The Lost Village by Camilla Sten (best fiction novels TXT) 📗

against your will, while everyone else is asleep. My hearing seems keener than usual, and however hard I try, I can’t stop myself from listening out for something.

Footsteps.

There’s no one there, I tell myself. You know there’s no one there.

But I don’t believe it.

There’s no sound outside.

I had denied what I thought I had seen and asked Emmy to leave the van, but even once the doors were shut that lingering fear had lived on in my body. I felt uneasy well into the evening, even after the clouds had dispersed enough to reveal an ethereally pink sunset. The ground was too wet to get a fire going, so instead we made grilled cheese sandwiches on the alcohol stove. I didn’t say much while we ate, just watched the others as they made full-mouthed small talk, spraying bread crumbs over the cobblestones.

I watched Emmy.

She was the one who was there, despite everything—the one who opened the door. And even though her hoodie was dry, that could have been some sort of setup: she could have had it in a plastic bag, for example, then put it on to make it look like she had run straight over.

But why?

Tone said she’d heard someone downstairs in the school before she fell through the steps, and Emmy and Robert did make it back to camp suspiciously quickly.

It feels ridiculous to picture Emmy behind all this, though. It would go against everything I thought I knew about her. However dim my opinion may be of her now, there’s no denying she has always taken her work incredibly seriously. At college she was just unbearable, so nitpicky that no one ever wanted to do group projects with her. She would edit and re-edit until her eyes were tired and bloodshot, her fingertips numb. She always had her eyes on the prize, results over all else.

I can’t believe that she would sabotage this project.

But then …

I have wondered why she agreed to come on board—despite us paying peanuts, despite having to work under me.…

No. I shake my head. The thought is insane. Emmy may be selfish, pragmatic, and cold, but she isn’t unhinged. She isn’t trying to ruin my chances, or my film. It’s all in my head. Silvertjärn is just getting to me.

I really wish Tone were awake. A familiar voice in this darkness. She would tell me to stop being ridiculous, remind me, in that deadpan voice of hers, that the most we have to worry about is a hungry bear fresh out of hibernation wandering into the village one night and deciding we look like a tasty breakfast.

But Tone’s sleeping soundly, and I’m the only one awake.

It’s a very lonely feeling.

I can’t help thinking about Grandma. Grandma, alone in a narrow bed in Stockholm, heavily pregnant and beside herself with worry. What she said about the last letter.

It arrived at the end of August, just before my due date. It had been a cool summer, but a heat wave had swept in at the end of July, and August had been just terrible. The air felt completely static, and I could hardly breathe, let alone move. It had been almost a month since I’d heard anything from Aina or Mother, which had worried me, but the pain and the heat had taken up more of my attention.

The letter was short. The handwriting wasn’t Aina’s usual style, which everyone had always praised for its elegance. It was written in a jerky, slipshod hand, on ink-stained paper, and was both incoherent and incomprehensible. She wrote that the hour was nigh, and that I must return to them before it was too late.

This made me frantic with worry, as I’m sure you can imagine. I begged and pleaded with your grandfather to let me go to Silvertjärn. Even he started to worry when he read the letter, but I was in no state to travel: I was in my ninth month, and practically bedridden.

So your grandfather went there himself.

He roped his best friend into going with him, in case he should need any help. They took the 09:13 from Stockholm Central Station to Sundsvall, where they changed to the train for Silvertjärn. It took them eleven hours to get there in all. Trains were slower back then.

It was already dusk when Grandpa and Nils got off the train, and the station was completely deserted. There wasn’t a soul in sight.

They made their way toward the center of town, the shadows drawing in, the houses empty. They knocked at doors here and there for directions—your grandpa hadn’t been there in a long time and couldn’t find my parents’ house, especially with the cottages looking so alike—but no one opened up.

It was only when they crossed the river to the main square that they saw it.

A pole had been raised in the middle of the square, and from it hung a limp body bound by ropes. Gitta must have been there for many long days, for the flies were swarming around her, and she had swollen in the late summer heat. Her face was bloody, beaten beyond recognition, and the stones they had used to execute her lay strewn around her body. Smooth, round river stones that had been gathered from the riverbed and blunted of any jagged edges. They were peppered with blood and hair.

Your grandfather and Nils were petrified. They had no idea what to do. At first they wanted to try to get her down, but it was soon clear that Birgitta was beyond saving. She had been dead for days. So they ran into the nearest house, in search of someone who could help.

It was empty. As was the next one, and the next. The doors all stood ajar, the rooms vacant.

By this point they were so scared that they were at their wit’s end. They ran back out into the square. Darkness had started to fall, and Birgitta’s body was still hanging from the pole. But when they looked at her, your grandfather swore—on