long leaves from the reeds, whirling around in the wind.

He stopped, closed his eyes, and curled up in the icy blast. If he just relaxed and stopped struggling, he would soon go completely numb, in his stomach and right through the rest of his body.

Was death warm or cold? Or somewhere in between?

Somewhere in his head were the Serelius brothers with their broad smiles. That got him moving again.