Fire (6 page)

Minoo observes Nicolaus. He stands absolutely still, like one of those ghastly mime characters at festivals who pretend to be statues. She wonders what he’s feeling.

Ida breaks the silence.

‘So, Nicolaus had an ancestor with the same name. What I don’t get is, why do we check out a graveyard in the middle of the night? Does Cat want us to take up genealogy? Or what?’

Ida’s tone of voice makes Minoo cringe.

‘
Memento mori
,’ she says, fighting to control her voice. ‘
Remember you must die
. It said so in the letter Nicolaus
wrote to himself. We have been wondering about it all this time. Now, maybe, we’ll find out.’

Ida raises her eyebrows and looks at Nicolaus, who still hasn’t said a word.

‘Fine. You’d better tell us then,’ she says. ‘What is so special about this grave?’

He simply shakes his head.

Minoo realises that she’s being unfair but, at this moment, he is so frustrating. She had no idea what she’d expected from him when he confronted the grave. But
something
, at least.

‘What do you think, maybe we ought to carry out a ritual?’ Anna-Karin asks.

Everyone looks at Minoo and she can’t help wondering why it has come to this. Why is she supposed to have the answers, she who can’t read the
Book of Patterns
and doesn’t even have her own element?

‘I don’t know. We could seek guidance from the book …’ ‘I’ve tried already and didn’t find anything useful,’ Linnéa says. ‘Besides, what we must do is perfectly obvious.’

She pauses, looks at the others.

‘We must start digging.’

It has occurred to Minoo, too, but she has dismissed the idea. They have done quite a few bizarre things together. Conducted magic rituals, fought demons – but to dig up a grave …

Still, she can’t come up with an alternative.

‘That’s simply disgusting,’ Ida says. ‘Do you want us to start clawing at the ground here and now?’

‘You will absolutely not break the peace of the grave,’ Nicolaus says suddenly.

Minoo glances at him. His face has taken on a determined, authoritarian look. A look that won’t allow you to argue. This is a side of Nicolaus that she hasn’t seen before.

‘What do you suggest we do?’ Minoo asks feebly.

‘Nothing. You do nothing. It is a mystery, I concede that. So it should remain. This is consecrated ground.’

‘But …’

‘No ifs, no buts!’

‘What is your problem?’ Linnéa asks. ‘It was
your
familiar that led us to this grave. It was
you
who wrote that letter to
yourself
, complete with the clue
memento mori
. Therefore,
you
made us come here. Back when you still remembered things, this was exactly what you wanted us to do. So why hold us back now?’

Nicolaus just looks at her. Then he turns away and leaves.

Anna-Karin runs after Nicolaus as he crosses the cemetery.

He takes such long strides it’s hard to catch up with him. Finally, she can reach out and put her hand on his shoulder. He stops instantly.

‘Wait!’ she says.

He turns to face her.

‘Please don’t go. We’ve got to talk about this.’

‘There’s nothing to discuss. Anna-Karin, I beg you. You must stop the others.’

His eyes plead, almost in desperation. And she wants to be on his side.

If Nicolaus doesn’t want them to dig up the grave, why should they do it? He is their guide. And, besides, he is her …

Her what? Her friend?

Can she call him that? She likes him. At times, she has felt more strongly than that. She might even love him, as the father she was never allowed to know.

‘But what are we to do then?’ she asks. ‘We can’t drop the whole thing. It might mean something. Cat seems to think so anyway.’

Nicolaus shakes his head and starts walking again. She wants to call out after him, but it would be stupid to go off like a loudhailer when you’re sneaking around a cemetery in the middle of the night.

When she returns to the graveside, everybody is still there, standing around and talking.

‘He’s right, it’s totally sick to dig up a grave,’ Ida announces crossly to no one in particular. ‘They could put you in prison for doing it.’

But none of the Chosen Ones cares to listen to Ida, as usual. Instead they decide to meet up here tomorrow night. And start discussing who can bring spades.

Vanessa cycles home along the empty streets of Engelsfors.

As she pedals along under the viaduct, the echo makes the rattling of the chain and the whooshing of the tyres against the tarmac bounce back at her. When she comes out on the other side, the silence is astonishing, as if she’s the sole survivor in a post-disaster film.

To get up the slope that starts when you’re past the disused petrol pumps, she has to stand and pedal. She feels drained but her longing to get home drives her despite the exhaustion.

Not far to Törnrosvägen now. She takes the short cut through bits of woodland, along the overgrown football pitch and the small playground where she sometimes takes Melvin …

She breaks so hard that the bike threatens to go to pieces once and for all.

Partly hidden by a shrubbery, a police car has pulled up on the far side of the sandpit and the swings.

Vanessa stays still. Is Nicke in the car or out prowling nearby?

Gripping the handlebars firmly, she focuses until the familiar wafts flow across her skin. During the summer, she practised bringing bigger and bigger objects with her into a state of invisibility. Just now, she is truly grateful for what she has learned.

She starts pushing the bike towards the car until she is about ten metres away from it. The front windows are open. Somebody is in the driver’s seat, a uniformed officer with close-cropped hair. Is it Nicke? Invisibility makes her movements soundless, but she steals forward all the same, almost holding her breath as she gets closer to the car.

Yes, it’s him.

What is he doing here? Vanessa thinks. She stops again.

Nicke’s head is thrown back, and he doesn’t move at all. He is so still she thinks he might be dead. Her brain goes into overdrive – call 999, then Nicke’s colleagues will come to the door to tell Mum and she will break down and, when Melvin asks at bedtime what death is, Vanessa must try to explain and then she spots a little smile flickering around Nicke’s mouth. One of his hands grips the steering wheel.

Then Nicke happens to hit the horn. Vanessa jumps. The bike nearly falls over when the handlebars slip out of her sweaty hand.

Nicke chuckles and looks down at his knees. He speaks in a low voice but is clearly audible in the still air.

‘Hey! You are really something else,’ he says, addressing his lap.

By now, Vanessa has to fight not to understand. Hopeless, it’s like fighting off a heavy lorry with a fly swat.

A dark head suddenly pops up next to the dashboard.

It is a woman, who slides up on to the passenger seat and kisses Nicke on the mouth. He shakes his head and laughs. And then kisses her back.

Vanessa retreats. She can’t stand watching this for another instant. She clenches her jaw to keep her nausea down, turns her bike, leaps into the saddle and pedals away with an energy she lacked just moments ago.

The black smoke is whirling around Minoo.

Anna-Karin, Ida, Linnéa and Vanessa are somewhere nearby. All helpless. Everything depends on Minoo now. She alone is left.

Alone with Max.

He stands in front of her with the black smoke eddying around him. Dark waves of hair frame his beautiful face.

‘I know you don’t understand now,’ he says, ‘but all I want … the only thing I’ve ever wanted … is for us to be together.’

The smoke swirls, grows denser around them. They are pulled towards each other and Minoo knows now that something isn’t working the way it should. At this point she should resist and the battle shift in her favour.

But it isn’t happening.

She tries to put up a fight, but is powerless. And suddenly Max is standing very close to her. His eyes are black and shiny, like a bird’s.

‘We belong together.’

He bends over her and kisses her with ice-cold, moist lips.

Minoo opens her eyes. Woken by a kiss.

It wasn’t like that at all, she tries to persuade herself. I was victorious. I saved the others.

She turns to lie on her side and stares out into the dark room.

Is something moving over there? Have the shadows of the night taken on a deeper shade of darkness?

The black smoke.

Minoo sits up in bed.

She can see it clearly now. A black cloud, shuddering as it hangs in the air. A long tentacle of smoke is creeping out of the room and into the corridor.

Minoo’s feet are caught in the ruffled sheet and she has to struggle to free herself before she can follow the black smoke. It has wound its way along the white wall of the corridor outside her room and crawled across the floorboards towards Mum and Dad’s bedroom.

Minoo goes to look in through the open door.

Mum and Dad are lying on their backs in bed. The smoke envelops them, pulsating as if it were alive. But her parents’ eyes are staring unseeing into the darkness.

‘You killed them.’

Minoo turns around.

Max is standing in the corridor. He looks at her with the black eyes of a bird.

‘You knew all along that this would happen. You haven’t even tried to get the measure of your powers, because you guessed what you would discover.’

He holds out his hand.

‘We belong together.’

And she knows it is true.

The alarm tone from Minoo’s mobile pulls her out of her sleep.

She sits up in bed and scrutinises her room.

No black smoke anywhere.

She gets up and walks along the corridor. Noises from the kitchen. Everything as usual.

It didn’t happen. Not for real, she thinks.

But she cannot make the dream go away.

Anna-Karin’s mum is reading at the kitchen table. Her dark hair is pulled back in a bunch. The smoke from her cigarette is snaking upwards through the already stale air. Opposite her, Anna-Karin is prodding at her yoghurt, watching as tiny air bubbles rise.

The
Enfelsfors Herald
rustles as Mum slowly turns the pages. She sucks up every word, as eagerly as she sucks up the poisons in her fags.

The silence in the kitchen is somehow made more tangible by the noises of traffic and people in the street outside. Being alone in town feels so much lonelier than being alone in the countryside.

Pepper pads into the kitchen and sniffs at his food bowl without much interest. Then he wanders off into the hall where he navigates between the removal firm’s boxes, still not unpacked after months and months. Anna-Karin feels a pang of bad conscience. It was selfish of her to bring him here instead of giving him away to someone with a house and a garden. He should be free to run in and out as he fancies, and has been used to. But she couldn’t have survived without him, not now when she has to live alone with Mum.

‘Well, now. Monika has had to shut up shop, too,’ Mum says.

Her eyes shine as they follow the lines of print under a photo of a grim-looking Monika standing in front of her closed café. Nothing excites Mum more than other people’s bad-luck stories. Probably her greatest pleasure, up there with smoking. Anna-Karin isn’t sure which of her mum’s
addictions is the most harmful. It’s no comfort to know that you can’t die from passive
Schadenfreude
.

Anna-Karin gets up and noisily dumps her plate in the sink.

‘Are you just leaving it there?’ Mum asks.

‘I’ll do it later,’ Anna-Karin says and walks out into the hall.

‘If you leave it there you might as well wash it up.’

Mum makes it sound as if
she’s
the one who usually does the dishes.

‘No time,’ Anna-Karin says before going to the bathroom to brush her teeth.

They live off the money left from the farm sale and the compensation eventually paid by the insurers after the fire in the barn. Anna-Karin doesn’t know how long this stash will last. Mum often speaks about getting a job. But when Anna-Karin comes back from school, her mother has often not even managed to drag herself out to shop for the basics.

Anna-Karin would rather not admit to herself that she is disappointed. It would be the same as admitting that she had hoped for things to get better, that moving into town would inject new life into Mum. The fact is that she at least had work to do on the farm. Now, she’s more isolated than ever before and Anna-Karin hates seeing her mother sinking deeper and deeper into paralysing depression.

But she gets into black panics herself when she thinks about the future and what will happen when the money runs out.

The air shivers above the hot tarmac. In the distance, the school looks like a mirage.

Minoo walks past the petrol station where she once bought an evening paper running a feature on the ‘suicide pact’ in Engelsfors. So unbelievably much has happened
since she read the interview with Gustaf. Back then, she felt that she could never forgive him. A friendship between them was even less likely.

Her thoughts are interrupted by the sound of a car horn. Three short blasts. A dark blue Mercedes pulls up on the verge of the road. The woman driver leans across the passenger seat as the window slides down soundlessly.

‘Hello, Minoo. Have you had a good summer?’

It is Adriana Lopez, the principal. They exchange small talk, but there is a slightly haunted look in Lopez’s eyes.

‘We will continue with the lessons in the fairground on Saturday,’ she says. ‘Do tell the others. We’ll meet there at the usual time.’

‘Okay. Of course,’ Minoo replies.

Adriana lightly pats her black page-styled mane, though not one hair is out of place.

‘In the near future, there will be certain … changes,’ she says, avoiding Minoo’s eyes.

‘What changes?’

The principal seems to hesitate.

‘Wait and see. Just until Saturday. Now I’ve got to move on. How would it look if the principal was late on the first day of school?’