The Lost Village

the houses weren’t on our schedule.”
I feel like Emmy’s about to clap back, but it’s quiet Robert who says:
“It was my idea. I wanted to see how they looked.”
“Oh,” I say. “Right.”
“Hard not to be curious,” he says apologetically, scratching his neck. He has very big hands and feet. It adds to the clumsy, slightly awkward impression he gives. He looks like a teenager who hasn’t quite grown into his body, even though Emmy’s said he’s only a few years younger than us. Maybe that’s why it’s hard to get annoyed at him.
“You can’t help but wonder what happened,” he goes on. “There was a cup on one of the kitchen counters. Like someone had just put down their coffee, gone out to pick up the paper, and then…”
“Disappeared,” says Tone quietly, finishing his sentence.
“Yeah,” says Robert. “Exactly.”
I take the toast off the fire, coax the slices off the skewer and hand them to Tone. She looks at them and says, “Mmm, well-done,” before taking a bite. Though the toast is practically charcoal, it comes as something of a relief: she sounds like herself, however tired she is, however much pain she’s in. Sardonic rather than beaten.
“Are there any theories?” Emmy asks me. I pull my sweater sleeves over my hands and sit back down on one of the camping mats.
“It’s in the packs,” I say.
“Yeah, yeah,” she says, “it’s all in the packs. But you know everything about this place. Can’t you tell us something about them?”
I clench my teeth, but then I see that both Max and Robert are watching me closely. I puff out the breath I’ve been holding in and relent.
“OK,” I say. “Sure. Of course I can.”
I search for a natural entry point, somewhere to begin. Scan my mind for the best thread to pull at. As I do this, I’m once again very aware of the square around us: the glaring, empty windows; the cold cobblestones beneath us; the impossibly high sky overhead. So many stars. Before Silvertjärn I’d never seen the Milky Way.
“The police investigation didn’t really reach any conclusions,” I say, fumbling around for the words. “You know that, it’s in the…”
I see a pull at Emmy’s lips, but then she purses them instead.
“Yeah. But anyway,” I say. “Obviously there are theories. Most people seem to think it was some sort of mass suicide. Like Jonestown—you know, that cult in South America with the insane leader who forced almost a thousand people to commit suicide.”
“If he forced them it sounds more like mass murder to me,” Emmy mutters.
I ignore her.
“You can see the similarities,” says Max. “A sect, an isolated location, a charismatic madman…”
“Except I don’t know if you could call this a sect,” I say. “I think most people have described it as a free church, if that. They never broke away from the Church of Sweden, so technically it was just a normal parish.”
“There’s no need to split hairs,” says Emmy. “It was a sect—whatever they called themselves.”
Before I can respond, Tone speaks up:
“Yeah, there are definite sect elements there. That comes through in the letters, if nothing else.”
“Aina’s letters, you mean?” I ask, and Tone nods.
“Anyway,” I continue, “we don’t know much about what happened in Silvertjärn in the final months. The last letter we have from Aina is dated May 1959. Except the very last one, that is. I’ve tried to track down other letters from the same period—there must have been other people who had relatives out of town—but I haven’t found anything. People probably didn’t save them, or else they’ve just been misplaced over the years. Some relatives gave witness statements to the police, but none of those give us much to work with. So all the theories about the church and the pastor are based on complete speculation.”
“But it’s got to have something to do with them,” says Emmy. “Right? It can’t be coincidence that they build up some fanatical movement around this guy and then just disappear.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” says Tone, stony-faced. “Some people claim they were all abducted by aliens.”
I smirk.
“I have to say, that one gets my vote,” I joke. “So if anyone spots any UFOs tonight, be sure to let me know.”
Emmy rolls her eyes, but I think I see a twitch at the side of her mouth. It gives me a strange feeling in my gut, an echo of a certain intimacy.
“No, of course it has to all be linked, somehow,” I say. “The most banal theory is that it was some kind of voluntary migration; that the pastor convinced them all that God had commanded him to take them north, or something like that, but that they died along the way. It wouldn’t be the first time something like that had happened; the history blog Our Dark Past compares it to the Children’s Crusades in the thirteenth century. Religious fixation can make people do very odd things.”
“Still, it’s weird they never found anything,” says Max. “You’d think they would leave some sort of tracks. Nine hundred people migrating would leave its mark—on the immediate surroundings, if nothing else.”
“And it doesn’t explain the baby,” says Emmy. “Right?”
I shake my head.
“No, it doesn’t,” I say. “Nor the dogs and cats. Or the murder of Birgitta Lidman. Or why no one seems to have taken anything with them. Like you said, Robert: there are still coffee cups on kitchen counters, pots on stovetops. The police report said there was even laundry hanging out to dry on lines outside the houses. Whatever it was, it seems to have happened fast. If it were a mass migration, you’d think they’d have taken something with them.”
“There are theories about mass hysteria,” Tone adds.
I nod.
“There are historic examples of that: in the sixteenth century there was something called the ‘dancing plague’ in Strasbourg, where hundreds of people danced on the streets uninterrupted for over a month. Many of them died of exhaustion. They think it was a form of stress-induced psychosis, caused by starvation