Again she heard a crunching in the snow. It didn’t matter one bit whether it was her imagination or something real that was threatening her, she couldn’t just stand there – but she couldn’t move, either. One, two, three. She resolved to shut out her surroundings and think about something else entirely. Pési. What was he doing now? Drinking hot chocolate and eating an apple, as he usually was when she picked him up early? Berglind shut her eyes and remembered how sweetly he’d smiled at her when she’d picked him up yesterday. He’d been sitting off to one side against the room’s back wall, while the other kids buzzed around the toy box. Their noise had subsided when he stood up and walked over to her; the children moving aside one after another as he walked through the group. Berglind had watched in surprise as they put down their toys, stood up and walked away. None of them said a word, and the rumpus that had met her ears on arrival seemed like a distant memory. Pési didn’t appear to be startled by this, and acted as if the children weren’t there. Berglind had been troubled; she’d been so preoccupied with her own problems that she hadn’t given any thought to how he might be doing in preschool. At first everything had gone smoothly; he appeared to have playmates, friends even, but when she thought back on it, things had changed. He was always alone when she collected him. Alone on a swing, dangling his feet; alone pushing sand around absent-mindedly in the sandpit; alone kicking up snow at the edge of the playground. Alone.
The preschool teacher had smiled at Berglind as if there were nothing more natural than other children being frightened of her son, and Berglind had bent down to Pési and asked him to go and put on his snowboots. Then she asked the young woman straight out what was actually going on and whether Pési was being bullied. The teacher had given her another smile, a rather sickly one, and said that kids were sometimes like that without meaning anything by it. There was no reason for their behaviour; it had started some time ago, seemingly for no reason, and showed no sign of stopping. They’d thought about contacting Berglind and Halli but decided to wait until parents’ evening at Easter, in case the situation should improve. But don’t worry, it’ll get better. Just give it a little time. Well, quite – this was exactly what she’d been told herself; she was going through a phase and just needed time to recover. When she pressed the teacher for answers, perhaps more zealously than she’d intended, the woman said that they’d tried to ask the brightest kids what was going on but hadn’t received any sensible reply, just something vague about how they were scared of the angry woman who followed Pési. They hadn’t been able to explain in any more detail which woman they meant, but as the teacher spoke Berglind realized that she was putting two and two together and was about to come up with five. She thought Berglind was the angry woman the kids were afraid of. Instead of telling the teacher the whole story, Berglind thanked her politely and left. She knew from experience never to discuss the subject with anyone she didn’t know well. Enough people knew about their misfortune as it was, and it was good to hold onto the faint hope that there were still a few who knew nothing about it.
Pési was waiting in the cloakroom, having put his left foot in his right boot and vice versa, obviously happy to leave preschool and go home. Never mind Berglind herself – her son deserved better. So instead of finding an outlet for her disappointment, she had bent down and smiled at him. Let’s go home; we can stop off at the baker’s and buy some doughnuts. He had shaken his head and said that he wanted to go straight back; he wanted to go to his room. Berglind knew why: home was his only refuge from the relentless and inexplicable bullying. As long as he didn’t go to the window… One, two, three. For Pési’s sake she had to go inside and get ready. The smell seemed to be subsiding again; it still lingered, but it wasn’t as powerful as it had been just a moment before. Perhaps that was a sign that she wasn’t in danger, and Berglind made her decision before she started having second thoughts. She turned around quickly.
The motion made the belt came off her dressing gown, which swung open. She stood there, exposed, facing the empty garden. Apart from the raven’s corpse there was nothing to see; no one stood there shuffling from one foot to the other in the snow, making it crunch; no one was taking a deep breath, about to blow down her collar. She wrapped the dressing gown back around herself and took the first step in the direction of the garden door. When nothing happened her confidence grew, and before she knew it she was back at the house, past the dead bird, grabbing the door handle with a clammy palm. For the first time since they’d moved into the house the door wouldn’t budge, and Berglind’s courage diminished with every fumbling, unsuccessful attempt to open it. She didn’t dare breathe through her nose in case the stench of decay had risen again, and the turmoil inside her as she scrabbled at the handle made her oblivious to the wind; she had no idea whether it was as warm as breath, or ice-cold. Suddenly the door came unstuck and opened just enough for her to squeeze inside. Panting, and with a pounding heart, she rushed into the warmth as she heard the crunching of the snow again behind her. With one movement she managed to slide the door shut again but she had to use all her strength, making the door slam loudly. Then she stood there for a moment trying to catch her breath, making sure to keep her eyes from the floor so that she wouldn’t look into the garden.
Once her heartbeat had returned to something resembling normality and the veins on the back of her hand had stopped trying to pop out of her skin, she reached for the floor-length curtain and pulled it shut. What was going on? Should she do something, say something? She hardly knew anything about Magga really, and even less about her death; her ori-ginal theory, that the girl’s confused spirit was trying to babysit Pési and complete the last task it remembered from its earthly life, didn’t fit, because right now she was alone here and Pési was at preschool. So what did it want, then?
The air suddenly cooled and once again she was covered with goose bumps. The cold seemed to radiate from the sliding door, creeping up the curtain and drifting through the room like invisible smoke. Rage suddenly coursed through Berglind and she swept the curtain back, the expensive material ripping right up to the track as she did so. Under normal circumstances she would have yelped at the damage to the curtain, which now hung slackly from one hook; they almost certainly couldn’t afford to repair it and would have to look out into the murky garden for what remained of the winter. But for the moment this thought was far from Berglind’s mind; now she stared open-mouthed at the glass, which was covered, on the outside, with frost from top to bottom. Through it, it was as if she saw the shadow of someone outside, but then it disappeared. Traced on the frosty glass, she read: O81NN. Or was it OBINN? She couldn’t be certain. Neither meant anything to her and she retreated from the garden door without checking to see whether whoever had written it had left behind any tracks.