A man wearing a dark business suit and a head mask made from bear. The headdress covers his head and hangs down his back; thick brown fur. His partner is blonde. Short. Her face is hidden beneath a black welders’ mask. She’s wearing a grey sweater and a grey miniskirt, only they’re not grey anymore, they’re red. She’s covered herself in red paint or synthetic blood. Just a guy and a girl out for a stroll. He’s pushing a pram, an old-fashioned pram with four spoked wheels. I can’t see what’s inside. It’s completely dark. As they pass me she rubs his crotch with her hand and he lifts his bear head and grunts.

More fire baskets. I turn into the square and there are perhaps a hundred small fires, each with a healthy stack of birch logs next to it. Mist mingles with smoke. The air is heady. The atmosphere is electrified like an inner-city estate just before a riot.

Another couple approach. The woman is a backwards walker. He’s facing me with a simple black sheet-mask and she’s pacing in reverse, holding his hand, her brown-leather mask facing forwards, her eyes looking back; her body facing back, but her mask looking forwards. Her black balloon is small, the size of a lightbulb. It’s helium-filled. Rising into the sky on a three-metre string. His is larger, like the ones Hans Wimmer showed me inside his premium storage unit. Larger than a human head and spray-painted black. Misshapen. Bulbous. It’s on a short string. It bobs around as they walk. They stumble past me and I hear him mumble, ‘And I shall fear no evil.’

Manic laughter from the bandstand.

Plumes of smoke rising vertically off this stunted mountain.

Shrieks of delight and pain from the locals. I get the feeling they’ve been waiting all year for this. For their private night. A very grown-up event they probably heard rumours of as children. Like Midsommar, this is a brief moment where they get to loosen their modern Swedish morals and shake off the twentieth century and delve back into their dark past. The middle ages. The Viking period. And beyond. Stretching back to their animal heritage. Pre-Christian. Pre-Sweden even. A thousand savages for one night.

People are picking the rotten apples and sinking their teeth into the soft and wasp-infested fruit. A man lies under a tree dressed from head to toe in a leather sheet, stitched roughly with long staples. He writhes into the mud, into the apple slurry, and he moans.

I look into the dental-surgery window. No lights on. There are no lights in any of the shops or offices. Even Konsum is dark and locked. When the mini-supermarket is closed on a Friday night you know something is seriously wrong. My stomach is tight with unease but also adrenaline.