The Lost Village(10)

The camping mat I’m sitting on isn’t really thick enough, so I can feel the heather beneath my thighs, the bumps in every cobblestone. Tone is sitting to my left, poking quietly at her hastily heated-up lentil stew. To be safe, we’ve brought enough food to last us a week, but this is no culinary master class; both Emmy and Tone are vegetarians, so we’re mainly sticking to lentils and beans.

Max is sitting to my right, slightly closer than Tone, his shoulder brushing against mine. He’s thrown a thick, gray knitted sweater on over his shirt, which is slightly too long in the sleeves. He’s taken charge of the cooking, and every so often he gives the stew we’ve shoved on the fire a self-important little stir. Typical Max. He wants everything to be done just right, and he never seems to trust anyone else to know what that could possibly mean. That’s why he insisted on driving up in his own car instead of riding in one of the vans, and I suspect it’s also why he insisted on coming with us on the shoot, despite having no filmmaking experience at all.

We first got to know each other after I graduated, when we fell in with the same loose circle of friends in those confused, midtwenties years. He was a computer geek with a taste for indie pop and a never-ending supply of puns. And extremely pedantic, even then.

On the other hand, it’s served him well. That meticulous side of him has meant that, by twenty-nine, he’s been able to amass a small fortune from Blockchain transactions. It’s also meant that he could put enough money into The Lost Village for us to actually be able to float it.

I look at Max and smile, and he smiles right back at me, his boyish, slightly asymmetrical face lighting up in the flicker of the fire.

“What?” he asks, and I shake my head.

“I just can’t believe we’re finally here,” I say. “I can’t believe I’m in Silvertj?rn.”

Out of the corner of my eye I see Emmy trail off midwhisper to Robert and look our way, so I’m only half listening when Max replies:

“Yeah, it’s pretty unreal.”

Emmy’s holding a hip flask, which she sips from while looking around her at the square. The stars above us are like a trail of shattered glass through the vaulted skies, the slim crescent moon is a sliver of an eye. The wind is no more than a whisper through the village, but it still manages to find its way in under my clothes. I shiver. Max makes to take off his warm sweater to offer it to me, but I shake my head before he gets the chance.

“I’m fine, it was just a shiver.”

Emmy takes another sip from her flask and hands it to Robert, who sees me looking and raises his eyebrows to ask if I want some. I almost accept, but then feel Emmy’s eyes on me and lose my nerve.

“No, I’m all right,” I say, a spark of irritation in my belly. “I’m running this thing, so I guess I’d better not drink while we’re here.”

“Smart,” says Emmy, and I’m sure I can make out a hint of mockery in her husky voice.

“I think so,” I say, as neutrally as I can.

Emmy doesn’t answer back. Instead she says:

“So there’s only one square in the village, then?”

Before I can get a word in edgeways, she goes on:

“This must be where they—”

“Yes,” I interrupt. “This is the main square. Where they found her. Birgitta.”

It was already dark when we finally got here, so there was no time to really explore the square. Still, I couldn’t resist doing a quick sweep of the cobblestones once Tone and I had put up our tent. To take in the scents; the silence; the soil. To picture it all.

I didn’t find the pole, but I hadn’t really expected to, either. They would have had to cut it down to remove the body, and in the unlikely event that they didn’t, a rough-hewn wooden pole would never have stayed standing for sixty years.

But I did find a hole.

“Where’s she buried?” Max asks, dragging me out of my thoughts with a jerk.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I’ve looked, but I couldn’t find that information anywhere.”

“There was almost nothing about her in the packs you gave us,” says Emmy.

I shake my head.

“Not much was written about her,” I say. “Most of the information we have comes from my grandmother’s letters, and that’s hard to fact-check. I’ve checked the local records, and I found a Birgitta Lidman who was born to Kristina Lidman in 1921. But that’s it. No medical transcripts, no school records, nothing.”

“No, I guess you wouldn’t expect her to have gone to school,” says Max. “Not if it was as bad as the letters suggest.”

“From the letters it sounds like she had some kind of autism,” comes Robert’s deep voice.

“Maybe,” I say. I’ve spent hours googling Birgitta’s symptoms. “Or some sort of chromosome abnormality.”

“You can’t just diagnose people like that,” says Tone. The firelight casts deep shadows under her eyebrows and nose, making her face look full of holes.

“No, of course not,” I say. “We’re not going to try to.”

The music has stopped; the only sound to be heard is the crackle of the fire. Most of the logs are already embers, seemingly glowing from within. It’s almost hypnotic.

“Did you try to find out what happened to the baby?” Emmy asks me.