PART 3.

The carefree and the scared.

ostergotland, October.

The film doesn't stop just because I want it to.

It's endless, and the images become more and more blurred, indistinct, grey, as their edges smoulder.

No matter what happens, they won't catch me.

I shall defend myself.

I shall breathe.

I won't hold back any of the rage. I shall let the young snakes, the last of them, leave my body.

I have to admit that it felt good this time. It wasn't a sudden outburst like the first time. I knew what I was going to do. And there were a thousand reasons. I saw your face in his, Father, I saw all the boys in the schoolyard in his face. I undressed him like they undressed me, I pretended I was laying him on an altar of young snakes.

It made me calm, the violence. Happy. And utterly desperate.

The darkness is getting thicker now, the raindrops are balls of lead crashing onto the ground, onto the people.

It's my turn now. I'm the most powerful.

No one will ever again be able to turn away from me. And who really needs those pigs with their traditions, names, the sense of superiority they acquire at birth. The pictures flicker, black and white with pale yellow numbers. The story of me, the one firing out of the projector, is approaching its end now.

But I am still here.

Father embraces me again in the pictures, and he's thin, and Mum won't survive the cancer for much longer. Come to me, son, stand still so I can hit you.

I have a friend.

It's possible to escape loneliness, captivity. The strangers and the fear, all the things that are unbearable. Life can be a blue, mirror-calm sea.

Money.

Everything costs.

Has a price.

The boy sitting in the garden in the pictures on the white projector-screen doesn't know that yet, but he has a sense of it.

Money. It should have been my turn.

Father, you have no money. You never have had. But why shouldn't I? Your bitterness isn't mine, and maybe we could have done something together, something good.

But things went the way they went.

A rented flat, a terraced house, feeble little abodes.

I am running alone through the garden in the pictures. The devil take anyone who creates loneliness, and the fear that comes with it.

The devil take them.

Boys. Living and dead, men with skins to try to fit into.

Then the reel ends. The projector flashes white. Neither the boy nor the man is visible any longer.

Where should I go now? I'm scared and alone, a person who doesn't exist in any pictures. All that is left is the feeling of young snakes crawling beneath my skin.

49.

Friday, 31 October The solicitor, Johan Stekanger, speeds up and puts the windscreen wipers on full, and they flap like hens with their necks wrung over the windscreen in front of him.

The Jaguar responds to his commands and they glide past the bus in plenty of time to avoid a sad black Volvo estate.

The heated seat is warming his arse agreeably. It's particularly rough outside at this time of the morning. The car still smells new and fresh, of chemicals, and the grey interior undoubtedly matches the season.

The art on the walls of the castle, every wall covered by pictures that don't seem to be of anything at all, but which he understands are worth a great deal.

Hence the idiot in the tweed suit in the seat next to him, a Paul Boglover, sorry, Boglov, an expert in contemporary art, down from Stockholm to document and value Jerry Petersson's art collection.

Boglov is presumably hoping he'll get the chance to sell the rubbish, Johan Stekanger thinks as they pull up in front of the castle, beyond the bridge over the now empty moat.

He hasn't said much.

Maybe he's picked up on my dislike of him, Johan Stekanger wonders. That was actually one of the reasons why he moved back to Linkoping after studying in Stockholm. The people here were more homogenous, and you hardly ever saw any queers on the city's well-kept streets. He's always had trouble with queers.

The clock on the dashboard says 10.12.

An estate inventory of the most grandiose variety, the largest he's ever dealt with. There'll be a hefty fee at the end of it, that much is beyond question.

So it was worth putting up with an art-loving queer from the queer metropolis.

He can't stand me, Paul Boglov thinks, as the ill-mannered solicitor in the cheap green suit and the blond hair hanging down over his collar taps the code into the alarm panel beside the main door of the castle.

But why should I care what he thinks?

Backwoods bigot.

'Well, welcome to the splendour of Skogs.'

'Bloody hell!'

The words are out of Paul Boglov's mouth before he can stop them, and when he finally manages to tear his eyes from the enormous painting on the wall of the entrance hall, he sees the philistine solicitor beside him grinning.

'Really? Valuable?'

'It's a Cecilia Edefalk. From her most famous series.'

'Doesn't look like much if you ask me. A man rubbing suncream on a woman's back. I mean, he could have rubbed it onto her front!'

I'm not going to respond to that, Paul Boglov thinks.

Instead he takes out his camera, photographs the painting, and makes some notes in his little black book.

'There's stuff like that in almost every room.'

Paul Boglov goes from room to room, taking photographs, doing calculations, and reacting with childish surprise, and with each room the feeling of making a great discovery grows within him. Was this what it felt like when they discovered the Terracotta Army in China?

Mamma Andersson, Annika von Hausswolff, Bjarne Melgaard, Torsten Andersson, a fine Maria Meisenberger, Martin Wickstrom, Clay Ketter, Ulf Rollof, a Tony Oursler head with the lights switched off.

Impeccable taste. Contemporary. Must have been bought during the last decade.

Did Jerry Petersson choose the works himself?

A feeling for quality. That's something you're born with.

And the philistine.

His idiotic comments.

'Looks like an ordinary photograph if you ask me.'

About the little Meisenberger.

'A bit of glass with holes in.'

About the Ulf Rollof above the bed in what must have been Jerry Petersson's master bedroom.

Art worth thirty million kronor. At least.

Almost all the rooms have been checked when Paul Boglov gets a glass of water in the kitchen and reads through his notes, checking the pictures of the works in his camera.

It's all in the eye.

Petersson, or someone else, must have had a perfect eye for art.

You're moving through my rooms.

You gawping, him mocking.

You don't know what you're about to find, what I've just seen.

There's a reason I was drawn to art, that much is true.

But I'm not going to talk about that now, Malin Fors will have to guess her way to it.

I was overwhelmed by art. I got so much more out of it than I expected. At first I couldn't afford it, but it didn't take long.

In my pictures I saw, I see, all the feelings I don't have names for. Just look at the perforated glass above my bed. At the beauty and pain in it. Or at Melgaard's fist-fucking monkeys, their poorly disguised terror at what they are, what they have become, the love they left behind somewhere.

Or at Maria Meisenberger's empty human shadows. Like sins you can never leave behind.

'There's a chapel as well,' the philistine says. 'It's got some Jesus pictures in gold. Do you want to see them?'

Icons, Paul Boglov thinks. He doesn't even know they're called icons, but he can't mean anything else, can he?

'Where's the chapel?'

'Behind the castle, down by the forest.'

Paul Boglov puts his glass down on the draining board.

Outside the Lord of Rain is in full command, the day dark even though it is only just midday.

They walk quickly around the castle. The chapel is located alone and abandoned on the edge of a dense forest of fir trees.

A key in the philistine's hand.

Icons, Paul Boglov thinks. I wonder if Jerry Petersson had as much taste when it came to them?

'Looks like it's unlocked,' the philistine says.

And they open the doors to the chapel.

They glide open slowly, creaking.

A dull light through glassless openings.

And they both let out an endless scream when they see what's lying there naked, almost draped across the raised slabs marking the site of the Fgelsjo family vault.