Fir E-Book

Sharon Gosling

• Herausgeber: Little Tiger Press
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 355

Beschreibung

Moving from Stockholm to an isolated pine plantation in northern Sweden is bad enough, but when the snows come early and all links between the Strombergs and the outside world are cut off, it gets worse. With only a grudging housekeeper and increasingly withdrawn parents for company, there is nothing to do but to explore the old plantation house. Anything to stay out of the endless pine trees pressing in on them. But soon it becomes clear that the danger within the old plantation house is even greater than what lies outside… A chilling YA horror, perfect for fans of Dawn Kurtagich, Juno Dawson and Stephen King.

Leseprobe

For Jon

Contents:

Title PageDedicationChapter OneChapter TwoChapter ThreeChapter FourChapter FiveChapter SixChapter SevenChapter EightChapter NineChapter TenChapter ElevenChapter TwelveChapter ThirteenChapter FourteenChapter FifteenChapter SixteenChapter SeventeenChapter EighteenChapter NineteenChapter TwentyChapter Twenty-OneChapter Twenty-TwoChapter Twenty-ThreeChapter Twenty-FourChapter Twenty-FiveChapter Twenty-SixChapter Twenty-SevenChapter Twenty-EightChapter Twenty-NineChapter ThirtyChapter Thirty-OneChapter Thirty-TwoAppendix iAppendix iiAppendix iiiAppendix ivAcknowledgementsExclusive Extract: Savage Island Exclusive Extract: Charlotte SaysMore RED EYE reads…Copyright

If madness had a shade, it would be white.

White as far as the eye can see.

White until it reaches right around the world

and taps you on the shoulder.

You’d never think there could be

so many colours in snow. But there are.

It just takes time to see them.

Your eyes have to adjust.

Once you’ve been out here for a while,

you can see them.

You can see them all.

We have been out here for a long, long while.

Chapter One

“…not going,” I said.

“Don’t be like that,” said Dad. “This will be good for us. You’ll see.”

I couldn’t see. Out of everything that was absolutely not apparent to me at that moment, how us moving to the middle of nowhere would be good for anything was right at the top of the list. I said this quite loudly and several times over.

“Well, if you’re going to be like that, there’s nothing more to say,” Dad said. “We’ll talk about this when you’re being more reasonable.”

“What about school?” I blurted.

“You’ll be homeschooled.”

I was so outraged that I actually snorted. “Seriously? There’s not even a school? And what –” I added suddenly, realizing something – “what about the internet? Will we be online?”

Dad didn’t answer that. He’d already left the room.

I had no idea why my parents wanted to do this crazy thing. I don’t think I talked to them at all for the whole two months before we left. Talking wasn’t something I was big on anyway and on top of that I was too angry about the whole stupid situation. Mum tried to start up a conversation once or twice but I shut that down pretty quickly. Dad kept leaving books about North Sweden and Norrbotten all over the place, probably hoping I’d get all interested and pick one up.

I didn’t. I wasn’t. I was pretty sure that as soon as we got up there, they’d find out what a massive mistake they’d made and come right back to Stockholm again, only now we’d be screwed because they’d sold our house. They’d never even been to visit the place they’d bought. That’s how mental all this was. They dumped everything, just like that, to buy a house they’d never seen in a place they’d never been, to take on a business they had not one single clue about.

I guess, really, if I’d been less pissed off, I might have stopped to ask myself why, but I didn’t. And hey, they didn’t volunteer any information, either. It was as if once I’d told them in no uncertain terms that this plan was really stupid and they were dragging me there against my will, they’d decided to let me get on with being angry – like a silly kid who has a tantrum over what bowl they eat their tomato pasta out of. But this wasn’t a bowl, was it? It was my life.

“Who the hell moves that far north?” asked Poppy as we walked home from school the next day.

“Us, apparently.”

“It’s going to be terrible,” said Lars. “You’re going to turn into a nutter. That much snow and darkness? A grade-A nutcase, that’s what you’ll be.”

“You’ll come and visit me, right?” I asked them. “In the summer?”

“You must be joking,” Lars said. “And get eaten by the locals?”

“Put over their fire like a sausage on a stick?” said Poppy.

“No, thanks,” they said together.

Lars and Poppy are my best friends. I have a very small life.

Anyway, a couple of weeks into September, a truck rolled up to our yellow townhouse and these men in natty blue shirts with neatly embroidered logos and tastefully matching trousers trundled out and started loading bits of our lives into it. This seemed to mean clothes, electrical equipment and knick-knacks, mainly. Most of our furniture was going into storage, which told me that for all their bravado, my parents weren’t as sure about this move as they said they were. When the removal men were done, I got into the back of our 4x4 and stared at my phone, wondering why Lars and Poppy hadn’t bothered to turn up to say goodbye or even text, and finally realizing what dicks my friends actually were. I put my earphones in and cranked Tool up as high as the volume would go, drowning everything out.

Through the window, I saw Mum and Dad standing on the top step of the old house. They put their arms round each other and Mum leaned her head on Dad’s shoulder. She’d been doing that a lot lately, which was pretty out of character, to be honest. I’m not saying my mum’s a tough nut, but she doesn’t stay at home to bake cake, if you know what I mean. She’s a lawyer who specializes in suing the crap out of big business on a daily basis. ‘Cuddly’ isn’t a word I’d use to describe her. Then they shut the door to the only house I’d ever lived in, walked down the steps and got into the car.

We followed the truck out of Stockholm and drove north.

We drove north for a very, very long time.

It became clear very quickly that my parents had decided we should take the scenic route to the end of the world. I thought they might have been sensible enough to book somewhere for us to stay halfway but apparently that was too much to hope for. We stopped a few times for food and drink, and so they could share the driving. But other than that we kept going. And going. And going. And what I noted during this unbelievably boring journey was that 1) my friends still hadn’t texted and 2) the trees outside the car windows grew exponentially bigger and thicker in direct contrast to how narrow the roads got. Which, I’ll be honest, wasn’t particularly reassuring.

I didn’t voice these observations to the two so-called adults seated in front of me. They talked to each other a little on the way. They dozed. They listened to the radio. They tried to talk to me. They failed.

It was dark when I fell asleep. When I opened my eyes again it was light and we were still going. We must have stopped again without me waking, because Mum was driving instead of Dad. My phone battery was completely dead. I could have asked Dad or Mum to plug it in for me but that would have involved speaking to them, so I didn’t. The removal truck was still ahead of us, trundling along. There were still trees lining the road, punctuated by red-walled houses that looked far more cheerful than they had any right to be.

I looked at my watch. It was 9 a.m.

And still we kept going.

Eventually the trees were so thick that the road grew dark, and I got a hint of what the winter would be like. The nights were already drawing in, even in Stockholm. Up here it would be worse. In the very middle of winter, the sun would barely rise at all. We’d just get a darkness that was slightly less dark. And let’s not forget the snow. Months of snow and darkness – hey, welcome to your new home!

Then, finally, the removal truck ahead of us turned off. We went from being on a reasonable road to being on an unreasonable road. I mean, I leaned forwards to look out of the windscreen and the sides of the truck were actually brushing the branches of the trees on either side. If it had got much narrower, we could have felled our own firewood on the way and wouldn’t even have had to get out of the car to do it. There were times when it felt as if the trees were squashing themselves against the car as we passed. Fir trees everywhere: fir and more fir, which is, in case you hadn’t noticed, the most boring tree in the world.

We drove for another hour and then the truck turned off again, driving past a large painted wooden sign that read Storaskogen. Then, suddenly, right ahead of us, I saw our new home for the first time.

It was massive. It was a mansion. It was the kind of place where you have to make an effort to count how many windows there are on each floor. It was like I was staring at a page on the ‘Visit Sweden’ website or something.

I swore. Quite loudly.

“Don’t use that language,” said Mum, on autopilot, like what I’d said wasn’t entirely reasonable under the circumstances.

“These are apartments, right?” I said. “This isn’t, like – the whole thing isn’t ours, right?”

Dad laughed. “I have to admit, it looks bigger than the estate agent’s photos. Doesn’t it, darling?”

He was talking to Mum, not me, by the way. For one thing, they’d never shown me any photos. For another, in case you hadn’t already worked it out, me and the word ‘darling’ aren’t what you’d call a fit.

The truck had pulled up outside the main doors, which were big and dark red. The men jumped out immediately and rolled up the back. They seemed in a hurry. I suppose they wanted to make sure they could leave again before night fell. I didn’t blame them. I wondered whether I could slip them some cash to let me stow away in the back when they went.

“Did we win the lottery or something?” I asked as we climbed out of the car. I was so stiff I could barely stand upright.

“This is just how they used to build the plantation homes, way back when,” said Mum, as if that explained how we could afford a place like this. Or, for that matter, why we would want one even if we could.

We headed for the main door behind Dad, who didn’t even knock before he went in. For a moment I thought that was weird. Then I remembered that the place belonged to us. Which was even weirder.

I wondered how long it had been since anyone had lived here. The place was silent. The floor of the big entrance hall was wood, which I guess isn’t surprising, but it was perfectly polished, which was. I mean, who bothers to polish a floor that never gets walked on? There were doors and corridors leading off left and right, and a giant staircase in front of us. Halfway up it spilt in two to become the balconies of an upper level that had more doors and corridors.

We stood there, three strangers in a house that was ours, but wasn’t.

“Hello?” Dad called, after a moment. “Anyone about?”

I swear you could have heard a pin drop. Then something did drop, outside – there was a thump as a removal man didn’t quite manage to keep his grip on one of the crates. I hoped it wasn’t mine, but I didn’t even go to look. Neither did Mum or Dad. It felt like we’d all been absorbed into the silence of the house. My ears felt full of glue.

“Hello?” Dad called again, taking another step forwards.

A shriek echoed down from the balcony. I nearly cacked myself. I saw Mum jump, too, and Dad. The shriek was followed by another and then the kind of manic laughter you hear if you have to walk past a first-year classroom after the bell’s rung for lunch. One of the doors on the balcony opened and out came this stream of kids. There were five of them – all girls, all about ten. They charged out of the doorway, all shouting and chattering at once.

“Hey!” Dad called, over the sounds that were bouncing down the stairs like high-pitched pipe bombs. “Hello!”

The girls came to a standstill at the top of the stairs. It was like watching something out of a cartoon – the first one stopped and the others all slid into her like ducklings on a frozen pond. They stared down at us, mouths gaping. But on the plus side they had stopped shrieking, so, you know, small mercies.

Another door opened but this time there was no horrific shrieking. Instead, a guy in his twenties with mussed-up curly brown hair and glasses appeared. He was frowning.

“Girls,” he said, in that tone that you know means he’s said it a million times before and expects to have to say it a million more. “What have I told you about the noise?” Then he looked over the balcony and noticed us. “Ah ha!” he cried, as if we were long-lost family. “You must be the Strombergs! Welcome!”

“Hi,” said Mum and Dad in unison. I didn’t say anything. My head was insisting that this was all some kind of weird dream.

“These are the Strombergs, the family that has bought the forest,” the guy said to the kids. “I’m Tomas,” he added, which I guessed was aimed at us. “I’ve just got to save the report I’m working on, then I’ll come down. Give me a moment?”

“Sure.” Dad nodded.

Tomas stepped back into the room and then reappeared a second later. “Hey,” he called. “They did tell you about the children, right?”

Mum and Dad both laughed, once again as if everything in this situation was entirely normal and not epically screwed up in any way.

“Oh, yes,” said Mum, with a smile that made me realize I hadn’t seen her smile, not really, in a while. “They told us about the children.”

No one had told me about the children.

Chapter Two

An hour later we were all sitting around a properly stoked fire in what I assume was once a ballroom or something. Now it was mostly empty apart from a long wooden table that ran down the middle and three large leather sofas arranged around a massive stone fireplace at one end of the room.

The kids – and it turned out that the group we’d seen were only a sample of the girls and boys who were in residence – were sat around the table, eating dinner from a buffet that had been laid out on another table by the wall. Well, I say they were eating dinner, but they could have been initiating World War III. How can twenty kids make so much noise? My parents and Tomas didn’t seem to notice. The four of us helped ourselves to food and then we moved over to the sofas, where Mum and Dad went about getting all cosy despite the fact that our new home already seemed to be occupied.

“When the estate agent explained to us about the programme, we thought it was a wonderful idea,” said my mum. She’d got her feet tucked up under one of the sofa cushions, like she used to do back at home. “How long have you been running it?”

What programme? I asked silently. Can someone please tell me what the hell is going on? I wasn’t going to ask out loud, though. I still wasn’t talking to my parents.

“This’ll be my fifth year,” Tomas said. “It’s been pretty successful, I’m pleased to say. I’m from the region, and it’s important to me to get kids from further afield interested in what I’ve been doing here.” He leaned forwards, his elbows on his knees, hands clasped together, his face eager. “It might be too soon to bring this up, but do you have any thoughts about whether you’d be willing to continue letting us use the plantation? It’d be great if the programme could continue.”

I shifted in my seat. Seriously, what were they on about? What programme?

“We’ve already talked about it and we’d love you to continue,” said my dad as Mum nodded. “To be honest, we’ll probably need the income, at least to begin with.”

“Fantastic!” said Tomas, with a disturbingly wide grin. “There are so few places open to running conservation courses these days. The larger plantations don’t want to know – too many legal issues involved in letting non-employees loose on their land.”

Conservation. So that was it. Tomas was a tree-hugger and his purpose in life was to instil the noble art of tree-hugging into the next generation. Because, obviously, given that Sweden is only seventy per cent forest, we’re really struggling to get anything going in that department. That other thirty per cent could really use a helping hand before it’s too late.

“I love that you’ll be continuing the family-run tradition here. Storaskogen has such a fascinating history,” Tomas went on. “I’ve always thought someone should write a book about it. Back in the 1940s it almost went under – timber yields were too low to make it viable and it nearly ended up absorbed into one of the larger plantations. But somehow it turned a corner and it’s flourished ever since, which is remarkable for such a relatively small operation. I’m sure you’ll enjoy getting to know the place. I’m just sorry you’ve got to share your new home with these hoodlums for the next few days,” he added, glancing over at the chaos vortex that was in the process of swallowing the table.

Mum smiled but it was a bit lopsided, as if someone had stapled one side of her lips to her teeth. “It’s nice,” she said. “Nice to have the children here, I mean.”

Dad reached over and squeezed her hand as the door at the end of the room opened and an old lady tottered in carrying an empty tray. She gave us a look that suggested we smelled of boiled cabbage and then made straight for the kids’ table to start clearing the plates. She looked about ninety, but she moved too fast for that, with strange little jumping tiptoe steps as if she were about to break into a run but kept thinking better of it.

“Ah – that must be Dorothea, is it?” Dad asked brightly.

“The housekeeper – yes.” Tomas nodded.

“Dorothea,” Dad called, standing up and making to go to her, “we haven’t had a chance to meet you yet. Why don’t you leave that for a bit? Come and have a drink instead, then we’ll help you clear the table.”

The old woman kept her back turned as she continued to pile dirty plates on to her tray. She didn’t say a word.

“Dorothea?” Dad said again, a little louder this time. I guess he was assuming that she was deaf, which was a pretty fair assessment, under the circumstances. But the old woman could obviously hear perfectly well, because at that point she turned round and stared at him.

“Hi,” Dad said again, with slight uncertainty. “Come and have a drink – we’d love to say hello properly.”

The housekeeper looked over at the three of us still seated on the sofa. It felt a little like being stared at by one of those paintings whose eyes seem to follow you around the room. Then she turned on her heel and disappeared back through the door. It banged shut behind her. Dad came back to the sofa, a pained look crossing his face.

“Don’t worry about her,” Tomas told him. “She’s a strange old stick, but no one knows this place better than she does – she’s worked here for decades. She’s stuck in her ways, but she’ll get used to you.”

Dad smiled and sat down again. “I’ll have to launch a charm offensive against her. I’m famous for them, aren’t I, darling?”

Mum again. Not me. Just in case that wasn’t clear to you by now.

“In future, I can see us going back to Stockholm when the season’s over, but we’ll be staying here this winter,” Dad went on. “Mainly so I can go over the books and try to work out how to get the business restarted. I need to re-establish some of the sawmill contacts. I’ve been looking at the lay of the land and there’s a large swathe of unmanaged forest in our northern sector that I want to clear over the next year.”

Tomas’s smile froze. He stared at Dad.

“You can’t be serious,” he said.

“Sorry?” Dad asked.

“That’s the old-growth forest you’re talking about.”

Dad shrugged. “I guess it must have been there a long time, yes.”

“‘A long time’?” Tomas repeated with a slight edge of laughter to his voice that had nothing to do with humour. “Try thousands of years.”

Tomas was annoyed, I realized. Not only annoyed – he was angry. I sat up straighter. Things had suddenly become far more interesting.

“I’ve done the research,” Dad said, oblivious. “It makes far more economic sense to level that section of land and plant more managed forest.”

“Well,” said Tomas slowly. “Yes, I suppose that’s probably true – if you’re a complete Neanderthal with no sense of wider ecological responsibility.”

Dad opened his mouth, but at first no sound came out. His eyes bugged in surprise. “Now, hold on a—”

“Have you even seen what you’re planning to cut down? Actually, don’t bother to answer that, because I already know the answer. Of course you haven’t. Even if you did, you wouldn’t understand what you were looking at.”

“Tomas…” Mum began, in her placating tone of voice, but Dad cut in before it did any good.

“I’m pretty sure I don’t need to see an extra hectare or two of fir trees, however old they are, to know what they’re like. Why do conservationists assume that everyone else is a complete imbecile?”

“Well, for a start, they’re not fir trees,” Tomas said angrily. “Which, if you had truly done any meaningful research, you would know.”

“Of course I know that,” Dad laughed. “Up here they’ll be Scots Pine or Norway Spruce. It’s a figure of speech, Tomas. They all look the same. Most people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, so what does it matter except to score some stupid self-righteous point?”

“It matters,” Tomas hissed, “if the person who is supposed to be caring for this area can’t tell the difference – or worse, doesn’t care.”

“They’re all trees,” Dad pointed out. “They’re all trees and they’re all on my land. Which, as you pointed out yourself, has been managed to produce timber commercially for decades.”

“Excuse me,” Tomas said. “I need to see to the children.” Then he stood up and walked over to the kids’ table, deliberately turning his back on us.

I was impressed. It usually takes longer for Dad to wind people up that badly. I got up, too.

“Well,” I said, “all this excitement is too much for me. I’m going to bed. Try not to piss off any more locals, Dad, yeah? They’ve probably all got pitchforks and flamethrowers.”

I left them there and went up to my room again. I’d only seen it for about five minutes so far, when I trailed along after the removal men with my single crate. Mum had already chosen where I was going to sleep.

“Just to begin with,” she’d said. “You can move later if you want to.”

It wasn’t a bad room, all things considered. It was big – of course it was, everything in this crazy house was big – and it was at the back of the house. It was pretty square – in shape as well as décor, but what else could I expect? There was a huge bed with duvets and blankets layered on top of it. My plastic crate was standing in the middle of the polished wooden floor. It was blue, floating on the ocean of wood like a confused Noah’s ark.

I went to the window. It was dark outside, with a fat moon and weak little stars hanging in the night sky. The trees surrounded the house, the forest starting a few metres from the back wall. They definitely looked like fir trees to me, whatever Tomas had said. They all had that triangular Christmas-tree look to them, although you’d have to have a pretty big house to fit one of these in the corner of your living room. A house like this one, in fact. I still couldn’t get my head around the fact that we were supposed to be living here now. That this was supposed to be our house. I mean, our place in Stockholm hadn’t been a shoebox either but this was something else. I wasn’t sure I liked it, and that wasn’t only because I was angry with my parents for disrupting my life. It was too big, too strange. It didn’t feel … right.

I stared out at the trees for a while. They were massive, all packed close together. There was a slight wind moving their spindly tops, but under that they were one dense, black mass. There was a sound, too. I thought it was the wind at first – but it was sharper than that: one single high note, rising through the trees to pierce the sky. It seemed to go on and on – more than a whistle, less than a song. It soared towards the stars and then suddenly dipped again, lower, lower, only to hike higher again.

Then the trees stopped moving. All of them.

They just … stopped.

It must have been the wind dropping but still, it was creepy. Then I realized that the sound was still there, rising and falling. So it definitely wasn’t the wind. Then it stopped, too. Everything outside my window was silent and dark. Empty. A void. A second later the fir trees started moving again, all at once, like they’d never stopped.

I tugged the curtain shut and turned my back on the window. Then I went to the bed and got in. I didn’t even undress. I pulled the duvet over my head and took my phone out of my pocket.

Not a single bar. Not one.

There’s a song in the trees.

They whisper rage,

whisper murder.

It is time, they say.

Do you remember?

Do you remember what must be done?

Do you remember what is owed?

Chapter Three

My wake-up call the next morning was laughter. Not the pleasant, happy-go-lucky kind. This was the hysterical horror-film kind from something that needed to be put out of my misery. It rolled through the hallway outside my room along with the manic beat of running feet, as performed by a drummer with zero sense of rhythm. I’d just decided that I was about to be eaten by zombies when an exasperated male voice yelled something. The racket descended to a harsh whisper and I remembered the children. Then I remembered everything else. If I hadn’t been seriously starving, I would have pulled the duvet over my head and gone back to sleep. Instead, I dragged myself out of bed. It’s safe to say that my feelings about this move had not improved.

There was a mirror on one wall of the room, large and oblong, about the same size as me. It was pretty ancient. I think the frame had been gold once but now it looked the way an old coin does, rubbed dull. It also had those weird age spots all over the glass. Maybe once it’d had sentimental value and that’s why it hadn’t been thrown out, because as something to check your reflection in it was pretty useless. Not that I cared. I rarely looked at myself in the mirror and whenever I did I wished I hadn’t bothered. I thought about changing my clothes, but I couldn’t be bothered to do that either. It wasn’t as if anyone would be able to tell the difference. Everything I wear is black or grey, or was once black and is now grey. And even if I had cared, there wasn’t anyone in this forest to impress anyway.

Downstairs the same table was surrounded by the same mass of kids, all talking at once as they tried to stuff food into their mouths. There was no buffet this time and I stood in the doorway for a while, wondering whether the people who actually owned the house were likely to have a chance to get breakfast. Then, as it dawned on me that I didn’t know where the kitchen was and that it was entirely possible I’d get properly lost if I went looking for it, Dorothea appeared. She scuttled out of a door across the other side of the hallway with that weird walk, wearing an old pea-green dress, flat shoes that may once have been brown but were now scuffed a dull white, a brown cardigan and an apron. The apron had big cheery red flowers on it. That gave me the creeps. It was as if Cruella de Vil had decided to put her hair up in bunches with pink spotty ribbon.

“You’ll be wanting breakfast, I suppose,” she muttered as she passed me. Then she jerked her head, which seemed to be saying that I should follow her.

Beyond the next door she opened was an oasis of calm, populated by my parents. They were sitting at a small round table covered with a white tablecloth. For a moment I had a similar feeling to the one I’d had the night before in my room: that we were in a hotel rather than somewhere that was supposed to be our home. Everything felt slightly skewed. I stood there stupidly. My parents looked up and seemed as awkward as I did.

The old woman jerked her head at the table. There was one empty place setting.

“Dorothea,” my dad began as I sat down. “You really don’t have to make us breakfast every day. We’re very happy to do it ourselves.”

Dorothea gave a half shrug but didn’t say anything. She sloped off through yet another door, appearing a few minutes later with a plate of bread rolls and some cheese and ham. She plonked them down in front of me. In his usual head-in-the-sand way, Dad seemed oblivious to the nuclear levels of hostility she was emitting and carried on speaking in a forced, cheery tone that made him sound like a totally patronizing idiot.

“So, we were wondering, Dorothea, if you could give us some information about the history of the place? I mean, you’ve been housekeeper here for so long, and—”

Dorothea turned her back and walked away. She was halfway to the door before her mutter made it back to the table. “Got to get the bread out of the oven.”

My rolls were very definitely fresh. They were still hot, in fact, suggesting that there was nothing left in the oven to come out, but I didn’t tell Dad that. He looked crestfallen. I felt bad. OK, so sometimes he can be an idiot but I have to admit that he does mean well most of the time.

“There are showers, you know,” Mum said, looking me up and down.

“Good morning to you, too,” I said.

“A shower every morning would probably put you in a better mood,” she said.

“I’m the one that needs to be in a better mood?”

Dorothea appeared again, this time with coffee, which she bashed down on the table so hard I was surprised that the cafetiere didn’t break. Then off she went again, with that strange fast-slow skitter, back through the door into the kitchen.

“Why is she here?” I asked.

“She lives here,” Dad said. It was a useful clarification because obviously, before he’d told me that, I’d been under the impression that she teleported into the house every day from somewhere else. “She’s got a bedroom in the attic.”

“But why? We bought the house, not her, right? Can’t we sack her or something? She gives me the creeps.” Although I had to admit that her bread rolls were pretty good.

“Dorothea’s lived here at Storaskogen for most of her life,” Mum said, looking as annoyed as she sounded. “She doesn’t have any family left and she’s an old woman with nowhere else to go – we can’t turn her out. I can’t believe you’d even suggest such an unkind thing.”

“All right, all right.”

“She can keep working as long as she wants to,” Mum went on.

I saw Dad cast a glance at her, which she avoided. It made me think this was an argument they’d already had. It was probably one of those weird adult compromize things. Dad had won the ‘let’s move to the middle of nowhere and completely screw up our lives’ argument and Mum had won the ‘let’s keep the creepy, rude old bat’ argument.

“Or until she’s too frail,” Mum added. “Then we’ll work something out. But I’m not just turning her out of her home. Who would do that?”

I opened my mouth to answer but Dad had apparently decided that it was a rhetorical question and cut in instead.

“So, Tomas and the children will be out of the house most of the day,” he said. “I want you to help me take an equipment inventory, starting with the outbuildings.”

I sighed. “Stocktaking? Really? Do I have to? Can’t Mum do it?”

“Your mum’s tired after the journey yesterday. She needs a rest. Anyway, she wants to do the same inside the house, don’t you, darling?”

Mum nodded. She was looking pretty pale and tired, I had to admit, but hey – weren’t we all?

“What’s the rush?” I asked. “Aren’t we here for, like, ages? Can’t we take a breath first?”

A familiar line furrowed between Dad’s eyebrows. “I would have thought you’d like to learn more about our new home and its surroundings.”

“Er, no. What I’d really like is an internet signal.”

Dad sighed. “Do you have to be so difficult?”

“I’m the one being difficult? Because I want to be connected to the outside world, that’s being difficult?”

“You could try making a bit of an effort…”

“Why should I? You brought me here. I didn’t have a choice. Why do I have to make the effort?”

Dad said nothing. I knew I hadn’t won the argument – he’d just got tired of having it.

I didn’t really listen to the rest of their conversation over breakfast. I munched my way through my food, wondering what Poppy and Lars were doing at that very moment. I kept checking my phone in case it miraculously generated its own signal but of course it didn’t.

I left our breakfast room as the children were preparing to head out for their morning activity. They were all in the entrance hall, making so much noise that I swear I could feel the floor juddering under my feet. As I was trying to work out how to get to the stairs without having to negotiate a mass of flailing feet and arms, Tomas waded into the centre of the maelstrom and held up his arms. The noise level dipped slightly.

“Right!” he shouted. “Let’s go!”

Watching the expedition leave the house was like observing some insanely excited military operation in one-third scale. At their tutor’s shout the kids all lined up in twos with their matching bright red jackets and little packed lunches. Then Tomas led them out and they all trooped through the double doors and away into the line of trees beyond.

Of course I ended up helping Dad. He has this knack for guilt-tripping. It works on everyone, so well that they usually end up going along with his plans whether they want to or not. It was another possible explanation for how we ended up at Storaskogen in the first place. If I hadn’t been so mad with Mum for letting it happen, I’d probably have asked her about it. Anyway, the alternative to helping Dad seemed to be starting the homeschooling shenanigans he’d mentioned before we left Stockholm. A pile of algebra textbooks had been strategically placed in an ominous position on one of the hallway tables. After I’d seen them, stocktaking didn’t seem like too bad an option after all.

There were three outbuildings: one large metal barn that looked quite new and two slightly smaller wooden structures that could have been in the same place for a hundred years, they looked so old. The newer barn had been built between the older two so that they formed a line that faced one side of the house, with their backs to the surrounding forest. Between the house and the outbuildings someone had poured gravel to make a driveway as wide as the road that led in through the plantation.

It was the newer barn that Dad marched towards. I trailed behind, wondering how my life had come to this. It was a gloomy day with heavy cloud overhead, hanging so low that the tops of the firs seemed to press right against it. Whatever sun was up there looked like I felt – as if it’d rather go back to bed and do this whole getting up and existing thing another day.

“Right,” said Dad as we reached the barn doors. He thrust a clipboard towards me. “You hold that. Let’s get going.” He unlocked the door and dragged it open. I peered into the slatted dark inside.

“Wow,” I said, despite myself.

Dad moved to stand beside me with his hands on his hips. He nodded. “There’s some pretty serious stuff in here.”

For once he was right. Inside the barn was a series of huge pieces of machinery that would have had engineering geeks wetting their pants. We wandered in and looked around. Everything was clearly designed for felling, stripping, slicing and dicing trees in the most efficient way possible. The biggest chunk of change was a truck-like thing with six caterpillar wheels and a mean-looking grabber on the front. The grabber was obviously detachable as there were other fittings dotted around – some that looked like giant scorpion pincers, others with large circular saws. There was also what seemed to be a portable conveyer belt with wheels and two caged trailers.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. No, really – I do, I’m smart like that. You’re reading this and thinking, Well, dur. You guys are on a timber plantation. Of course there are going to be big bits of forestry equipment all over the place. And yet you sound confused. Seriously, how dumb are you? And I get that, I do.

But see, here’s the thing. It wasn’t the equipment that was weird. It was the state it was in. Because hardly any of it had been used. There was one truck with tyres that might have seen a few miles but that was it. Everything else belonged on a catwalk for seriously large machinery. That big harvester? There was shrink-wrap plastic sealed around all the levers in the cockpit. There was still a clear plastic coating on the windscreen – you know, like the sort you get on a new phone and have to peel off. There must have been over six figures’ worth of shiny just-rolled-out-of-the-factory equipment standing in that barn and none of it had even been touched.

So, yeah. Bet you’re not feeling quite so smug now, right?

“Where did all of this come from?” I asked Dad as he checked over one of the chainsaws. “Did you have it delivered before we got here?”

“The previous owner bought it all and then decided to sell the plantation. Most of it’s never been used – he’d only just started logging when he decided to jump ship,” Dad said. “Good for us, I can tell you – I got all of this for a fraction of what it would have cost new.”

I frowned. “Why did he change his mind so quickly?”

Dad shrugged. “Originally he was going to clear-cut all of the old forest to rejuvenate the young timber stock – that was what gave me the idea in the first place. Maybe he realized it was a bigger job than he’d thought and decided he couldn’t devote all the time to it that it would need. His wife died of cancer a few years ago, sadly, so he was bringing up their son on his own. Doing that here would be pretty difficult even without the stresses of running the plantation. I think he’s only in his thirties. Whatever the reason, he sold up and they both left.”

I stared at the teeth on one of the rotary cutters. Mum gets pissed off if I buy a packet of cereal and don’t finish it but this guy gets away with spunking hundreds of thousands on brand-new equipment, uses it for five minutes and then changes his mind.

There is no justice in the world.

Chapter Four

I helped Dad out for a couple of hours, ticking off the names of equipment from his list as he foraged around in the barn and yelled out weird things like “Rottne H8”. By the end of the exercise he seemed pretty happy and I’d crossed off everything on his list, so I guess that meant the absent owner hadn’t pulled a fast one and nicked off with a random saw blade that Dad had paid for.