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Back Bad Apples Save as PDF
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  65. Acknowledgements

We walk toward the statue of Adolf-Fredrik Edlund. The anvil sparkles after its recent deep clean. There are pumpkins all around the base and Sheriff Hansson is there in full uniform, with his star badge and beige shirt and brown tie and striped trousers and radio attached to his shirt loop. Outside the Hive, there’s Noora talking to Hans Wimmer the Austrian clockmaker. Law enforcement are out in force. Or as much force as we ever have, all the way out here at the end of the world.

Noora looks over and narrows her eyes. Is she jealous of Julia?

The music changes to Girl…You’ll be a woman, soon, and the boy singing has an exceptionally smooth voice. The beat vibrates through me and reverberates round the square.

More and more kids arrive. Some in groups, and other, younger children holding the hands of their parents. A tall woman wearing a Scream mask carries a doll close to her chest. I smile and of course her mask doesn’t move so I don’t know if she smiles back or scowls but the doll isn’t a doll it’s a real baby. Its own extra-small Scream mask tipped back to the rear of its head, its fat, ruby-red lips clamped to its mother’s breast, its cheeks flushed from the cold air of hill town, or the warmth of its mother’s sweet milk.

There’s a pair of young boys in clown costumes complete with curly red wigs and they’re collecting slugs from under the apple trees. One has almost half-filled a jam jar with black, shiny, engorged slugs, and the other is mixing them with his Halloween candy. All looks the same from where I’m standing.

Julia and I walk across the square and the music’s too loud just here. The junior band is enthusiastically playing ‘Jeepers Creepers’, and an elderly couple wearing latex smiling-dog masks are dancing like they’re eighteen all over again. Then the woman slips on the apple sludge and the music stalls and she’s taken away by three men, the Sheriff overseeing them.

The pumpkins outside the pop-up shop aren’t pumpkins.

The sign in the window still says ‘31% off. Closing It Down Sale’, and the door to the shop is wedged open with an oversize hustomte troll, a regular, not a special, just one of Cornelia’s, this one the height of my knee. The sisters are being less coy than usual. The window display is crammed full of expensive carved trolls. Specials. Some of Alice’s finest work. They’re lined up like a battalion of evil, pine men looking out at Visberg town square. What I thought were pumpkins are in fact carved turnips with mean little slits for eyes. They’re small. Fist size.

The music changes to ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’.

The fog thickens.

And then a gun goes off outside Visberg Grill.

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