Part 7 (1/2)

They had doubtless known how to look after their own child. But the early sixties, the art of social engineering-smiling mothers in floral ap.r.o.ns, record years, the building project known as the Million Program. Lighting a fire on the ground and no food in the larder, if they even had a larder. Such things couldn't be permitted.

Tina had heard that people were sterilised well into the 1970s. Was that what happened to her parents?

A mental inst.i.tution.

She couldn't get away from the image of those white cubes, her mother and father each locked in their own s.p.a.ce, screaming themselves hoa.r.s.e until they died of grief. She tried to think that perhaps it was for the best. That otherwise they would have neglected her until she died. But she had survived at least one winter, hadn't she? The most difficult winter, a baby's first winter. They had brought her through that.

Tears blurred the view as she looked over towards the fir trees along the side of the road, enclosed by fences, wire fences keeping the wildlife away.

Keep the forest away from us. Tame it. Enclose it.

Vore. How much did he know about all this? Had he always known what he was, or had he also had a moment like this when everything came cras.h.i.+ng down on him and he was forced to reinterpret his entire life?

She rubbed the tears from her eyes with her fists and rested her forehead on the window, following the forest with her gaze.

The cottage was empty. The furniture was still there, of course, but his suitcase, the hatching box, his camera, his binoculars and his books were gone. She lifted up the towels on the top shelf in the wardrobe. The cardboard box had gone too.

He had left her without a word of farewell.

No. His notebook was still lying on the desk. She picked it up to see if there might be a note underneath. When she didn't find anything, she flicked through it. It fell open in the middle, revealing a small pile of photographs. She looked at the top one. It was a picture of his... hiisit.

She went through the book page by page to see if he had written her a message. Nothing. Only the lists of times, the illegible notes. She sat down at the desk and tried to decipher them. They were worse than a doctor's prescriptions; they looked like something written by someone pretending he could write.

After a while she managed to identify a number of consonants, and with their help she was able to guess at others. It took almost two hours before she had a comparatively legible alphabet, and was able to put the letters together to work out longer words: 0730 man leaves 0812 window open 0922 post 1003 dishes. asleep?

1028 outside. raking leaves.

1107 wakes up?

She turned to other days, saw the same schedule repeated. She closed the notebook, rubbed her eyes and looked out of the window. What she saw made her heart flutter.

No...

She picked up the photographs, looked at them one by one. At first she was convinced they were pictures of his hiisit, but in the later photographs she could see a woman's hands holding it. And in the last picture, the woman was there.

Elisabet.

She was standing in Tina's kitchen holding her child, a beaming, slightly strained smile on her face. The child was identical to the child that had lain on a bed of towels in a cardboard box. The child that was not a child. The child that was a hiisit, that could be- shaped -that could be made into an image of anything whatsoever. As long as you had something to go on, a model. Like photographs.

Tina looked out of the window again. Saw the neighbours' house. The cottage was the perfect spot if you wanted to spy on them. If you had a pair of binoculars, made notes on their movements...

Why have you got it?

Don't you know?

She knew now.

Suddenly she threw back her head and laughed. A coa.r.s.e, terrible laugh that sprang from the same original source as rage, as tears. She laughed, she screamed. It was all so obvious, so simple. The only thing that had stopped her from seeing it was that it had been right in front of her nose.

She slapped her head with the palms of her hands.

'Idiot!' she yelled. 'Idiot! Every single person knows what we do, after all!' She laughed again, panting. 'We swap children! We steal their children and leave our own in their place!'

She didn't want to do it, but she had to.

There was a strange car parked outside the neighbours' house. A dark blue Volvo 740 with the same ominous authority as a police car, an undertaker's car.

She knocked on the front door. When no one came she pushed it open slightly and called out 'h.e.l.lo?' Elisabet appeared in the living-room doorway. She looked like a hiisit herself: her face was grey and empty, her body somehow soulless, heavy.

'What's happened?' asked Tina.

Elisabet made a vague movement with her head in the direction of the room, and moved back inside. Tina walked in, took off her shoes. She walked across the rag rug on sensitive feet. She was a living lie, she was a remnant of a tribe, a traitor. She had become all of these things in just a few hours.

Goran was sitting on the sofa, talking quietly to a man who was presumably a doctor. Elisabet sat down on an armchair and gazed vacantly into s.p.a.ce. The cot was standing next to her. She was holding on to one of the bars. Tina walked over to her.

The child was lying there naked, with no nappy or blanket. Presumably the doctor had just examined it. As it lay there now in a child's natural environment, Tina could see how...unalive it was. The hiisit. Its skin was waxy, it looked neither soft nor warm, and lacked the flowing blood of a child. The face was immobile, closed, with only the lips moving a fraction. The eyes were closed, fortunately. She wondered if Elisabet had seen the white eyes. She probably had.

'I...' Elisabet said in a dead voice. 'I just went up to the mailboxes to fetch the post. When I got back...'

She made a feeble gesture towards the child. Tina walked around to the other side of the cot and crouched down. The child was lying on its side. Even though the light in the room was subdued, as if they were keeping vigil with a corpse, she could clearly see the small appendage beginning to grow at the bottom of the back. The tail.

Vore hadn't mentioned it, but Tina had a feeling that was confirmed by the resolutely neutral expression on the doctor's face: a hiisit didn't live for very long. Not long enough to have to grow up in the world of human beings.

Human beings who didn't believe in trolls. And if they found any, they locked them up in mental inst.i.tutions, operated to remove their tails, sterilised them and forced them to learn the language of human beings. Tried to forget that such a thing even existed.

Until we come and take your children.

She murmured a few words of sympathy that grated in her mouth like rusty metal, and left the house. Left something else behind her at the same time. She went over to the cottage, crawled into bed and let the hours pa.s.s. She could lie there as long as she wanted. n.o.body was going to come. Ever again.

When Roland got home on Sunday evening, she told him she'd had enough. He could find somewhere else to open his kennels. She locked herself in her room and communicated via a series of terse messages through the door. It took a few days before he realised she was serious. And a few more days before he gathered up his possessions, along with some of hers.

When she checked the house after his departure, she also went through her jewellery box, not really thinking he would stoop so low. She was wrong. A couple of diamond rings and a heavy gold chain were missing. He probably thought she wouldn't bother to contact the police, and he was right. She didn't care.

That's one thing the fairy stories have got wrong, she thought. He could have taken the whole box as far as she was concerned. This particular troll didn't collect treasures.

She spent November searching the forest. She had signed herself off sick for the foreseeable future, and as she wasn't claiming any benefits she didn't need a doctor's note.

No more doctors, no more hospitals.

It was hardly surprising that she had been afraid, even panicstricken. They had s.n.a.t.c.hed her out of the environment in which she had grown up, the entire world of smells and light that her two-year-old brain recognised. They had shoved her in a hospital, operated on her, spoken to her in a language she didn't understand and tried to press her into their mould, reshape her into one of them.

They make us into their image. We make ourselves into their image.

A few days before the first snow fell, she found what she was looking for.

She was a long way from home, and if she had a been a human being she would probably have thought she was lost. She had been walking at random for hours without bothering about landmarks; she simply relied on her own internal compa.s.s.