Chapter 8

Simon awoke to the sun streaming through the window. He tried to hold onto the slippery fragments of a pleasant dream where everything in the garden was growing and thriving, but he saw the ring of frost around the windowpane and realized with a heavy heart that it was still winter.

His phone dinged and he knew immediately that he’d received an email from Sofia, but decided to get through the workday before reading it. He always enjoyed hearing from Sofia, but she was unpredictable: her messages demanded his undivided attention, and right now he just wanted to get to work.

But after a few hours he found he was too curious, so he opened his phone and found the email, which contained only a link. Once he’d opened it he gasped; the image was so shocking. There was Elvira, totally nude, her arms crossed to hide her breasts. Her belly was exposed, and it was enormous. A long tendril of her loose hair coiled down to her navel. The rest was a golden wave down her back. Her eyes were made up to look huge; her lips were parted and her front teeth rested on her lower lip. Cult Kid, read the title.

Simon typically didn’t surf the internet during his working hours, but now he sat down on an overturned bucket to read the blog. It was Elvira’s story in grisly detail. It was especially unpleasant to read the description of what Oswald had done to her in the attic, forcing her to have sex while choking her; he had nearly strangled her.

There was a childish tone to the text and it had obviously been written by Elvira herself – there were a number of spelling errors and curse words. But that only made it better. More real. There were already several comments on the entry.

An anxious, crawling sensation filled his belly, and he realized he was sweating even though it was rather chilly in the greenhouse. This is going to be big, he thought, with a hunch that the blog was a bomb soon to explode. He didn’t know if this was a good or bad thing, but he knew one thing for sure: the truth was out, and Franz Oswald would certainly not give it his stamp of approval. He fervently hoped that Sofia and Elvira knew what they were getting into.

The trip to Lund went more smoothly than he’d expected, even though he disliked travel. Strangers, unpleasant odours and sounds. His parents had never taken him on trips; they couldn’t leave the animals alone on the farm. But he wanted to see Sofia, and of course there were things he needed to tell her. When he reached Central Station in Gothenburg he stopped at Pressbyrån to buy a newspaper, and right away he noticed the headlines on the posted billboards.

STRANGLED AND RAPED BY THE CULT LEADER
Fourteen-year-old Tells All

SHE WAS FRANZ OSWALD’S SEX SLAVE
Now Forced to Bear His Children

MARKED FOR LIFE BY THE CULT
Fourteen-year-old Speaks Out

Only the more sensational evening papers had the story on the front page, but Simon even found an article about Elvira in Göteborgs-Posten. The papers had used the image from the blog, with those huge, innocent eyes gazing into the camera.

Simon sat on a bench at the station and tore at his hair. Good or bad? He couldn’t decide. But he was glad Oswald would have something to worry about in prison. And in some ways he was relieved, because what he was going to tell Sofia was nothing compared to this.

She met him at the station. She had grown out her hair; it reached her waist. There was no makeup on her face and she was wearing an anorak with a huge fur collar and jeans with big holes at the knees. In the middle of winter. Her cheeks were rosy red and he wondered if it was from the cold or because she was glad to see him again.

‘Come on, let’s go eat, you must be hungry.’ He always was. She knew that.

‘Quite the commotion you two have caused,’ he said once they were seated at the restaurant.

‘About time, wasn’t it?’

He let her speak first. Her mouth moved nonstop. They’d already had over one hundred thousand hits on their site; others had written to them to tell their own stories. Elvira had already been booked on a talk show on TV, and there would be more offers down the line.

It’ll go on like this for a few months, while she’s got that big belly, Simon thought. And then I’m sure there’ll be a heck of a fuss when the babies come. But what will she do after that? He wondered how long a person could live that way.

Sofia realized she’d lost him in the middle of a sentence.

‘Are you listening?’

‘Of course. It’s just a lot to take in. Is she going to give the babies up for adoption?’

‘She still hasn’t decided. But how could she keep them? Don’t you imagine they’d just be a constant reminder of him?’

‘I don’t think that’s how kids work. I guess they’re just themselves when they come out.’

Sofia nodded. She took Simon’s hand on top of the table. ‘It’s so great to see you again.’

‘Same to you. I’m glad you two did this. And I hope Oswald reads the blog.’

‘There was something you wanted to tell me?’

‘Yes, is Benjamin coming? Because if he is, I’ll tell you both.’

‘No, not this weekend. It’s just you and me.’

So he couldn’t put it off any longer. He told her everything he knew about the cult’s return to the manor: who was there, when they gathered, all about the gate and the lock. Her expression didn’t change as he spoke. She just nodded now and then, squinting as if she were trying to transform his words into images.

‘Well, that’s terrific!’ she said when she was done. ‘Well done, changing the lock. You should have emailed me. That’s the kind of news I like to hear. And Elvira told me they’re back on the island, so I knew that part already.’

‘And then there’s this.’

He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, and placed it on the table in front of her. As she read it, he watched her face; he noticed that she was startled when she read the very last line. She rested her finger on it and looked up at him.

‘What do you think this means?’

‘Not sure. It could mean anything from that they’re going to send you your stuff, to that they’re planning to kill you.’

He immediately regretted those last words.

‘Someone from the police sent my stuff. Ages ago. I asked them to, because I didn’t want to go there again.’

‘Oh, so that’s not it then.’

Simon thought she looked lovely as she sat there trying to figure out what the bullet point meant. She stared at nothing as if in a trance, her features soft and smooth. Sofia had always been apt to zone out while they were talking. One second she was there; the next she was swept away in her thoughts. He understood why men were drawn to her, why Oswald had become fixated on her. There was so much life in Sofia, in her eyes, her body, and even out to the ends of her unruly hair. Yet she was capable of looking so calm when she was pondering something. She was like the fog out on the island. Encircling everything with her attention, then setting it free in a split second when she was done thinking.

‘Simon, what the heck do they mean by this?’

‘Maybe it doesn’t mean anything,’ he said. ‘You know how it was there. One disaster after the next. They’ve had more than six months to come after you. But nothing has happened, right?’

‘No, but now we’ve got the blog…’ Her gaze turned inward again.

‘Simon, you were always so good at ferreting things out. “Think like him,” you used to say about Oswald. What do you think he’s really up to these days?’

Simon thought about the blog and then about Oswald, and it made him shudder.

‘To be honest, I think he’s royally pissed off. He’s already being hung out to dry by the media, and then that’s how he finds out he’s going to be a father. You know what, I bet his mind is elsewhere for the moment, not on you. Although if you two keep blogging, of course, you’ll have to be prepared to accept the consequences.’

The day ended up even better than Simon had imagined. The skies had begun to clear, and all of Gothenburg glowed with the fantastic sharpness a ray of sunlight brings on an overcast day. They strolled around the city for hours. Sofia took him to the cathedral, which was so majestic it gave Simon the shivers. At last she had to drag him away, because he’d found himself captivated by the medieval astronomical clock near the entrance and couldn’t tear himself away. He read and reread the sign that explained how the clock worked, drinking in the details: how you could see the phases of the moon, the position of the sun relative to the horizon, the knight that showed the time, and the calendar that extended all the way to the year 2123.

‘What will happen then, after 2123?’ he asked Sofia.

‘How should I know? We’ll be dead by then anyway. Come on, let’s go.’

They wandered around the campus of the university, where Sofia showed him the library where she worked and told him that they lent out over half a million books per year. They sat on a park bench in Lundagård as the sun set and Sofia got him to tell her everything he’d seen at the manor. She made him repeat some parts of his tale several times. In the end they agreed that the new group was nothing but a big joke. A bunch of failures who couldn’t even come close to posing any sort of threat.

Sofia made dinner for him back at her little place. He slept on her sofa that night and took the train home the next morning. Before he left, he promised Sofia he would keep an eye on ViaTerra and be in contact with her at least once a week.

As he sank into his seat on the train and gazed out at the bare winter landscape, he decided it really wasn’t so terrible to take a little trip now and then.