The Lost Village by Camilla Sten (ereader android .txt) 📕

I trip on a root and fall. I feel Robert’s bound hands fumble to catch me, but he can’t do much. I land headfirst on the heather, and my knee slams into a stone, sending a jolt of pain up into my hip. I lay there for a few seconds with my face in the moss, my leg throbbing and my heart full of something resembling hate.

“Up,” Aina commands.

When at first I don’t move, her voice becomes softer, slightly teasing.

“Or maybe you don’t feel like it? A little sleepy, are we?” Her way of speaking is strange—both young and old at the same time. It’s like hearing a teen try to imitate the archaic speech patterns of an old movie star.

I don’t need to see what she does to be able to interpret the sound that is pressed from Tone’s throat. I force myself up to my hands and feet, ignoring the shooting pain in my knee.

My eyes have adjusted enough to the shadows now to make her out in the darkness. She gives a wide, cold smile, a slash across the middle of her face.

“You two, keep walking,” she says. “Straight ahead.” Her smile grows, impossible as that ought to be. It looks like her face has been cleft by an ax. As though she could explode—bite—stab—at any second.

“We’re getting close now.”

Close to what? I have my suspicions. I know the direction we’re walking in. It’s the part of the forest we were warned to steer clear of, where the ground was too unstable. Due to the mine underneath.

The searches had never gone down there because the entrance was still sealed, but those tunnels run deep into the earth’s underbelly. I remember some of the words I found scrawled in Pastor Mattias’s sermon.

Only in silence can we become free. Only by allowing the darkness to embrace us can we step into the light.

In silence. In darkness.

I glimpse it through the trees as we approach, a hollow like an open grave, a blackness deeper than the shadows. It’s wide and uneven, hardly more than a hole in the ground, but I know where it leads.

Aina doesn’t need to direct me to it; I’m drawn there all by myself. I stop at the edge and look down into the hole. It’s too dark for me to see how deep it goes.

“What…” I hear Robert mutter behind me, and I reply before she does.

“The mine,” I say. “It leads to the mine.”

“To our church,” Aina whispers, her voice merging with the whistling treetops.

“Jump,” she says, her voice harder now.

“What?” I say and start turning around, but then I feel something that makes me instantly freeze. A blade on the back of my neck.

“Jump,” she says, and the pressure grows until I feel it swell to a shooting pain. “Jump, or I’ll give you a little push. We must go to them.”

To the choir beneath us. To the darkness of the tunnels.

“Jump!” she says, her voice piercingly shrill, and suddenly I feel a foot against my back, a quick kick that gives me no time to react.

I fall.

 THEN

She climbs down the ladder, down into the darkness, her sweaty fingers gripping the rungs tightly. They are rough and prickly, and feel sloppily made.

The darkness beneath is compact, their only light that of the pastor’s torch. Down in the darkness it dazzles, its shifty flicker lighting up the tunnel in both directions.

This must once have been a transport tunnel, as it is long and sloping. The walls are rugged and damp. It’s already cooler down here than it was up at the surface.

The pastor starts walking down into the darkness. Elsa hurries to find her feet, stumbling after him as fast as she can into the blackness and bedrock. Anything to not lose the light; anything to not be left in the darkness with the silent hordes behind her.

Elsa has seen their true faces now. She has seen the saliva frothing at their mouths; the glint in their eyes at the sight of blood; the intoxicated joy of their breathless gasps at the crack of bones.

The dancing cone of light ahead of them moves deeper and deeper underground; he is the light they follow in darkness. Elsa can see that as a symbol it must be seductive. Surely he knows that. It must be intentional.

Although Staffan worked in the mine some twenty-four years, Elsa has only been down here twice in her life, and never this deep. The air feels thicker and heavier, and the walls seem to press down onto them. She can feel the weight of the bedrock above her; thousands of tons of rock and ore, all held up by flimsy structures, mathematics, and goodwill.

Elsa wonders how they knew where to dig to reach the tunnels. But perhaps that’s no great wonder: of all the villagers behind her, how many hundreds used to work at the mine? They knew where the tunnels ran, where it would be safe to dig and blast.

Then the tunnel opens up before them, expanding to form a cavern.

The torch isn’t powerful enough to reach its furthest corners, but it’s bright enough for Elsa to see that the space is large—some fifteen feet high—and long. Elsa doesn’t doubt that the entire village will be able to fit in here. Whether it’s a natural air pocket or one of the older shafts from when the mine was new and Silvertjärn no more than a few farmsteads out in the forest, she can’t tell.

In the middle of the cavern is a shallow body of water, hardly more than a pool. That’s what they are now approaching, Elsa and Ingrid and Dagny and Pastor Mattias, with the congregation behind them. He stops at the water’s edge and raises the torch. At first he says nothing, just lets the light speak for itself.

Frank grabs her shoulders again, hard—so hard that her bones rub. But the pain can’t reach her. He’s probably expecting her to launch at the pastor, to attack him in