The Lost Village

to Max, who has just made it over to us, and then, turning to the others, I add:
“Follow us.”
Emmy nods without another word, thank god, and I hear her ask the technician:
“Robert, do you want to take the downhill?”
Max gives me a thumbs up and heads back toward his car.
I get in the driver’s seat. Just before I close the door, I hear Emmy shout:
“But drive carefully—we don’t want to damage the equipment!”
“As if she’s even paying for it,” I mutter, slamming the door shut behind me.

 NOW
I bite the inside of my cheek in concentration as I try to negotiate the steep bank. There must have been a road here somewhere, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t find it on any maps. Clearly most of the deliveries in and out of the village came by train.
At one point I hear something shift in the back, which makes me grip the wheel even tighter. Tone looks back over her shoulder—not that you can see much through the middle partition—and when she looks forward again she asks:
“Are you sure you can work with her?”
I know she’s asking out of concern, but it feels like criticism. Tact isn’t always her strong point.
“It’s not like I have a choice,” is all I say.
We drive over a root, and the van lurches.
“No,” she agrees. “Not now you don’t.”
Emmy was a last resort. I tried to pull in every contact I have in the industry, put out advertisements and announcements on social media, but it was no good. There was some interest, of course, but everyone backed out when they found out how tight we are for money and how little experience we have. One degree in filmmaking and the odd bit of production assistant work doesn’t carry much weight when that’s the sum of your entire production team’s CV. It’s not easy to put together a crew for an as-yet unfunded passion project, especially when it’s people with talent and experience you need.
So, in the end, one desperate, exhausted night, after my last hope—an old schoolfriend’s ex who, despite his terrible attitude and long, greasy hair, had been involved in a few big productions for TV4—called to turn me down because he’d landed another job that could actually pay, I caved and threw Emmy’s name into the mix.
I had never mentioned Emmy to Tone before that night. But, despite my persistent efforts to pretend Emmy Abrahamsson had never existed, she had always been there at the back of my mind. I had checked her Facebook page every now and then, googled her the odd late night as the shadows crept up on me.
Things had gone well for Emmy since college, better than most of our former classmates. Half of the people we studied with had left the film industry within a few years of graduating, but not Emmy.
Not that this came as any surprise. Emmy had always been smart.
When I mentioned her name to Tone, she raised one eyebrow and asked why I hadn’t suggested her before. Truth is, she sounds like a godsend—if you don’t know who she is, that is. Or how she can be.
I shift down a gear as the slope starts to flatten out, and let out a long sigh I’d hardly realized I was holding in. Then I turn my attention to the houses that have now started to appear in front of us.
They are built in the classic Swedish cottage style, with gabled roofs and small windows. The first building we pass is small, barely bigger than a shed, and it’s set back slightly from the other buildings, which start about a hundred yards up the road. Its walls were once Falu red, but the paintwork is now peeling off the clapboard in big clumps. The windows gape, black and empty, shards of glass dangling out of the flaking white window frames. The setting sun hangs behind it in the west, and the matte, sloping roof casts shadows too long for us to be able to see inside.
I slow down almost subconsciously.
“Is that…?” asks Tone.
“Birgitta Lidman’s house,” I say. “It has to be.”
I would love to stop and take a look, but we should really try to get camp set up before nightfall. According to our schedule, we start exploring the village first thing tomorrow. We won’t start shooting any footage until day two or three, but we’re going to need every minute of the five days we’ve budgeted for.
There’s a lot to prepare: we have to figure out where we’re going to shoot, and the scenes that will best convey how we want the finished documentary to look.
The short trailer we’ve uploaded to the Kickstarter site is surprisingly slick, given we had hardly anything to work with. Tone managed to get a freelancer from her advertising days to do it for mate’s rates. But, slick as it is, it’s still only forty-five seconds of generic sweeping shots of nature, spliced with old documents and an ominous voice-over. A real trailer with dramatic images of Silvertjärn itself would do a lot to get our Kickstarter going.
We should have hired a drone, I think, as I scan the small houses and cottages we’re approaching. What an opener that would have been: Silvertjärn as seen from above—a picture-perfect village bathed in golden spring light—before swooping in toward the houses to shatter the idyll, reveal the decay: the collapsing walls, the sinking houses, the perfect little porches left to rot and crumble.…
I thought it wasn’t essential at this point, that we could save the drone for the real shoot, but now that we’re here I’m regretting that decision. I mean, there might never be a real shoot. Truth is, everything hangs on this trip; we only have one shot. If we can’t get this to work then I can hardly expect Max to pay for another bite of the cherry.
“There,” says Tone.
At first I don’t get what she’s pointing at, but then I suddenly see it: a wider gap