The Lost Village(92)

“If you run I’ll slit her throat open.” She clears her throat, then coughs. When she speaks again, her voice is quieter, softer. “And then I’ll take you both, one by one. Where do you think you can go? Silvertj?rn is my home. You can’t hide from me here.”

She’s old, I think feverishly, and we’re young and strong. We can run faster, can get away from her if we just make a run for it. We have a chance.

But then I hear Tone whimper quietly behind my back. Some of the seriousness of the situation must have forced its way through her haze, because so far she has done as Aina has said. I don’t even want to imagine what would happen if she started kicking and fighting like she did with Robert and Max.

I think of Max’s smashed-in head and outstretched hand. Of Emmy’s empty, staring eyes.

I open the door and slowly step out.

“Toward the square,” Aina says. “To the forest.”

Is this a nightmare? Or is it really happening?

The edge of the forest looks like an impenetrable barrier, a wall to another world. The pines rise up over our heads like ancient, forbidding divinities. Against my better judgment I stop; I get stuck between heartbeats, and suddenly I can’t take another step.

I can’t go in there. I can’t step into that darkness.

The fear explodes in my stomach, and for a while all I can think is:

Then she can kill me.

“Go,” says Aina, and she doesn’t need to use any threats, because Robert whispers my name behind me, and that single word is enough to make me move. I can throw away my own life—that much I’ve been prepared to do before—but not theirs.

The forest around us is coming to life in a way I’ve never seen before. Had Silvertj?rn been a graveyard, there would be whispering and whistling all around us. Movement everywhere. Countless eyes tracking our last steps.

My breath stings in my throat. In the darkness I trip on a root and fall. I feel Robert’s bound hands fumble to catch me, but he can’t do much. I land headfirst on the heather, and my knee slams into a stone, sending a jolt of pain up into my hip. I lay there for a few seconds with my face in the moss, my leg throbbing and my heart full of something resembling hate.

“Up,” Aina commands.

When at first I don’t move, her voice becomes softer, slightly teasing.

“Or maybe you don’t feel like it? A little sleepy, are we?” Her way of speaking is strange—both young and old at the same time. It’s like hearing a teen try to imitate the archaic speech patterns of an old movie star.

I don’t need to see what she does to be able to interpret the sound that is pressed from Tone’s throat. I force myself up to my hands and feet, ignoring the shooting pain in my knee.

My eyes have adjusted enough to the shadows now to make her out in the darkness. She gives a wide, cold smile, a slash across the middle of her face.

“You two, keep walking,” she says. “Straight ahead.” Her smile grows, impossible as that ought to be. It looks like her face has been cleft by an ax. As though she could explode—bite—stab—at any second.

“We’re getting close now.”

Close to what? I have my suspicions. I know the direction we’re walking in. It’s the part of the forest we were warned to steer clear of, where the ground was too unstable. Due to the mine underneath.

The searches had never gone down there because the entrance was still sealed, but those tunnels run deep into the earth’s underbelly. I remember some of the words I found scrawled in Pastor Mattias’s sermon.

Only in silence can we become free. Only by allowing the darkness to embrace us can we step into the light.

In silence. In darkness.

I glimpse it through the trees as we approach, a hollow like an open grave, a blackness deeper than the shadows. It’s wide and uneven, hardly more than a hole in the ground, but I know where it leads.

Aina doesn’t need to direct me to it; I’m drawn there all by myself. I stop at the edge and look down into the hole. It’s too dark for me to see how deep it goes.

“What…” I hear Robert mutter behind me, and I reply before she does.

“The mine,” I say. “It leads to the mine.”

“To our church,” Aina whispers, her voice merging with the whistling treetops.

“Jump,” she says, her voice harder now.

“What?” I say and start turning around, but then I feel something that makes me instantly freeze. A blade on the back of my neck.

“Jump,” she says, and the pressure grows until I feel it swell to a shooting pain. “Jump, or I’ll give you a little push. We must go to them.”

To the choir beneath us. To the darkness of the tunnels.

“Jump!” she says, her voice piercingly shrill, and suddenly I feel a foot against my back, a quick kick that gives me no time to react.

I fall.





THEN



She climbs down the ladder, down into the darkness, her sweaty fingers gripping the rungs tightly. They are rough and prickly, and feel sloppily made.

The darkness beneath is compact, their only light that of the pastor’s torch. Down in the darkness it dazzles, its shifty flicker lighting up the tunnel in both directions.

This must once have been a transport tunnel, as it is long and sloping. The walls are rugged and damp. It’s already cooler down here than it was up at the surface.