The Circle (Hammer)

49



THE ROUGH WALLS of the waiting room are a depressing mint green. Someone has painted a waist-high border of happy ducks pecking at the ground. Somehow they make the atmosphere a thousand times worse.

Anna-Karin is sitting on the sofa staring vacantly ahead. Outside the room, hospital staff are running to and fro. A few are talking far too loudly to each other, as if this is any old job, not one where people are ill and dying. Alarm signals buzz and beep.

Anna-Karin looks at the ducks again. They’re smiling at each other with their blunt bills, apparently moving along in time with a gay little melody. She realises why she finds them so awful: no one wants to be in this room. You’re only here if your worst nightmares have come true. But someone had thought that the ducks’ perkiness would rub off on whoever was sitting here.

A male nurse with tribal tattoos down both arms pops into the room and asks Anna-Karin to come with him. They’ve finished today’s tests on Grandpa.

Anna-Karin feels as if everyone is looking at her askance as she follows him down the corridor. There goes that girl who hasn’t even been once to see her poor grandfather. She ought to be ashamed of herself.

The nurse stands outside Grandpa’s room and gestures for Anna-Karin to go inside.

She looks at the open door. More than anything she’d like to bolt down the long corridor and escape into the fresh air, away from the smell of hospital and sick bodies. Away from Grandpa.

Grandpa.

She walks past the nurse. Washes her hands thoroughly at the little sink inside the door, then rubs them with alcohol from the pump bottle attached to the wall.

The room is ghostly in the dim afternoon light. An old man lies in the nearest bed, with fingers as crooked as claws. His eyes are squeezed shut and his toothless mouth gasps air. Anna-Karin’s insides go cold before she realises that he isn’t Grandpa. She hurries past him.

A light-grey curtain is drawn halfway around the other bed.

At first she sees only his legs delineated beneath the light blue hospital blanket. When she’s closer she can see his arms resting outside the blanket. Needles attached to long tubes have been inserted into the back of his hands and secured there with papery tape. Another tube feeds out from beneath the blanket. Anna-Karin follows it with her eyes to a bag of pee hanging from the bed near the floor.

She takes a few more steps and there is Grandpa’s face. It’s almost transparent in the pale light from the window. Yet another tube feeds into his nose. An IV stand has been placed next to the bed. A beeping sound comes from a machine with wires that disappear under the collar of his nightshirt. He’s like a machine into which fluids are pumped in and out.

Anna-Karin takes her last steps to the edge of his bed. ‘Grandpa,’ she says.

He turns towards her. His features have sort of collapsed. The skin looks smoother. It’s Grandpa lying there, yet not. All the qualities she identifies with him, the strength, the alertness, the vitality and intelligence, are all missing.

She wants to hug him, but doesn’t dare. She’s afraid of hurting him. Afraid he won’t want her hug.

‘Grandpa … It’s me. Anna-Karin.’

Grandpa looks at her silently. It’s impossible to tell whether or not he recognises her.

Only now does she realise she’s crying for the first time since primary school. ‘I’m sorry. It’s all my fault,’ she whispers, and sniffles. ‘I’m sorry.’

Grandpa blinks a few times. He seems to be trying to focus. Her mother had said he was so heavily medicated he was completely out of it.

‘They told me it was dangerous,’ she continues, ‘but I never thought it could be dangerous for anyone but myself. Least of all you. But I’ve stopped now.’

She takes his hand, careful not to disturb the needles.

‘I should never have started in the first place. I should have listened to the others. I know that now, but it’s too late. I’ve ruined everything. Grandpa, you’ve got to get better. Please. Please.’

Grandpa blinks again. He opens his mouth and manages to say a few words. She can barely make them out, but he’s speaking Finnish. She’s heard the language now and then throughout her childhood, but never learned it.

‘Can you say it in Swedish, Grandpa?’

‘They said on the radio that war was coming,’ Grandpa says slowly. ‘Everyone has to choose which side they’re on.’

‘Everything’s going to be fine,’ Anna-Karin says. ‘You mustn’t worry, just get better.’

Grandpa shuts his eyes and nods weakly. ‘My father said, “If we don’t do something now, we’ll have to live with the shame for the rest of our lives.”’

Anna-Karin strokes his head as he drifts off to sleep. His hair is thin and silky. His forehead is cool, almost cold.

‘He’s your grandfather, isn’t he?’ a nurse says, as she enters the room.

Anna-Karin nods and wipes away her tears with the back of her hand.

‘I know he looks awful …’ The nurse explains what all the wires, pumps and needles are for. Anna-Karin feels a little better when she understands what they’re doing for him. These people have a plan for how they’re going to keep him alive, make him better.

‘He’s improving,’ the nurse says. ‘It may not look like it, but he is.’

Anna-Karin meets her gaze for the first time. Even if she hadn’t seen her picture in the paper, she would have recognised her. Rebecka’s mother is an older copy of her daughter. She smiles at Anna-Karin, a smile that is also Rebecka’s. She’s lost her daughter yet she’s trying to comfort Anna-Karin. What if she knew that Anna-Karin is among those who could find Rebecka’s murderer but has decided to do nothing? If we don’t do something now, we’ll have to live with the shame for the rest of our lives.



Minoo has almost fallen asleep when she hears a mysterious sound in her room, a rhythmic buzzing. She can’t tell where it’s coming from.

The old fear rouses her and she sits up wide awake, sure she’s going to see black smoke coiling along the walls and across the floor towards her bed …

But the room looks normal. And now she realises where the sound is coming from. Her mobile is vibrating on the bedside table.

‘Hi,’ Linnéa says, when she answers.

Minoo switches on her little green bedside lamp. ‘Hi.’

‘Thanks for helping me today,’ Linnéa says.

‘No problem.’

‘Robin and Erik are such f*cking arseholes. That was one good thing about Anna-Karin exerting her power over the school –that everyone hated them. I’m sorry they read out that bit from my diary. It wasn’t about you. Well, it was, but I was having a bad day.’

Linnéa speaks quickly, as if she feels she has to apologise but wants to get it over with. Is it even an apology? Minoo feels a painful twinge when she remembers what it said about ‘M’: She gives me a headache.

‘Let’s forget about it,’ she says, and wishes it was that simple.

‘Okay. I’m calling because I have to tell you something,’ Linnéa says. ‘I can read the Book of Patterns now, too.’

‘Since when?’

‘Just a minute ago. And I’ve found something. I’m sitting here now, looking at it through the Pattern Finder. And now that I’ve found it, I can’t understand why I didn’t see it all along.’

Great, Minoo thinks. Pretty soon that damn book will be transmitting to everybody except me. ‘What’s it say?’

‘It’s hard to explain. I’m not sure I understand it. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. You’re probably the only one who can work out what it means.’

‘I can try.’

‘Okay … It’s about … this thing. I can’t explain it. This thing, whatever it is, is meant for one person. If it’s shared, it won’t work properly.’

Minoo feels the tingling she experiences when she’s close to solving a difficult maths problem. What Linnéa is saying sounds familiar.

‘Go on,’ she says, as she opens the drawer of her bedside table and takes out her notebook.

Linnéa sighs. ‘The problem is that one person will always end up outside this thing. And if that person dies, another person ends up outside it. And then the next. And the next …’

‘Wait,’ Minoo says. She fumbles as she flips back and forth through her notebook.

‘What is it?’ Linnéa asks.

‘Ida talked about the same thing when she discovered she could read the Book of Patterns,’ she says, and finally finds the right page. ‘This is what she said: “That it’s, like, built for one. Then it works just great. But if more people try to get in there, someone always gets left out. And if the one who’s outside disappears, then the next ends up outside. And then the next. And the next. And the next. Until everyone’s gone.” She said it was like some kind of atmosphere.’

All the pieces fall into place. There’s the answer. Beautiful. Crystal clear. Minoo doesn’t need the answer to know it’s correct. ‘I know what the book is trying to tell us,’ she says. ‘It’s about the magic protection. What Adriana was talking about in the beginning. The thing that she and the Council thought was protecting us. Now you know that, try looking in the book again. Maybe it’ll change what you see in the patterns.’

‘Hang on,’ Linnéa says.

She’s silent for a long moment. Meanwhile Minoo hears her mother come up the steps and go into the bathroom. She must just have come home from the hospital. Water starts gushing from a tap.

‘Okay,’ Linnéa says. ‘It’s definitely talking about the protective magic. It was created for a single Chosen One. The book is trying to explain what the side effects are when it’s been expanded to cover seven people. It can’t protect everyone at once. One of us will always be left out. It’s like a kind of safety valve. This magic can’t contain multiple psyches, emotions, wills and thoughts. Like, it would implode if it tried to keep a tight defence around all of us.’

‘So someone always ends up outside its protection,’ Minoo says. ‘And as long as that person is alive, the rest of us are hidden. But if that person dies …’

‘… then someone else becomes exposed,’ Linnéa concludes.

Minoo gropes for the next logical link in her chain of thought.

‘Elias must have been the first who was unprotected,’ she says, ‘and when he died, it was Rebecka’s turn. Then mine. I’m the one who’s unprotected now.’

They fall silent.

‘But why did the attack on you fail?’ Linnéa asks eventually. ‘We don’t know what powers Elias may have had, but Rebecka could throw heavy shit around just using her mind. Is there something you can do that they couldn’t?’

‘I don’t know,’ Minoo says.

But she thinks about the black smoke. How she was able to make it disperse, at least for a moment. She wishes she could tell Linnéa about it, but she still feels ashamed to talk about it.

‘I suppose we’ll get all the answers tomorrow,’ Linnéa says, ‘when you speak to Gustaf.’

‘Let’s hope so.’

‘Are you scared?’

Linnéa is probably the only person in the world who would have to ask that.

‘Oh, no, I’m really looking forward to it,’ Minoo answers.

Linnéa laughs. Then she says gravely. ‘Good luck.’

They hang up and Minoo lies down on the bed. She shuts her eyes. Her thoughts hurtle through her mind until she feels as if she’ll suffocate under their weight.

Why did Elias and Rebecka die while she got to live?

Elias died at school. So did Rebecka.

The school is a place of evil.

Is the evil that’s after them weak outside the school?

She thinks about the crack in the playground.

She thinks about the blood-red moon that hung heavily over Engelsfors’s whispering forests.

She thinks about Cat, about the letter Nicolaus wrote to himself. The last words. Memento mori.

Remember that you are going to die.

She thinks about the list of questions she prepared for Gustaf this evening. She thinks about Gustaf outside the library and Gustaf in the darkness by the viaduct. Gustaf who was loved by Rebecka. Gustaf who may have killed her.

I can’t do it. I won’t do it. I won’t listen to you.

Those words follow Minoo into her sleep.