I threw myself out into the corridor, screaming. Dad came running out of their bedroom, pulling the door shut behind him.
“What is it?” he shouted as I stumbled towards him.
I grabbed his arm, pulling at his sleeve. “They’re here, in the house!” I babbled. “They’ve got in! They’re going to kill us! He’s here! He’s going to—”
He shook me off and then grasped my shoulders. “What is? And what have you done to your face?”
I reached up and touched my cheekbone. My fingers came away covered in blood.
“The gun,” I shouted at Dad, trying to drag him back along the corridor, “where’s the gun? They’re coming!”
“Calm down,” he said again, glancing over my head. I twisted around to look but there was nothing behind us. “Calm down and tell me what happened.”
I couldn’t. I kept expecting to see the kid and his fiendish mates surging down the hallway towards us in a flurry of teeth and claws. I shook my head. “I went into the room where you found Mum. I opened the window and now – now they’ve got in. They’re in the house. We need the gun, Dad. Please—”
Dad let me go and began to walk along the corridor, back the way I’d run. I grabbed his arm but he shook me off.
“We can’t,” I said. “Dad, we can’t go in there!”
But he didn’t stop. He strode towards the room and went straight in. I froze, waiting for him to start screaming but he didn’t. There was only silence.
“There’s nothing here,” said his voice, floating to me from inside. “Come and see. Everything’s fine.”
It took me a minute to make myself move. But I did. I walked slowly to the door and looked inside. Dad was standing at the open window. Little billows of snow were rippling in, falling to the floor, but otherwise the room was empty. There was the bed, the bookcase, the sad little rug crumpled on the wooden floor where I’d slid on it. I could see the curtains blowing open, feel the cold surging in from outside. But there was nothing else. No murderous half-child. No wolf. Nothing at all but an empty room.
“Come here,” Dad said again, nodding to the window.
I tried to get a hold of myself. I walked slowly across the room, right up to the window.
“What do you see?” Dad asked. “Look out there and tell me what you see.”
I did as I was told. I looked out, through the whirling flakes of white and down to the drift beneath where we stood. There was nothing there at all. There weren’t even any footprints. There was nothing but the snow and the trees, laughing at me.
“See?” Dad said, in a very tired voice. Then he put his hands on my shoulders and turned me round. “Look,” he said quietly. “I know this has turned into a nightmare. I know it’s scary, being stuck here, and what’s happened to Mum. But we have to hold it together. All right? You and me. I need you to hold it together.”
“Dad,” I said. I knew I couldn’t have imagined it all, I couldn’t have. “Dad, listen. It happened, I know it did. The scratch, this scratch on my face, that proves it, and—”
“Please,” he said. I could hear how exhausted he was. “I have to check on your mother. I have to go to bed. Things will be better in the morning. They usually are. Get some sleep. Please.”
He left me there in that empty room. I stood still for a few minutes. My cheek was stinging and I could feel the black hole in my head beginning to swallow me up completely. Everything was whirling around up there, lost and untethered.
They didn’t come inside.
They didn’t come inside.
They’re out there. I think they’re really out there. I think they’re real things. But they didn’t come inside.
This is what was going through my head as I staggered back to my room. My ears were buzzing and I kept on shaking – shock, I guess. I curled up on my side under the heavy duvet and tried to think rationally about everything that had happened. Like there’s a way to rationalize the sight of a kid stuck to the outside wall of a house in the middle of nowhere.
They didn’t come inside. They couldn’t have done. They couldn’t have got out of that room without Dad and I seeing them in the hallway.
I kept clinging to this little piece of information because right then it was a life raft and I was adrift on a churning sea. The window had been open, there had been nothing to stop that thing from surging straight into the room and tearing me apart with whatever it had instead of nails – but it hadn’t. Why?
Because you’re mad, said a voice in my head. Because you’re imagining it all.
But my cheek was still stinging. I wasn’t imagining that. Was I? That was real enough. And something must have done it…
Something outside.
They didn’t come inside.
The varulv belong to the forest…
The varulv is a forest spirit…
I will never give him his name…
He needs his name…
Fragments of sentences Dorothea and Mum had said combined with what I’d read in that old encyclopaedia entry, dancing round and round in my mind, never settling long enough for me to understand them properly. But one thing stuck. The varulv belong to the forest. That’s what they exist to protect. Could it be as simple as that? The varulv couldn’t come inside because this wasn’t their territory? What had the encyclopaedia said? That they could become human again if they’re given their names. But if they weren’t, they stayed varulv. They remained the forest. They remained outside. They couldn’t come in. That had to be the answer, didn’t it?
I didn’t sleep for the rest of that night. Everything I’d shoved into my brain over the last twenty-four hours kept spinning around, keeping me awake. I lay there, listening to the roar of the blizzard. This one seemed particularly ferocious. The hours ticked by, slow minute by slow minute. I stared at the thick shadows at the edges of my room, imagining them to be shapes of things other than they were: trees growing towards me through the walls, turning inside into outside, bringing the varulv with them hidden in their branches. I was tired, so tired, but I couldn’t sleep.
They didn’t come inside.
They can’t come inside.
I decided that night that I wasn’t leaving the house again until I could be sure I was leaving it forever. Because that was the secret, wasn’t it? We just needed to stay indoors. That was why Dorothea had talked Mum into going out into the blizzard and making her arms bleed. The varulv couldn’t get into the house so she had to find a way to make us go outside. And there was no way I was letting the varulv take me or my family.
Yeah, so anyway. In case you hadn’t already realized, I went off the deep end that night. Isolation will do that to you. Endless snow will do that to you. Lack of sleep will do that to you. Fear will do that to you.
Next morning, I waited in the corridor until I heard Dad leave their bedroom. I didn’t really feel like going down and facing Dorothea alone. I figured there was safety in numbers. The two of us against one old woman – what chance did she have?
“Dad.”
He jumped, his hand still on the door handle to their room. He turned round and as he did I registered that there were piles of stufflying all over the corridor outside their door: chairs, blankets, clothes, even the dresser Mum had put her make-up and toiletries on when they first arrived. There must have been nothing left inside the room except the bed Mum was presumably still asleep in and maybe a rug on the floor. Then I realized that when I’d spoken he’d been in the act of quietly turning the key in the lock on their door. He looked guilty as he slipped it into his pocket.
“I don’t want to do it,” he said, in answer to a question I hadn’t asked. “But I’m scared she’ll wander off again or use something in there to hurt herself.”
“You can’t lock her up,” I said. Something lurked on my shoulders, a heavy feeling from the deepest part of me, threatening to drag me down. I swallowed. “Dad, that’s just—”
“It’s for her own good,” he said.
“Dad,” I said, feeling sick. “Listen. Last night. I swear, outside—”
He held up a hand to stop me. “Don’t,” he said. “Please. Whatever you think you saw – don’t. I’ve got your mother to deal with. I don’t need anything else on my plate right now, all right?”
“But—”
“I mean it,” he said. “Whatever you saw, whatever you think you saw – it was just a figment of your imagination. There are four people in this house. We are the only people for miles. You know that.”
We stared at each other for a full minute. What could I tell him? I knew what I’d seen. I also knew it was utterly crazy.
“All right,” I said. “But I’m not going outside again. Not until winter’s over. You can yell at me all you want. You can threaten to lock me up, too, if you like. But I’m not going out there. And you shouldn’t, either. None of us should.”
Dad rubbed a hand over his face, over the straggling black-and-white strands of his beard. “We have to. We’ll need wood at the very least.”
“We can burn furniture.”
“We can’t burn the furniture.”
“We can. It’s not even our stuff anyway, is it? It came with the house. It looks like it’s been with the house since even before Erik bought it. Why, Dad? Did you ever stop to ask yourself that? Why was he in such a damn hurry to get out of here that he didn’t even take his stuff with him?”
Dad put his hands on his hips. He kept frowning, trying to focus. I figured he was pretty tired. I knew how he felt – I was seeing double myself.
“We can’t burn the furniture,” he said. “It’ll be easier to sell this place if it’s fully furnished. Furnishing from scratch would cost a fortune. That’s why everything is still here. There’s no big mystery. It’s the way things work up here, that’s all.”
A word he’d said buzzed in my ears for a second before I repeated it. “Sell?”
Dad shrugged. His shoulders stayed down when he’d finished the motion, defeated. He might as well have been waving a flag of surrender. “You were right. We should never have come here. We’ll go back to Stockholm as soon as we can.”
I could have hugged him but of course I didn’t. “That’s … that’s a good idea,” I said instead. I was so relieved that my legs felt weak. “That’s a good idea, Dad.”
“So we can’t burn the furniture. We’ll need to go out and get more firewood.”
“Fine,” I said. “Then we’ll bring it all in here. All of it. Today. Every last log that’s in the shed. And then we never go out of that door again. Not until we leave this hellhole for good. Deal?”
He stood there staring at me. He wanted to ask why, I could tell. He wanted to ask what the problem was with being outside but he couldn’t let himself.
“There are things in the forest, Dad,” I told him. “Erik started cutting it down and they’re angry. They want us – and not in a good way.”
He shook his head. “Please,” he said. “Just—”
“All I want is for us not to go outside,” I said. “That’s not an insane thing for me to want, is it? There’s no reason to go out, is there, not once we’ve brought the logs in? It’s not as if we can do any felling. We won’t be having any nice walks in the snow. Anyway, it’ll be easier to keep an eye on Mum if we’re both in the house all the time. Won’t it? We won’t have to keep her … locked up.”
Dad turned to glance at their door, a pained look on his face. Then he nodded. “All right,” he said. “We’ll do it.”