Free Echoes From the Dead by Johan Theorin Page B

degree angle.
    The quarry was no more than four or five yards deep at most, but it was bigger than several football pitches. The inhabitants of Oland had been quarrying there for centuries, working their way down into the rock, but to Julia it looked as if everybody had suddenly thrown down their tools one day and gone home forever.
    Finished blocks of stone still lay down there on the gravel, neatly lined up.
    On the opposite side of the quarry, tall, pale figures were lined UP on the alvar; it was too dark and they were too far away for her to be able to make out any details, but after a moment Julia realized they were stone statues. They looked like a series of artworks made of stone, all different sizes. Right on the edge of the quarry stood a block of stone some six feet tall; the top came to a point, and it looked like a medieval church tower. A replica of Mamas church, perhaps.
    Julia realized she was looking at Ernst Adolfsson’s work.
    Behind the stone statues stood a wooden house, a dark red
    rectangle out on the alvar among the lowgrowing trees and the juniper bushes, and beside the house stood Ernst’s bulky, rounded Volvo. Lights showed in several windows of the house.
    She decided to take a closer look at Ernst Adolfsson’s artwork the following morning, before leaving Stenvik.
    From here she could also make out Bla Jungfrun, a small
    bluegray mound on the horizon. Blakulla was another name for the island, where according to legend the witches would go to celebrate with Satan. No one lived there, the whole island was a national park, but you could go there on a day trip by boat. Julia had gone there as a little girl one sunny day, along with Lena and Gerlof and Ella.
    There had been lots of round, pretty pebbles on the shores
    there, but Gerlof had warned her against taking any of them away with her. It would bring misfortune, he’d told her, so she hadn’t done it. But of course she’d had misfortune in her life anyway.
    Julia turned her back on the witches’ island and turned back toward the boathouse.
     
    Twenty minutes later she was sitting on the bed in the boathouse, listening to the wind and not feeling tired in the slightest. At around ten o’clock she tried to start reading one of the love stories she had with her, entitled The Secret of the Manor, but it was slow going. She closed the book and stared at the old compass on the table by the door.
    She could have been in Gothenburg now, sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of wine and looking out at the streetlamps illuminating the empty road.
    In Stenvik it was pitch dark. She had gone out for a pee, stumllng about on the stones and almost losing her bearings in the arknes just a few yards from the boathouse. She could no longer see the water down below her; she could only hear the sighing of the waves and the rattle of the pebbles as they reached the shore.
    Above her dense rain clouds scudded across the sky over the island like evil spirits.
    As she squatted out there in the darkness, her bare bottom
    exposed to the wind, Julia’s thoughts turned involuntarily to the ghost who had turned up here on the shore one night at the beginning of the 1900s.
    She remembered one of her grandmother Sara’s tales in the
    twilight hour: about how her husband and his brother had gone down one stormy night to haul their little fishing boats up to safety, away from the crashing waves.
    As they stood there by the foaming water, hauling and dragging at their wooden gigs, a figure suddenly emerged from the darkness, a man wearing heavy oilskins, who began to tug one of the boats in the opposite direction, out to sea. Grandfather had yelled at him, and the figure had yelled back in very broken Swedish, repeating one word over and over again: “Osel!” he’d screamed. “Osel!”
    The fishermen had held on tight to their boat and the figure had suddenly turned and dashed out into the heaving waves. He had disappeared into the storm without a trace.
    Julia