The car was perched at the very edge of the brand-new cliff. Siri grabbed the hot engine hood for support and aimed the trembling beam of the flashlight out beyond.
“Oh my God,” Siri said. “Everything’s gone.”
48
Whatever happens, morning will always dawn, but a morning like this would probably never happen again. That’s what people said after the fact, as though the night had been a crime against previous nights, a jag in time.
For Sander, it would always be different: what happened that night was not something he could separate from all the rest. It was simply the next stage, or maybe the end, the brink of the cliff. He had reached the precipice that had begun to take shape on the night Mikael was murdered.
The earth could no longer hold him. Without Mikael and Killian, it couldn’t bear him, so it buckled.
That must have been what happened.
For many people, it began not with thunder but with a dull rush that sounded almost like the sea. It increased in strength and shook the walls, knocked pictures down, broke dishes. People in the area were roused from bed, sleepy and confused, with an icy knot of fear in their chests.
Sander’s parents came upstairs and opened the door to their son’s room. When he wasn’t there, they turned to look at each other, fearing the worst. They put on coats and shoes and ran out to look for him.
“What are you doing out here?” his mother exclaimed when shealmost collided with him on the front steps. He was fully dressed, gazing down toward the village.
“I woke up and came out,” he said vacantly.
“Are you okay?”
He didn’t respond. Around his wrist was a bracelet he’d never worn before, a thin band of leather wound several times around and fastened with a small clasp. He touched it over and over.
Those who lived a little higher up could look down over Skavböke, but in the dark of night it was hard to make out the change until your eyes adjusted. At first it merely seemed like a larger, deeper blackness, far below.
And that—the fact that you couldn’t see what had happened, only hear it—was almost even more dreadful.
Animals bellowed and howled so loudly that you would have thought they were being pursued. And then there was the field. Once your eyes adjusted, you could see that it was moving in the quiet moonlight, and not the way it usually moved in the window, when the fallow fields stooped in waves of wind. On this night, it looked as though something were tearing at the very ground.
Östholm’s old combine was still standing in one of the fields, its reel broken. In the clutches of the landslide, it was nothing more than a toy. The ground opened up, an enormous maw expanding with a roar. It swallowed the combine and their neighbors’ houses, their farms and property. Its hunger knew no bounds.
Erik squinted. “I think there’s a fire over by the Söderströms’.”
Unaware of what he was doing, Sander had taken his mother’s hand.
“Fire!” Sander’s mother shouted at her family. “Down there. Jesus, it’s on fire!”
The flames awakened slowly, like sleepy animals. Soon they were lapping eagerly at the house. Surrounded by their glow, the walls fell in and the roof collapsed; it took only a few minutes. Those who had set off to help had to turn back. They came upon a vast hole, a bottomless chasm that would get even bigger if you came too close.
“We have to go around, I think,” said Bengt Lindell, who was coming back uphill, out of breath as he passed Sander’s house. “But I don’t know how far that goddamn hole goes, I can’t see a thing. I think that’s where it started.”
“At Söderström’s?”
“Yes, exactly. Did you hear the explosion?”
“No,” Eva said. “At least, I don’t think so.”
“I woke up,” Sander said. “I don’t know why, maybe it was the explosion.”
As they waited for ambulances and fire trucks to arrive, people dug out flashlights, cars and trucks started up and got as close to the edge as they dared, their high beams aimed at the wreckage to try to make sense of what had happened. The rubble of the Söderströms’ house was burning like a torch.
Life—sometimes it’s exactly like a story. If it had been in this instance, Sander would have already known as he stood there, could have counted the dead. It would have been simple. But of course it wasn’t. Who had been home? Who was somewhere else? Where had they been?
Knowing that they must have lost someone, but not who, wondering who was gone, never to return to the group gathered on the hill, was a state of being without a name. Sander stood alongside his parents, frightened and grim. He thought of Killian, Felicia, Mikael; he thought of the boy on the bridge. Where was he, when he jumped? He touched the bracelet on his wrist again.
Wherever that boy was, Sander was in the same place right now. Maybe he’d been there for days.
