Strindberg's Star
STRINDBERG’S
STAR
VIKING
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in 2012 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Copyright © Jan Wallentin, 2010
Translation copyright © Rachel Willson-Broyles, 2012
All rights reserved
Originally published in Swedish as Strindbergs stjarna by Albert Bonniers Forlag, Stockholm
Publisher’s Note
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Wallentin, Jan, 1970–
[Strindbergs stjärna. English]
Strindberg’s star / Jan Wallentin ; translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-58358-6
1. Signs and symbols—Fiction. 2. Secret societies—Fiction. 3. Murder—Investigation—Fiction.
I. Willson-Broyles, Rachel. II. Title.
PT9876.33.A24S8713 2012
839.73’8—dc23 2011043888
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
TO SAMUEL, LYDIA, AND HENRY
Excerpt from my diary in the year 1896.
May 13th.—A letter from my wife. She has learned from the papers that a Mr. S. is about to journey to the North Pole in an air-balloon. She feels in despair about it, confesses to me her unalterable love, and adjures me to give up this idea, which is tantamount to suicide. I enlighten her regarding her mistake. It is a cousin of mine who is risking his life in order to make a great scientific discovery.
—Inferno, August Strindberg
That which has been is far off,
and deep, very deep; who can find it out?
—Ecclesiastes 7:24
Table of Contents
Part 1
1 Niflheim
2 Dalakuriren
3 The Æsir Murder
4 Bubbe
5 Copper Vitriol
6 Up into the Light
7 A Secret
8 Northbound E4
9 La Rivista Italiana dei Misteri e dell’Occulto
10 Don Titelman
11 Solrød Strand
12 The Interrogation
13 The Dream
14 Eberlein
15 Elena
16 Strindberg
17 The Awakening
18 The Eagle
19 The Postcard
20 The Syringe
21 The Ankh
22 The Station
23 The Car
Part 2
24 Ypres
25 Saint Martin d’Ypres
26 Stadsarchief
27 In Flanders Fields
28 Saint Charles de Potyze
29 The Glass Capsules
30 Les Suprêmes Adieux
31 The Telephone
32 The Tower
33 The Visit
34 The Login
35 Mittelpunkt der Welt
36 Wewelsburg
37 The Blindness
38 The North Tower
39 Brüderkrankenhaus St. Josef
40 Mechelen–Berlin
41 Healed
42 Changing Tracks
Part 3
43 MypMaHCK
44 Yamal
45 The Seventy-seventh Parallel
46 The Third Day
47 Agusto Lytton
48 Eva Strand
49 Jansen
50 Under the Surface
51 Changing Course
52 The Opening
53 The Black Sun
54 The North Star
55 Gone with the Wind
The Letter
Acknowledgments
The Invitation
His face had really withered. The makeup artist’s tinkering couldn’t hide that fact. Yet she had still made an effort: fifteen minutes with sponge, brush, and peach-colored mineral powder. Now, as she replaced his aviator glasses, there was a sickly shine over his grayish cheeks. She gave him a light pat on the shoulder.
“There, Don. They’ll come and get you soon.”
Then the makeup artist smiled at him in the mirror and tried to look satisfied. But he knew what she was thinking. A farshlept krenk, an illness that was impossible to stop—such was growing old.
He had rested his shoulder bag against the foot of the swivel chair. When the makeup artist left, Don bent down and started to rummage through its contents of bottles, syringes, and blister packs. Popped out two round tablets, twenty milligrams of diazepam. He straightened up again, placed them on his tongue, and swallowed.
In the fluorescent light of the mirror, the hand of the wall clock moved a bit. Thirty-four minutes past six, and the morning news murmured from the closed-circuit TV. Eleven minutes left until the first studio guests were on the couch.
Then he heard a knock, and a shadow appeared in the doorway. “Is this where you go for makeup?”
Don nodded at the tall figure.
“I’m off to channel four later,” said the man, “so the girls might as well apply enough to last.”
He took a few steps across the yellow-speckled linoleum floor and sat down next to Don.
“We’re gonna be on at the same time, right?”
“Yes, it seems like it,” said Don.
The swivel chair creaked as the man leaned closer.
“I read about you in the papers. You’re the expert, aren’t you?”
“Not really my area of specialization,” said Don. “But … I’ll do my best.”
He got up and removed his jacket from the back of the chair.
“In the papers it said you know this stuff,” said the man.
“Well, then it’s got to be true, right?”
Don put on the corduroy jacket, but as he put the strap of his bag over his shoulder, the man grabbed it. “You don’t have to act so fucking important. I’m the one that found everything down there, aren’t I? And by the way, there’s …”
The man hesitated.
“By the way, there’s something I think you could help me with.”
“Oh?”
“There’s …”
He cast a quick glance at the door, but there was no one there.
“There’s something else I found down there. A secret, you could say.”
“A secr
et?”
The man pulled Don a little closer, with the help of the shoulder strap.
“It’s at my place in Falun, and if it’s possible I’d really like for you to come up to my house and …”
His voice died away. Don followed the man’s eyes to the doorway, where the presenter was standing and waiting in a light brown suit jacket and a frumpy skirt.
“So … I see you’ve gotten to know each other?”
A stressed smile.
“Perhaps you two can talk more afterward?”
She pointed out toward the hallway, where a cue light was glowing in red: ON THE AIR.
“This way, Don Titelman.”
1
1
Niflheim
With each step, Erik Hall’s rubber boots sank deeper into the mud, and his legs were tired. But it couldn’t be much farther now.
When, through the fog, he could make out the clearing past the last trunks, he came to a halt, and for a moment he felt uncertain. Then he caught sight of the ruins of the old fence. The rotting stumps stuck up like warning fingers in front of the slope down to the opening of the mine shaft. He slid down the incline to the ledge in front of the mouth of the shaft, pulled off his three dive bags, and stretched his back.
It was cold here, just like yesterday, when he had managed to find his way to the abandoned mine for the first time. The heavy pack of tanks with the inflatable buoyancy vest was still lying where he’d left it, and the same horrible, rotten stench was still in the air.
The fog had reduced the light to dusk, and it was hard to make out any details as he leaned over the steep shaft. But when his eyes had adjusted, he could make out the supports that started at a depth of about thirty yards. They braced the walls of the shaft, and an image of sparse, blackening teeth flashed by. Like looking down into the mouth of a very old person.
Erik took a few steps backward and carefully inhaled. The smell seemed to subside as he got farther from the hole.
He gave himself a pat on the back. He’d been able to make his way in this darkness and find the right route yet again; there weren’t very many people who could pull it off.
Anyone could use a GPS navigator to get from Falun to an address out by Sundborn or Sågmyra. But finding the right place three miles straight out in the wilderness—that was different.
Most—in fact, all—abandoned mine shafts were supposed to be noted on the maps. The surveyors from the Mining Inspectorate had seen to that. But this hole had apparently been overlooked.
Erik heard a faint buzzing, as some flies had started to gather around him. They made their way in curiosity down into his bag to see if there was any food.
But in the first bag there were only spools of rope, snap hooks, and bolts. The double-edged titanium knife with a concave and a sawtooth edge. A battery-powered rotary hammer drill, the climbing harness, and the primary dive light that he would fasten to his right dive glove.
When Erik had dumped everything out on the yellowed grass, he opened the side pocket of the bag. In it were the Finnish precision instruments in hard cases. He unpacked a depth gauge, which would measure how far down he sank under the surface of the flooded shaft, and a clinometer to estimate the gradients of the mine paths once he got there. The flies had increased in number; they hovered around him like a cloud of dirt.
Erik waved the insects away from his mouth, irritated, while taking the regulators and long hoses that would keep him alive out of the next bag and checking the pressure of the tanks. Then he moved backward a few steps, but the cloud of flies followed him.
Half standing in the gravel, he pulled off his green rubber boots, then his camouflage pants and his Windbreaker. With bugs crawling across his face and neck, he opened the cover of the last bag. Under dive computers and a headlamp waited the bulky wetsuit and the rubberlike skin of the dry suit. Glossy black three-layered laminate fabric, specially developed for diving in forty-degree-Fahrenheit water.
He pulled on the full-cover neoprene hood. Now the flies could reach only his eyes and the upper part of his cheeks. Then he took out the bag that contained his fins and mask. At the opening of the shaft, the rotten-egg stench almost made him change his mind, but then he attached a nylon rope and began to lower the bag.
Forty, fifty yards—he managed to follow its jerky descent that long—but the line just kept going. Only after a few minutes did it reach the water that filled the lowest part of the shaft.
He secured it with a few loops around a block of stone, and then he went to get the bundle of climbing gear and hooks. When he got back to the shaft, he sank down to his knees.
A strident roar from the hammer drill finally broke the silence, and he could soon attach the first bolt. He pulled—it would hold. He drilled bolt number two.
Then he lifted the hundred-pound pack with tanks, the buoyancy compensator, and the hoses onto his back and fastened the strap of the climbing harness across his chest and did a few tests of the self-locking rappelling brake that would control the speed of his fall down into the shaft. He swung himself over the edge, the brake hissing as he dropped.
There were blurry pictures on the Internet from urban explorers in Los Angeles who, without a map, hiked their way through mile after mile of claustrophobic sewer systems. You could find texts from Italians who dedicated themselves to crawling through rats and garbage in ancient catacombs, and from Russians who described expeditions to ruins of forgotten prisons from the Soviet era, hundreds of feet below the ground. From Sweden there were video clips that showed dilapidated mine shafts where divers swam in pitch-black water. They crawled through tunnels that didn’t seem to end.
Some called themselves the Baggbo Divers and hung out outside of Borlänge. Then there was Gruf in Gävle, Wärmland Underground in Karlstad, and several groups in Bergslagen and Umeå. And besides them, there were people like Erik Hall, who went diving on his own and most of all wanted to keep to himself. It wasn’t recommended, but people still did it.
Because they shared tips about equipment and shafts that were worth exploring, all of the mine divers in the country knew of each other. Year in and year out, it was the same people who did it. Without exception, they were men.
But a month or so ago, a group of girls had started putting up pictures of their mine dives on the Internet. They called themselves Dyke Divers. No one knew where they came from or who they really were, and for their part they didn’t answer any questions. At least not the questions that Erik had sent as a test.
At first when he was surfing around the girls’ Web site, he had found only a few grainy photos. Then clips of advanced diving had shown up, and yesterday there had suddenly been a snapshot from a mine shaft in Dalarna.
The picture had shown two women in diving suits down in a cramped mine tunnel: pale cheeks, bloodred mouths, and both had shining black hair trailing over their shoulders. Behind them they had spray painted:
545 feet, September 2
Under the photograph, the girls had listed a pair of GPS coordinates, which marked a place near the Great Copper Mountain in Falun. The position had been only ten or fifteen miles from Erik Hall’s summer cottage. They added:
Flooded shaft from the 1700s we found on this:
/coppermountain1786.jpg/map, blessings to the county archive in Falun. After the scrap iron in the water, there are tunnels for whoever dares to pass.
No country for old men;)
The self-locking rappelling brakes lowered him gently into the depths. The cloud of flies was still circling up by the opening, but down here in the dark, Erik was hanging alone. He breathed only through his mouth now to avoid the smell of sulfur.
When he let his eyes drift around, it was like sinking down into a different century. Rusted-away attachments for ladders, half-collapsed blind shafts, notches cut by pickaxes and iron-bar levers.
There was no room for mistakes when lowering yourself down into a mine. But he tried to persuade himself that this shouldn’t be difficult, just a v
ertical hole and dirty support posts that had managed to withstand the strain of the rock for hundreds of years.
Still—older mine shafts were never truly safe. What looked like a wafer-thin crack could run deep into a rupture. And if the wall gave way, it would mean that one of the one-ton boulders hanging above him could suddenly come loose and tumble down.
How much farther?
Erik broke a glow stick and let it fall. The glowing flare disappeared in the dark, but then he heard a splash much earlier than he had dared to hope for. The stick glittered green far below, bobbing on the black water.
The depth meter on his wrist indicated that he had already lowered himself some 225 feet, and the cold had only gotten worse. Frost glistened on the rock wall in front of him, and the next glow stick landed on an ice floe.
Then he discovered that a small ledge stuck out just above the water. It was about ten yards to the right, so he swung himself along the rough boulder and landed.
Now to the most important part.
He took out a little bottle of red spray paint from the leg pocket of his suit and with a few quick movements, he sprayed a large E and an H. Under the letters, Erik Hall wrote: SEPTEMBER 7, DEPTH OF 300 FEET, then snapped a few pictures.
He pulled off his neoprene hood and ran a hand through his curls. Several more flashes. He examined the results on the camera’s display.
His hair was a bit thin, now that he was over thirty, but it was hardly something you’d notice. The dark circles under his eyes made more of a dramatic impression than anything else, Erik thought to himself.
Then he sank back down into a crouch in the stench and the cold. He tried to forget that no one knew where he was and that no one would miss him if he drowned or disappeared in the tunnels far below ground.
The Dyke Divers had left bolts where he could secure his navigation line before his dive. When it was fastened, he pulled on his flippers and mask and put the regulator in his mouth for a first test breath. Before he had time to exhale, he had already taken a large step down into the water. The roll of line he was holding in one dive glove spun quickly, and above him he could see how the strong wire cut through several layers of ice as it followed his sinking body.