Chapter 18
September arrived with a chilly wind and cold air. Jenny had stopped doing yoga outside; it was already too wet and cold and Emelie missed her. Now she didn’t have anything to look at while doing the dishes in the morning or after she had walked the girls to school. Before Linn went to work, she had informed Emelie that she had bought all the ingredients for the mulled and that it was time to make the first batch so that they had time to test it in a couple of weeks. If it turned out nice she would make a bigger batch for the market and if it didn’t, she had plenty of time to try again and still be able to serve a nice tasting glogg at the market.
“Can you go down and fetch me the bottles in the cellar? We are going to need them for the mulled wine,” Emelie said.
Emelie shivered. She wasn’t a fan of that cellar, and some nights she was still certain that she heard sounds coming from down there. Several times she had been awoken by a scraping noise, sat up in bed and turned on the light. But then it was quiet again and Emelie had laid down and fallen asleep. The day after, it would always feel like a bad dream, even if she wasn’t entirely sure of it. Even if it was just mice, she didn’t like the thought of going down there. Also, the light on the ceiling was still broken, since she didn’t feel like going down there to fix it. Catch 22. Emelie glanced at her daughter, sighing and whining like a small child at her request.
“Oh, but it’s scary down there,” she said, distorting her voice.
Linn laughed.
“Come on, mum, it’s just down the stairs and they’re right there! Easy peasy!”
“Easy for you to say when you are not the one going down there,” Emelie scoffed and dried soapy water off her hands.
But then she smiled and shoved Linn out the door.
“Get out you, I’ll handle it.”
Linn waved to her and took off. Emelie walked back into the kitchen and looked at all the ingredients standing on the little table. It would have been great to have the big kitchen table to make mulled wine, but Andreas wasn’t ready with it yet so they would have to make do with the small table, the worktop and in worst case – the floor. Emelie looked at the different bags, reading their labels: cloves, cardamom seeds, cinnamon sticks, raisins, ginger. There were several bottles of malt beer as well, and potatoes, sugar and yeast. She had no idea how to make mulled wine, but Linn had Astrid’s recipe from the book, so she had it covered. She looked out into garden and Andreas’ cottage. Their so-called date was already forgotten as she was certain that Linn was still Andreas’ favourite on the island. She sighed. The cottage door opened, and Andreas stepped out. He looked up and waved and she smiled at him. He had a torch in his hand, and that gave her an idea. She knocked on the window and waved at him, telling him to come inside.
“Hello there, how’s it going?”
His eyes…oh to hell with them, she said to herself.
“Can you help me with something? Linn is making mulled wine…”
“From scratch?”
“Yes, it’s Astrid’s old recipe.”
Andreas nodded and smacked his lips.
“Oh, it’s delicious, if she gets it right.”
“I know nothing about it, that’s all Linn, but she needs bottles, and they are down in the cellar,” Emelie said.
“Do you need some help carrying them?”
“Yes, exactly, and I can see you have a flashlight. Mine is probably broken and the light down there isn’t working either, and the windows are super filthy so there’s hardly any light coming through that way.”
She was pleased that she didn’t have to say that she feared the cellar and that there might be a ghost living there. Andreas stretched a bit and nodded.
“Sure, right now? I have half an hour before I have to be at the nursery.”
The cellar door creaked loudly when she pulled it open. It was a heavy thing made of oak, and if anyone wanted to break in, it would be easier to pick the door on the ground floor, but no one used that. Emelie didn’t even know if it still opened, she had never tried. The cold, still air hit them and Emelie shivered a little. Andreas walked in front of her, flashlight in hand. He walked carefully down the stairs taking one step at a time but after three steps he came to a sudden halt and Emelie bumped into his back with the hand that she had been holding in front of her. He turned off the flashlight.
“What are you doing? We can’t see anything like that,” she whispered.
Why was she whispering? It wasn’t like anyone could hear her.
“Shh…”
She stopped talking and looked around, but the room was pitch dark. There was a tiny window right under the ceiling, but just as Emelie had guessed, it was too dirty for any light to find its way in. The cellar was large but stretched under the stairs so they couldn’t see the whole room without going down the stairs first. But she could definitely hear a sound. As if someone was pulling something over the floor. Not heavy furniture, more like when Emelie was moving the boxes of Christmas decorations around in the attic. She was rather certain that it was the same sound that she had heard at night when she thought she was just imagining things.
“What is it?” she whispered.
Andreas carefully started walking down the stair again; one step at a time, and with each step the fear in Emelie’s chest grew stronger, and without thinking about what she was doing, she reached for Andreas’ hand. When they had made it all the way down, they noticed a faint, flickering light that was moving towards the back of the cellar, close to the door. Andreas turned towards her and whispered into her ear:
