When Dad’s eyelids drop like a guillotine she pulls the car door shut with a click. He turns his gaze to the road, and from her shady spot in the backseat she can only see his right arm and leg, a small patch of cheek. Dad’s sunglasses lie on the dashboard, glinting at Kore like black stars. The AC hums quietly. The car smells new.

As he backs out of the yard, she turns towards the window in time to wave to her mother who is standing down on the flagstones outside the house, watching them leave. The car stops, gears are shifted. Then they’re on their way.

Five weeks, that’s the plan.

It’s the same every summer, time is split into two big blocks. The first has disappeared already, now it’s the middle of July and starting to get darker, you can see it in the corners, in the crowns of the trees, and the grass has deepened in colour, swapped its light June getup for a deeper dark green shag.

Five weeks. Kore sinks back in the seat and tries to loosen the belt, but it’s stuck. Along the roadside the midsummer flowers have lost their blossoms, only the empty stalks stick up. They had been pink, white, purple. When she and Mum had decorated the Midsummer pole there had been loads of them, they had picked an armful and then stayed up really late, until one thirty.

The car slows down a little when they reach the top of the slope. The dry sound of the blinker. Then they turn onto the highway. When the speedometer needle sweeps past seventy Dad pushes a button that locks all the doors.

The date had approached like a sharp hilltop with an unknown, and yet known, far side. Then the hour. Tick, tock. And then she had glimpsed the car up by the road. He never had to call for her. She would come anyway, as if pulled towards a black magnet, though her feet hardly moved. All morning she had wandered around from room to room with the open bag. But it didn’t matter what she packed. Everything was already there. A new toothbrush instead of the matted one she had at home, pink rainwear instead of the green ones hanging on the hook in the hallway, lots of comic books in the chest of drawers. And toys. A drawing pad. Even small tubes of oil paint that she got for Christmas. Everything you could imagine needing was at her Dad’s, everything.

And at the same time nothing.

He was always late and she always sat waiting, in the hallway, her hands clenched around the bag’s handles. Katja had been preparing dinner in the kitchen at the time. Susanna would be over later, they would sit on the veranda behind the house, light a mosquito coil, drink wine and gossip. Kore’s body had felt empty when she thought about it, that everything would be as usual here. Except her. If she weren’t waiting for Dad just then, she’d have taken out her craft kit and put it on the kitchen table, then listened to cassettes and made something out of paper balls, glue and sequins. And afterwards she and Mum would have watched Disney Afternoon and drunk fizzy drinks and then there would be Fort Boyard. But only if Mum had had time to finish the cleaning, otherwise she would do that first.

“I wonder if you’ll find any snails this year?” Katja had said, taking a packet of prawns out of the freezer, “And you’ve hardly had any time to ride your nice new bike, have you? I’m sure that chain doesn’t wobble at all.”

Kore had nodded and gripped the handles of the backpack again. Up there at the roadside the wind gently nudged the rowans. Still no car. The hallway was dim.

On the wall next to the front door were the faded chalk marks Kore had made when she was three. After Mum had finally found a forgotten bit of the same wallpaper in the attic and pasted it over, it had only taken a few days before Kore had drawn a new crude chalk picture in black and red on the exact same spot, “Apparently there was meant to be a drawing there,” Katja would say with a laugh.

The rustling in the kitchen had stopped. When Kore looked that way Katja had avoided her eyes and started fumbling with the knot of the plastic bag again. Kore had looked back outside and then she saw the car arrive. Emerge from nothing. She got up right away and put on her backpack.

“Call me if there’s anything,” her mum had said, giving Kore a hug. “My little sweetie pie.”

Have a great time, she had said. Haveagreathaveagreathavgrttme.

“Kore,” says her dad.

He looks at her in the rear-view mirror. Far behind them the house is already gone.

“Let’s go to the toy shop,” he says. “And you can choose whatever you want.”

The cool air inside the car gives her legs goosebumps, from her sneakers all the way up to her patterned cycling shorts. Her thighs stick to the cream-coloured leather seat covers. She feels a little cold but doesn’t say anything. Her voice has crawled deep inside her and hidden away, like a hard pea somewhere in her body.

Dad drives quickly through a changing landscape, the car moves almost soundlessly at seventy miles an hour. He glances over his shoulder at every car he glides past. The tip of Kore’s nose happens to touch the window pane, she wipes it carefully with her sleeve so as not to leave a mark. Outside she can see the invisible animals, the seven that have been with her since she was little, following them along the roadside. Titus, Babel, Bollo Sé, Mitko, Masha, Ivrahim and Long-fingers. Titus is running ahead, so beautiful. His pearly black eyes are gleaming. The others have to work to keep up with him, to make it over the tree stumps, through the thickets and across the dikes. Mitko flies sometimes, it’s easier that way. Ivrahim keeps his distance from the rest. Beyond the tilled fields on either side there’s nothing but miles of game fencing. And behind that bushy forest. She knows there are other, bigger animals in there among the trees. So far they haven’t made an appearance. But they are there.

The road descends, the sun flickers between the tree trunks. Here and there she glimpses houses, fewer of them the further down they get. Then the world becomes desolate and empty. They drive past an unattended petrol station, a collapsed barn. Some bare trunks against the burnt grass of the area. Everything is falling, gaping emptily in the void. Then the car reaches the muddy bottom, rounds a bend and the town spreads out in front of them. A roundabout with a large iron figure in the middle, behind which chimneys shoot straight up into the thick cloud cover. The manholes are steaming. Next to the bus station a teenager sits hunched on a railing.

A minute later the car stops, and with a single step her dad is outside. Kore steps onto the pavement and follows him towards the shop. Out of the corner of her eye she notices that the animals have stealthily hidden behind one of the rear wheels.

When they’re back outside Kore is holding a thin bag, and in it lies the doll. A light blue dress, rustling frills. There had been so many of them in there, in the end she took only one. Her hands look sooty in the weak light.

The animals get into the car with her this time, crowding around her feet on the mat. Now they are in her father’s land and live under her father’s laws. Their eyes wander.

 

Everything is quiet and peaceful in the villa quarter at Ektjärn, the sun smooth like a tongue above the roofs. No one is out mowing the lawn, the trampolines are abandoned. An auburn cat sits grooming itself on the front steps of one of the houses. It breaks off mid-movement as they drive past. Kore sees the car reflected in every window they pass. An egg-shaped, shiny stone. And in the middle of the stone – her face.

Once Dad has parked and let her into the house, she sits down in the armchair in the living room. Then he fetches the presents. She gets one after the other, until her lap is full of small figures and boxes inside boxes and hair accessories and colourful bracelets. The objects come from all over the world, her dad travels a lot with work, to various conferences and institutions. He travels to places where people speak like birds, have gold teeth and gaping mouths. He’s been to New York, Singapore and Madrid. Istanbul and Lima. Sydney, once. She holds a small lacquered box up to her nose and takes in the smell of the other life Dad leads, when she isn’t there.

Kore thanks him and thanks him some more, gets yet another present, and then, when she can hardly take it anymore, he stops and jiggles a slender piece of jewellery out of a red box in the pocket of his suit jacket and lays it out across his hand, and it glitters and from the very end of the necklace hangs a little silver heart.

“This is a grown-up present, really,” he says. “But I want you to have it. My little queen.”

Kore looks at the necklace that seems to run and trickle even though it’s lying perfectly still in her father’s hands. As he puts it around her neck she hears his voice behind her.

“The jeweller I got it from told me that the heart of whoever you give the necklace to is yours for ever.”

He laughs a little. The light from the living room lamp is making her giddy, its tiny electric strands whirl through the air and descend towards her. Straight at her black, absorbent pupils.

“Promise me, Kore?”

His voice seems to grow more distant, as if floating somewhere above her. That you’re mine for ever. She moves her lips but no sound passes them, she wants to say no but can’t, it sounds almost like he’s crying now, and the specks of light from the lamp steal into her eyes one by one, they’re pulled towards the earth and her face. In her stomach the black ball aches, digs down deeper into her flesh. On her second try, her answer is audible but no louder than a whisper. A final utterance before her voice shuts down.

Yes.

Here at Dad’s house her room is in the basement, below the staircase. At night it creaks as if someone were walking down there. That does happen sometimes, when Dad’s on his way to his study, which is further along the hall. She never goes there, though. She stays on the other side. Her room here is bigger than the one at home, light blue and mauve – she got to choose the wallpaper herself. The floor is covered in soft carpet so that she won’t feel cold, and the windows are shut tight. Otherwise the snow might crack them in winter, Dad has said. But she knows that it’s to stop her from escaping.

If only she had a sister, she thinks, then everything would be different. In the room next door, a sister, like Snow-White had her Rose-Red, someone who would dare to raise her hand to any attackers and cry Stop! They could read stories to each other when they couldn’t get to sleep, tap messages through the wall using a secret code. And her sister could help her with Dad, so that he wouldn’t get sad.

After they have said goodnight that first night, Kore lies with the duvet pulled up to her chin and looks at the posters he has put up. A purple galaxy on one of them, two bunnies on the other. In the middle, a portrait of herself. Dad says it really resembles her, but when she tries to look at the picture all she can see is a small aching ball where her face ought to be. A shining black stone.

Kore. Daddy’s little queen.

The next morning Dad is happy, he sits at the kitchen table reading the newspaper with her at his side. The room smells of coffee. The latest hits are playing on the radio, and Kore makes drawing after drawing and shows them to him, they’re all for him, full of suns and animals and their houses. Then they play cards, a game for grown-ups.

“You come from a long line of poker players,” he says and lays out a three of a kind. “My dad taught me when I was six.”

He enjoys teaching her things, and she listens carefully and nods all the time, her face is glowing and after a while she can’t resist fooling around, trying to make him laugh by hiding cards up her sleeve, and it works because he laughs and says she is a card shark like his cousin Robert, who bought his house with the money he had won playing cards.

“He’s a real clever one,” says her dad.

Dad likes it when people are good at doing sums in their heads, so he tests her on the times table, she has practiced so much at school that she knows it by heart, even the most difficult number which her dad says is eight times seven. But then she accidentally knocks over a glass, sees it roll over the edge of the table and onto the floor in slow motion. Three big shards and lots of small ones, they spread everywhere. She doesn’t move. He gets up and fetches the broom from the cupboard. He says that he isn’t angry, but she knows the card game is over.

They eat lunch in growing silence. The bigger it gets, the harder it is to break. She forgets to chew, just sits there with the fork in her hand. In her leaden mouth, her tongue is an immovable slug. Then she notices the photo of the dogs on the wall behind him, next to the barometer. She says what were your dogs called again Dad. She asks although she already knows. Zeus and Argos, and then he had Medea who died before she was five. He points at the photo and says that one is Zeus, who didn’t obey anyone but me, a rare black breed, smart and loyal, but he’s been dead for a long time. Argos was good too, but none was like Zeus.

“He never betrayed me,” says Dad, “not even when we crossed the fresh bear tracks in Porsön and he got the shivers, not even then did he run away, although he was shaking all over.”

Kore immediately asks about bears. Then about shivering and foaming.

Once they’ve eaten Dad shows her how to make a fire in the big fireplace downstairs. First he tears strips out of yesterday’s paper, then he makes a rectangle out of the thinnest sticks of kindling he can find, stacks them carefully on top of each other. And then he lights it.

Now everything that happened before is forgotten, because Dad loves the fire. He loves blowing on it and watching the flames eat into the wood, he loves the way the wood groans, and the black smoke that emerges when a living thing starts burning. He loves putting his hands almost close enough for them to catch fire, too. But Dad never gets burnt. He can nudge a burning piece of firewood, move his finger through the flame of a candle as if he were immortal.

At times like this he’ll occasionally take her out. This is my daughter, she’s finally arrived, he’ll tell all the neighbours they meet. Look how pretty she is. Look at her eyes, so like mine.

At other times she will feel, even before she goes into the kitchen in the morning, that it – something – has happened again. The small animals will feel it too. Titus’s ears will go tense and his eyes restless, the others will press against her legs, seeking shelter from the unknown being that at any moment might turn around with the face of a predator and a mouth full of teeth. Just seeing his back is enough, she can feel it in the air, the vibrations of his distorted blood circulation.

But it can also happen suddenly. Even if she is close by. Sometimes she knows why. If something breaks or if she forgets herself and says something about Mum. She has taught herself the signs, even the smallest ones. A facial twitch. The change in his voice. Sometimes it can be mended. If she’s quick. But each eruption only barely hides the promise of an even greater rage.

She imagines a butterfly-like man with a black cloak and antennae slowly descending from the ceiling towards Dad’s body as he sits reading the paper. When Dad feels the antennae on the nape of his neck and turns around, his eyes are filled with a dark dust from an evil star, and it’s this dust that turns her dad into the subterranean other. Into a heaviness that methodically sucks the oxygen from the house. She tries walking silently on the tips of her toes. The silver necklace hangs around her neck like a snare. The coldness of the metal numbs her skin.

She thinks about her promise.

After the Friday movie that night she can’t get away. A half-empty glass in hand, he turns to her with moist lips. His heavy breathing is machine-like, and the air around him pulsates when he fixes his eyes on her. A trembling mouse before the snake.

Why do you even come here, he starts chanting.

He looks at her from deep down, as if his gaze has slipped below the surface of his eyes. This is before he starts crying. That comes later, and it’s the worst. To begin with he hid his rage, let it grow in silence, a dough silently brimming over the edge. She had been focusing on the film, had probably sensed that something was tightening inside him, but not that it would happen so quickly. He must have started drinking earlier in the day. She hadn’t been paying enough attention.

His voice closes like a hand around her neck, intense, cruel, heavy. Why do you come here when you don’t even care. You just want presents, you don’t love me. I just give, and give, and you take. You’re not my princess anymore. You’re just as cold as her. She can’t speak. Sits on the edge of the armchair with all of her muscles tensed up.

The animals pull and drag at her, the whites of their eyes restless and gleaming, but she can’t move. She is caught in his gaze. Her father’s eyes are shiny and his cheeks oily, his mouth wet from saliva.

Kore’s lungs shrink inside her, she’s only exhaling now, nothing wants to go back inside.

“Are you too posh,” he slurs, setting his glass clumsily down on the table, “too posh to speak to your dad?”

For a moment his eyes lose focus, waver towards the dark window as a car drives past in the street. She is freed. The animals get her to her feet and drag her towards the staircase.

“Go on, get out of here!” he says and starts sobbing. “Just do it, leave me here alone … bloody scumbag …”

She doesn’t run, just walks quickly down the stairs. Remembers that her toothbrush is still upstairs. One single time doesn’t matter, that’s what Mum says. But Kore doesn’t want to think about her now, she turns the key and sits down on the bed to comfort her animals. Pets their fur slowly until they’ve stopped trembling. Long-fingers climbs up her arm and falls asleep on her shoulder. The others yawn and pile up on the blanket next to her, even Ivrahim. But Kore can’t sleep.

If she had a sister they would sit whimpering with their arms around one another. But when you’re alone, crying doesn’t help. The tiny pea has shot up in her throat like a choking lump she can’t get rid of, even though she keeps swallowing until her mouth goes dry. Her eyes on the lock of the door, she squeezes the key in her fist. But he’s got one too. In case there’s a fire. She listens for steps on the stairs, but he isn’t coming after her. After maybe twenty minutes she hears the front door slam shut. A bin falls over as he backs the car out. Then everything is quiet.

By half past eleven or so the next day she’s the meanest child in Norrbotten. It’s true. She’s sitting, sticky-fingered, at the kitchen table. Her dad is straight across from her in a dressing gown, just out of bed, his large body heavier than usual.

A viscous sour smell hovers in the air around him like a halo. Kore looks down at the table. Two halves of a pomegranate lie in front of her. They’re all around the house, placed in bowls, like bait. The heavy, meaty food in the fridge is hard to swallow, so this morning she took a piece of fruit. Cut it in two with a big knife from the second drawer. To begin with it didn’t taste any good, but she got used to it. The juice looks like blood on her hands and on the teaspoon she uses to scoop out the fruit. The pits are ruby-red like gemstones, they crackle as she chews. On the middle of her tongue lies a compressed mass that has grown to fill her mouth completely. She wants to go and spit it out in the sink. But she doesn’t. Because just then he enters the kitchen. Next to her on the table lies an old Bamse magazine that she brought up from the basement. It’s always the hardest thing, coming back upstairs. You never know what to expect. She doesn’t dare leaf through the magazine with her sticky hands. Still, it’s best not to move now. She is the meanest child in Norrbotten, deserting her own dad. Why doesn’t she say anything when he’s speaking to her? Finally she swallows down the sharp mass of seeds.

That day she and the animals keep to the basement. They are scared, don’t dare go upstairs with her, say there are other animals in the house that he let inside last night. Animals bigger than them, and older, and more dangerous. Her dad is mowing the lawn outside, she hears the distant sound of the mower through the narrow basement window just beneath the ceiling. The summer light gleams between the window slats. Just one week ago she was with Mum.

Kore sits with the animals on her lap and one on her shoulder, on the big corner sofa upholstered in grainy, dully shining black leather. On the shelf beside her his video tapes are lined up, she has watched almost all of them. Dad doesn’t like cartoons, so he usually translates the dialogue for her so that they can watch his films instead, but it’s hard to catch anything but the sharp sounds of echoing shots, the dark blood slowly covering the floor, the long nail digging into the wound until it dislodges a silver bullet, and the screams of the man as his steaming heart is torn right out of his chest.

Mum calls every Tuesday and Friday. The long piercing signals make Kore jump to her feet and start running. But when she picks up the voice is far away and scratchy. The little ball has begun aching more and more in her stomach again, and Kore has difficulty concentrating. She doesn’t answer Mum’s questions properly, and asks none of her own. Her ankles feel naked and cold up there. Only Titus and Masha have gone upstairs with her, though they stopped at the top step, now they’re crouching there, waiting for her to come back. Her dad is nowhere to be seen, the house holds its breath. Perhaps he’s standing with his back to an adjoining wall, listening.

“I miss you so much, my little sweetie,” says Katja.

Kore watches the slow dance of the dust motes in the ray of light from the kitchen window, without saying anything in reply. Soon they hang up.

That evening there is a party in the back garden with its dark vegetation and metallic lamps stuck into anything trying to live there, into tree trunks and into the ground. Taxi after taxi comes and drops people off: no one drives their own cars, everyone is going to drink and toast with her dad, together they raise their glasses towards the sky. A long table is set leading to a big fire into which he sticks small, flayed bodies, the sparks swirl around them like burning eyes in the night. The guests laugh and eat, with fatty, gleaming fingers and lips they shout for more between bites. And her dad chats and gurgles and drinks. Stands at the fire as if he were inside it. One eye an extinguisher, the other a lighter. He looks one by one at his guests until they start moving like waves. And when they break on Kore they grab at her with their fingers and the smell of meat steams at her neck, but she backs away, straight through an opening in the hawthorn hedge. On the other side of it the air is cool. There’s a little nook there, an arbour. She climbs into the neighbour’s old hammock and lies down, rocks it gently so that it won’t squeak. She brushes away the first mosquito that lands, but not the second.

 

Outside the sky is blue and the sun shines white in the clouds. Her dad tells her to lie down on the sofa in the living room. A stranger is standing next to him, a man he knows, a colleague named Kenneth. Dad pulls up her shirt and unbuttons her trousers for the man to examine her. His hands sink into her tummy in two places simultaneously. She’s ill again, in the end she had to say it. But the pain hides from the eyes of others. When Dad’s around it goes unnoticed, like everything else to do with her. She shakes her head when the man asks her if it hurts here, or here, or there. Kenneth moves his hands every time she says no. Dad’s mouth is tense.

“I’ve taken her everywhere over the years. Done an ultrasound, a gastroscopy.”

His colleague doesn’t notice the ball, doesn’t feel anything. It’s too small to be discovered. Impenetrable now, shiny, wet and black. They pull her trousers a bit further down to check the bottom of her tummy, exposing a few downy wisps of hair on her sex. Their eyes are immediately drawn there. A moist snake slithers through Kore’s insides, her hands break out into a cold sweat. Tense as a board, she clenches her jaws to be able to take the wave upon wave of shame breaking over her. But her dad and the other man seem relieved. The pressing on her tummy stops. Something premenstrual, probably. Puberty. Would have thought her too young, but anyway. They clumsily pull down her shirt again and shake hands. Kore pulls up her trousers and slips away.

As soon as she is out of the room she doubles over.

She has arranged all her presents on the shelf in her room. There’s nowhere to put the doll, so she holds it against her chest while looking around in indecision. Its blond hair is long as a grownup’s. Its eyes roll back into its head when she looks at it. She rests it like a baby on her arm and tries to catch hold of the eyelids, tries to close them. A shadow towers in the doorway. He is standing there, half visible. Between the wooden window slats, the sun is low and blinding. Almost gone. A glass hangs in his fingers, reflecting the light like amber.

“Do you have any milk for it,” he says with a smile.

Slowly her face slides off her, down into the abyss. There it continues to fall.

As soon as he’s gone, she hides the doll under some blankets in the wardrobe. Back in her room, she starts looking for her animals. Gets down on her knees and searches under the bed, raises the coverlet. Her eyes flit around the room, she runs into the hallway, to the room where the films are, to the bathroom, back to her own room. She can’t find them. Just the looks of the plastic animals on the shelf, so ingratiating with their painted-on smiles and synthetic fur. She touches her own face. Beneath the smooth layer of rubber it feels bumpy, like fuse-dried particles of coal directly on her skull.

She rubs and rubs.

That evening everything accelerates quickly and infinitely slowly at the same time. She knows it’s already too late. The blood fruit, the verbal agreement and Dad’s crying, swollen face.

“After all, it’s not like I’ve raped you,” he says after a pause.

She doesn’t know why he says it, where it comes from. So that idea is there, inside him? That look? Suddenly she can feel it, she feels nothing else anymore. And he said it in his own defense. As if to say that if he had actually done it she would have had the law on her side. It would have been possible to examine her, there would be traces. But no one can find the black ball, it’s invisible to everyone.

She flees like a hare, as she always does. Down the hole, down underground.

She wakes up in the night to find herself standing still in the middle of her dark room. She is trying to catch something. A sound she heard. A distant, cold sound, like metal against china. Against teeth. She’s heard it before, but doesn’t know where it comes from. The room is filled with tentative shadows that shrink and grow. She walks slowly to the door, follows the walls of the hallway. The open toilet door is an oblong, gaping hole of darkness, she continues past it, onwards, like a sleepwalker, mechanically, her eyes blurred, as if she were under water. Or inside the earth. She can feel the weight of the soil, feel it pressing against the walls and the roof. Faint clammy sounds are all that are heard when she raises her night-sweaty feet from the floor: she knows exactly where to step so the floorboards won’t creak. As if she’s woken up in the night a thousand times before, heard a sound and gotten up to check what it was. Right in front of her is the door to the study, now near, now far away. It pulsates to and fro. A streak of light falls out, the door is ajar, it’s usually always locked. She gets a glimpse of him inside, big and heavy, bent over something. And then she’s right there near him. The sight of his back makes the air harder to breathe, a heavy, wet sheet tightens around her chest, and the air she inhales is suddenly cold, as if she’s eaten a throat lozenge, she tries not to breathe in the air too noisily, the least sound will make him turn around and stare at her with shining eyes, chemically green in the thick darkness. His broad back is just meters away from her now, he’s wearing his doctor’s coat, rocking from side to side as if laughing, his elbows jut out to the side every now and then. He is stooped over something, she can’t see what. He is wearing white plastic gloves, and next to him lies a white tray of metal implements. There are tongs, pliers, scalpels – he moves quicker, drops one tool, takes another – the used ones are bloody and now Kore’s feet are moving towards him of their own accord, slowly, as if against the current.

And then she sees what is lying in front of him on the table.

She sees it. She sees.

She presses her hands against her mouth so as not to scream, but her knees bend and wobble at the sight of the pleading eyes radiating towards her from the table, those eyes that will never refuse, never speak out, never say no, just yes, yes, yes, do what you want with me! She sees the childlike, little look in those eyes, entreating, pitiful, pathetic. And she backs out of the room, step by step, shh, quiet, quiet, doesn’t let go of her mouth, the eyes, those eyes, the worst of all eyes. In the hallway she turns around and runs away, doesn’t care about being heard any more, she just has to get out of there, get back to her room in time, but it’s already far too late.

Where courage comes from, no one knows.

But eventually it comes.

Early in the morning she quietly calls the animals, tries one last time. This time they appear, the ones that are left. Just two have survived. Titus’s gaze is empty as she strokes his back with her index finger. He seems unharmed. Ivrahim has gone blind in both eyes, as if someone has scorched him with a white-hot poker. Kore lifts them gently into her backpack and steals away. She passes all the houses, only one neighbor is awake. On his way from the mailbox he hesitantly raises his hand to greet her. At the bus stop she mechanically takes out her money. For seven kronor she gets a ticket. When she gets off at the station in her mother’s town she goes straight to the phone booth, lets three more kronor drop, and then she dials the number for home.

“Are you sure?” her mum asks, when they’re sitting in the car.

But Kore says nothing. How can anyone be sure.

Later everything is quiet, not a sound is heard from her father’s realm. He doesn’t demand that she return, doesn’t send anyone to collect her. But every night she waits. To see someone outside the window, a long finger extended towards her, digging into her flesh, digging until it pulls out her steaming heart and breaks it open like a piece of fruit.

In her memories of him, all his power has drained away. If she closes her eyes she can see him, sees him sitting in his house at night. The lamp switched off, the only light touching him the light that falls in through the windows from the street lamps outside.

His eyes are dry. Because when you’re alone, crying doesn’t help. The cylindrical glass. Always meticulous about coasters to prevent ring-shaped stains on his coffee table from Switzerland. She remembers him buying it, how proud he was. He wanted everything he bought afterwards to match it. The rounded two-seaters in the colour of a dark-green avocado skin, the paintings in beige, dark brown, a similar green hue and a few wine-red splashes. Handed-down silver candlesticks on the walls. He never lit them, worried about getting spots of wax on the clear wooden floor.

She can picture him sitting there all by himself. Sitting there looking at nothing. The street light in his eye, his speckled, cloudy eye.

Then for a long time she tries to pretend that he doesn’t exist. Tries to forget the basement, his turned back, his stealthy car. That all those things never existed and belong to one of the thousands of evil stories that flow out of every book she touches. Because all the books she reads are about him, all the films. He still has that power. And sometimes she thinks she can see him driving past in his silvery car. She always feels totally cold, as if she’s been immersed in dark water. The moment when it seeps through her clothes. Sometimes she thinks he’s spying on her. That his tearful rage has changed into a fixation. That he’s become psychotic, delirious and wild-eyed, drives around in his car searching day and night all the way across the border into brighter lands. That he has started behaving strangely even among others, started showing other people who he really is. Missed the board meetings and finally lost his position at the clinic. And at night his neighbours can now see a strange greenish glow emanating from his basement window. Poisonous vapours steaming from every crack. The basement rebuilt as a laboratory.

And there he sits.

Night after night, chanting incantations to draw her towards him. To bind her. His eyes have become black hollows. From the blackness comes a sickly light. And then the little black ball inside her starts aching, wakes from its slumber and answers. Yes, Dad! I’m coming! Steam rises from the ball and right through her body, unobstructed, as if her flesh were a screen full of holes. Rises up to her eyes so that all she can see is mist. Inside it, a land of shadows emerges, with mud eyes and beasts of prey and tree crowns forming a black ceiling above her head. She did promise him. The ball remains, and inside the ball her father, a condensed, stunted version in which the essential is magnified, engraved and forever unchanging.

Whenever everything else is moving away, his face hovers in front of her. It is the only thing she can see. As if he has been sitting behind her all this time, in the dark. Waiting for her to stop running and turn around, to finally understand that he will never leave. That she is, and forever will remain, his little queen. He is not someone you leave, but someone you come to. And he will stand up and take her, fill her with the old.

With childhood again.  

And so it came to be that she created her own kingdom, one more desolate than his. She is alone there. And though her kingdom may be new, it is also ancient. Because someone lived here a long time ago. The traces lie hidden in the moss. They have continually sunk deeper, become one of the treasures of the layers of soil.

This kingdom is the first and only landscape she has got to know. Her father’s face. There she stays. Waiting for the least twitch or tension, so that she can seek shelter in time.

She can see her footprints in the furrows along his face in which round tears used to drown all life. Now the ground is dried out, and the tracks in the dry clay have cracked. She finds her way into the eyebrows, but they offer no protection from the sun. Her feet sink into his cheeks like in quicksand.

The most secure place is at the tip of his cheekbone, at the edge of the forest on his temple. That’s how it used to be, and that’s how it is now. Some days she considers letting herself drop, when the silence inside is too resounding. But the height is dizzying. So instead she decides on the opposite, a journey within. The black ear hole.

Should I call out? she wonders for a moment, but finds it safest to enter first, down the hollow that leads deep inside, behind the mask where she’s been living until now.  So she jumps. Inside the ear canal her steps echo like drops in a cavern. She continues inwards, but slips – glides downwards, downwards, until all light has vanished.

She starts to hear a terrifying sound, dull, rhythmical. Its strength increases as she reaches the edge of the throat. The wind beats against her, softer across her back, more intensely on its way back up. She squats down and tries to climb down his tracheal rings, but with just half her body below the ledge a cough jumbles everything, and she falls headlong.

She falls, falls further.

Life is now just a fall.

She lands with a thud on an elastic membrane. In the middle there is a tightly laced opening, and in the stomach below her acid is splashing. Down here the sound is louder, and she knows where to go. With her back to the wall, she starts pushing her arms into the softness. At first there is resistance, then the wall gives way. Maybe he knows. Maybe he can feel her now. For a long time she crawls through the tissue, the sound is dulled, the flesh is shaking. Then she feels her fingers pass through, into something else. An empty space. She grabs hold of the edges and pulls her body through.

The ear-splitting beats are slung at her.

And there it is. The machine. Blackened red, convulsive. Dad’s heart. She had always imagined it to be so much smaller, hardly visible to the naked eye. But she was wrong. It’s gigantic.

She tries to squeeze her leg inside it, but the muscle beats violently, repelling her. So she takes a run-up and jumps straight at it, her legs and arms outstretched. Fastens onto it with a sucking sound, forces her face straight through the muscle wall – and, like magic, her body slips through.

On the inside everything is quiet.

There is no wind, since no wind exists here. Is this it. Is there only this darkness here.

But then something comes floating towards her. A body, a small one. Sleeping. Swaddled in cloth, it drifts closer.

It is a child.

Is it me? she thinks. Is that me floating in your heart?

She wants to recognize herself in the child’s face. But its features are so plain that she forgets them in the blink of an eye. Like a picture in a frame before you replace it with your own.

After that, she tries to write a letter to him, but she just sounds and expresses herself like a small child, doesn’t know what she wants to say. Or how she wants him to respond. After all, she is the one who left. She glues a dried flower to it, a light blue forget-me-not. But she doesn’t send the letter. It sounds too helpless, too pleading. Something else is needed.

As the years pass, she starts dreaming of becoming tall and terrifying. Cool, patient, powerful. And she dreams of the day when he’ll finally come begging. She won’t even react when he enters, but will finish writing her very long sentence instead, calmly put away her pen and look at him with an expressionless face.

“Yes?”

Only this, after his long journey to catch a glimpse of his lost child. Yes? And he will tremble before her, he’ll be anxious, but at the same time filled with wonder at her transformation. From a ten-year-old slip of a child with tear-heavy eyelashes to this being – so collected, so dangerous. With calm eyes she will watch him put forward his request for reconciliation, and she will let him finish speaking without interruption, then say with a honey-coated voice:

“For people like you there is no mercy.”

This “people like you” has been carefully thought out, since it shows that she knows him to be of a certain type – someone who always cared more about himself than his own child. This single sentence would make him understand, regret. And then the dust would vanish, the thicket of thorns around his house would dry up and scatter in the wind. Everything would be different.

It had to end like this.

But time passes. And he doesn’t come.

Nothing is as it should be.

Finally she goes to him, in secret, disguised. This time she goes there alone, in a borrowed car that can accelerate quickly. He has a new position at a clinic in one of the grey tower blocks in the centre of town. But the town looks different now. Like any other town, with a mall and a car park and a pond with a fountain in the middle. No one cares about her, or even recognizes her. She pulls off her cap and looks around in the pale afternoon light.

The trip reveals two things: He has acquired a new car and a new family. A new wife and a little daughter. Kore hardly looks at him, in fact, for as soon as she notices the new child that he lifts out of the car seat in the back and goes into the toy shop hand-in-hand with, she doesn’t have eyes for anyone else. The girl – small and light-haired with corkscrew curls and blinking eyes – doesn’t look like Kore at all. Like a dirty old man she stands hidden, staring at the sweet child. The child whom she, at the first opportunity, will catch in a black sack and carry into the forest. Cut her hair off. Drown her in some pool. And when the search party finds the dead little girl, she will be all pale and covered in mud, her locks straightened into ugly tangles.

But that would also be wrong, since Dad would cry and raise his hands to the heavens. And he would hold the dead child in his arms and gently rock her as if she were just sleeping, but her dark blue eyes would be staring blindly straight ahead.

Kore, squatting behind a stump or an uprooted tree, would see everything, and she would know that doing this had not made anything better, since now he would grieve his beloved child forever, the child who never betrayed him. And when Kore then looks down at her own hands, they are covered in grey, slimy scales, earth-spattered, with rough claws instead of nails.

She opens her mouth to shout, but no sound emerges. A reptilian click in her throat, that’s all. Once the new wife has gone to do some errands and her dad drives away with the child, Kore follows the car out of town, to his domain. The river is steel-grey, lifeless, empty. Then she is back at his house, just look how easy it was. He is waiting for her in the drive, as if he has known all along.

“Now, come and say hello,” he says immediately, as she watchfully steps out of the car.

He waves his hand gently, and she follows him, as she always has done. Then he shows her inside, where her little sister sits playing with Kore’s old toys. The black plastic horse, the doll, the wheel, the bracelets, the boxes. The marbles, the puzzle and the other animals.

“Now she’s finally here,” Dad calls out, loud enough for the girl to jump.

Kore asks him to stop, says that he’s scaring her, but he just laughs it off. Then they stand watching as the child places her plastic animals in a ring around her, at perfect angles. The animals look at the girl with frightened plastic eyes, until she gets angry and kicks them over. Dad takes Kore into the living room and offers her juice – she would rather have coffee, but he doesn’t care about that.

He hasn’t changed at all.

And as she sits there, on the very edge of the sofa, glancing at the nursery, her fingers clutched tightly at the glass so that he can see that she still bites her nails, just like before, he opens his mouth to speak.

And he says: When I was born my dad planted a tree that would grow in step with me, so that when I died the tree could be chopped down for the growth rings to be counted, and I would get to see how many years of my life I had lived happily. For trees only grow then, that’s what my dad told me.

“Is the tree still there?” asks Kore.

But then his face disappears into a black hole that sucks everything towards it, a vacuum mouth tearing at her clothes, tearing at her skin. With his hole of a face, he starts growing, turns a bluish grey, swells up towards the ceiling until his neck gets bent into a corner of the room. He squeezes her out of the room, she has to run to get away, to avoid getting sucked back into the hole. Something moves up through her throat, something burning, a small black ball that’s sucked out of her body and disappears, as she grabs hold of the door frame just in time and manages to pull herself out of the room. She throws open the front door and is outside.

On her way to the car she does see the tree, standing in the shade of the house. A pitiful sort of plant, she had never noticed it before. It has a sickly pale trunk and strangely dark-red flowers. And from the tree comes a quiet whistling, it follows her into the car and lies down on the rubber mat beneath her feet, like an animal that has been lost for a long time but has finally found its way home.

 

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*Editor of translation: Alex Fleming