The Lost Village

don’t find anything interesting enough for a documentary.”
“I doubt you’ll have to worry about that,” she mutters.
In the stillness of the abandoned building I can almost hear Grandma’s voice again.
It was only a village, but it had everything you could need. There was a church that held services every Sunday—which was where my parents got married—a little grocery store, and a pharmacy. Twice a month a doctor passed through town to tend to any scratches or scrapes, but for anything more serious you would have to drive to the general hospital down in Sundsvall. And there was a school, of course.
The staircase before us is made of wood, not stone, which is a bad sign. On the other hand, it does look in better shape than the rest of the building. The steps are lined with what must once have been a thick, burgundy carpet, but which years of sun and rain and snow have faded and thinned to the extent that only a few ruffled patches remain, like the pelt of a mangy animal.
“Let’s start down here,” I say to Tone.
In preparation for this trip, I’ve spent many a long night on a forum for urban explorers. Most of them seem to be based in the United States and Germany, and they spend their nights and weekends exploring abandoned houses and buildings on the outskirts of cities. It’s their tips I’ve used on which respirator masks to wear, what equipment we need to carry, and the safety rules to live by, namely: never take a staircase without checking how stable it is; always tread carefully; and keep an eye out for patches of damp or mold that could have weakened weight-bearing beams and walls.
The lobby gives out onto two corridors, one to the left and one to the right. I gesture to the corridor on the right with a quick jerk of the head, and Tone nods.
The first door we come to leads to a bathroom with four compact cubicles. Tone has the camera in her hand and takes a few quick snaps, but there’s nothing too noteworthy here: tiles with dirty grouting; old-fashioned sinks in cracked porcelain; cubicle doors hanging off their hinges. I touch one of them but the hinge is more rust than metal, and the wood disintegrates beneath my fingers.
We move swiftly on into the first classroom. There are rows of desks with tiny Windsor chairs. For some reason the size of the chairs make the whole sight even more disconcerting. Some of the desks have lost their legs and collapsed, but most of them seem to be more or less intact. There’s a large slate chalkboard on the far wall, but nothing is written on it.
The next two doors lead to an identical classroom and a small broom closet. Then the corridor ends. Tone takes a shot of the dead end without a word, and then we wander back along the row of shattered windows.
The corridor on the other side is exactly the same. In one of the classrooms the chalkboard has fallen from the wall and shattered into large black chunks on the floor. Tone lifts the camera to her eyes, but then lowers it again.
“Isn’t it kinda weird?” she asks, without turning around. She takes a few steps into the room, toward the windows.
“What?” I ask from the doorway.
Tone tilts her head to one side.
“There aren’t any insects,” she says. “On the windowsills. No dead flies, no mosquitoes…” She looks around, her eyebrows raised.
I shrug.
“We’re still coming out of winter,” I say. “Maybe they got washed away by the snow.”
Tone turns away and nods.
“I guess,” she says. “Maybe.”
She lifts the camera and takes a picture of the windows, while I try to shake the feeling coming over me.
“Shall we see if we can get upstairs?” I ask.
“Sure,” says Tone.
Once we’re back in the lobby, she looks up at the staircase with pursed lips.
“Ready?” I ask.
She gives a silent nod.
Having the rucksack on top of my jacket has made me start to sweat, so as I walk toward the stairs I unzip the jacket to let some air in. I look over my shoulder at Tone. She’s standing still, watching me. Her gaze is steady, which should make me feel calmer.
“OK,” I say, more to myself than to her.
I place one foot on the bottom step and slowly lean into it. The step creaks a little, but it doesn’t sound like it’s about to cave in. When I take my other foot off the ground I’m half-expecting the wood to give way beneath me, but now it doesn’t make a sound.
“Seems stable,” I say, still facing forward.
I take another careful step. My shoes sink into the carpet like mud, and the reddish fibers break away with my soles as I lift them.
I look over my shoulder.
“I think it’s OK,” I say, and Tone nods.
“Be careful,” she says. “Stay near the wall. That’s where it should be strongest, structurally.”
“I know,” I say.
The staircase spirals up to the second floor. I go first, and it feels as though I’m holding my breath the whole way up, half-expecting the floor beneath us to cave in with each step, for us to fall several feet onto the hard, warped wooden floor. But it holds. Some of the tension dissipates once I reach the second-floor landing, but my eyes stay glued to Tone as she slowly works her way up the stairs behind me. It’s only when she’s standing next to me that I actually relax.
“Be careful,” I say. “Keep near the walls. We don’t know how stable the floor is.”
I expect her to say that she knows, but she just nods.
The floor is dusty and very worn, but you can tell that at one point the wood must have been beautiful. To our right there is a pair of large carved oak doors. Not only do they look miraculously undamaged; they are also still closed. I put my hand on the brass door handle and press it