Harbor by John Lindqvist (classic novels for teens txt) 📕

short-wave radio, and they promised to make sure that Torgny, Maja and Johan would be informed that Anna-Greta was fine and was waiting for better weather conditions before setting off for home.

Although Anna-Greta and Gustav had a working business relationship and could perhaps even be called friends, it was still slightly embarrassing for Gustav to have womenfolk in the house overnight. He didn’t know what to do with himself, he felt like a spare part in his own cottage.

It was a relief to discover that Anna-Greta wouldn’t say no to a drop of schnapps. They sat across the kitchen table from each other, looking out over the rough sea, the breakers picked out by the flashing light, and drank a few glasses. Their embarrassment melted away.

No one who hadn’t heard it for themselves would have believedit, but as the evening wore on, Gustav became positively chatty. He built up the fire and, as the temperature rose, told tales of foundered ships, maritime maps scratched into flat rocks and birds that collided with the lighthouse during their autumn migration and died by the barrowload.

When he pulled off his woolly jumper, Anna-Greta noticed that he was wearing his vest inside out, and mentioned this to him. Gustav looked at her, his eyes half-closed. ‘Well, you have to protect yourself as best you can.’

‘Surely you don’t believe that nonsense, Gustav.’

‘No. But I do believe in this,’ said Gustav, taking out a bottle containing a cloudy liquid. ‘And so should you. If you’re going to spend the night here.’

Just to be polite Anna-Greta drank a shot glass of the bitter brew. She knew that many lighthouse keepers grew wormwood to use as a spice for their schnapps, but Gustav’s version was overdone to say the least. It tasted disgusting.

‘It’s not much of a pleasure to drink,’ said Gustav as Anna-Greta slammed her glass down on the table, ‘but it protects life, and that might be worth something after all.’

Anna-Greta wasn’t prepared to settle for a statement like that. The schnapps had made her eager to ask questions and it had made Gustav communicative, and so it happened that Gustav explained for the first time what the situation was with the sea.

It wanted him, he said. It called to him. It showed him things and made him false promises. It threatened him. He had turned to the Bible and found some guidance, but if the wormwood hadn’t been growing in such profusion around the lighthouse, he would never have got the idea.

And it seemed to work. The sea no longer dared touch him in a menacing way, and the whispers of the night had as good as fallen silent since he started thinning his blood with wormwood.

The next morning the wind had eased, and Anna-Greta was able to set off home. Before she left Gustav gave her a coffee tin in which he had planted a wormwood root in a little soil.

‘Take good care of it,’ he said, half-joking in his deep, prophesying voice, ‘so that it may be fruitful and fill the earth.’

Anna-Greta waved goodbye to Gustav and headed away from Stora Korset. She had gone no more than one nautical mile when she heard a strange noise coming from the engine. She cut the power immediately, afraid of doing more damage, and started to check connections and gaskets.

But the noise was still there, even though the engine was switched off. It was a caressing, whispering sound. She turned this way and that, but was unable to locate the source of the noise. She leaned over the rail and looked down into the water. The water was soft and welcoming, like the open arms of a lover. That was where she wanted to be.

That was the first time she heard the call.

She managed to break the spell by starting up the engine and concentrating on its even throbbing, but behind the sound of the cranks and pistons working away she could still hear the wordless whispering that held such a promise of warmth and simplicity.

Gustav had maintained that there were people on Domarö who knew the secrets of the sea, but never spoke of them. Anna-Greta thought she now understood why. There was one important detail missing from Gustav’s private insight.

You can’t hear it if you don’t know about it.

Anna-Greta continued with her trading around the islands for a few more years, but after meeting Simon she sold her boat to avoid hearing the siren call of the sea. As time went by it appeared to have lost interest in her, and the calling stopped.

She had planted Gustav’s wormwood on the edge of the shore down below the Shack, and there it spread in silence without anyone asking any questions.

Together with Simon, Anna-Greta entered a different life where the sea had no access. And things would probably have stayed that way if Johan had not come to her one evening many years later and told her about the island that was nagging at him, the voices that spoke to him.

To cut a long story short, she eventually managed to get out of Margareta Bergwall what there was to know about the sea. She was holding a trump card, because she could also provide something that had been lacking until now: a defence. Within a few years the wormwood was flourishing in several gardens belonging to those in the know, and Anna-Greta went up in everyone’s estimation.

She took care not to involve Simon. Even if the sea was capricious and sometimes selected its victims from those who knew nothing, it was evident that the more you knew, the greater the risk of hearing the call. Or being taken.

So what became of Gustav Jansson, then?

Nobody knew what had happened. Perhaps he ran out of wormwood, perhaps something else went wrong, but in the bitter winter of 1957 the lighthouse was suddenly dark. It was a night of heavy snowfalls, and it wasn’t until the following morning that anyone was able to get out to