Johan Theorin
The Voices Beyond
Prologue
The ghost ship came gliding out of the darkness across the black waters of the Sound, giving way to nothing and no one.
The boy in the rubber dinghy didn’t have time to get away when the ship suddenly appeared. His small inflatable craft almost capsized in the collision, but at the very last moment he managed to pull close to the steel hull and throw a line around the gunwale.
The ship loomed above him. It was oily and rusty, as if it had been sailing the seven seas for many years. Nothing was moving on deck, but deep inside he could hear the throbbing of an engine, like the beating of a heart.
The dinghy had been damaged and was letting in water, so the boy had no choice. He reached up to the gunwale and clambered aboard.
Cautiously, he climbed over and down on to the dark deck; there was a powerful stench of rotten fish.
Slowly, he crept forward, along the side of a closed hatch.
After only five or six metres he saw the first dead man. A seaman dressed in filthy dungarees, lying on his back and staring blankly up at the night sky.
Then more seamen came staggering out of the darkness towards him — dying or already dead. Yet still alive. They reached out to him, spoke to him in weak voices, in some foreign language.
The boy screamed and tried to flee.
Thus began the last summer of the twentieth century in the village of Stenvik.
And thus began the story of the ghost that haunted the village.
Or perhaps it all began some seventy years earlier, in a small inland churchyard. With another young man, Gerlof Davidsson, who heard the sound of someone knocking loudly from inside a coffin.
Summer 1930
Gerlof Davidsson left school at the age of fourteen, and went to sea as a boy sailor two years later. In between, he worked on the island of Öland, when he wasn’t helping out on the family smallholding. Some of the jobs he did were good, some less so. The only one that ended badly was his stint as a gravedigger in Marnäs churchyard.
As long as he lived, Gerlof would remember his last day there, when Edvard Kloss the farmer had to be buried twice. Even when he was an old man, Gerlof still had no explanation for what had happened.
He liked ghost stories, but he had never believed in them. Nor did he believe in vengeance from beyond the grave. And Gerlof would normally have associated words like ‘ghost’ or ‘phantom’ with darkness and unhappiness.
Not with sunshine and a summer’s day.
It was a Sunday in the middle of June, and Gerlof had borrowed his father’s big bike so that he could cycle up to the church. He could manage it now; he had shot up over the past year and caught up with his tall father.
Gerlof bowed his head and pedalled away from the village on the coast, wearing a thin white shirt with his sleeves rolled up. He was heading east, inland. Blue viper’s bugloss and purple alliums bloomed alongside the straight dirt track, with juniper and hazel bushes behind; in the distance on the horizon he could just see the sails of a couple of windmills. Cows were grazing in the meadows, and the sheep were bleating. Twice, he had to jump down to open the wide gates that kept the cattle safely enclosed.
The landscape was vast and open, almost treeless, and when the swallows swept past his bicycle and soared up towards the sun, Gerlof just wanted to leave the track and head off into the wind and freedom.
Then he thought about the task that awaited him, and a little of the joy went out of the day.
Edvard Kloss had been sixty-two years old when he died the previous week, a solid, well-established farmer. Kloss was regarded as well off in northern Öland; he didn’t have a great deal in terms of money, but was rich in land along the coast south of Stenvik, Gerlof’s village.
‘Taken suddenly, sadly missed by everyone,’ as Gerlof had read in his death notice. Kloss had died during the construction of a large wooden barn. Late one night, a newly erected wall had fallen on him.
But was he really sadly missed by everyone? There were plenty of stories about Kloss, and the accident that had caused his death had yet to be fully explained. His younger brothers Sigfrid and Gilbert were the only ones who had been there that night, and each blamed the other. Sigfrid insisted that he had been out of sight over by the piles of timber when the wall came down, but claimed that Gilbert had been right by the barn when their brother died. According to Gilbert, it was the other way round. In addition, a neighbour said he had heard loud voices from the construction site that night, voices he didn’t recognize.
Gerlof was pleased to see that there was no sign of the brothers when he reached the churchyard and propped his bike against the wall. He suspected this was going to be a grim burial.
It was only half past eight in the morning, but the sun was already blazing down on the grass and the graves. The whitewashed stone church, built like a fortified castle with thick walls, rose up against the blue sky. The muted sound of a bell echoed across the flat landscape from the western tower, tolling for the deceased.
Gerlof opened the wooden gate and made his way among the graves. The hut that served as a mortuary was over on the left.
There was a myling sitting behind it.
At first, Gerlof couldn’t believe his eyes: was he really seeing a myling, the restless ghost of an unbaptized child? He blinked, but the child was still there.
It was a boy, a few years younger than Gerlof. He was extremely pale, as if he had spent the entire spring locked in an earth cellar. He was crouching down with his back to the mortuary, barefoot and dressed in a white shirt and light-coloured short trousers. The only thing about him that wasn’t pale was a long, dark scratch across his forehead.
‘Davidsson! Over here!’
Gerlof turned his head and saw Roland Bengtsson, the gravedigger, waving to him over by the churchyard wall.
Gerlof set off towards him, but glanced back at the boy. He was still there. Gerlof didn’t recognize him and was puzzled by his pallor, but at least he wasn’t a ghost.
Bengtsson was waiting for Gerlof with a couple of iron spades. He was a tall man with a permanent stoop; he had tanned, sinewy arms and a firm handshake.
‘Good morning, Davidsson,’ he said cheerfully. ‘That’s where we’re digging.’
Gerlof saw that a broad rectangle of turf had been removed over by the wall. Edvard Kloss’s grave. When they reached the plot, Bengtsson asked quietly, ‘How about a cold beer before we start?’
He nodded towards the wide wall behind them, where a couple of brown bottles were waiting on the grass. Gerlof knew that Bengtsson’s wife was a Good Templar and presumed that the gravedigger drank beer while he was working because he wasn’t allowed to do so at home.
Gerlof could see that the bottles were cold and covered in condensation but, in spite of the fact that he had cycled all the way from the coast, he shook his head.
‘Not for me, thanks.’
He wasn’t all that keen on beer and wanted to be in good shape when he started digging.
Bengtsson picked up one of the bottles and looked over towards the mortuary. Gerlof noticed that the pale boy had got to his feet and was standing by one of the graves, as if he were waiting for something.
Bengtsson raised his hand.
‘Aron!’ he shouted.
The boy looked up.
‘Come over here and give us a hand, Aron! You can have twenty-five öre if you help us dig!’
The boy nodded.
‘Good,’ Bengtsson said. ‘Go to the toolshed and get yourself a spade.’
The boy loped off.
‘Who’s he?’ Gerlof asked when he was out of earshot. ‘He’s not from round here, is he?’
‘Aron Fredh? No, he’s from the south, from Rödtorp... But he’s a kind of relative.’ Bengtsson put down the bottle behind a gravestone and looked wearily at Gerlof. ‘He’s a relative incognitus, if you know what I mean.’
Gerlof hadn’t a clue. He’d never heard of Rödtorp and he couldn’t speak any foreign languages, but he nodded anyway. He knew that Bengtsson only had a little girl, so perhaps the boy was one of his nephews?
Aron came back from the shed carrying a spade. He didn’t say a word, simply positioned himself next to Bengtsson and Gerlof and started digging. The earth was as dry as dust and free of stones, but Gerlof’s spade found the first body part after just a few minutes. It was a dark-brown human bone, possibly part of a thigh bone. Having worked as a gravedigger for a month, he was used to such discoveries, and simply placed the bone carefully to one side on the grass and covered it with a small pile of earth. Then he carried on digging.
They worked their way downwards for over an hour.
The sun disappeared and the air grew colder. As Gerlof shovelled away, an old story kept going through his mind:
Once upon a time there was a door-to-door salesman who called at a farm on the island of Öland. A little boy opened the door.
‘Is your daddy at home, son?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Is he far away?’
‘No, sir. He’s in the churchyard.’
‘What on earth is he doing there?’
‘I don’t think he’s doing anything. Daddy’s dead...’
When it was almost eleven o’clock, they heard the sound of whinnying echoing off the walls of the church. Gerlof looked up and saw two white horses trotting through the gates, surrounded by a cloud of buzzing flies. The horses were pulling a black carriage with a wooden cross on the top — a hearse. Erling Samuelsson, the priest, was sitting next to the coachman. He had conducted the funeral service at the dead man’s farm.
By this stage, the grave was deep enough, and Bengtsson helped the two boys out of the hole. Then he brushed the dirt off his clothes and went over to the mortuary.
The hearse had stopped there, some distance away from the church. The shiny, expensive wooden coffin containing the body of Edvard Kloss had been lifted down and placed on the grass. Most of the relatives who had made up the funeral procession turned around and went home once they reached the gate; there was only the interment left now.
Gerlof saw the two brothers standing on either side of the coffin. Sigfrid and Gilbert had nothing to say to one another today; they stood in silence in their black suits, and it seemed as if there were a grey cloud hanging between them.
However, they had no choice but to work together. The brothers were to carry the coffin over to the grave, along with Bengtsson and Gerlof.
‘Up we go,’ Bengtsson said.
Edvard Kloss had enjoyed his food and the good things in life, and the base of the coffin cut into Gerlof’s shoulder. He set off, taking short steps; he thought he could feel the heavy body moving around inside, as if it were shifting back and forth — or was it just his imagination?
Slowly, they moved towards the grave. Gerlof saw that Aron was now standing by some tall headstones over by the churchyard wall, as if he were hiding.
But he wasn’t alone. A man in his thirties was on the other side of the wall, talking quietly to Aron. He was simply dressed, a bit like a farmhand, and he seemed on edge. When he took a step to one side, Gerlof noticed that he had a slight limp.
‘Davidsson!’ Bengtsson said. ‘Give me a hand with this!’
He had laid out two ropes on the grass. The coffin was placed upon them, then lifted again and positioned above the black grave.
Slowly, slowly, it was lowered into the hole.
When it reached the bottom, the priest picked up a handful of earth from the pile the gravediggers had made. He threw it on to the lid of the coffin as he spoke over the body of Edvard Kloss:
‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. In the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through Our Lord Jesus Christ...’
The priest threw three more handfuls of earth on to the coffin, committing the deceased to his final rest. When he had finished, Bengtsson and Gerlof picked up their spades.
Before Gerlof began to fill in the grave he glanced at the Kloss brothers. The older brother, Gilbert, was standing behind him as steady as a rock, his hands behind his back. Sigfrid was wandering up and down by the wall, looking a lot more anxious.
Gerlof and Bengtsson shovelled the earth back into the hole. When they had finished they would lay their spades on top in the form of a cross, as was the tradition.
After a little while they took a break. They straightened their backs, took a few steps away from the grave and let out a long breath. Gerlof turned his face up to the sun and closed his eyes.
He could hear something in the silence. A faint sound. He listened carefully.
Knocking. Then silence, then three more faint knocks.
The sound seemed to be coming from the ground.
Gerlof blinked and looked down into the grave.
He glanced over at Bengtsson, and could see from the other man’s tense expression that he had heard the same thing. And the Kloss brothers, who were standing further away, had gone white. Even further away, young Aron had also turned his head.
Gerlof wasn’t going mad — they had all heard the sound.
Time had stopped in the churchyard. There was no more knocking, but everyone seemed to be holding their breath.
Gilbert Kloss walked slowly to the edge of the grave, his mouth hanging open. He stared down at the coffin and said quietly, ‘We need to get him out of there.’
The priest stepped forward, rubbing his forehead nervously.
‘That’s not possible.’
‘Yes, it is,’ Gilbert said.
‘But I’ve just committed his body to the earth!’
Kloss didn’t speak, but his expression was determined. Eventually, another voice from behind said firmly, ‘Get him out.’
It was Sigfrid Kloss.
The priest sighed.
‘Oh, very well, you’d better bring him up. I’ll go and telephone Dr Blom.’
Daniel Blom was one of the two doctors in the parish.
Bengtsson put down his spade, sighed loudly and looked at Gerlof.
‘Will you go down, Davidsson? With Aron?’
Gerlof gazed down into the darkness of the grave. Did he want to go down there? No. But what if Edvard Kloss had woken up and was suffocating inside the coffin? If that was the case, they had to hurry.
He scrambled down into the hole and cautiously stepped on top of the lid, which was covered in soil. He remembered what he had read in his confirmation class, about Jesus’s encounter with Lazarus: