Samurai Summer (15 page)

“Did they leave the fire burning?” asked Janne.

“Maybe something happened.”

“Here?”

He looked around. Everything looked normal. The only thing that was new was the magpie chattering. I looked up but I couldn’t see it.

“There doesn’t seem to have been a battle, anyway.”

“Maybe something happened somewhere else,” I said.

“At the camp?”

We listened in that direction, but we knew it was too far away to hear anything, not even if they’d had a hundred Triumph motorbikes revving their engines on the playground.

“You mean that something lured the troop away?”

“Let’s find out,” I said as I kicked soil over the embers that had started to cool down.

Even though we were getting close to the camp, we still couldn’t hear anything. The sun was going down, but it wasn’t time for supper yet. We couldn’t see anybody in the woods near the big entrance gates. Everything seemed to be just as deserted as the castle had been.

“Something must have happened,” said Janne.

The merry-go-round on the playground was spinning without anybody on it. I noticed that the wind had picked up, and when I looked up I could see clouds in the sky above the lake. There were black lines like mourning bands around the edges of the clouds. There was a rumble of distant thunder and several black clouds came rolling in. It all happened in the space of a few minutes. Clouds were scudding across the sky now.

“All hell’s going to break loose,” said Janne.

“Has everybody gone inside to take shelter from the storm?” I wondered.

“They couldn’t have known about it until five minutes ago.”

Suddenly a figure came rushing out of the woodshed. As he ran toward us, the first raindrops began to fall. The air had thickened. It felt like a woolen sweater. There was already a smell that made you think you were on the other side of the world in a jungle. The boy running toward us had short legs that started to gleam as the rain poured down.

It was Sausage.

“Where have you been?” he shouted through the rain.

We didn’t have time to answer. There was a flash of lightning over the lake. It was followed just a few seconds later by a loud crash all around us. Then we saw another
flash bigger than the first one. After a couple of seconds there was a huge explosion in the sky.

“It’s dangerous standing out here!” yelled Janne.

We ran toward the woodshed that Sausage had just come from.

There were others standing inside. It was the troop.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“It’s raining,” said Mats.

“But you were in here before it started, weren’t you? The playground was completely deserted when we got here, and the thunder and lightning hadn’t started yet.”

There was another crash. The rain was pouring down like Niagara Falls. A whole summer’s worth of rain was falling all at once. The shallow trough around the merry-go-round was already filling up with water.

Our moat would get filled up now. This would be the last stage. After this cloudburst, the castle would be finished. As long as the roof on the tower held up under the rain, we’d be able to move in.

“Why were you hiding in here?” I asked again.

“We weren’t hiding,” said Mats. “We were waiting.”

“Waiting? Waiting for what?”

“For the others to head off in the other direction.”

“The search party,” said Sven-Åke.

“Search party? For us?”

“No. They haven’t noticed you’re missing yet.”

“Who is missing then?” I asked.

I had a strange feeling that I already knew what Sven-Åke was going to say.

“Kerstin,” said Lennart—who hadn’t spoken until now—repeating the name I expected.

“Kerstin?” repeated Janne.

The others looked at me. I realized they must know more than I thought. Maybe they knew that I’d shown her the castle. Everybody must have seen us talking to each other.

“Did she run away?” I asked.

“Nobody knows.”

“What about her friend? Ann?”

“She’s out looking too,” said Sven-Åke.

“And why aren’t you?” I asked.

“We… might know where she is,” said Lennart.

They hadn’t wanted to tell Matron or the counselors.

Nor Christian.

“He’s come back?” I asked.

“Yesterday evening,” said Lennart, “or during the night.”

“I saw him last night,” said Sven-Åke, “under the window.”

“Which window?” I asked.

“Ours, of course,” said Sven-Åke. He meant the window nearest his bed in the dormitory, which was opposite mine and directly above Kerstin’s. “He was sitting on the merry-go-round smoking. I thought I heard something squeaking, so I looked out and there he was with a red glow coming from his mouth. It was like he was spying on us. I was scared he would see me.”

“Are you sure it was your window he was looking at?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“The girls,” I said. “I’ll bet he was staring at
their
windows.”

“I don’t understand,” said Sausage.

“Lucky for you,” I said.

“Hmm,” mumbled Sausage, who was maybe starting to catch on after all.

“You didn’t want to say anything to the grown-ups about Kerstin?” I said.

“There’s something weird about him,” said Lennart. “About Christian.”

“Does it have something to do with Kerstin?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You said you might know where she is,” I continued. “So, where is she?”

“In the woods, but in the other direction.”

He pointed.

“How do you know?”

“We saw her. Sausage saw her.”

“She was running like a deer,” said Sausage.

“When was that?”

“A few hours ago. This morning.”

“Why didn’t you run after her?”

“I didn’t know she was running away,” said Sausage. “All I saw was that she was running. I mean, everybody runs around here, Kenny.” He looked at the others. “But when they started saying she’d disappeared, I realized…”

I thought about Kerstin when he said that. No doubt she could run like a deer—or like a pony with her mane of hair flowing behind her.

“Did she look scared when she was running?” I asked.

Sausage shrugged.

“But you knew enough not to say anything to the grown-ups?”

I felt a cold chill at the back of my neck as I said that. My hair felt like it wanted to stand on end—like I was having a nightmare or had just had one and still hadn’t woken up properly. What had happened while Janne and I were in town?

“They looked… strange,” said Lennart. “Both Matron and Christian.”

“How? When?”

“When they told us to go out and search for her. I don’t
know… Matron came out of her office and Christian was in there, and then he came out too, and both of them looked… well, strange.”

“Strange?” I asked. “What do you mean
strange
?”

“As if they…
knew
.” Lennart looked at the others. “Isn’t that strange? But they looked like they knew somehow.”

“Knew? Knew what?”

“Why Kerstin had run away, of course. And that she
had
run away.”

“She probably ran away for the same reason as the rest of us,” said Sven-Åke. “None of us wants to be here.”

“I don’t know,” said Lennart. “Matron looked sort of… shaken.”

“Let’s go look for Kerstin now,” I said.

It stopped raining just as quickly as it had started. Clouds were still racing across the sky, but now they were heading off to another country. There were big, black pools of water all over the playground and courtyard, but they would soon evaporate. Water surrounded the merry-go-round like a moat. It had never occurred to me before that the rut had become so deep from all the kids kicking at the ground over the years to make the merry-go-round spin. It could be a hundred years old, that moat.

The forest looked like a different place now. It was darker, wetter.

“She was running in that direction,” said Sausage pointing into the darkness.

The sun had disappeared behind the tops of the fir trees on the other side of the lake. We could have used a flashlight. The fir trees seemed to be leaning over us. When I looked up, the sky was no more than a little hole. A black bird fluttered past like a dragon overhead.

We moved farther into the trees. The bird let out a cry as though warning somebody. To our right I could see the lake glittering like silver. Steam was rising from it like it was a hot spring. I’d almost forgotten what it was like after a heavy rain. The ground underfoot was wet and warm. Steam was rising from there too. I noticed that I was sweating so much that it was getting hard to see. Everything was blurred. I wiped my eyes with my hand but everything went blurry again before I had time to blink. It was like trying to wipe water from your face when you were swimming right down at the bottom.

“She could have run for miles,” said Janne.

“Then she’d have to get around the lake,” said Lennart.

I could see the lake glint again in the darkness. It seemed to be trying to tell us something, to show us something. Was
it something to do with Kerstin? I felt that cold chill at the back of my neck again.

“Can she swim?” asked Janne, seeming to read my thoughts.

“Like a fish,” said Lennart. “I mean, she won the swimming competition a few weeks ago, didn’t she?”

“Did she try to swim across the lake?” asked Sausage.

“Let’s go down there,” I said, although I didn’t want to. The lake felt like a more dangerous place than the forest right now. It had turned black. All the silver had vanished from the surface.

We made our way through the dense undergrowth. Lennart was in front of me, and I wasn’t quick enough to get out of the way when he let go of a branch that hit me in the face. It hurt, but I had more important things to think about.

The water’s edge was overgrown with reeds. I took a step out and immediately sank down into the water.

“Your face is bleeding,” said Sausage.

“What?”

“You look like you’ve got war paint on.”

“We don’t use war paint,” I said, and I thought about the explorers. The archer had two red stripes over his cheeks. No doubt I looked a bit like him now.

“I can see something moving out there,” said Janne.

We continued wading through the reeds. It was still shallow at this point, but soon the bottom would become muddy and we’d be forced to turn back. The mud in this lake was like quicksand. If you got caught in it, you couldn’t get out.

“It’s a boat,” said Sausage.

The reeds were thinning out. The mist over the water was starting to fade. I could see something long and narrow moving slowly over the surface.

“It’s a canoe!” said Janne. “The explorers! They’re still here!”

As the canoe drew closer to the shore, I could see that the two explorers were not alone in the canoe. We pulled it in through the clumps of reeds and there sat Kerstin shivering and shuddering after swimming with her clothes on. Her lips were the same dark blue as the sky.

“All of a sudden, there she was swimming,” said the archer.

“In the middle of the lake,” said the one with the hat. “We almost ran right into her in the mist.”

“Kerstin,” I asked gently, “are you all right?”

She was sitting in the middle of the canoe. Her soaking-wet T-shirt was hanging off her, looking like it weighed a ton.

“She hasn’t said a word,” said the archer. “We didn’t really know what to do until we saw you.”

“But we realized that we shouldn’t take her to the camp,” said the one with the hat.

“Did you see anybody?” I asked.

“No. The place looks deserted. But it wasn’t easy to see anything in this mist.”

Kerstin stood up and stumbled out of the canoe. She lost her balance and I grabbed hold of her arm. She was freezing cold—colder than you usually are after a swim.

“Why did you run into the lake like that?” I asked.

“I… heard something and thought that he… that they were after me.”

“Who’s they?”

She didn’t answer.

“You said
he
. Do you mean Christian?”

She nodded.

“What did he do?”

“He… he…” She couldn’t bring herself to say any more. Instead, she started shivering twice as much as before.

“She could catch pneumonia,” said Sausage.

“We’ve got to get her some dry clothes,” said Janne.

“She’s got her stuff back at the camp,” said Sausage.

“NO!” screamed Kerstin.

She looked at me and then at the others.

“I don’t want to go there!”

“There’s nobody there,” said Janne. “Everybody’s out searching. For you.”

“But… somebody always stays behind,” said Kerstin.

“Put this on for now,” said Janne, starting to take off his shirt.

“We’ve got an old blanket in the canoe,” said the archer. “She didn’t want to put it around her out there.”

“Okay,” I said and started walking toward the camp. “Wait here.”

“Where are you going?” asked Sausage.

“I’m going to check the camp.”

Everything was quiet as I walked across the playground. Most of the water had already drained away from the trough around the merry-go-round, leaving a layer of mud behind. The fog over the lake was gone. A canoe wouldn’t be able to hide out there anymore. Nor would a swimmer.

It looked like everybody was still in the forest searching. I thought I could hear some shouts, but it might have been birdcalls.

I knew which dorm Kerstin slept in but not which bed. But I did know that she kept her suitcase underneath her bed
and that her name was stenciled on the side of it.

As I snuck along one of the walls in the mess hall, I could hear an awful clattering coming from the kitchen. Maybe the cook was busy killing a beaver for dinner.

It was quiet in the girls’ dormitory. All the beds were made in a way that would have won first prize in our dorm.

Kerstin’s bed was the third on the right. I could see the case underneath it, but it was too big for me to carry back to the canoe.

I almost felt like a burglar when I opened the case, but I had to do it. I took out some sweaters and underwear and a pair of jeans and some socks. There was a pair of sandals at the bottom and I took those too.