Echoes From the Dead

33

Gerlof was dying, and dead people were showing themselves to him.

They were making noises too. The bones of a warrior who fell in some long-forgotten Bronze Age battle were rattling down on the shore — he closed his eyes to avoid seeing the ghost dancing down there, but he could clearly hear the rattling.

When he opened his eyes he saw his friend Ernst Adolfsson walking around in circles in the meadow looking for stones in the grass, his body spattered with blood.

And when Gerlof looked out to sea, Death himself was sailing by in the twilight, straight into the wind, aboard an old wooden ship with black sails.

The worst thing of all was when his wife, Ella, sitting beneath the apple tree in her nightgown, looked at him with a sad and serious expression and asked him to give up the struggle. And Gerlof closed his eyes and really wanted to give up and go with her aboard the black ship; he wanted to fall asleep and escape the rain and the cold, to stop worrying and just pretend he was in bed in his room at the home in Marnäs. He didn’t know why he was trying to stay awake. Dying was taking a long time, and that bothered him.

The rattling continued down on the shore, and Gerlof slowly turned his head and opened his eyes.

The horizon, the line between sea and sky, had completely disappeared in the darkness.

But was it really old bones rattling down there? Or something else? Was there a living human being somewhere nearby?

Somewhere within his numb body a faint spark still flickered, a faint echo of the will to live. It was like hoisting a mainsail in a strong wind, Gerloff thought — difficult, but not impossible. He counted: One, two, three, then he pulled himself up to his knees, using the old apple tree for support.

Heave-ho, heave-ho, he thought, placing his right foot on the ground.

Then he had to rest for a few minutes. He stayed completely still, apart from the trembling in his knees, before he made the final lurch into a standing position, like a weight lifter.

Heave-ho, heave-ho.

It worked. He managed to get up, with one hand clutching the tree and the other gripping his cane.

The mainsail was hoisted, now the ship could begin moving toward the sea. He could use the engine if necessary. Gerlof had always taken good care of his machinery. His cargo ships had been equipped with compression-ignition engines. They needed greasing every hour when they were running, but he’d never once forgotten to do it.

“Heave-ho,” he said to himself.

He let go of the tree and took a shaky step toward the sea. It felt pretty good; his joints had gone numb, and were no longer aching.

He kept close to the stone wall, where the grass was shorter than out in the meadow, and slowly drew closer to the shore. The wind was blowing in off the sea — it felt as if it were cutting straight through Gerlof’s wet shirt and into his upper body. But the rattling noise was growing louder and louder, and the sound drew him on. He was beginning to grow more and more certain that he knew what it was.

He was right — it was an empty plastic bag.

Or a garbage bag, to be more accurate, big and black and half-buried in the sand. Presumably thrown overboard from some ship out in the Baltic. There was more garbage further down the shore: an old milk carton, a green glass bottle, a rusty tin. It was shameful, the way people threw garbage overboard — but if Gerlof wanted to survive, he was going to need that plastic bag. If he pulled it up out of the sand, made holes in the bottom, and put it on, it would protect him from the rain and retain his body heat during the night.

Good.

Not bad thinking, for a frozen brain.

The problem was getting down onto the shore, because where the meadow ended, the waves had created a sharp ledge. It dropped straight down, like a step.

Twenty years earlier, perhaps even ten, Gerlof would have stepped down onto the shore quickly and easily, without even thinking about it — but now he no longer trusted his balance.

He screwed up his courage, took a deep breath in the ice-cold air, and stepped out into the wind, his right foot raised and his cane outstretched.

It didn’t go well. The cane hit the shore first and sank deep into the wet sand.

Gerlof toppled forward, let go of the cane too late, and heard it snap with a sharp crack.

He fell and fell toward the shore, trying to break the fall with his right hand. When he landed, the surface of the sand was as hard as a stone floor, and all the air was knocked out of him.

Gerlof lay there, a few yards from the plastic bag.

He couldn’t move — something was broken. Trying to reach the bag had been a good plan, but this time he wasn’t going to be able to get up.

Once again he closed his eyes. He didn’t even open them when the purr of a car engine reached his ears.

The sound was nothing to do with him.