The Darkest Room

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Translated [from the Swedish] by Marlaine Delargy.

This is where my book begins, Katrine, the year when the manor house at Eel Point was built. For me the manor was more than a house where my mother and I lived, it was the place where I became an adult.

Ragnar Davidsson, the eel fisherman, once told me that large parts of the manor were built with salvaged cargo from a German vessel carrying timber. I believe him. On the wall at the far end of the hayloft inside the barn, the words

IN MEMORY OF CHRISTIAN LUDWIG

are carved into one of the planks.

I have heard the dead whispering in the walls. They have so much to tell.

Valter Brommesson is sitting in a little stone house at Eel Point, praying to God with his hands clasped together. He prays that the wind and the waves sweeping in from the sea this night will not destroy his two lighthouses.

He has experienced bad weather before, but never a storm like this. A white wall of snow and ice that has come howling in from the northeast, stopping all building work.

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