The door opened slowly on stiff hinges, but stopped after six or seven inches.
It was because of the big limestone slab. The winter waves and ice-or perhaps the grass growing around it-had pushed it upward over the years, and the bottom of the door was catching on it.
When Joakim grabbed hold of the upper part of the steel
door, it bent outward an inch or two more, but refused to open.
He peered inside, with the sense that he was looking into a black mountain crevice.
“What’s inside?” asked Livia behind him.
“Wow,” he said, “there’s a skeleton on the floor.”
“What?”
He turned and smiled at her wide-eyed expression.
“I’m only joking. I can’t see much… it’s almost pitch black.”
He stepped back onto the stone slab and let Livia take a look.
“I can see some stairs,” she said.
“Yes, that’s the staircase leading up into the tower.”
“It’s curved,” said Livia. “It goes round… and up.”
“Right up to the top,” said Joakim, and added, “Wait here.”
He had spotted a rectangular piece of rock down by the water, and went down and fetched it. This gave him a good threshold to stand on.
“Can you move back a bit, Livia?” he said. “I’m going to try and climb in and push the door open from the inside.”
“I want to come in as well!”
“After me, maybe,” said Joakim.
He stood on top of the piece of rock, bent the upper part of the door outward as far as he could, and squeezed in through the opening. He just managed it-he was glad he didn’t have a beer gut.
The daylight disappeared once he was inside the lighthouse, and he could no longer hear the wind from the sea. He stepped down onto a flat cement floor, and felt thick, curved stone walls around him.
Slowly he got used to the darkness and looked around. How long was it since anyone had been inside the lighthouse? Several decades, perhaps. The air was dry, as in all buildings made of limestone, and every surface was covered with a powder of gray dust.
The stone staircase Livia had seen started almost at his feet and spiraled up along the walls, around a thick pillar in the center of the tower. It disappeared up into the darkness, but somewhere up there he had the impression of a faint light, presumably from the narrow windows in the tower.
Someone had left things on the floor. A couple of empty beer bottles, a pile of newspapers, a red and white metal can with the word CALTEX on it.
Next to the stone staircase was a low wooden door, and when Joakim pushed it open a little way he saw even more trash: old wooden boxes piled on top of one another, empty bottles, and dark green fishing nets on the walls. There was even something that looked like an old mangle in there.
Someone had been using the lighthouse as a dumping ground.
“Daddy?”
Livia was calling him.
“Yes?” he replied, and heard the echo of his voice bouncing up the spiral staircase.
Her face peered in through the doorway. “Can I come in too?”
“We can try… Can you climb up onto the rock, then I can try and pull you in?”
As soon as she began to squeeze herself through the opening, he realized he wouldn’t be able to bend the door outward and pull her inside at the same time. She could easily get stuck.
“I don’t think this is going to work, Livia.”
“But I want to come inside!”
“We can go over to the southern lighthouse,” he said, “and maybe we can-”
Suddenly Joakim heard scraping noises from above. He turned his head and listened.
Footsteps. It sounded like echoing footsteps high up on the spiral staircase.
The noise was coming from the tower. It was his imagination,
but it sounded like heavy footsteps-and it sounded as if they were slowly but surely coming down the stairs.
This wasn’t Katrine, this was someone else.
Heavy footsteps…It sounded like a man.
“Livia?” called Joakim.
“Yes?”
She was still outside, and Joakim thought about how close she was to the water; if she took a couple of steps back and happened to fall…And Gabriel, Gabriel was alone up in the house. How could he have left him?
“Livia?” he called again. “Stay where you are, I’m coming out.”
He grabbed the doorframe and heaved himself up. The steel door seemed to want to keep him there, but he forced his way out through the opening. It might have looked quite funny, like a parody of a birth, but his heart was pounding and Livia was standing there looking at him with fear in her eyes.
Joakim climbed down onto the stone outside and breathed in the fresh, cold sea air.
“There we are,” he said, and quickly pushed the steel door shut behind him. “Let’s get back to Gabriel. We can look inside the other lighthouse another day.”
As he quickly replaced the padlock and locked the door, he was expecting protests, but Livia said nothing. She took his hand in silence and they walked back along the jetty and up onto the shore. It was almost twilight.
Joakim thought about the noises in the lighthouse.
It must have been the wind from the sea blowing around the tower, or the beak of a gull scraping against the glass. Not footsteps.
The dead are trying to reach us, Katrine. They want to talk to us, they want us to listen.
What do they want to say to us? Perhaps that we should not seek death too early.
In the loft above the barn there is a date from the time of the First World War carved into the walclass="underline" December 7, 1916. After that there is a cross, and the beginning of a name: † GEOR-
– MIRJA RAMBE
WINTER 1916
Alma Ljunggren, the wife of the master lighthouse keeper, is sitting at her loom in the room at the back of the house. A wall clock is ticking behind her. Alma cannot see the sea from here, and that suits her very well. She doesn’t want to see what her husband, Georg, and the other lighthouse keepers are doing down by the shore.
There are no voices to be heard in the house; all the other women are down on the shore. Alma knows that she too should be there to support the men, but she dare not go. She hasn’t the strength to be any kind of support; she barely has the courage to breathe.
The wall clock continues to tick.
A sea monster has drifted ashore at Eel Point this winter morning, in the third year of the Great War. The monster was discovered after last night’s fierce snowstorm: a black monster with pointed steel spikes all over its round body.
Sweden is a neutral country as far as the Great War on the Continent is concerned, but is still affected by it.
The monster on the shore is a mine. Presumably Russian, dropped the previous year in order to stop the Germans from transporting ore across the Baltic. But of course it doesn’t
matter what country it comes from, it is just as dangerous anyway.
The ticking in the room suddenly stops.
Alma turns her head.
The wall clock behind her has stopped. The pendulum is hanging straight down.
Alma picks up a pair of black sheep shears from a basket beside her loom, gets up, and goes out of the room. She throws a shawl around her shoulders and walks out onto the veranda, at the front of the manor house. She still refuses to look down toward the shore.
The waves must have torn the mine free of its mooring out at sea during the blizzard over the past few days, and slowly washed it toward the land. Now it is stuck fast in the sandy seabed and the slushy ice only fifty yards or so from the southern lighthouse.
The year before, a German torpedo drifted ashore just north of Marnäs. It was shot to pieces, and the naval authorities now insist that mines be dealt with in the same way. The Russian mine must be destroyed, but it is not possible to blow it up so close to the lighthouses. It must be towed away. The lighthouse keepers are going to place a rope around the mine and then carefully tow it away from the lighthouses.