Rites of Spring, Anders Motte [reading diary .TXT] 📗

without really knowing why. The dog took a couple of cautious steps, keeping its belly low, tail tucked between its legs. Then it suddenly stopped and stiffened, as if it had heard something.

Little Stefan turned his head, but the house was still in darkness. When he looked back, the dog was gone.

He set off up the concrete steps leading to the front door; halfway up he realised it was ajar. He paused, unsure of what to do. On the wall next to the door he saw a half-metre-tall figure woven from fresh green branches. His grandfather had made one every spring and hung it on the front door.

So that the Green Man will ride on through the night. So that he won’t stop at our house.

‘Hello? Anyone home?’

The words bounced off the walls and came back like a distorted echo, as if it were someone else’s voice. Someone who was watching him from the darkness. Imitating him, mocking him.

Little Stefan looked at the creepy figure again, and for a second he was ready to run back down the steps, jump in his truck and get out of there. Tell Erik Nyberg that no one had been home, and reading the water meter would have to wait. However, he was a grown man with a job to do, not some little kid who was scared of ghosts.

He knocked on the door frame.

‘Hello?’ he shouted again. ‘Anyone home? It’s Little Stefan, from the castle.’

No response.

The silence from inside the house was making him increasingly uncomfortable. His shirt was sticking to his back. He took a deep breath and knocked once more, harder this time. Pushed the door open and stepped into the porch. There was a weird smell, a stale odour that reminded him of animals – but what was it?

‘Hello?’

He checked out the kitchen. The table was littered with dirty plates, glasses and cutlery for three people. Several flies were buzzing around among the remains of the food. One of the chairs had been knocked over. Through a doorway on the other side of the porch he could just see a neatly made bed.

‘Hello!’ This time he yelled up the stairs.

Still nothing. He was feeling very uneasy now, but he pulled himself together and made his way up the creaking wooden staircase.

The upper floor was in darkness. On the left was a bedroom with a double bed, also neatly made. The door on the right was closed. It took him a few seconds to realise that it wasn’t simply a uniform green, but was covered in a carefully painted pattern of leaves. Almost a work of art, in fact.

Elita’s Room, someone had written in attractive, ornate lettering at eye level.

So this was her room. This was where she had lived her life.

Elita Svart. The spring sacrifice.

Little Stefan reached for the handle; his heartbeat seemed to be reverberating throughout the house. He was on the point of doing something forbidden, stepping into a world to which he was not permitted access. An uninvited guest, an intruder.

Then he saw another message on the door. Small, distorted words that almost blended in with the artwork, but became clearer as his eyes grew used to the darkness.

Nature is hungry and the Green Man is riding through the forests.

At the same time he spotted something else. Hidden among the leaves there was a large, terrifying male face.

The realisation was sudden, and chilled his blood. He didn’t know where it had come from or why, but the sensation was so strong that it made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. Something had happened in this house. Something evil that had made Lasse Svart and his women leap to their feet in the middle of their supper, run out to their cars and drive away in the night. Something connected to a dead sixteen-year-old girl on a cold stone, and a ghostly rider galloping through the forest.

Little Stefan let go of the door handle and took the stairs in three strides. Hurtled out through the porch, down the steps and into his truck.

He started the engine and set off with a screech of tyres. He didn’t even glance in the rear-view mirror until he was absolutely certain that Svartgården had disappeared, deep among the trees.

1

‘Hi, Margaux, it’s Thea. Sorry I haven’t called you for a while – there’s been a lot to do with the move, but now David and I have arrived in Skåne. Our new life can begin. A new, happier story than the old one. At least that’s what both of us are hoping for.’

The drone begins by taking a close-up of the main entrance and the impressive stone steps, then it slowly pulls out until the whole castle can be seen: a large central section with two wings, which from above makes the building look like an elongated H.

The white, freshly cleaned façade, the green copper roof, the coach house and the stables a short distance away to the right, beyond the east wing. The moat beyond the west wing. Then the voiceover.

‘Bokelund Castle is situated approximately four kilometres from the small community of Tornaby in the district of Ljungslöv in north-western Skåne, not far from the southern point of Söderåsen National Park. The castle is one of the oldest in Skåne, dating all the way back to the fourteenth century. The current main building, in the style of the French Renaissance, was constructed around 1880, but remains of the original castle can still be found down in the cellar, where one of the dungeons still exists.’

A slight exaggeration. No one actually knows what the little vaulted room down in the cellar was used for, but Thea has to admit that David was right when he said that a dungeon sounded better than a larder.

The camera zooms a little further out, revealing the mossy green moat. The avenue linking the castle to the main road in the south. The narrow stone bridge leading across to the