The Forbidden Place Read online

  “And here we have Alex, our caretaker,” Agneta said as a tall, muscular man came through the door. “You can give him a shout if anything needs fixing.”

  Alex stopped, his eyes fixed somewhere up by the chandeliers, and gave a curt nod. Then he kept walking, heading for the back rooms.

  “Gustav and I are available on weekdays from nine to four, in case you have any questions. Most of the time we’re in the office in the next room along, unless we’re up a ladder painting a barn door or fixing a broken tractor or the like. The rest of the time, you’re likely to find us in the east wing, which is where we have our home. It’s fine to contact us outside office hours as well.” She paused, then went on. “That should be about it. This is what we call the off season; there’s not much going on just now. Are you here for any particular reason, if I may ask?”

  “Yes… I’m working on a doctoral dissertation. It’s about how the greenhouse effect influences the process of decomposition in wetlands. I’m a biologist.”

  “I see.” Agneta smiled, motioning toward the window. “You came here because of the bog. Interesting.”

  “Yes, I was planning to do a few last field experiments…”

  “It is quite unique, this bog,” Agneta continued. “They say it was once a so-called sacrificial bog.”

  “Right.”

  “Maybe you’ve heard of those? Apparently, back in the Iron Age, various offerings to the gods were buried here. Even people, actually. We have brochures about it in the office. Around the new millennium one of those bodies was found here, from 300 B.C. It’s at the Karlstad Museum now…”

  Nathalie nodded. “Yes, I think I did hear about that.”

  “The Lingonberry Girl,” Agneta said.

  “Okay,” said Nathalie.

  “Yes, that’s what she’s called, the girl they found… but speaking of the bog, I hope you’ll be careful when you go out there. It’s very marshy in some spots and the boardwalks are slippery this time of year. But I suppose you’re used to it.”

  The cabin was below the manor house and had one room plus a kitchen. The kitchen consisted of a counter and washbasin with no tap, a large wood-burning stove, and a dining nook with a traditional kitchen sofa and two chairs. The room was furnished with a bedframe on legs, a wardrobe, a simple desk, and, in front of the tile stove, two old easy chairs and a tiny table.

  The autumn chill had forced its way through the thick timber walls. It felt raw inside, but it smelled fresh and clean.

  A large mirror was leaning against the wall in one corner. Nathalie sank to the floor, sitting cross-legged, and observed her face. She never ceased to be surprised that she always looked so much more energetic than she felt. Her sand-colored hair, which she trimmed once a year, was still cut the same way a star stylist had suggested eleven years earlier as Nathalie was preparing for a modeling session. Simple, medium-length, a soft bob—easy to maintain.

  When she was eighteen she had been “discovered” outside a cinema and offered a modeling contract, even though she was really too short—apparently she was expected to be immensely grateful that they were willing to overlook this fault.

  She had just finished secondary school and was hoping to earn a bit of easy cash, but she couldn’t handle all the hustle and bustle. She couldn’t tolerate the hairspray that stung her nose or the powder brushes moving over her face or the commands in front of the camera: rather brusque orders that were supposed to make her radiate something exceptional—she never understood what. After two weeks she’d had enough.

  The hairstyle was her only significant legacy from that parenthetical aside in her life. It took very little effort but helped her keep up her advantageous appearance, which she chose to maintain for purely practical reasons: it kept those around her satisfied and preoccupied by what was happening on the surface.

  There were two jugs of water and a large basket of wood in the entrance. She began by lighting both the kitchen stove and the tile stove, and then she unpacked her groceries and placed her clothing in the wardrobe. Last of all she unrolled a large map of the area, tacked it on to the wall next to the desk, and pulled on her slippers and a heavy sweater.

  She walked around for a moment, looking at the room. The fire crackled and popped, and so much smoke leaked from the stove that she had to open a window.

  After a while, everything seemed to be working. She warmed up a can of tortellini from the service station and ate a piece of bread with cheese spread from a tube.

  Behind the house was a small garden, hemmed in by overgrown dog-rose bushes, and in front there were two wooden lawn chairs. A few meters past them was the path that wound its way around the bog.

  She put on her jacket, cautiously sat down on one of the chairs, and gazed out at the scenery. It felt like nothing had changed, as if everything had remained as it always had been—and not just for the past fourteen years but for centuries, since time immemorial. The knotty, gray pines. The pools of water, like blinking eyes, between damp green tussocks. A homey sort of desolation in a muted palette; the shimmering heads of cotton grass on their slender, rust-colored autumn stalks.

  The flute-like song of the curlew: she could hear it echo beneath the skies although the bird had long since migrated away for the winter. She could hear it even though she hadn’t listened to its bubbling, cheerful song for so long; that aerial display and call—she had truly loved it before everything changed, before it transformed into scornful, mocking laughter in her memory, a threatening warning trill about what was to come.

  When she considered what she was about to subject herself to, she felt bold, bordering on reckless. It was as though she had crossed a line out of some compulsion, even though she wasn’t properly prepared.

  If she gazed westward she could see the electrical poles rising above the foliage. Those were the same poles that had been outside her old bedroom window, the ones that had served as her landmark and salvation each time she got half lost out there. The thought was almost incomprehensible: if she just followed those poles, she would eventually arrive at the place where everything began and ended.

  It was still dark out when she woke on her first morning in the cottage. The darkness was one of the few signs of autumn she didn’t appreciate. The dark mornings, the dark evenings; more light lost with each passing day. Summer was preferable in that respect: at four in the morning, the usual time she was awakened by the knocking in her head, the day had already begun. The light made it easy to shake off the weight of surging into consciousness, that wordless feeling that something was wrong even as her brain was fumbling for an explanation. The autumn darkness, though, had the opposite effect. It seemed to want to brood on those difficult feelings.

  She lit the kerosene lamp next to the bed and walked over to the tile stove. It was still warm. She hugged it gingerly like a large, long-lost friend, moving close to it with her eyes closed, letting her palms, thighs and one cheek rest against its warmth. The word prayer flitted through her mind. Was this what it felt like?

  Then something scraped against the window, a sharp sound.

  What was that?

  She slowly walked over and tried to peer out.

  Magpies?

  She couldn’t see anything. Nothing but the outdoor lights up at the manor house, a hundred meters away, two little blobs floating in the darkness.

  When it was this dark out, the light of the kerosene lamp made her vulnerable. There were no curtains to draw. But there were nails at the upper corners of each window. She stood on a chair, tied two knitted sweaters together, and tried to hang them so that they would cover the window closest to the bed. It was clumsy work. She would have to remember to find a blanket. Or a sheet. For the other windows, too.

  She took yesterday’s paper from her suitcase and crawled back under the duvet. She tried to read an opinion piece about energy policy, but she couldn’t concentrate. The windows were glaring at her. The darkness was staring in.

  Shit. How was this going to
work?

  She hadn’t counted on feeling so exposed. That wasn’t part of the plan. No, forget all that. Now it was time to focus on two things: work and that vague, underlying task, the one she suspected had something to do with her personally. Something had pulled her in this direction, maybe for years. Something that she hadn’t listened to on a conscious level, but still somehow had followed. Like a yearning from the underground. A call from within.

  No one knew she was here at Quagmire. No one but her adviser, who was off traveling as well.

  Nathalie liked the thought of just going away somewhere. Because there was something cleansing about vanishing from your usual surroundings, a kind of ultimate freedom.

  Fourteen years ago, she had left this region without a word. Now that she had returned, it was like mirroring herself, plying the thread all the way back to work out the knots and start again.

  Most of her friends would hardly notice she wasn’t in Gothenburg; they were researchers just like she was, spread out all over the globe.

  The only people who might start to wonder were her foster parents.

  In the past few years, Nathalie hadn’t had the energy for the effort it took to keep up her relationship with them, and as their contact grew more infrequent their reproach grew stronger, especially from her foster mother Harriet.

  “Is this the thanks we get, after all we’ve done for you?” Harriet had said the last time they’d had something that could be likened to a conversation. They had dropped by with flowers for her birthday, and Harriet had been unable to hide her feelings. Her round face turned bright red and she had to fight to prevent herself from crying.

  Nathalie’s foster father Lars had sat there with his coat on for the entire visit. He had kept tugging at his mustache and staring at the floor.

  “Let’s leave now,” he said at last. “It’s time to give up on all this. She doesn’t want it.”

  His cynical attitude made Nathalie feel a certain amount of affinity with him, but beyond that she hadn’t felt a thing. Nothing. And that was what Harriet had realized.

  Before she left, Harriet studied her, her eyes narrow, her sympathy gone, and said in a broken voice, “You are horrible, do you know that? I’ve always thought you act the way you do because of what happened to you, but now I don’t know any more. Maybe you’re just like that: superficial, cold and ungrateful.”

  With her dressing gown tied firmly around her waist, Nathalie sat down in the center of the room to take control of and defy the feeling of vulnerability. She spread a stack of documents out in front of her: the results of the measurements and experiments she had performed so far in Germany, Holland, Poland and Denmark.

  The silence, she thought, looking around. It was so quiet in the cottage. So demanding. Maybe she just needed to get used to it.

  She tried listening to all the sounds that surrounded her in spite of it: a lazy fly buzzing its last verse in the kitchen window, the crackle and draft from the stove, the muffled cawing of a raven close by. She switched to focusing on smells. That was more difficult: burning wood, soap, soot.

  She spread out her diagram of nitrogen fractions and thought about the deviations. Why, for example, had there been higher amounts in Germany than in Poland? Did it have to do with the time of year, was it because of the nature of the surroundings, or was it linked to global climate change?

  Those of her international colleagues who worked on similar questions had mostly conducted studies in the polar regions, enormous areas that were always frozen. Now that global warming was causing these areas to thaw, processes were beginning in the ground that released even more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. The question was how much was added and how it affected warming on the whole.

  Nathalie had previously been part of a Nordic research team who studied the same phenomenon in the mountainous regions of Sweden. When an opportunity popped up with the chance to focus more specifically on Nordic and central European wetlands, she jumped at it right away—and got the job.

  Her research would surely turn into a meaningful addition to the climate research that was so important when it was time for politicians to make decisions. But only once her visit to Mossmarken was booked and almost totally planned was she struck by the realization that it was more than just work-related interests that had brought her here. That there were personal motives, that her choices and decisions were grounded in something entirely different than she’d first thought.

  However obvious it might seem in retrospect, those thoughts had overwhelmed her. They had shoved her up against the wall and made certain that she would listen this time, before they let go. And although she still hadn’t dared to dig very deeply in her own mind, at least she hadn’t backed away.

  She had made her way here, to this desolate place in the wetlands between Dalsland and Värmland.

  And maybe that was the most important thing.

  She left the cottage only when she needed to shower, fetch water or charge her computer and mobile phone. She needed to anchor herself in the house, to find a stable starting position before she began to head out into the bog for real.

  She drew preliminary sampling sites on her map. She would take samples in a total of twelve different parts of the bog, spread over two days, so as to make sure her test results were significant. Then she would do it all over again in November, once the ground was colder.

  During the first few days, she didn’t speak to a single person. But every afternoon, at approximately the same time, she noticed a man about her own age jogging by on the path outside. Each time, he glanced curiously up at the cottage.

  One day as he approached, she was on her way back from the outhouse. He stopped, resting his hands against his thighs to catch his breath. At first they pretended not to notice each other, but then he nodded at her in a quiet greeting.

  “Hi,” he said, still breathing hard. “Do you live here?”

  She found herself feeling trapped. She hadn’t expected to run into anyone out here; she had been looking forward to avoiding involuntary contact with the outside world.

  “Yes, I guess so,” she said. “Temporarily. I’m just renting.”

  She turned around to go inside.

  “Nice place. My name’s Johannes,” the man said, raising his hand to say hello. “Could I… possibly trouble you for some water? I forgot to bring my bottle. I’m awfully thirsty.”

  “Of course.” She went inside to fill a glass, then handed it to him.

  “Thanks,” he said, then drained it all at once and handed the glass back. He wiped the sweat from his face with the bottom of his shirt, then stretched his back and ran his hand over his shiny hair.

  Raven hair. The words flew through her mind. Handsome.

  “Is this a nice place to run?” she asked, mostly just to have something to say.

  “It’s fantastic. This place, I mean…” He shook his head as if he couldn’t quite find the right words. “I’m a student at the art school over in Fengerskog, and no one else I’ve talked to seems to have been here. Which is ridiculous. It’s so pretty here. But that’s fine with me,” he said with a smile. “It’s nice to be alone out here.”

  He nodded at her.

  “What about you? What are you doing here?”

  She hesitated. The words inside her felt stubborn; they didn’t want to come out; they wanted to hide, or just rest. They were tired of being dutiful, keeping up the eternal game. At the same time, there was something about him she found intriguing.

  What’s more, she couldn’t deny that at close quarters he turned out to have rather hypnotically smooth skin, olive, as that shade would be called. She would have nothing against getting an opportunity to observe it in secret for a while, pondering what types of genes and fatty acids could lend such advantages to skin cells.

  “I’m measuring the greenhouse gasses out in the bog,” she said, pushing a lock of hair behind her ear. “Among other things. Or, I’m going to. I haven’t actually started just
yet.”

  “Greenhouse gasses?” he asked. “Is that for a company?”

  “No… I’m working on my dissertation. In biology.”

  “Oh, that’s interesting.” His gaze seemed to sharpen somehow. “I would love to hear more,” he said, pausing as if to feel out the situation before he went on. “But I don’t want to bother you. I’m sure we’ll see each other again; I run here almost every day.”

  He raised his hand once again, then went on his way, up toward the car park.

  Nathalie observed the muscles in his thighs and calves as he went. Long and supple, she thought. Full of stamina.

  During the next few days she stayed inside around the time of Johannes’s runs. She kept away from the windows, yet was still close enough to sneak a peek without him noticing.

  One afternoon, she acted on impulse and made a whole pot of tea. She was sitting in one of the chairs outside the cottage with a cup when he passed by.

  “May I offer you some tea?” she called.

  He stopped, ran one hand across his cheek, and raised his eyebrows in surprise. At first she couldn’t tell if he was surprised or just thought it was a strange invitation, and she immediately regretted asking.

  But then he said, “I’d love that,” and approached her.

  She felt both excited and a little nervous as she gathered milk, sugar and another cup and placed it all on the little table between the chairs.

  He took a seat. His movements were slow, gentle; he didn’t take up more space than he needed, but he didn’t take less either. An openness toward everything, nothing to hide ran through her, and, at the same time, she felt a chill gust through her chest: Like me, but the other way around.

  He put several scoops of sugar into his cup. When he noticed her skeptical smile, he laughed.

  “I know. My dad was from Morocco, so the sugar craving is in my blood.”

  The afternoon sun sank quickly as they leaned back.