I’m sat in the backseat of someone’s pickup. I don’t know any of the other passengers. There are two women up front and neither one of them’s talking. On my left is a quiet guy. On my right is a man licking an ice cream like a ravenous anteater might lick deep inside a termite mound.
We pass along the main road and then turn right into Utgard forest. Everything darkens. I feel a chill inside. The driver slows. We’re behind about ten other pickup trucks and in front of ten more. There are very few passing places on this gravel track and I do not envy the designated drivers tasked to turn and head back to base camp.
Bengt Gustavsson’s decrepit clapboard house is deserted. The Utgard hoarder’s not here anymore but it looked almost as decrepit when he was. We pass his pallets and his overgrown vegetable patch and his caravan. We head on. Viggo Svensson’s dark red cottage is on the right-hand side, cameras and security lights pointed out at the track. Out at us.
We stop at the base of the big hill. There are stacks of felled pine trunks as big as cruise ships on one side of the track. Feels like an act of abject stupidity to leave the truck and step into all this black wilderness. You might think you’ve been to a forest like Utgard, but you have not. There are patches of this overgrown spruce world where man has never set foot, either before the last ice age or since. You can walk away from this track for a whole day at a decent speed and you might still be closer to the centre of the forest than the edge.
The guy by my side fills the reservoir of his hi-tech backpack with drinking water. The woman in front checks her knife and her GPS map device. Feels good being sandwiched between this pair. They don’t talk much and they are equipped.
I climb down from the truck.
The light dims further as we venture away from the relative safety of the gravel track. My eyes strain to see what my ears can’t hear. Hoof prints and teeth. Spider webs. I walk and push low pine branches from my face, the dry, lifeless needles showering my hand as I pass through.
Benny Björnmossen’s stun gun is in my pocket and thank the lord almighty for that. My weapon. The electric shock I carry around with me. That burst of potential power I have under my control. I am terrified in this forest, in the evening murk, but I am here to find my best friend. The one who listens. Doesn’t judge. The woman closer to me than my own mother ever was. At Karlstad train station when I left Tam for the south she gestured to me she was my sister and that she would always be my sister. My eyes prickle at the memory. My sister. Mine. We’re both only children and that word holds real weight. Her saying that was everything. But then I left her behind on that desolate snowy platform.
Something growls.
Or howls.
A hunt dog? Or a wolf? Only a few codes of DNA separate them. The difference between attack and defence. Our side or theirs. Man’s best friend or his worst imaginable enemy.
It howls again. Definitely a howl. Something with its neck bent up to the sky. Commanding its family to be wary. Or to go hunt fresh meat.
The pine trees tower over us and their roots knot around my boots. The trunks stand like a never-ending ghost army on every side of me. Uniform and straight. Giants. From a distance, when I see them from the edge of a clearing, they appear as multiple viscous drips of black treacle, wide at the base, at the falling edge, like dark molasses dropping from the skies above.
Another howl.
Are you here, Tammy? Are you still bleeding?
I trudge on and the light levels are falling. Everything is slate grey. A faded photograph of a bad memory. I negotiate damp granite rocks and gnarled roots covered in soft slick moss. I am cautious. Every safe boot placement is a victory. My ankles are intact. My bones haven’t splintered or snapped sideways out of my dry shin skin. They are strong and intact. Every step a win.
I glance at the guy to my right every now and then, his yellow hi-vis vest like a buttercup petal coming and going in my peripheral vision. I’m grateful he’s there. If I looked that way and saw only bark and lichen and stumps I think I’d scream. But he’s there. I’m one of many.
Dad would have been here helping. He’d have his old leather boots and he’d be probing around with a stick and slapping the bugs from his bristly cheeks. He’d be walking next to me, too close, breaking the rules, maybe five metres from me. He’d be checking on me and checking on whoever was the other side of him, and he’d be looking for Tammy and Lisa. He wouldn’t stop and neither will I. You hear that, Tam? I will get to you. I’m not fit and I am not brave but I am as bull-headed as anything that has ever lived and I will find you. Just wait there, I’m coming.
I dodge a dense patch of nettles and trip and get tangled in some wretched spider threads. Gurning, I spit and fight with the web. If you saw me you’d see a city person fighting an imaginary foe, swinging her arms and her face around, dragging something invisible from her hair. And then you’d see her spit on the ground and walk on.
There are birds around. Or bats. Something small flapping around between me and the canopy of this living, breathing hellhole. And there are beetles. Blue-black metallic things scurrying around my boots like armoured robots all on a mission, all with purpose and a good sense of direction.
I come across an elk hunting tower with a ladder and camouflage netting wrapped around it. You might expect me to think of Medusa, of that awful day, days, plural. But I just think about Dad. His crash. The way mum reacted to the phone call. One dumb animal took him from me, and him from her, and then her from me. Left me alone. To cook and clean and take electricity bills to the post office to pay them. For me to organise her prescriptions, or rather to ration them. To budget. For me to remember both our birthdays because she didn’t. I celebrated us the first few years. I tried to make cake. Candles. A flimsy card. But she never ate the cake or blew out the candles. She never opened her card. Eventually, I stopped. Another year, another degree of erosion. Our lives grew more narrow. More stark.
There’s a noise in the distance and it comes and goes. My aids don’t work so well out here. Not in the twilight. Not when I’m focused on not falling and not getting hunted. It’s like I’m more deaf in the dark. I think it’s a chainsaw. One of the two lumberjacks clearing Utgard, harvesting on behalf of whoever owns the pines now, felling and cutting with some reptilian machine with multiple saws and caterpillar tracks. I’ve written about these forest devourers. Harvesters, they’re called. They look more military than civilian.
I step through patches of wild sorrel and pick a few leaves and let them rest on my tongue. The faintest hint of lemon and cut grass. Mum showed me these when I was little, well before Dad’s crash. When she still coped. Thrived, even. She and I would pick sorrel and we’d eat it reverentially and we’d look into each other’s eyes. Those times are some of the very few good, early memories I have of her. The weight of what happened next, the exhausting marathon of my teenage years, means I have to reach very far, very deep, to snatch anything pleasant from my early years. I need to exert myself. But the memories are there.
I see elk and grey wolves, and I see a family of bears but they’re all rocks or fallen tree trunks. I walk with one hand on my knife sheath, thank you, Benny, and one hand out in front of me to stave off webs and brambles.
The man from my right is approaching. Not directly; he’s just narrowing the gap between us. I focus on my area, on looking for a familiar boot or a phone or a patch of black hair. But he’s coming closer. And then I realise. There must have been a change in order. In the sequence. How did I not notice? At some point people changed places. Because Freddy Bom is walking next to me. Towards me.
His flawless skin gleams.
He says something but I can’t make out the words.
‘What?’
‘Find anything?’ he asks.
‘No,’ I say, my hand still on my knife, the bone handle dry against my palm.
He looks like a photoshopped image of a baby’s head on a man’s body. All the more preposterous out here in the deep forest. I can see Norwegian spruce trees as tall as church steeples, and a man-size baby with a walking stick. His face glows pinkish-yellow in the twilight and his skin’s glazed with sweat. He looks like a donut.
‘Liquorice?’ he pushes his hairless arm out to me and I see a box of Grimberg salt liquorice tight in his hand.
‘No, thanks,’ I say.
‘You got a thing,’ he says, squinting at me. ‘On your neck.’
‘What? What is it? Get it off.’
He steps closer and I want to scratch at my neck but that is not the right thing to do. It could be a deer tick. Or a wolf spider. It could be a leech.
‘It’s just a mosquito,’ he says. ‘Big one.’ He brushes his hand over my neck slowly like a child petting a Labrador. I shiver at it all – at the flying insect sucking from my own blood supply, and at the child-man wiping his skin over mine. Who wipes? You’d flick or pinch, surely?
I step back from him. ‘Let’s keep walking. We can’t fall behind. Let’s spread out.’
‘You’re welcome,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘I said,’ his lip curls into a dark smile and he looks handsome for a split-second. ‘You’re welcome.’
Sarcastic chicken shit. Maybe I should have said thanks – well, excuse me if my manners are lacking out here in the murder forest, please accept my apology. No, in fact, don’t. I take it back. If I had time to spare I’d swing a branch at his ankles and wipe him out. Shiny-faced man-baby.
I side-step around an ant nest as big as an armchair and then the dogs start barking. I turn my head and stop. Someone shouts but I can’t make out the words. More dogs. Someone in camouflage and a red cap sprints past me like an animal towards the noise. What is it? Tammy? I start running but I am a slug compared to that guy. Even Freddy overtakes me. I run and there are loudhailers saying something. I can’t make it out, not in twilight, not on the move. It’s just noise. The voices sound pained. Urgent. I run and step in a puddle of acidic brown water and my foot soaks inside my boot. I run on. Lights. Torches and a lantern. People. Dogs barking, their owners holding them back. More talking on the loudhailers. People holding their faces in their hands. One woman sinks to the moss beneath her, rocking backward and forward on her ankles.
‘What is it?’ I ask, my breath catching in my throat, my heart beating hard in my chest, thumping against my ribs. ‘What?’
I step towards the tree.
It’s bathed in torchlight and it is dead.
A hollow tree, broken.
People’s faces look ghostly pale in this June twilight. Their eyes are wide like they will never unsee what they have seen. I step closer and a woman in a green fleece holds me back.
‘No,’ I say, shaking my head, sweat flying off me. ‘Let go.’
The people start to make some kind of circle around the tree. Some kind of barrier.
I fight to get closer.
‘What’s in there?’ I yell, but my voice is extinguished by a loud-hailer asking for the police to be radioed.
I duck under an arm and lurch forward.
Inside the hollow of the tree, tucked down as if hiding. Something. Someone. Alone in the darkness. A tuft of black hair, matted.
The top of a skull.