The Key (75 page)

Sigrid smiles modestly. He puts his arm around her shoulders and they walk away.

‘Those two, are they witches too?’ Elias asks.

‘Yes, they are.’

‘Good or evil?’

‘The other Chosen Ones have been fighting about that for ever. But, if you ask me, I’d say evil.’

Elias turns back to the school.

There it is. As if it had never disappeared.

And then he is somewhere else altogether.

The light in the unfurnished room is dim, but Elias instantly recognises where he is. He and Ida stand in the middle of the sitting room in Linnéa’s flat on either side of a mirror. Around them, several people sit on the floor holding hands.

One of them is Linnéa. He calls her name but she doesn’t react at all. He goes to kneel in front of her. Her fringe almost hides her eyes, which are fixed on the mirror. Her expression is tense, as if she is waiting for something to happen.

‘Linnéa!’ he says again.

He reaches out for her, tries to touch her. Dread grows inside him when his hand passes straight through her cheek.

‘It’s no use,’ Ida calls to him. ‘Come here!’

He tries to touch Linnéa’s knee. Nothing. Nothing.

She is so close. And he can’t reach her.

Dead
.

He lowers his hand.

He died. He died and Linnéa was left behind, alone. His sister in all but blood. She was his last thought before he died.

She is as he remembers her and yet she is not. She has grown older and she has changed. Elias can see that.

He will never laugh with her again, never share her sadness.

Dead
.

Only now does he begin to understand the true meaning of the word.

Never more.

‘What the hell, Elias!’ Ida calls sharply. ‘You’ve got to help me!’

Elias turns to her without caring that she’ll see him cry. She has settled down on the floor, too, near the mirror.

‘What do you want?’ he snaps.

‘Are you blind?’ Ida says. ‘This is a séance! They’re trying to contact the dead!’

Elias looks at the mirror, which reflects neither him nor Ida. And now he sees that someone has scribbled all over it. Lots of letters inside circles. An upside-down glass has been placed in the centre of the mirror. He should have known immediately. He has played spirit-in-the-glass himself.

‘Have you tried touching the glass?’ he asks.

‘Guess!’ Ida hisses. ‘Here. Come and hold my hand.’

She holds out her right hand and Elias takes it, a little hesitantly.

‘It will make us stronger,’ she says.

Oddly enough, Elias understands what she means. He
feels
it, like warmth slowly filling his whole being.

‘It might be that we have to accept that it won’t work tonight either,’ the man who sits behind Ida says.

The school caretaker. His ice-blue eyes are fixed on the glass. He was the last person Elias saw before he died. And Ida’s story is that this man is four hundred years old.

‘No,’ Linnéa says tersely. ‘Let’s try for a little longer. It has to work.’

‘Shit, they mustn’t stop now,’ Ida says. ‘You try touching the glass, Elias.’

Elias cautiously touches the bottom of the glass.

He can feel the hard surface.

‘It works!’ Ida says, and places her fingertips on the glass. ‘OK, let’s start with the
I
!’

But the glass won’t shift.

‘Linnéa, it isn’t working,’ Vanessa Dahl says.

‘Shut up! It does so work!’ Ida almost shrieks. ‘Elias, focus!’

Elias focuses on the glass. Focuses on feeling its surface. It will work. It has to work.

And the glass moves. Just one centimetre. It leaves a white trail.

Anna-Karin Nieminen draws breath.

‘It moved!’ Linnéa exclaims. ‘It moved!’

‘I saw it, too.’ That’s from a guy with glasses who sits between the school caretaker and Vanessa’s mate Evelina.

Elias tightens his grip on Ida’s hand. They move the glass across the mirror, adding letter to letter.

I-D-A

E-L-I-A-S

H-E-R-E

And then the mist sweeps in and thickens around them.

Elias and Ida face each other in the Borderland, still hand in hand.

And they are beaming at each other like two mad people.

‘Now they know we exist!’ Ida says.

‘How do we get back?’ Elias says as he lets go of her hand.

‘I don’t know,’ Ida says as she starts walking. ‘But we can’t hang around here.’

‘Isn’t it better to wait?’

‘No,’ Ida says. ‘Believe me.’

Elias is past asking any more questions by now and just follows her, full of conflicting emotions.

He thinks back on seeing Linnéa again. He knows her so well and can sense every feeling she tries to hide. She looked so alone.

‘How has Linnéa been?’ he asks.

‘Not so great,’ Ida says. ‘I mean, it wasn’t like she called me when she was feeling low. But it was pretty obvious that she missed you. A lot. And lots of other tough things happened …’

She pauses.

‘But good things as well. Like Vanessa. They seem to have broken up now but they were really in love.’

‘Has Linnéa been together with
Vanessa Dahl
?’

Now he has to smile. Linnéa, who always used to make fun of him because he had a thing for blondes.

‘You must tell me everything,’ he says. ‘From the beginning.’

‘Yes,’ Ida sighs. ‘I suppose I must.’

Sharp snowflakes burst from the clouds, patter against Vanessa’s jacket and find their way in under her scarf. The world is made up of whirling white spots against the pale grey sky and brilliantly white ground. Autumn came and went before anyone had time to notice it. Now, in October, mid-winter has arrived.

Vanessa is invisible where she stands on the roof, looking out over the other blocks of flats along Törnros Road, all identical to the one where she lives with Mum and Melvin. She goes to stand at the edge of the roof and looks down at the place where Olivia died three weeks ago.

Vanessa doesn’t want to think about what Olivia’s parents and siblings must have been going through this past year. Olivia had begun by dropping out of school and then physically declined. Her family must have feared that she was seriously ill. They must have feared much worse things when she suddenly vanished without a trace for six months. And then she died breaking into the home of an old schoolfriend and throwing herself out of a window. The official explanation was ‘psychosis’. ‘She said that she wanted to be with Elias,’ Vanessa had told Nicke, and felt quite sick when she saw this quoted in the evening papers.

She touches the small scar above her left eyebrow.

She knows that what happened wasn’t her fault.

Olivia had pushed her towards the window, not the other way round. Then Vanessa lost control of her magic and they both fell. In mid-air, they lost their grip on each other. Vanessa hardly had time to notice that she was hovering by the time Olivia’s body crashed into the pavement. There was nothing she could have done.

But what if she had had a chance to rescue her? If she could have grabbed Olivia’s hoodie and stopped her from hitting the ground, would she have done it?

Would she have let Olivia live?

In her nightmares, she lets her die.

And every time she wakes up, she longs for Linnéa.

The dense snow means that Vanessa can’t see Linnéa’s block of flats. She imagines Linnéa in her sitting room. She won’t have slept, just smoked one fag after another while brooding on how much she misses Elias; Elias, whom they got in touch with last night.

Matilda had said that Elias had passed on. Had she lied? Or didn’t she know? She did say once that the demons at times seem better informed than the guardians.

They must find out more.

Nicolaus thinks that to avoid the contact being broken again, they need a stronger and more experienced metal witch than Rickard. And they have only one alternative. An alternative they will try to find today. The door of the Crystal Cave has had the same sign in place for six weeks now.
CLOSED FOR HOLIDAY
. But the last time Mona vanished, she was actually in Engelsfors all the time. She had just been lying low. She must have a home somewhere, even if the Chosen Ones have never been able to work out where.

The wind tears and pulls at Vanessa. She closes her eyes. The snowflakes are blasting her face and sting like pinpricks on her eyelids and lips.

She releases more of her power. She feels the magic fill her, an energy that radiates from within her body, makes her feel so light. During these last three weeks, she has been practising every day. But always safely, on the ground or at low heights. It is time for the real test.

Vanessa opens her eyes, lifts one foot and puts it over the edge of the roof. It should be all right. This is what birds do to fledglings, after all. Push them out of the nest to make them fly.

She looks at her foot. The ground is so far away.

Her power is strong inside her. It is so obviously a part of her. And yet, it’s against every instinct to do this.

She steps straight out into empty air.

It holds. She is hovering.

She lets the wind carry her upwards. Upwards. Leans into the wind so that it takes her in a wide arc around the residential area.

The snow stops falling as suddenly as it began. A last flurry of flakes and then the view clears.

Engelsfors lies spread out underneath her. The railway and the national road divide the town and the forest surrounds it. The snow-covered ice on the canal turns it into a wide, white road.

Vanessa looks down on the closed petrol stations. The industrial estate with the steel plant where no smoke has risen from the chimneys during her lifetime. The burnt-down sawmill. She allows herself to be carried even further. The manor house looks like an extravagant doll’s house. Among bare trees, the church spire sticks up. Then, the area with the grand villas, the ‘Beverly Hills of Bergslagen’ as Mum calls it. There is the centre of Engelsfors, with Storvall Park and the huge block of grey cement that is the City Mall.

There, in the distance, she sees Engelsfors senior school.

Last night, the fox watched as the school became invisible. The air element. Only two portents left now, earth and water. And then, darkness will fall in Engelsfors. The wall of rock underneath the school will open. What will the portal look like? How are they going to be able to close it?

Vanessa looks at the manor house again and wonders if the doll’s house is Minoo’s prison or if she stays there of her own free will. What is going on in there now? Has Minoo found out how to close the portal? And what will she say when they tell her that their dead friends have not passed on?

Vanessa suddenly becomes acutely aware of how high up she is. What if her power stops?

She forces her panicky thoughts out of her mind and listens to the wind. Her body understands, in a way her mind can’t grasp, how to lean against the wind so that it carries her back to the only roof where there are deep footsteps in the snow.

* * *

It has stopped snowing. Minoo’s room is bathed in the pale morning light. Everything looks chilly, even the yellow and white striped wallpaper, which usually adds warmth to the room. The desk, usually a busy mess, is cleared. The bed is tidily made. No one has slept in it for three weeks.

And, last night, no one slept in Anna-Karin’s bed either. She has been awake.

I-D-A

E-L-I-A-S

H-E-R-E

They haven’t passed on.

Today, they must try to find Mona and get her to help them contact the dead Chosen Ones again. They need answers to so many questions. But Anna-Karin knows one thing for sure. They must get Minoo out. They should do it now. She mustn’t stay in the manor house. She should never have set foot in there in the first place.

‘Good morning.’

Anna-Karin turns to see Minoo’s father standing in the doorway. His creased shirt and stubbly cheeks and chin tell her that he hasn’t slept either, just sat up all night in his study.

‘Good morning,’ she says.

Erik looks around the room, takes his glasses off and rubs his eyes.

‘I’m really looking forward to the day Minoo finishes that damned project,’ he says.

It is obvious that he misses her, but he doesn’t sound bothered at all by not having heard from his daughter for three weeks. Anna-Karin used her magic to convince him and Farnaz that everything is fine and that Minoo will come back home as soon as her boss has got his project up and running.

‘How are you getting on with the articles?’ she asks to change the subject.

‘As well as can be expected, I suppose. It would be so much easier if I didn’t have to commute to Fagersta.’

When all the communication networks went down, the
Engelsfors Herald
moved back to the office of the
Fagersta Gazette
. Minoo’s father is working on a series of articles about ‘the Engelsfors situation’, about what happens to a town when landline and mobile phone links, Internet and television transmission have broken down. All the expected and unexpected problems that crop up.

Credit cards don’t work. ATMs don’t either. Emergency services are no longer at the end of a phone call. The town council has set up community aid centres around town, where people can go for information and assistance. It is heartening to hear of how many people have clubbed together to do things like look after the elderly whose safety alarms no longer work. It is rather less cheering that vigilante committees had been formed, once rumours about unchecked crime started doing the rounds. The stories were mostly about criminal gangs from outside, drawn to the newly vulnerable Engelsfors. Already, the police have arrested several old boys from the civil defence who had taken it upon themselves to go out on armed patrols.

‘I don’t know how much more this town can take,’ Minoo’s father says, shaking his head. ‘To be honest, I don’t know how much more
I
can take. I have enough contacts to survive on freelance work and I’d very much like to write the book about Engelsfors before Cissi does it …’