The tensions had begun to appear after upper secondary school, that autumn when there was no school to go back to, which had come as a shock to most people. Some moved south. Mostly girls. She herself had applied and been accepted to medical school in Umeå, but Susso didn’t seem to have any plans whatsoever. She worked in a shop and seemed content. Did sporadic shifts as a carer. Natta Simonsson worked in care too, so she and Susso started hanging out, drinking pretty heavily. Simonsson was friends with Sporty, and that was where Diana drew the line. Sporty had not earned her name by being into sports but rather by sleeping with a visiting floorball team from Sälen. The entire team. Not all at once, but over the course of the week she had worked her way through them all and played with several sticks at least once. At least that’s how rumour had it. That Susso would go out and get trashed with Sporty, this infamous harlot, was incomprehensible. They had used to make fun of her! Joke she didn’t just suck, she sucked a whole floorball team. This development had made Diana distance herself and as a consequence her move to Umeå had been less of an abrupt goodbye. They emailed a little bit back and forth, but then that petered out too. And when she moved back home to do her residency at the local hospital, Susso was still working in the same shop, virtually unchanged.

Except that she had become a cryptozoologist. In earnest.

The aerial photograph Susso’s grandfather had snapped in Sarek National Park had exercised a powerful pull on them during the part of their teenage years when they were drawn to anything that was somehow eccentric. Anything that was odd. Susso had shown her the blurry picture, furtively, without her mother’s permission, and it had filled her with a titillating and trepidatious horror that she could, in fact, still recall today.

The small photograph, which was kept in an unmarked manila envelope, had been a door to a different world. A portal to a supernatural realm no one else knew about or could be allowed to know about. This was something Susso’s family had decided. The Picture wasn’t even spoken of, and that’s what made it so remarkable and exciting. Diana had been let in on the secret and she had felt like she had become a Myrén and she had even wished she were one.

However, over the years, she had come to the conclusion that the secrecy surrounding the photograph probably sprang from shame. An unwieldy shame that no one in the family knew how to handle. There was no other explanation than that the patriarch, the great nature photographer Gunnar Myrén, world-famous in the north of Sweden, had produced a fake picture and his descendants found that embarrassing.