The Lost Village(65)

The front door slams downstairs, and she stops writing.

“Staffan?” she ventures to ask, but his name sounds flimsy and washed-out on her lips. Her voice falters.

Elsa hears steps and stands up. Quickly shuffling the letter together on the desk, she looks for somewhere to hide it.

She opens the wardrobe and shoves it down the side of her underwear drawer, then closes the wardrobe door just as someone calls her name.

She steps away from the wardrobe. The bedroom door bursts open.

It’s Dagny.

Her face is shiny with sweat, and her hair is in disarray. She is holding her sunhat in her hands, and her yellow shoes are covered in dust and muck. She looks like she’s been running.

“Elsa,” she says, her voice rough and scratchy from exertion. “It’s Birgitta. You must come.”





NOW



I wake up slowly, my consciousness cloudy with sleep and confusion. Then I sit up and look around. It must be late morning—ten or ten thirty, judging by the warmth of the light outside. It’s a beautiful morning that lends the church a magical aura, despite the mud and dust on the checkerboard slate floor.

Oh God. I must have fallen asleep, even though it was my watch. Yet another thing I can’t do right.

Luckily enough, none of the others seems to have woken up and caught me sleeping on the job. Small mercies.

I blink and yawn into the back of my hand. Some of my papers have fallen to the ground, so I quickly bend down and sweep them together into a small pile. It’s quite peaceful in here, with the sunlight streaming down on the others as they sleep. The only thing to taint the image is the glowering Christ above the altar.

When I take a closer look at the others I give a start. Robert’s eyes are open.

“I didn’t want to wake anyone,” he says, so quietly that I almost have to read his lips.

He sits up, slides carefully out of Emmy’s arm, and gets up.

“Is there any water left?” he asks.

I look down guiltily at the empty bottle next to the pew and shake my head.

“Sorry,” I say. “I drank the last of it.”

He nods.

“Hard to make it stretch to four people,” he says.

“We can sneak out and get some more,” I whisper. “The river isn’t far. I would have gone earlier, but it seemed stupid to go alone.”

Robert glances at sleeping Emmy, who has curled up into a little ball under the thin blanket. Her face is soft in sleep; it looks younger, strangely familiar. When I used to sleep over at her room I would usually wake up first—she wasn’t a morning person—and sometimes I would just lie there and watch her sleep. It was the sort of friendship that can only exist in those few brittle years between teenage life and fully fledged adulthood, before you’ve set your limits as to how much you let others in.

“OK,” Robert whispers. “But we’ll have to move the pew. We should try not to wake them.”

I jump off the pew and take hold of one end. We try to lift it but don’t manage to get it far—I can’t keep my end up—and it slips out of my hands and scrapes loudly against the floor.

I glance at Emmy, but she hasn’t even moved. Max is still lying where he was, snoring in thin whistles.

I pull open the heavy door. The fresh air streams into the room like a gasp, and I take in the smell of morning after the rain. The light is of the clean, white type that seems to only exist in April and May.

I stride out onto the steps. It’s completely still. Not even the blades of grass are swaying.

Robert comes out behind me, and I hear him close the door. I look around.

“Ready?” I ask. My voice sounds almost perky.

But Robert isn’t looking at me.

He’s staring past me, down at the steps, with an almost thoughtful look on his face. I turn to follow his gaze.

The rain has turned the dust on the steps into mud. It has started to dry up again in the morning sun, but the ground is still sticky and wet.

And dotted with smeared, muddy footsteps.

My mind runs through the possibilities in less than a second. The prints are clear enough to visibly be footprints, but it’s hard to tell if they were made by shoes or bare feet. They could possibly have been made by an animal with elongated paws … but no. We haven’t seen any animals since we arrived.

Someone has been here. In the past few hours.

I look at Robert. His face is completely calm. He walks past me and down the steps, stops by one of the marks, and squats down for a closer look.

“What is it?” Emmy asks, giving me a start.

Clearly she wasn’t so sound asleep after all. She’s standing in the doorway behind me, looking at Robert. It seems to take her a few seconds longer than us to register what we’re looking at, but then her eyes widen, and some of the color drains from her cheeks.

Without a word, she walks out and down the steps, too. I hastily look up and out at the countryside around us. All I can see are empty houses and swaying greenery revived by the night’s rainfall, but that doesn’t make me any calmer. One thousand empty windows stare back at me on every side. I look left and right, try to catch some sort of movement, spot something out of the corner of my eye, but everything is quiet and still.

Meanwhile, Emmy has squatted down next to a print, which she studies intently. She reaches over and picks something out of the mud. It looks like a small, light pebble.