The Voices Beyond: (Oland Quartet Series 4) (2 page)

‘Who’s he?’ Gerlof asked when he was out of earshot. ‘He’s not from round here, is he?’

‘Aron Fredh? No, he’s from the south, from Rödtorp … But he’s a kind of relative.’ Bengtsson put down the bottle behind a gravestone and looked wearily at Gerlof. ‘He’s a
relative incognitus
, if you know what I mean.’

Gerlof hadn’t a clue. He’d never heard of Rödtorp and he couldn’t speak any foreign languages, but he nodded anyway. He knew that Bengtsson only had a little girl, so perhaps the boy was one of his nephews?

Aron came back from the shed carrying a spade. He didn’t say a word, simply positioned himself next to Bengtsson and Gerlof and started digging. The earth was as dry as dust and free of stones, but Gerlof’s spade found the first body part after just a few minutes. It was a dark-brown human bone, possibly part of a thigh bone. Having worked as a gravedigger for a month, he was used to such discoveries, and simply placed the bone carefully to one side on the grass and covered it with a small pile of earth. Then he carried on digging.

They worked their way downwards for over an hour.

The sun disappeared and the air grew colder. As Gerlof shovelled away, an old story kept going through his mind:

Once upon a time there was a door-to-door salesman who called at a farm on the island of Öland. A little boy opened the door.

‘
Is your daddy at home, son?
’

‘
No, sir.
’

‘
Is he far away?
’

‘
No, sir. He’s in the churchyard
.’

‘
What on earth is he doing there?
’

‘
I don’t think he’s doing anything. Daddy’s dead
…’

When it was almost eleven o’clock, they heard the sound of whinnying echoing off the walls of the church. Gerlof looked up and saw two white horses trotting through the gates, surrounded by a cloud of buzzing flies. The horses were pulling a black carriage with a wooden cross on the top – a hearse. Erling Samuelsson, the priest, was sitting next to the coachman. He had conducted the funeral service at the dead man’s farm.

By this stage, the grave was deep enough, and Bengtsson helped the two boys out of the hole. Then he brushed the dirt off his clothes and went over to the mortuary.

The hearse had stopped there, some distance away from the church. The shiny, expensive wooden coffin containing the body of Edvard Kloss had been lifted down and placed on the grass. Most of the relatives who had made up the funeral procession turned around and went home once they reached the gate; there was only the interment left now.

Gerlof saw the two brothers standing on either side of the coffin. Sigfrid and Gilbert had nothing to say to one another today; they stood in silence in their black suits, and it seemed as if there were a grey cloud hanging between them.

However, they had no choice but to work together. The brothers were to carry the coffin over to the grave, along with Bengtsson and Gerlof.

‘Up we go,’ Bengtsson said.

Edvard Kloss had enjoyed his food and the good things in life, and the base of the coffin cut into Gerlof’s shoulder. He set off, taking short steps; he thought he could feel the heavy body moving around inside, as if it were shifting back and forth – or was it just his imagination?

Slowly, they moved towards the grave. Gerlof saw that Aron was now standing by some tall headstones over by the churchyard wall, as if he were hiding.

But he wasn’t alone. A man in his thirties was on the other side of the wall, talking quietly to Aron. He was simply dressed, a bit like a farmhand, and he seemed on edge. When he took a step to one side, Gerlof noticed that he had a slight limp.

‘Davidsson!’ Bengtsson said. ‘Give me a hand with this!’

He had laid out two ropes on the grass. The coffin was placed upon them, then lifted again and positioned above the black grave.

Slowly, slowly, it was lowered into the hole.

When it reached the bottom, the priest picked up a handful of earth from the pile the gravediggers had made. He threw it on to the lid of the coffin as he spoke over the body of Edvard Kloss:

‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. In the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through Our Lord Jesus Christ …’

The priest threw three more handfuls of earth on to the coffin, committing the deceased to his final rest. When he had finished, Bengtsson and Gerlof picked up their spades.

Before Gerlof began to fill in the grave he glanced at the Kloss brothers. The older brother, Gilbert, was standing behind him as steady as a rock, his hands behind his back. Sigfrid was wandering up and down by the wall, looking a lot more anxious.

Gerlof and Bengtsson shovelled the earth back into the hole. When they had finished they would lay their spades on top in the form of a cross, as was the tradition.

After a little while they took a break. They straightened their backs, took a few steps away from the grave and let out a long breath. Gerlof turned his face up to the sun and closed his eyes.

He could hear something in the silence. A faint sound. He listened carefully.

Knocking. Then silence, then three more faint knocks.

The sound seemed to be coming from the ground.

Gerlof blinked and looked down into the grave.

He glanced over at Bengtsson, and could see from the other man’s tense expression that he had heard the same thing. And the Kloss brothers, who were standing further away, had gone white. Even further away, young Aron had also turned his head.

Gerlof wasn’t going mad – they had all heard the sound.

Time had stopped in the churchyard. There was no more knocking, but everyone seemed to be holding their breath.

Gilbert Kloss walked slowly to the edge of the grave, his mouth hanging open. He stared down at the coffin and said quietly, ‘We need to get him out of there.’

The priest stepped forward, rubbing his forehead nervously.

‘That’s not possible.’

‘Yes, it is,’ Gilbert said.

‘But I’ve just committed his body to the earth!’

Kloss didn’t speak, but his expression was determined. Eventually, another voice from behind said firmly, ‘Get him out.’

It was Sigfrid Kloss.

The priest sighed.

‘Oh, very well, you’d better bring him up. I’ll go and telephone Dr Blom.’

Daniel Blom was one of the two doctors in the parish.

Bengtsson put down his spade, sighed loudly and looked at Gerlof.

‘Will you go down, Davidsson? With Aron?’

Gerlof gazed down into the darkness of the grave. Did he want to go down there? No. But what if Edvard Kloss had woken up and was suffocating inside the coffin? If that was the case, they had to hurry.

He scrambled down into the hole and cautiously stepped on top of the lid, which was covered in soil. He remembered what he had read in his confirmation class, about Jesus’s encounter with Lazarus:

The man who had died came out, his hands and feet bound with linen strips, and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go
.’

Gerlof listened as hard as he could for any sound from inside the coffin, but there was nothing. However, he didn’t like being down there; the air was icy cold. At some point in the future he too would end up in a place like this. For all eternity. Unless Jesus came along and raised him from the dead.

A scraping noise behind him made him jump, but it was only the boy clambering down on to the lid of the coffin, clutching a spade. Aron Fredh from Rödtorp. Gerlof nodded to him in the darkness.

‘Let’s dig,’ he said quietly.

Aron was staring down at the coffin. He whispered something – just one word.

‘What? What did you say?’

‘America,’ the boy repeated. ‘That’s where I’m going.’

‘Really?’ Gerlof was sceptical. ‘How old are you, Aron?’

‘Twelve.’

‘In that case, you’re too young.’

‘Sven’s going to take me. I’m going to be a sheriff when we get there!’

‘Oh yes?’

‘I’m a good shot,’ Aron said.

Gerlof didn’t ask any more questions. He didn’t know who Sven was, but he’d heard of America. The promised land. Things weren’t going too well in America at the moment, with the Wall Street Crash and high unemployment, but the attraction was still there.

At that moment, standing on top of Edvard Kloss’s coffin, Gerlof decided to stop being a gravedigger. He would leave Stenvik and his strict father. He didn’t want to go to America; he would go to sea instead. He would take himself off to Borgholm and get a job on some cargo ship travelling between the island and the mainland.

Do something that would give him more freedom. Become a seaman in the sunshine.

‘How’s it going?’ Bengtsson shouted from above his head. Gerlof looked up.

‘Fine.’

He and Aron, the future sheriff, began to dig, and they quickly cleared all the earth from the lid of the coffin.

‘Done!’

Bengtsson threw down the ropes. Gerlof managed to get them around each end of the coffin, then climbed out of the grave as quickly as he could.

Edvard Kloss was lifted out and carried into the cool sacristy.

‘Put it down,’ the priest said quietly.

The coffin was placed on the stone floor with a scraping sound.

Then there was silence. Edvard Kloss was dead.

And yet he had knocked.

Dr Blom arrived twenty minutes later, carrying his black medical bag. His shirt was soaked in sweat and his face was bright red with the heat, and he was clearly in need of an explanation. He asked just one question, his voice echoing loudly beneath the vaulted stone ceiling: ‘What’s going on here?’

The men waiting in the aisle looked at one another.

‘We heard something,’ the priest said eventually.

‘You heard something?’

‘Yes.’ The priest nodded in the direction of the coffin. ‘A knocking noise from down in the ground … Just when they started filling in the grave.’

The doctor looked at the lid of the coffin, filthy and covered in scratches from the spades.

‘I see. In that case I’d better take a look.’

The Kloss brothers stood in silence as Bengtsson removed the screws and lifted the lid.

Lazarus had spent four days in his grave, Gerlof recalled. ‘Lord, by this time he
stinks
,’ his sister, Martha, had said to Jesus as they stood before the stone.

The lid was off now. Gerlof didn’t move closer, but he could still see the body, washed and arranged for its final rest. The arms were crossed over the big belly, the eyes were closed and there were black bruises on his face, possibly from the wall that had killed him. But Edvard Kloss was smartly dressed; the corpse was wearing a black suit made of thick fabric.

‘If you dress the deceased as well as you speak of him, he will have a smile on his face when he is lying in his coffin,’ Gerlof’s grandmother used to say.

But Edvard Kloss’s mouth was no more than a narrow, straight line, his lips hard and dry.

Dr Blom opened his leather bag and bent over the corpse; Gerlof turned away, but he could hear the doctor muttering to himself. A stethoscope rattled against the stone floor.

‘No heartbeat,’ the doctor said.

There was silence, then came Gilbert’s voice, sounding strained:

‘Open a vein so we can be absolutely sure.’

That was enough for Gerlof. He went out into the sunshine and stood in the shade of the church tower.

‘Now will you have a beer?’

Bengtsson came over, carrying two fresh bottles.

This time, Gerlof nodded and gratefully accepted a drink. The bottle was ice cold, and he raised it to his lips and drank deeply. The alcohol went straight to his head and slowed down his thought processes. He looked at Bengtsson.

‘Has this happened before?’

‘What?’

‘Have you heard noises before?’

The gravedigger shook his head.

‘Not personally, at any rate.’ He gave a tight little smile, took a swig of his beer and looked over at the church. ‘But of course the Kloss brothers are a bit different … I have a problem with that family. They just take whatever they want. All the time, all over the place.’

‘But Edvard Kloss …’ Gerlof said, struggling to find the right words. ‘He can’t have …’

‘Calm down,’ Bengtsson broke in. ‘This isn’t your problem.’ He had another drink, and added: ‘In the old days, they used to tie the hands together. When someone died, I mean, so that they’d lie still down there in the coffin. Did you know that?’

Gerlof shook his head and didn’t say another word.

After a few moments the church door opened, and Gerlof and Bengtsson quickly hid the bottles of beer. Dr Blom stuck his head out and waved them over.

‘I’ve finished.’

‘And he’s …’

‘He’s dead, of course. No sign of life whatsoever. You can put him back where you got him from.’

The interment was repeated. The coffin was carried out of the church, the ropes were slipped underneath and it was lowered into the grave. Gerlof and Bengtsson started shovelling earth into the hole once more, clutching their spades with a certain amount of grim determination; they were feeling a little unsteady after the beer. Gerlof looked around for Aron Fredh, but both the boy and the man with the limp had disappeared.

Everyone gathered around the grave, including Dr Blom, who was holding tightly on to his leather bag.

The earth thudded against the coffin lid.

Then the sound came again: three sharp raps from down in the ground. Quiet but clear.

Gerlof froze in mid-movement, his heart pounding. Suddenly, he was completely sober, and frightened. He looked across at Bengtsson on the other side of the mound of earth; he, too, had stopped dead.

Sigfrid Kloss looked tense, but his brother, Gilbert, seemed to be absolutely terrified. He was staring at the coffin as if mesmerized.

Even Dr Blom had stiffened at the sound. Gerlof realized the scepticism was gone, but the doctor shook his head.

‘Fill in the grave,’ he said firmly.

The priest was silent for a moment, then he nodded.

‘There’s nothing more we can do.’