The Quarry

16

Vendela weighed the cow stick in her hand. Was it really the same one? It looked shorter now than when she was little, but it was still unpleasantly long. She thought she could hear the faint sound of cow bells in the distance.

Go, go, go!

After forty years she can still remember the swishing sound of the stick, but not why she had hit the cows so hard. Was she a sadistic child?

She put the stick back in the shed and walked through the empty garden, in amongst the trees next to the house.

A narrow path led to an open space. Now she was standing in the pasture where the cows used to graze in the summer, but it was no longer a meadow; it was overgrown with tangled bushes. There were no cowpats in the grass. No cows had grazed here for many years.

Rosa, Rosa and Rosa, she thought, and started to run.

The alvar began beyond the stone wall on the other side of the pasture. It had been almost completely devoid of trees and bushes when Vendela was little, but now she could see low-growing birches and spindly hawthorns in front of her. The bushes were in the way, but she managed to maintain as straight a line as possible as she moved across the flat ground.

When she could no longer see the farm behind her, she focused on a bush straight ahead and kept on running, increasing her speed. The sun would not remain in the sky for more than a couple of hours now, and she had no wish to be out on the alvar in the dark.

Ten minutes later she was out in the wilds — the distance seemed shorter than in her childhood. A couple of hundred metres ahead of her she could see a tall, dense group of juniper bushes and slowed her pace. Her legs were shaking; she inhaled the cold air and concentrated. Then she made her way through the thicket and stopped in the little glade inside. Any visitor was completely hidden from view in here.

The stone was still there.

It was rough and unpolished, just as she remembered from childhood.

It’s all about being in the right place at the right time, she thought.

She moved slowly closer to the rectangular stone. It was solid, sunken firmly in the ground.

The elf mill, where the elves once milled their grain in the twilight. The gateway to their kingdom.

The stone seemed a little smaller now; perhaps it had sunk further down over the past forty years. But it was probably just that Vendela had grown up.

There were things in the hollows.

No, not things, money. Old coins.

Made of bronze or gold? She wasn’t brave enough to pick them up and take a closer look, but now she knew that other islanders believed in the power of the elves too.

She remained a few feet away from the stone, listening. The wind soughed in the trees, and far away she could hear the faint roar of traffic from the main road.

But there were no rustling noises. No footsteps.

Vendela walked up and placed her hand on the stone. It was just as cool as she remembered, even though the sun was shining.

She lay down behind the elf stone, where it was less windy. The ground was cold but not damp, and she closed her eyes. She could feel the big stone beside her, emanating solidity and a protective sense of calm.

When Vendela was thirty she had travelled to Iceland, where people still believed in elves. She had met elderly people who said they had seen them, and had accompanied a group of tourists up to Snaefjellsjökull, the glacier north of Reykjavik where the elves evidently appeared from time to time. She had spent one bitterly cold night sitting waiting in a cave by the glacier, but she hadn’t seen them.

Five years earlier she had seen an advertisement in a magazine about a course on the island of Gotland, where you could learn to see and communicate with elves. Vendela secretly booked a place on the course, and flew to Visby one sunny Friday at the beginning of May. (She told Max she was going to do a pottery course.)

The course leader was about thirty, and had long brown hair in a pony tail. His name was Adam Luft, and he lived in a crofter’s cottage south-west of Visby; the area was flat, but with plenty of trees, and several elf paths met there. Adam did not cut the grass around his house, because he said it was important to leave nature untouched as far as possible.

‘The paths often lead between hazel or juniper bushes,’ he said. ‘That’s where we find the gateways into their world.’

Adam could sit cross-legged talking about elves for hours on end. He was particularly interested in their private lives, which according to him were free and open. Vendela wasn’t quite so sure about that, and sometimes when he talked about sex between elves and people, she had the feeling it was more a case of wishful thinking on Adam’s part — but when he left that particular topic alone, he often said sensible things. Such as: ‘It’s important to embrace new ways of thinking. When the Europeans first came into contact with white tufts of cotton during the Middle Ages, they had no idea what kind of material it was, or where it came from. They guessed that the cotton came from small flying sheep and lambs, who built their nests up in the trees.’

Adam had paused to let his students finish laughing.

‘So when today’s scientists hear that people have met elves,’ he went on, hands outspread, ‘what are they to think? How do they interpret this information? Just like almost everyone else, the scientists are helpless when faced with the inexplicable.’

Adam told her so much about elves. For Vendela the weekend course had been a fantastic experience. The little group had gone for long walks in the spring countryside, and had sat down to sing to the elves when the sun went down. After a while, several of the participants said they began to see them. One of the youngest, a twenty-year-old girl from Stockholm who also worked as a medium, saw elves so frequently and so clearly that she started to recognize them and gave them beautiful names, such as Galadriel and Dunsany.

Vendela was slightly envious, because she never saw any elves, but the course was still brilliant. The landscape on Gotland seemed timeless and tranquil, just like Iceland. She had returned home with a new-found belief in elves, and a powerful desire to find them on Öland, the island of her childhood. And now here she sat by the elf stone. Nobody knew where she was. Out here the rest of the world was of no importance.

Adam Luft had said it was easier to see the elves if you had faith but lacked hope. Then you were ready for them. And you could only glimpse them out of the corner of your eye. Elves didn’t like it if you stared straight at them, according to Adam; they couldn’t cope with our intense scrutiny.

The countryside had suddenly grown still around her; not a twig was moving on the juniper bushes around the stone. Vendela slowly opened her eyes and thought that the alvar, with its vernal yellow grass, looked frozen, faded like an old photograph. If she looked at her watch now, she knew the hands would be standing still.

The kingdom of the elves.

She suddenly heard a rustling sound in the grass beyond the bushes, as if someone was moving along, light as a feather. She got up cautiously, but saw no one. And yet she still had the feeling that someone was watching her through the bushes.

Her tracksuit was damp, and she shivered. All her energy was gone, chased away by a sudden sense of anxiety. She wanted to go up to the dense thicket of bushes and look on the other side, perhaps ask if anyone was there, but she remained standing by the stone.

They’re creeping up on me, she thought. The elves... or the trolls?

She didn’t dare go over and look. Her legs were taking her in the opposite direction; she moved backwards around the elf stone so that it was between her and the muted noises.

Then everything fell silent once more. The rustling stopped.

The wind began to blow, and Vendela breathed out. She felt stiff and cold, but had one thing left to do. She rummaged in her jacket pocket and placed a coin, a shiny new ten-kronor piece, in one of the empty hollows on the stone.

It was risky to wish for things in this place; nobody knew that better than her. But she needed help.

She was going to ask for one thing, no more.

Please don’t let Aloysius go blind, she thought. Give him a few more healthy years... That’s all I wanted to ask.

She put the coin down and backed away from the stone.

As she left the glade tucked away among the juniper bushes, she felt time begin to move once more. Her watch was ticking, and it was evening. The sun in the west had lost its yellow glow and was sinking down towards the horizon, the light reflected as red stripes in the spring lakes around her.