Handling the Undead Read online

Is he looking for something?

  Ghosts coming back to put something right. The fruity smell had grown stronger. She rested the tips of her fingers against the wall as if to maintain contact with reality.

  Tore’s white, stiff hands moved across the desk, over the photocopied texts of psalms they’d sung at the funeral, blank stationery, the copy of today’s newspaper that Flora had brought. He lifted a piece of paper to his eyes, moving his head back and forth as if he were reading—

  Only a day, one moment at a time

  —whereupon he put the paper down, and picked up a new piece with the same text and read it with equal care.

  ‘Tore?’

  Elvy started at the sound of her own voice. She had not been planning to say anything, it just slipped out. But there was no reaction from Tore. Elvy relaxed. She did not want him to turn around, do anything or—

  God help me

  —say anything.

  She shuffled out of the room along the wall and closed the door gently behind her, listening. The paper sounds continued. She pulled the armchair up to the door, jammed the chair back under the door handle and wedged in a couple of books so that the handle wouldn’t turn.

  Flora was still sitting on the floor in the same position as before. Tore’s return was inconceivable, quite beyond Elvy’s comprehension, but she was afraid for Flora’s sake. This was too much for her sensitive girl.

  Elvy sat down next to her, and it was a relief when Flora asked, ‘What’s he doing?’ since it meant she had not completely dissociated; she was interested. And Elvy had an answer for her.

  ‘I think,’ she said, ‘that he is pretending to be alive.’

  Flora gave a little nod, as if this was just the answer she had been expecting. Elvy didn’t know what to do. Flora shouldn’t be anywhere near this, but Elvy couldn’t see how she could get her away. The buses had stopped running and Margareta and Göran were in London.

  She couldn’t have called her daughter anyway. Margareta might be generally better socially adapted than Flora and Elvy, but her capacity for hysteria, on the few occasions when it did break out, was enormous. Margareta would come over, and she would take care of everything. Margareta would be speaking very rapidly in a high-pitched voice, and if the smallest detail went wrong she would start to claw at her face.

  Damn Tore.

  Yes. As Elvy sat wrestling with the problem, she began to feel increasingly hostile toward Tore, whose fault this all was. Hadn’t she already done enough? Hadn’t she done everything that could possibly be done?

  Wait a minute.

  Something occurred to her and she smiled, in spite of everything. Of course it was only theological hairsplitting; but didn’t it say, ‘For better or for worse, until death us do part?’ She looked over at the closed door. Tore was dead. Therefore this was no longer her responsibility. She’d made no promise to the priest, forty-three years earlier, to have, hold or cherish anyone after death.

  A sound from Flora. Elvy asked, ‘Sorry? What did you say?’

  Flora looked her straight in the eyes and said, ‘Aaaaah.’

  A jolt of terror ran through Elvy. This was it. She’d failed to protect the girl, and now…Her hands went up to Flora’s face, stroking her cheeks. She said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I should call a taxi. Does that sound good? I’ll call a taxi and then…you and I can get out of here. Yes?’

  Flora shook her head slowly, grabbed Elvy’s hands and held them. ‘Aaaaahhh,’ she said again, with the shadow of a smile this time. Elvy gave a short, sharp laugh, almost a bark, of relief. Flora was joking. She was making the sound the undead made in her computer game.

  ‘Oh, Flora, you scared me. I thought…’

  ‘Sorry, Nana.’ Flora looked around the room with her normal eyes. The emptiness in them had vanished. ‘What should we do?’

  ‘Flora, I don’t know.’

  Her granddaughter frowned.

  ‘Let’s think this through,’ she said. ‘The first thing is: is there a chance that he never really died? That he’s sort of been gone, and now he’s come back?’

  Elvy shook her head. ‘No. Unless we’ve all simply been duped somehow. I looked at him when I went down with his suit the day before yesterday and…Flora, are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine. I’m just trying…to work this out.’

  Elvy was amazed. She was speaking in a completely normal voice, holding her fingers up in front of her and checking off the possibilities. It was as if she had gone through a few minutes of shock and doubt, and was now done with that. In its place, the side of her had emerged that she usually tried to suppress: the lawyer’s daughter.

  ‘Secondly,’ Flora checked off on her middle finger, ‘if he really is dead, what is it that brought him back to life? Does it have anything to do with what happened in the garden?’

  ‘Ye-e-e-s…I think that’s likely.’

  ‘Thirdly…’

  Elvy began to understand. This change in Flora, she thought, was not as straightforwardly positive as she’d believed at first. The rational way of talking had taken over beause she’d started to look at the whole situation as a video game; not as an impossible event, but as a series of problems, there to be cracked.

  Well, Elvy thought, it could be worse.

  ‘…thirdly: is this something that only we can see or is it like real…well, you know what I mean.’

  Elvy thought of the feeling of Tore’s sloped shoulders under her hands, the chill that had radiated from them.

  ‘It is real, and I think we should…call an ambulance.’

  Flora stood up. ‘Can I?’

  ‘Don’t you think it’s better if I…’

  ‘Yes. But can I do it?’

  Flora had actually clasped her hands in front of her, entreating, and Elvy shrugged. She did not understand the child’s enthusiasm but thought this was a good enough way to be. Flora went to make the call while Elvy sat on the floor, thinking.

  It means something.

  All of this…means something.

  * * *

  Overview

  23.10–23.20: The dead come back to life at every morgue in the greater Stockholm area.

  23.18: An old man is observed on the street, completely naked, outside the aged care facility in Solkatten. Does not respond to speech. The police are called to the scene in order to return the individual to his home.

  23.20: A young man is run over by a van about a hundred metres from the Medical Examiner’s office in Solna. When the police arrive at the scene, the victim has walked away. The driver of the van is in a state of shock, claiming that the victim had a big scar on his abdomen. The man was thrown some ten metres in the collision, and his stomach split open, but he stood up and walked away.

  23.24: The first call to the emergency line. An elderly woman has received a visit from the sister she’s lived with for the past five years, who died two weeks ago.

  23.25: The staff of Danderyd Hospital start calling around to those aged care facilities and churches that have mortuaries, to inform them of the situation.

  23.25–23.45: Twenty-odd reports of old people wandering around on the street.

  23.26: Nils Lundström, retired nature photographer, takes the picture that will dominate the front page of the tabloid Expressen the next day. At the cemetery by Täby Church, seven old people in shrouds come staggering out of the mortuary, heading for the exit. The photograph captures them among the gravestones.

  23.30–23.50: Radio communications from patrol cars dispatched to take care of disoriented old people reveal that all of the individuals concerned died over the course of the past few weeks. The Ministry of Health and Social Affairs is informed.

  23.30 and on: The emergency call centre in inundated by callers in a state of shock, sometimes hysterical, reporting the return of dead relatives. Paramedics, counsellors and religious ministers are quickly rounded up to be assigned to the families concerned.

  23.40: The infectious diseases ward at Danderyd
Hospital is designated as a temporary gathering place. Extra staff are summoned urgently.

  23.50: There is a report from Danderyd that two bodies have not come back to life. Their medical records show that one has been dead for ten weeks, the other for twelve. Both corpses had been treated repeatedly with formaldehyde while the formalities regarding their funeral arrangements were cleared up.

  More reports of non-awakenings follow. It appears that only those who have been dead two months or less have come back.

  23.55: Databases are correlated: numbers of deceased unburied in the greater Stockholm area going back two months, yields a total of exactly 1042 people.

  23.57: It is decided that the unthinkable must be investigated. A delegation with sound amplification and digging equipment is dispatched to the Stockholm Woodland Cemetery in order to listen to the graves, possibly with a view to opening them.

  23.59 and on: Emergency psychiatric units begin to receive relatives who have had breakdowns upon being reunited with their dead.

  14 August

  Where is my love?

  Råcksta 00.12

  Ängbyplan, Islandstorget, Blackeberg…

  Mahler’s sweating hands slipped on the steering wheel as he turned out of the space-age roundabout and took a right at the Råcksta Crematorium and Cemetery.

  His mobile rang. He slowed down, managed to extract it from his bag and checked the number. Editorial. Benke probably wanted to know how he was doing with the pictures, where his story was. No time. He put the phone back and let it ring as he turned into the small parking lot, turned off the engine. He opened the door, reflexively grabbing the bag, heaved himself out of the car and…

  Stop.

  He stood by the car, leaning against the door. Hiked up his pants.

  There was no one here.

  There was utter silence inside the high brick walls. A yellow early-summer moon spilled soft light onto the angular outline of the crematorium. Nothing moved.

  What had he expected? To see them standing here, shaking the bars and…?

  Yes. Something like that.

  He walked up to the gate, looked in. The large open area in front of the chapel where he had stood only a month ago, sweating in his dark suit with his heart in shreds, had been given over to the night. The moon spread its blanket over the headstones, lit the occasional star in the gravel.

  He looked up toward the memorial grove. Weak dots of light illuminated the pines from below. Memorial candles, placed there by grieving loved ones. He felt the gates. Locked. He stared up at the spikes on top. Impossible.

  But he knew the cemetery by now; it was easy to get in. More difficult to see why they locked it in the first place. He walked along the wall until it gave way to a sharply inclined grass embankment where some artificially watered annuals bloomed when everything else in sight had withered.

  Easy?

  Sometimes his brain still believed that it inhabited his thirty-year-old body. Back then it would have been easy. Not now. He looked around. A couple of windows in the tenements on Silversmedsgränd flickered TV-blue. There were no people outside. He licked his lips and peered up at the top of the ridge.

  Three metres; maybe a forty-five degree angle.

  He leaned over, gripped a couple of tufts of grass and started to heave himself up. The weakened roots of the grass gave way and he was forced to dig his toes into the earth so as not to fall back. He lay with his face pressed into the ground. His belly was in the way, braking him as he dragged himself, sloth-like, foot by foot up the slope and in the midst of his misery he started to laugh, then stopped abruptly as the movement threatened to throw him off balance.

  What I must look like.

  At the top, he collapsed panting for a while, staring out over the cemetery. Gravestones and crosses stood in neat rows, raised out of their moon-shadows.

  Most of those at rest here were cremated, but Anna had wanted Elias to be buried. Where Mahler had felt terror at the image of his little body in the cold earth, Anna had found comfort. She had not wanted to let him go from her at all, and this was as close as she had been able to get.

  Mahler had thought then that it sounded like a bad reason, something that would lead to regrets later on, but perhaps he’d been wrong. Anna went to the grave every day and said that it felt good to know that Elias was actually down there. Not just ashes, but hands, feet, head. Mahler had still not grown accustomed to it and, beyond his grief, he felt a kind of unease every time he visited the grave.

  The worms. Decomposition.

  Yes. Now it struck him that this was a serious question, and he hesitated before making his way down the slope.

  If…if this really was happening…what would Elias look like?

  Mahler had attended countless crime scenes. He’d seen body parts dug out of plastic bags, corpses removed from apartments where they’d spent a couple of weeks alone with the dog, bodies mangled in canal locks, in trawler machinery. It was never pretty.

  Elias’ white coffin was burned on his retina. The final goodbye, an hour before the ceremony. Mahler had bought a box of Lego that morning and he and Anna had stood together next to the open casket, looking at Elias. He was dressed in his favourite pyjamas, the ones with penguins, his teddy bear was tucked under his arm and everything was so terribly unnecessary.

  Anna had gone up to the coffin and said, ‘Wake up, Elias. Come on, little one, that’s enough,’ and stroked his cheek. ‘Wake up, honey. It’s morning now, time to go to daycare…’

  Mahler had held his daughter and there were no words to be said, for he felt the same thing. He put the box of Harry Potter Legos that Elias had been wanting next to the teddy bear, thought for a moment it would bring him round, make him stop lying there when he was so nice and whole and only had to get up in order for this nightmare to be over.

  Mahler slip-slid down the slope, entering the cemetery warily, afraid of disturbing the peace. Elias’ grave lay quite a distance away and en route he passed a gravestone at the head of a relatively fresh grave:

  DAGNY BOMAN

  14 September 1918 – 20 May 2002

  He stopped. Listened. Heard nothing. Continued.

  Elias’ marker came into view, the very last on the right. The vase of white lilies that Anna had placed there gleamed faintly in the moonlight. A graveyard could be so densely populated and yet it was the loneliest place on earth.

  Mahler’s hands trembled and his mouth was dry as he sank to his knees at the grave. The turf squares laid on top of the exposed soil had not yet had time to grow in. The seams stood out like black shadows.

  ELIAS MAHLER

  19 April 1996 – 25 June 2002

  In Our Hearts

  Always

  Nothing could be heard. There was nothing to be seen. Everything was normal. No bulging ground, no—

  Yes, he had thought as much

  —hand that reached up, seeking.

  Mahler stretched out on the ground, embracing the earth where the coffin lay buried. Pressed his ear against the grass. This was insanity. He listened down, pressing his hand against the ear that was not on the ground.

  And heard it.

  Scraping.

  He bit his lip hard enough to draw blood, pressed his head down harder, felt the grass give way.

  Yes, there was scraping down there.

  Elias was moving, trying to…get out.

  Mahler flinched, got to his feet. He stood at the foot of the grave and hugged himself, trying to keep from going to pieces. His mind was blank. Even though this was precisely why he’d come, he’d been unable, right till the last minute, to believe it could really be true. He had absolutely no plan of action, no tools, no way of…

  ‘Elias!’

  He dropped to his knees, ripping out the clumps of grass and started to scratch away at the ground with his bare hands. He dug like a man possessed, nails breaking, dirt in his mouth, dirt in his eyes. From time to time he laid his ear against the ground, hearing the scrapi
ng more and more clearly.

  The soil was dry and porous, not yet reinforced by a net of roots. The sweat that fell from Mahler’s brow was the first moisture it had tasted in weeks. After twenty minutes he had gone so deep that his arms could no longer touch the bottom, and still there was no sign of the coffin.

  He worked for a long time with his head lowered over the edge and his blood surging against his skull like the clapper of a bell. Everything went dark. He was forced to pause so he would not faint.

  His back screamed as he heaved himself back, landing softly in the piled earth. The scraping continued, amplified in the open hole. He thought he heard a thin wail, almost a whistle, and held his breath. The whistling stopped. He took a breath. That wail again. He snorted: dirt and mucus flying from his nose. It was his airways that were wailing. He let them wheeze on.

  Dry earth.

  Thank you God: dry earth.

  Mummifying. Not decomposing.

  He lay for a while and breathed, trying not to think. His mouth was dry, his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth. This could not be happening. And yet it was. What do you do in this situation? Either you lie down and attempt not to exist. Or else you accept, and go on.

  Mahler stood up. Tried to stand up, but his back said no. He lay like a beetle, arms flailing, trying to bend unbendable joints. It didn’t work. Instead he rolled over on his stomach and dragged himself up to the opening in the ground.

  He shouted, ‘Elias!’ and pain shot down his spine toward his tailbone.

  No answer. Only scraping.

  How much farther to reach the coffin? He did not know, and he couldn’t move any more dirt without tools. His fingers closed around the beaded necklace and he lowered his head like a penitent, praying for forgiveness. He spoke down into the hole, ‘I can’t. I’m sorry, buddy. I can’t. You’re too far down. I have to get someone, I have to…’