I spent the rest of the evening helping Dad, which seemed to mean sealing ourselves in. All the windows had fitted metal plates that could be screwed over them from the inside, so I held them in place while Dad drove in the bolts. By the time we had finished, the windows downstairs were covered. It felt as though we had locked ourselves inside a tomb. I should have been freaked out but instead, it made me feel safe. Neither Dad nor I said much as we worked. I should have told him about the elk and the girl I thought I’d seen, but I couldn’t work out how without sounding completely insane. The more I thought about it, the more I decided I must have imagined her. That the thing that had chased me really had just been a wolf. You know, one of the ones that were supposed to be more afraid of us than we were of them. Yeah, right.
It was after midnight when we finally finished and I went upstairs to bed. My body was tired but my mind was nowhere near sleep. I kept thinking about the girl, standing there in the snow with blood dripping from her fingers. The slashes in my side were hurting, despite the painkillers I’d taken. The wind screamed around the walls, rattling the window frames like it was trying to find a way in. Dad hadn’t mentioned boarding up the windows on this floor but I hoped that was the next task. It would mean I wouldn’t be able to see the trees outside, for a start. I was sick of the forest and scared of what it was doing to us. I tried to avoid looking out at all as I went over to pull the curtains shut.
I could hear the firs rustling in the wind outside, restlessly moving against each other. I kept my eyes on the floor. It seemed that they were nearer the house, as if the edge of the forest had taken a collective step closer, crowding in, surrounding us so that we wouldn’t be able to get out. I had this sudden, horrible idea that if I looked up at the window I would see a mass of branches pressed against the glass – that it wasn’t the wind trying to find a way in but the firs themselves – my nightmare become a reality.
I crawled into bed and pulled the duvet over my head. I lay there for what felt like hours, listening to the screech and scrape of the trees outside and wondering what else was out there among them. I kept tossing and turning. I didn’t think I’d sleep at all but I must have, at least a little, because when I next looked at my watch it was after 3 a.m. The trees were still moving outside and even though I was still tired I didn’t think I was going to go to sleep again. I went back to thinking about what I thought I’d seen in the forest, about how Mum was falling apart, wondering if the same thing was happening to me. I thought about how long we were going to be trapped here for, in this tomb of a house. In the end I decided to get up.
I went back to the office where I’d found the photographs. I’d been in there earlier when Dad and I had shuttered the windows but I’d been so out of it that I hadn’t even really looked at the desk. I half expected to find that they had disappeared. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Dorothea had gathered them up. But no, everything was exactly as I’d left it when Alisa’s accident had happened, even the photographs that had fallen to the floor.
I stood at the desk, looking down at the Polaroids lying on top of it. “Hello, Erik,” I said to the man in the selfies.
I pulled out the chair and gathered up the old black-and-whites from the floor. One of them had fallen face down and for the first time I realized that it had something written on the back of it. I picked up the photograph and looked at the scrawled handwriting. I was pretty sure that whoever had written it was the same person who had also written on the back of the Polaroids – the writing looked similar. So that had to have been Erik himself, right?
Girl, aged about 7, said the note. Disappeared from Storaskogen in 1949.
A weird, tight feeling pulled at my chest as I turned over the rest of the pictures.
Boy, aged around 10, said the next one. Last mentioned at Storaskogen in 1957. Cannot trace without name.
Girl, aged around 12. Name unknown. Went missing in 1979. Dead?
I stared at the words as though I might force them to change into something else but of course they didn’t.
People go missing in this forest all the time.
Dorothea’s voice whispered in the back of my mind, like the hollow whooshing of the wind in the trees outside. I felt numb. I got up slowly, with the photographs still in my hand. I picked up the Polaroids, too. Then I laid everything out on the desk in a line.
There has to be a reasonable explanation, I told myself. If these kids really had gone missing, it was years ago. Someone must have investigated, right? Someone must know what had happened to them.
I sat down on the chair and concentrated on the faces in the black-and-white pictures – not only on the family themselves and the kids that had apparently gone missing but the rest of the household, too. All those servants who had once lived here. Where were they now? Sure, some of them would be pretty old but they couldn’t all be dead. As I looked at each of the pictures one after another, I realized something. Several of the faces were repeated from one photograph to the next. Even though the families who owned the place had changed, clearly they had kept on some of the servants. I guess that made sense – they’d know how the place worked, after all. Why train new staff when the old ones already knew what they were doing?
As I looked at those pictures I realized something else. I recognized one of the faces. Sure, she was older now, wizened and bent over – but it was definitely her.
Dorothea was in every one of these photographs.
I put them in date order according to the notes on the backs and there she was, getting older as the decades went by. In the first one – the one marked as 1949 – she actually looked young. She can’t have been much older than me in that picture – eighteen, maybe? – but she still wasn’t wearing even the trace of a smile. I guess the bitterness sunk in early and never left.