He found the glue and spent another half-hour smoothing down any slight imperfections and sticking the tiles together. The morning sun was slanting in through the kitchen window as he stood back to admire his work.
Nine tiles with room for four hundred beads on each one, all stuck together. A white, knobbly surface just waiting for three thousand six hundred coloured dots. Anders nodded. He was pleased with himself. He could get going now.
But what shall I make?
As he smoked a cigarette and sipped at the warm liquid, which did indeed taste more like the ghost of a cup of coffee, he contemplated the white surface and tried to come up with a picture that he would create there.
One of Strindberg's wild sea paintings in beads. Yes. But there probably weren't enough nuances for that. Something more naive, like a child's picture. Cows and horses, a house with a chimney. No, that was no challenge.
A child's picture…
He glowered at the lighthouse on North Point and searched his memory. Then he pushed away his coffee cup and started rummaging in drawers. He hadn't a clue what had become of the camera.
He found it in the junk drawer, where everything that might just be worth keeping ended up. The counter showed that twelve pictures had been taken. He used the point of a pencil to push in the rewind button, and the motor began to turn, slowly and with much complaining. The batteries were more or less dead. There was a click and the motor speeded up: nothing more to rewind. Anders removed the roll of film and sat down at the kitchen table again.
He closed his hand around the small metal cylinder; it felt cool after lying in the drawer. They were in there. The last pictures of a family. He warmed it in his hand, warmed the tiny people on the ice who would soon be struck by something dreadful.
He took the roll of film between his thumb and index finger, studying it as if he might be able to see something of what was inside. An impulse told him to leave it alone, to let that family stay in there, forever unaware of what was to come. Not to let it out to trample in the sludge that life had become. To let that family stay in its little time capsule.
Someone hates us
With the morning's first cup of coffee by his side, Simon was sitting at the kitchen table staring down into the half-open matchbox. The black larva lay there motionless, but Simon knew it was alive.
He sat with his lips clamped firmly together, gathering saliva in his mouth. When he had enough he allowed it to trickle out between his lips and down into the box. The larva moved slightly when the spit landed on its shiny skin, as if it were sleepy; Simon watched as the saliva was slowly absorbed and disappeared.
It was a morning ritual that was every bit as necessary as going for a pee and having a cup of coffee, he had come to realise.
A week or so after Spiritus came into his care, he had left the box in the kitchen drawer one morning without spitting into it, and taken the boat over to the mainland to do some shopping. As he set off in the boat he already had the taste in his mouth. It grew stronger during the crossing. The taste of old wood, of rancid nuts, expanded out of his mouth, into his blood and through his muscles.
As he was slowing down ready to moor the boat by the jetty in Nåten, he threw up all over the floor. He knew the reason, but refused to give in and carried on towards the jetty, moving as slowly as possible. When the boat hit a post, it was as if his body was being wrenched inside out. He threw up until there was nothing left but bile.
This was a nausea much greater than the body itself can produce, a septic shock similar to acute poisoning. Simon curled up in the stern as his stomach contorted in cramps, and managed to swing the boat around so that it was heading back to Domarö.
He was convinced that he was going to die, and all the way back he remained curled up in the foetal position as deep, wet belches forced their way out of him and his body rotted.
He didn't manage to moor the boat properly, but ran it up on the shoreline and crawled on his knees through the shallow water, across the pebbles on the shore, the lawn and into the house. By the time he got the matchbox out of the drawer, his mouth was so dry from all the vomiting that it took him a couple of minutes to collect enough saliva to enable him to give Spiritus what Spiritus craved. It took several days before he was fully recovered, before his body felt strong once again.
Since then he had been careful to spit into the matchbox every morning. He didn't know what was waiting at the end of this pact he had entered into, but he knew he had to fulfil its terms for as long as he lived.
And then?
He didn't know. But he feared the worst, in some form. And he regretted the fact that he hadn't swept Spiritus off the jetty that day. Down into the sea where it belonged. He regretted that. But it was too late now.
He took a sip of his coffee and looked out of the window. The sky was high and clear, the way it looks only in the autumn, with a few yellow birch leaves drifting down. There was nothing to indicate that a storm was on its way, which Simon knew it was, just as he knew many other things. Where to find water under the ground, when the ice would form, how much rain would fall.
When he had finished his coffee and rinsed the cup, Simon put on his knee-high boots and went out. This was one of the islanders' habits that he had adopted: knee-high boots in every situation. You never knew what you might end up squelching through, and it was best to be prepared.
Perhaps the post and newspapers might have arrived on the early boat today, and if they hadn't there were always some old men by the mailboxes who, like Simon, had nothing better to do than to go and see if the post had come on the early boat. Which it almost never had.
On the way up to the mailboxes he glanced along the track to the Shack. There was plenty to do there, and perhaps that was a good thing for Anders. Something to occupy the hands is an excellent cure for gloomy thoughts, he knew that from personal experience. During the worst periods with Marita, his first wife, it was practising with packs of cards, handkerchiefs and other things that had stood between him and panic-stricken terror.
With Anna-Greta things were very different, of course. In that relationship it was mostly melancholy he had driven away with sleight of hand and miscalculations.
As far as he knew, Anders had no particular hobby to occupy his mind, so undergrowth that needed clearing, flaking paint and wood that needed chopping could well do him some good.
From a distance of a hundred metres away, he could already see that today's conversation group by the mailboxes consisted of Holger and Göran. They were instantly recognisable. Holger stooped and miserable from disappointments that had started when he was only young, Göran still straight-backed after forty years in the police service.
But what the…?
The two men were deep in an intense discussion. Holger was shaking his head and waving one arm in the direction of the sea, while Göran was kicking at the ground as if he were annoyed. But that wasn't what was peculiar.
The mailboxes were gone.
The wall of the shop, closed for the season, was completely empty. Only the yellow box for outgoing post was still hanging there, and that looked odd as well.
Have they stopped the postal service?
As Simon got closer he realised that wasn't the problem. Ten metres away from the shop he stood on the first splinters. Splinters of plastic and splinters of wood, bits of the mailboxes that had been hanging on the wall only yesterday. The yellow metal box for outgoing post was dented and crooked.
Holger caught sight of him and burst out, 'Oh, here comes the Stockholmer. We're not likely to get much sympathy there.'