Free Strindberg's Star by Jan Wallentin

would come about the time he got to Gränna, he thought, that tickling feeling of alertness. Then maybe another helping at Mjölby, before he turned off toward Motala and Örebro.
    Then continue on Route 50 until he began to approach Falun. According to the directions, he should look for a sign that said Svartbäck. A right on a gravel road, and left six hundred yards after the fallen barn.
    Then, the diver had said, he just had to keep an eye out for a fenced-in yard and a sunporch.

9
La Rivista Italiana dei
Misteri e dell’Occulto
    A gust of wind rattled the bedroom window. A few drops of rain hit the pane, and then came the dull rumble.
    Erik Hall was sitting in his bed and had drawn the blanket up over his knees. On the nightstand next to him was a bottle of gin and a half-empty glass. The tired springs made the mattress sag into a hammock under his heavy body, and as the thunderheads darkened the sky out there, all the light slowly disappeared.
    T hat cunt of a photographer really had given it away; everything he’d told her had been there, distorted and crooked, in
Dalakuriren
’s article.
    The ankh, the words about the key to the underworld, and then above that: the picture of his face, which no one would ever be able to take seriously again. Coming back one week later and suddenly telling about an Egyptian cross that he’d discovered down in the mine … She had made him look like a fucking clown.
    Erik let the bitter liquor roll around in his mouth.
    A fucking clown … was that what the girls in Dyke Divers had thought when he’d sent them his pictures of the ankh?
    A fluttering flash of light, short pause, and then thunder and the black masses of water.
    He had only to close his eyes to be back down in the vault, to hear the cracking sound as the ankh was cut away from the fingers of that hand, and to stagger backward again, crashing down into the cold water of the pool.
    There was a sudden hiss as Erik drew in air between his closed teeth, in order to be able to find his way back out of the depths of the shaft.
    He opened the bedroom door into the dining room and tried to avoid looking over at the corner with the diving bag, where the ankh lay rolled up in its wine-colored towel. But he couldn’t help it.
    The bundle was so light as he lifted it up out of the bag, and he let the tips of his fingers grope through the terrycloth until they brushed the shaft of the ankh.
    Way down below the slope of pines, beyond the haze of rain, was the lake. If he were just to go out in the storm, down the dark path, and then throw in the ankh, deep, deep … then wouldn’t that cunt, the Dyke Divers, and all the readers of that fucking paper be satisfied? Yes, he might as well throw himself in too, while he was at it. One thing was certain: No one would look for him.
    But then the towel loosened, exposing the perfect white metal, which no one would voluntarily throw into a lake. Erik let his fingers stroke along the eye to the sound of the hammering rain. A chill crept from the ankh, as though it had lain in a freezer; it shot through his fingertips, through his wrist, up to his arm, and he felt a longing for light.
    E ven though it was only late afternoon, it could easily have been midnight, and the glow from the low-hanging porcelain lamp was only strong enough to light up a small part of the kitchen table.
    He sat down on the sofa with his back to the window and carefully laid the ankh down in the middle of the pale circle of light.
    It was perhaps a foot long, and as far as he could tell, it was cast in a single piece. But the metal was not entirely smooth: Some sort of decoration twined over its cold surface. Striations a millimeter high, too finely made to be able to read with the bare eye against all that white.
    He had tried a magnifying glass and a strong flashlight, without result. When he gave up, he let the ghostly ankh lie hidden, so he didn’t have to look at it, until Titelman came. If that bastard was ever