Midway through the Mountains.

When he awoke that morning, Dylan knew that it was once again because of the dream. The terrible sweat that lay upon his brow and upon his body and in the tangled crack of his boxers was indication enough. The morning sun, that at this point of the year and in this part of the world never fully set, had transformed the tent into a greenhouse, pooling their condensation sickeningly over their heads upon the nylon roof, yet the sweat that he lay in was icy cold. He got up stiffly, careful not to disturb the sleeping form of his girlfriend, and managing, nevertheless, to tread upon her extremities as he clambered out of the tent’s entrance. In the cramped confines, she seemed to have sprouted at least two extra pairs of arms and legs. His own limbs, in comparison, had diminished, becoming stiffer, more ungainly, and overall less useable. He felt with growing sullenness the ache of fatigue as they continued, day after day, their hike. Anna’s initial encouragement had soon faded in the face of his discomfort; they walked now, more often than not, in total silence: his demands, more and more frequent as the hike dragged on, for a rest or for a cigarette seemed to frustrate her. When they did stop, she would use these few minutes- far too few in Dylan’s opinion- to check the distance that they had traversed in a manner that he was sure was intended to be aggravating and accusatory. She denied this strenuously- how could simply looking at a map be interpreted as anything else? – but there was something implicit in her loud sigh and crumpled frown that he was certain was directed at him. He relished, guiltily, these few moments before she awoke.

Outside, the sun’s pale watery light had just begun to touch the furthest corners of his vision. The tiny pit-stop of Abisko, and the comfortable hotel that they had spent their first night in, were almost indistinguishable. This high up in the mountain range, the vast and impenetrable landscape, within which Sweden blended into Norway, was the only thing that Dylan could see. Beneath him, obscured faintly by the brush of clouds, there was only a vast terrestrial plain that, for all its jutting mountains and wooded forests, presented itself to the eye as a great flatness. Like a close view of an aged face, the landscape had folded itself into wrinkles, folds, crags: perhaps it was simply that the ravines and the mountains cancelled one another out, but Dylan felt that the Swedish mountains, despite their height- buttressing roughly from the ground like poorly-capped teeth- conjured up an image of great horizontal, rather than vertical, expansion, as though he were looking at a desert. In the winter, Anna had told him sleepily on their first night in Abisko, the glaciers that topped the mountains would grow, swallowing the entire thing in sometimes only a single night of heavy snow. Within another week, the town would be subsumed too, and there the entire region would remain, frozen until the snow softened, and the skiing season began, and the tourists arrived in their garish jumpsuits and with their strange southern accents. Until then however, while the ice was thick and the snow wet, no one could leave their house, or reach larger civilization by train or road. They could only draw their curtains and stoke their fires against the luminous snow that lay in wait for them outside. Anna had sounded enamoured, in her half-conscious state, of the winter snow. She had spoken eagerly too of the picturesque nature of the northern Swedish mountains, especially during Summer, and of the exhilaration of hiking them. Looking down upon them now however, Dylan felt no whisper of beauty within him. With his aching feet and sore back, he could think of nothing other than the wrinkled, snaggle toothed, grinning face that the landscape reminded him of. He shivered. The dream was still clearly with him.

He smoked a cigarette, and then another, while he tried to work out how to get the coffee going. The little gas-stove that they had brought refused to turn on for him, and anyway he did not know how to assemble the tripod upon which he was supposed to boil the water. Like everywhere else in Sweden, he felt clumsy, out of place. When Anna awoke, she only noted in silence the mess that he had made of her father’s equipment, before promptly fixing the tripod and stove and brewing them both a cup of coffee. Dylan sipped his, quiet with anger, though at whom it was directed he was unsure. He felt a superiority in her attitude that he knew she would never admit, though he knew that her lack of response to his muttered “thanks” was proof enough. He felt keenly upon him, like the sweat of his dream, the suspicion of her disdain. Outside of a few festivals, he had never been camping before, and never anywhere more than thirty minutes from a town. He had never assembled a tent before, had never made a fire from scratch, had never walked more than an hour or two. All of these skills, previously useless in the city that he had never left, now highlighted his inferiority to Anna, who had gone camping every summer, like clockwork, with her strapping family.

It had been her family that had suggested this trip. His initial meeting with them had hardly been a success and he still harboured faintly the suspicion that their suggestion to go hiking had been only a veiled attempt to get rid of him for a week. When they had arrived at what Anna brashly called “the country cottage” in the southern archipelago, he had been taken aback by the ’cottage’s lushness and size. Her family also owned all of the surrounding land for miles, and a bevy of motor and sailing boats that they kept tethered at the dock only feet away from the house. Such opulence was apparently not uncommon among Sweden’s middle class, but Dylan, who had known only his crowded childhood home, then his pokey student housing, and finally the studio that he now lived in, began to feel the first stirrings of the angry shame that would come to characterise his entire trip to his girlfriend’s home country. As he had climbed out of the car and stared at the cottage and its own private dock, he had spied Anna’s assortment of brothers- all taller and broader and blonder than the last- diving gracefully, porpoise-like, into the archipelago’s calm waters.

Dylan was not a strong swimmer, and the brothers’ polite attempts to include him were stymied. They had offered to teach him to sail, and he had promptly almost wrecked the boat. Afterwards, with that polite bluntness that was so alien to the English, Sixten had shaken his head, and said “perhaps this was not such a good idea”. The statement had come to take on a mournful, prophetic, operatic nature that Dylan was worried had infected not only his entire trip, but also his relationship. Just as the Swedes’ country home threw into unflattering relief his own small apartment in the city centre, the entire family seemed to draw out his weaknesses, his insecurities. He was shorter than them all, even the teenagers, and had quickly abandoned the idea of taking off his shirt and learning to swim, when he first saw all four brothers and even the father, splashing confidently with the unlearned grace of a marble statue. It was with a very peculiar kind of horror, the sort that seemed to send him outside of himself, that he realised that they swam, with careless abandon, in the nude. It was with yet more horror that he realised that this was the norm, and he suffered several agonizing sessions in their sauna, sweating through his long trunks and t-shirt while five greased adonises stared at him with polite puzzlement, before he eventually began to refuse invitations to spend time with them.

If he could only have played his discomfort off as a joke, then all might have been well. But he lacked the capacity. His discomfort turned quickly, therefore, to shame, and from shame to sullen anger. It did not help that Anna, who was happy to reconnect with her family after a long separation, paid him little attention: he felt isolated, abandoned, not only been his own inadequacy and the mismatched pride that accompanied it, but by his own girlfriend. She did not notice; her family had been so excited to see him that she was sure that they would get on well. This had, probably, been true. Sixten had told Dylan within five minutes of their meeting that he was keen to play football properly, like the English do. Dylan had promised him a game the next morning. However, like all Englishmen, when Dylan claimed to play football he was referring, more often than not, to the messy seven-a-sides with his friends that served as a prelude to the pub. Sixten had actually meant that he could play football. Dylan was, accordingly, a wheezing jelly before their halftime.

His holiday had passed in a similar manner, in waves of shame and anger. In reaction to the polite disappointment that he imagined to be present in everyone’s eyes, Dylan had grown increasingly morose and withdrawn. He felt himself to be only the regrettable background to Anna’s family reunion, and he sat silent at dinner, as everyone surrounding him chattered away in their strange sing-song language (they all spoke, of course, perfect English but, mute as Dylan was in their company, increasingly forgot to do). Until one day, when the family had been reminiscing on the subject of their old camping holidays together in the North, and Dylan had leapt upon the subject with gratitude, hopeful for a week alone with his girlfriend. Within a night, camping gear had been borrowed, train tickets had been booked and Dylan was hopeful again for the first time in over a week. He imagined the hike only in the context of the few countryside walks that he had taken, and had not been mentally prepared for the gruelling, mountainous reality. And now he imagined the same disappointment that emanated from Anna’s family reflected now in her own eyes as she watched him pause their walk in order to take his fourth smoke break of the morning, or fail to set up the tent, or complain of his blistered feet.

When they had finished their coffee, they ate an energy bar of some kind before setting off. Dylan’s face felt itchy, puffed; he took an antihistamine while Anna packed up the tents, their equipment, and their sleeping bags. Within thirty minutes, he felt again the familiar ache in his thighs and calves and feet that had plagued him since their first day of walking. His breath came with increasing strenuousness as the air grew irritably cold. He craved every cigarette that he smoked, but each puff made him cough, shamefully, as Anna watched him. He began to fall behind his girlfriend’s more powerful stride, although he knew that she was walking as slowly as she could for him: he resented her for it. As they climbed higher, the wrinkled face of the mountains fell even further behind them, and all evidence of human civilisation was blinked out of existence. One moment, Dylan had been looking behind him longingly at where he imagined the Abisko hotel to be, and the next, there was no longer even the suggestion of a focal point upon which he could fix his desire. As the town vanished, so too did all reminder that they were people bound to society and to the earth, from which, despite his heavy muscles, Dylan felt that he might accidently float away to disappear into the enormity of the globed sky. He wanted a break, a smoke, something to eat and something to drink, but he resented having to ask, like a child. Instead he pointed off the path and into the green and craggy meadow that covered this mountain face, at something that he had increasingly seen over the last few days: “What’s that?”

Anna turned and looked at the rock at which he was pointing, the like which he had seen multiple times over the course of their hike; in the middle of a grassy slope, or a thorned bush, or resting ridiculously upon an almost vertical ascent, there was, more often than not, a tall, smooth and uniform rock, an enormous rectangle, taller than a man, completely divorced from its brethren, or from any reason to be there- all alone, sticking out incongruously in a surrounding that wanted nothing to do with it. They looked almost as though they had been planted purposely, as a warning, or a message of some kind, to all those foolish enough to broach this high up upon the mountains. Or so Dylan, in his tired and negative frame of mind, chose to interpret it.

“Jötnar” Anna said, looking at the stone and smiling.

“You what?”

“In school, in our religion classes, we learned that the Jötunn would throw those stones. When they were fighting each other, or sometimes Thor, and when they missed in their throw, these enormous stones just ended up in the funniest places, miles away from the fight. That’s why you find them standing there, all on their own, away from all the other stones. Or some people say that the stones are the Jötunn, but frozen into rock by the sun. Kind of funny, aren’t they?”

Dylan had only drawn attention to the rock in order to take a break, but considering it properly for the first time, he found it a rather sinister-looking thing: a solid thumbprint in a field of green and blue, where it had no right to be. He smoked his cigarette pensively. “What are they? The yotann?”

“I don’t know how to translate it. I think in English you would call it giant, or maybe ice giant. But that doesn’t really explain them. They’re big, but the Gods are big too and they aren’t giants. They’re easiest to understand as a sort of opposition or an opposite to Odin and Thor and Freja and the gods. Their enemies.”

“Wouldn’t that make them devils? Or demons?”

“Maybe. That’s a little too Christian, though. You can’t think of it in those terms, like that. For most of our history, they weren’t just myths. They were real. It was what we believed, in order to explain-” she waved a vague hand at the rock, and then at the enormous landscape that stretched uncaringly below and above and away from and around them. “It’s from the English that we took Christianity. Though it was never so popular as the old gods.”

Dylan nodded. You needed a crowd to fill a church, to make an audience, and, looking at all of the ruinous, cavernous country, he could understand why most Swedes chose now to be atheists, rather than to believe anything other than their enormous, ferocious myths. That night, after camp had been set up in a crevice formed by a natural overhang of rock, and after two cans of beans had been dutifully eaten, and they were both lying side by side, his head nestled into the crook of her arm, Dylan had asked Anna to tell him more of these Swedish myths that seemed to exert, through the image of the great grey stones, a powerful and repulsive curiosity over him. In response, she told him of the Jötunn’s war with the Norse gods, and of how, in their battles, Thor’s great hammer would pound so heavily upon his enemies’ heads that it shattered the earth and formed, through tectonic force, the great mountains and valleys whose surface they were now traversing precariously like ants upon a heel of bread. The great flat emptiness of his surroundings seemed suddenly explicable to Dylan as he lay almost asleep in the expanse of rock and sky and grass and nothing that seemed to inch closer as he slept, midway through the mountains. The story became entangled with other snippets of history that she had told him previously: of the kings Gustav of Sweden and Christian of Denmark, both respectively known as tyrants in the countries they invaded and by the populations they slaughtered. He heard too, in his last moments, of the story in which the enormous and bearded Thor disguised himself as his sister to be betrothed to the King of the Jötunn in order to reclaim his stolen hammer. He could see them all; tall, cold figures seated around a long wooden table. He was, in fact, only guessing at their height by the length of their pale shanks, for he was crouched, shivering beneath their table, hoping not to be noticed and knowing that if he were, he would be cooked and served to the wedding party. And suddenly there were not many Jötunn, but one, and it paced slowly around the mead hall, emitting long, slow sniffs as it searched for him, its long nails crunching upon the straw.

The dream shifted, changed. Dylan was still crouched upon the floor in a tight ball, but now he was situated beneath his old childhood bed and when he peeked through the cradle of his fingers over his eyes, he saw his adolescent room in almost total darkness, save for the slither of light that patterned through the adjacent door over his old posters, the ones that he had thrown away when he was fourteen. The only other light came from above: the glow in the dark stars upon the ceiling for which his mother had chastised him. She had never been able to get them off without tearing the wallpaper. With a shiver of horror that never became less powerful for its repetition almost every night since he was a child, he knew that it was the same dream as always, and although, as always, he dreaded its arrival, he heard from the ground floor the same crash and splinter of the front door being forced open as it entered. Whatever it was, it was immensely heavy: he heard, as always, its ponderous bulk drag itself along the carpeted hallway, and the thin clatter of legs that were not quite strong enough to support the totality of its weight. At the front of the hallway, he heard a long, low, ragged sniff- a convulsive and bubblingly wet drawing in of breath- as it searched for his whereabouts. Then there was again the awfully delicate tapping of its many legs- their sound betokened more than four, that at least he knew- as it half-skittered and half-dragged itself to the end of the hall, to the bottom of the stairs. There, again, another dreadful sniff- almost a wheeze. A pause. From the hallway it had only to take a right to go up the stairs to the first-floor landing. At the ending of the landing was the corridor and at the end of the corridor was his bedroom. There was an asthmatic hiss and Dylan heard the thing begin climbing the stairs, its legs apparently tangling beneath it. At this point, he knew that he should emerge from his hiding place and run, perhaps jump past it on the stairs if he could. But the thought of seeing its face, of seeing what exactly made the hissing sniff with which he was so familiar- the thought was unbearable. He could only remain curled into a ball beneath a bed that should have been far too small for him. The thing reached the top of the stairs and paused. It did not seem sure of the course that it had taken. He knew his scent must be weak: his mummy and daddy had told him to take a bath before they left, and he could not smell of much more than the children’s apple-scented shampoo with which he had feathered and rinsed his hair. By now, the thing had advanced to his parent’s bedroom and he heard the tap-tap-tap of one of its legs. It seemed to be considering. Then- the door to his parent’s bedroom creaked softly open, and he felt rather than heard, through the vibration upon the floorboards, its entry. There was a pause, and an angry hiss, almost a shriek. It knew that he was not there. It withdrew and seemed almost about to leave- he prayed desperately that this time it would, that it would leave him be, that he could sleep peacefully- before it stopped and he knew that it had seen, or smelt, his door. There was a wet giggle. And, horrifically, he knew that it could not be further than a few feet from him, for he could smell its heavy scent in the air: a cloying stench of urine and of the talcum powder used clumsily to disguise the urine and an underlying rottenness of bad breath. And then all of a sudden, there was the scrape of a leg or a talon upon his door, and the slither of light that had been thrown upon his posters grew, expanded, swallowing the entire wall, before it was extinguished by the dark shadow of whatever was entering. He closed his eyes as tightly as he could, screwing them shut, and shifted his tiny frame into the very corner of the space beneath his bed, where it joined the wall. The smell was growing ever stronger and he had to clap his hands over his eyes to block out the thudding of its legs as it advanced into the room. His chest was bursting from the effort of holding a breath that had long since turned to ice. And then he sensed, rather than felt, a splash of light across his waiting face as something lifted the cover of the duvet that had overlapped the bed and had previously hidden him beneath it. He opened his eyes. It was the wrinkled, rotten-toothed face of his grandmother that glared back at him. Her eyes were as vacant as they had always been in the last few years of her life, though still glaringly full of judgement, and the boiled smell of her piss burned his nostrils and tongue as he drew in breath to scream, and suddenly he knew that he was no longer beneath his bed, and that her reaching arm had vanished and that the dream was fading back into unreality and into the dim fabric of the tent’s roof. The only face that he could see was that of Anna, though the morning half-light that filtered in through the mosquito net gave it a horribly familiar liver-spotted appearance.

“You’ve pissed the bed.” She said, her voice strangely flat and emotionless. “Helvete. You’ve pissed the bed.”

“What?” He pushed himself up and further into an awoken state. A foetid feeling shame was cooling rapidly around his legs and groin. “I can’t have done. That’s impossible.”

“No. Everything’s ruined. Everything’s wet. What happened?”

“It was the dream.” His voice came out embarrassingly close to a sob, though what more pride he had to lose he did not know. “The same one as always. I’m so sorry. I’ll pay for everything. To have it washed. Or to replace it. Please don’t tell your dad. Or Sixten.”

He tried, after, to wash himself as best as he could, but Anna objected to this frivolous use of their drinking water. He would have to wait until they found a stream that he could submerge himself in. Until then, he was forced to dry in the sun, his shame rising off him in a faint mist. Their equipment, they were at a loss to know what to do with. Nauseated, he tried as best he could to ring out his urine from the sleeping bags, but they had absorbed it too hungrily. The tent’s groundsheet was waterproof but when he went to shake it out over the edge of the ravine, he misjudged the wind and succeeded only in shaking a good measure of his piss back into his own face. Anna watched his shamed fumbling in silence, smoking a rare cigarette, that same strange, flat expression upon her face. When eventually they started walking, she made no attempt to walk slowly for him, but strode on up ahead. He could do nothing more than attempt to keep up, a faint lust for her taught thighs tickling his insides, exacerbating the other feeling of angry self-pity that roiled turbulently within him.

The mountain grew less and less verdant as they climbed. More and more often the wide pockets of glacier ice that characterised the beginning of the top of the mountains appeared, and at this point the path began to level out, snaking its way horizontally around the mountain rather than taking them perilously and dangerously to its peak. However, although it had grown less horizontal, the path became, if anything, more difficult to hike: it was comprised now of loose tumbling stones that slid like gravel beneath the boots and retarded Dylan’s progress. Every time they reached an apparent crest or peak, he saw with despair that there was another, higher pinnacle to climb. His legs ached, his shoulders were sore from the weight of his pack, and mosquitos had increasingly begun to hang around him, attracted by the sweet smell of his dried urine. Behind him, the cracked hammer-blows of the fells fell increasingly away: even the other mountains seemed smaller. He felt a desire to fall stupidly backwards and to be carried away, to be absorbed into the emptiness from which he had climbed, and which wanted to swallow him. He could have been at the very ends of the earth and wanted nothing more than to march over its edge.

“What is your dream about?” Anna asked him. It was the first time that they had spoken since the morning. She had stopped and turned around, and he had almost walked into her.

“I’ve told you about it.”

“No, you haven’t. You’ve just said that you have a recurring nightmare.”

He did not know whether or not her expression was mocking. He found it difficult to meet her eyes. “In it, I’m very young. The same age as when my grandmother died. Nine or ten, maybe. I’m hiding beneath my bed and there’s something looking through the house for me. When it finds me, I can see that it’s her- my grandmother, I mean.”

“Your grandmother?”

“Yes. She came to live with us a few years before her death. We looked after her. She was a bit- gone. Dementia, or Alzheimer, or something. I- I don’t really know the difference. And mum and dad were away a lot, so it ended up mainly being me that looked after her. Just making her food, making sure she was comfortable. That sort of thing. But I- I didn’t really like her.”

“Why not?”

He paused. How could he explain to her the dread she had once inspired within him? Her giggling, vacant stare when she was having a bad day, or the sharp, chastising pinches she had used to deliver on her good days, intended to punish, to instruct. She had called him his father’s name and had slapped him heartily whenever he dropped her evening glass of gin, whenever he burnt her food, whenever he had not looked sufficiently pleased at the contents of her toilet bowl that she always insisted on showing him. Something in his chest was caught, unwilling to come undone. “I found her sort of odd I suppose. Like she could do or say anything. One of the symptoms of what she had. And one night, a burglar broke in when my parents were away, and I was asleep in bed, and she confronted the burglar with her stick, and he pushed her over and she just died. Like old people do when they fall over. She was ancient. I found her the next morning, on the floor.”

She looked at him with sympathy. “That must have been awful. Why did your parents leave you at such a young age on your own? And why with someone that needed care?”

“They both worked. And that night they both had night shifts they couldn’t change. And she didn’t need care, not really. Or they wouldn’t have left me with her. If I had been better, maybe, or done better, or-”

“Stop. It wasn’t your fault. You should never have had that much responsibility. But-” And she frowned, realising that his story did not quite come together, “-If it was the burglar that killed her, why is she the one that is searching for you? That broke in?”

He felt hot, flustered. He was bad at lying on the spot. “Who knows how dreams work? I didn’t like her very much, and then all of a sudden, she was dead. If I had woken up, I could have rung the police, or the ambulance.”

She nodded, letting it go, sensing his discomfort. Then she said, “I think maybe you should see someone about this Dylan. It is not normal to be this scared of a bad dream, or to have the same bad dream again and again, or to wet the bed-”

“Oh, fuck off.” He said, exasperated, annoyed at being reminded of what still shamed him. In a flash, his irritability had returned.

There was a pause, and her face took on again that same expressionless flatness that she had worn that morning. “Okay then.” And she turned on her heel and began to march away.

“Anna, don’t.” But she was already off, walking quickly into the distance. Dylan allowed, for a second, the same feeling of shame and anger to quietly curdle inside his stomach and to subsume him. Then he took in a breath and followed her with dragging feet.

Within an hour, he needed another pause, another cigarette, another place to sit down. For all of its horizontality, the path still dragged slightly upwards and he scrabbled uselessly over its loose stones. His still-damp underwear chafed against his thighs. Already, he was dreading the idea of going to sleep in their damp sleeping bags in some godforsaken hollow in their godforsaken tent. The midday sun rose and dipped and signalled the coming evening; its intermittent heat and the cold of the wind ensured that he was always uncomfortable, no matter how many layers he stripped off or put on. The path became steadily unbearable: it zigzagged suddenly upwards and became ever steeper, transitioning from loose gravel to mud wet from a nearby river. His boots slipped and threatened to send him crashing sideways into the thorn bushes that flanked what had become only the approximation of a path, the faint and dreary prints of someone who had passed this way long ago. When he did inevitably lose his footing, he pitched forwards and splashed mud all the way up the trousers that he had borrowed from Anna’s father, and across his hands. For a second he considered not getting up, but instead just embracing the cold ground, losing himself within it. Anna had not noticed his fall and was still plodding resolutely up, with all the assuredness of a pack animal. It was then that he heard the voice.

“Hej hej! Vad gör ni?”

There, perched cheerfully upon one of the Jötunn rocks only a few feet away, was a man. Framed against the dwindling sun only his silhouette was visible, nonchalant, and tapping a single boot against one the stone. It had been a few days since Dylan had seen anyone other than Anna and the strangeness of his presence as well as the unnerving singularity of the rock that he sat upon, contributed to the bizarreness of the atmosphere: he goggled dumbly before pulling himself to his feet.

“Hej.” His voice cracked. “Pratar du English?”

The man laughed throatily. “Of course, old man. What brings you two so far up?”

Anna had stopped dead in her tracks, staring at the man. “We’re on holiday,” she said. Her tone was unwelcoming.

“Funny place to take a holiday, I should think. I certainly wouldn’t want to vacation here. Bad weather, bad surroundings. Far too remote for me. Enough to give you he shivers. Still. Takes all sorts. Isn’t that what they say?” He winked roguishly at Dylan, who had begun to rather like this stranger. His manner was warmly familiar. When he tried to recall later, however, what it was specifically about him that he had liked, he drew a blank. In fact, he was later to remember very little about this stranger, despite the striking nature of his attitude. He remembered only that he was probably of average height, though it was difficult to tell when he was sitting upon the rock, and that his face was long and his grin rather keen and dog-like and that he wore silver-rimmed glasses. On the whole, however, his face was so very generic that Dylan struggled to recall any specific characteristics. When he later attempted to reconstruct the man’s appearance from the details that he remembered, he knew instinctively that the portrait was so erroneous that he quickly abandoned the project. In a typically foreign fashion, Dylan only really remembered that the man spoke very good, but very old-fashioned and strongly accented, English.

“If you don’t like it here,” Anna asked, politely but coldly, “then what are you doing here?”

“There’s a party, don’t you know. A midsommar celebration. Rather later but there you are, better late than never.” The stranger replied, “It’s up there, above the mountain. I come every year. We all do. Not much else would make me come this far north. It’s worth the hike. Champagne, good food, good company.”

“Where is it?”

“Up, up, up. Beyond that peak there. By the waterfall. Very picturesque if you like that sort of thing. Can’t say that I do. But the lodge there is rather splendid. Oak and marble and what have you.” He pointed vaguely to an area above where the path split into two, up toward the peak of the mountain where the ground was at its steepest while still being walkable.

Anna frowned. “There’s nothing on the map that high up. Just the waterfall.”

The man laughed. “It’s not on the map. A bit hush hush this gathering. You have to go off the path to even get to the place but it’s really very simple to find. Just head up and you can’t miss it. The only reason it’s remained secret, so to speak, is that no one ever strays off the path.”

From her silence, Dylan knew that Anna was stymied. He knew with a rather smug satisfaction that during all of her hiking experiences, she and her family had never once not followed the official trail laid out by the Swedish Tourist Association. He smiled at the stranger. “It sounds nice. I hope you have a good time.”

“Well come along, by all means. We’d be grateful for some fresh blood. Can get rather boring celebrating with the same old crowd year in year out. There’ll be baths and food and good drink. Not a bad time of it, all in all old chap.”

Dylan liked this idea really very much. He was still wearing the smell of his stale urine like a second skin. “Sounds great. Can you walk us there?”

“No go, old man. I’m out walking a little longer, I think. But it’s no more than a few more hours. Make a start now, you should be there not too long after dusk. Really, you can’t miss it. Where the path forks, you make a right and just head straight up the mountain. And besides, I know some of my friends have gone out for a stroll too. You’re sure to bump into them on your way there; they’ll be happy to point you in the right direction if you get a little waylaid.”

“Sounds great.” In his rapture, Dylan had not noticed a growing annoyance at his elbow: Anna had been pinching the skin on the back of his arm.

“You ought to get walking if you want to be there before dark. I’ll see you both later tonight.”

“Sure,” Dylan replied, and he and Anna walked on, leaving the man resting as he had been before, staring into the distance on top the rock. When they had rounded a bend, Dylan turned to his girlfriend, excited: “well, what do you think? Sounds good, doesn’t it?”

His heart sank at the expression on her face. “Dylan, I’m not sure. There was something not so good about him.”

“What do you mean? He seemed friendly to me.”

“Too friendly. That is not normal in Sweden. And nothing he said made any sense. Baths? There’s no plumbing or running water this high up. We left that behind in Abisko. And champagne? How did they carry crates of champagne so high up in the mountain?”

“By helicopter?” The stupidity of his response annoyed him, and he felt a flare of frustration at her refusal to be cheerful with him.

“And who would build a Lodge so high in the mountain and not put it on the map so that the mountain patrol could find it and use it? He smelt bad too. Like bad breath and piss.”

“You were probably smelling me.”

“No. It came from him. I’m sure of it. And he spoke strange.”

“His English was great.”

“But it was too old fashioned. We don’t learn that sort of English here. I could barely understand him. What did he call you- old boy? Chap? What is that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he learnt it somewhere old-fashioned. Eton, or, or Oxford or somewhere. But we can ask him tonight after we’re fresh and washed and full and have had a drink.”

She shook her head slightly, biting her lip. He felt annoyed. “You of all people shouldn’t be criticising another Swede’s English.”

“You’re being rude. We should go.”

“So that’s it then? No more discussion?” He felt wounded. The promise of a decent night’s sleep and a wash had been tantalisingly close.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

He took the map from her. “Okay, wait a moment. The trail is going to lead around and then further upwards before it forks off. Let’s think about it and then when we get there we can decide.”

Her lack of response was acquiescence enough; his fatigue made welcome of it as confirmation. He was sure that she would change her mind. And as they hiked further along and further up, his pack felt lighter than it had at any point in their trip, and his legs ached less at the thought of a warm bath and a drink and a proper bed and a meal that had not come from a can. The stranger’s vague promises of champagne and interior plumbing snowballed in his imagination: he envisaged a spacious luxury oak-walled dining room, an enormous great table of people laughing and clinking their glasses, and after, a plush mattress and a gently slumbering fire casting its orange light over the duvet. His desire was only increased by the other partygoers that they met along the way- two men who smiled friendlily (Anna, annoyingly, drew behind his back as they passed them) and, incredibly, a woman who wore a plunging red dress and hiking boots.

“Going to the party?” Dylan had asked her.

She smiled back, “You’re the fresh meat, I take it? We’ve heard you’re coming. Everyone’s very excited to meet you.”

“We can’t wait,” Dylan smiled back, while Anna glowered behind him.

They left her behind, smoking a cigarette and stubbing it out on another of the Jötunn rocks, looking for all the world as though she should be in a Stockholm ballroom, if it were not for her boots.

Finally, they reached the path’s fork. Anna seemed determined to continue without stopping, but he blocked her. “What are you doing?”

“What are you doing?” She shot back, “you know that I don’t want to go.”

He stared at her, unbelieving, the hope that had built in his chest dissipating hotly. “How can you be serious?”

“How can you?”

“Stop repeating me.” Hope had turned to frustration. His legs hurt, he smelt bad and he was tired. “Bed, champagne, and a bath. You know it’s on the level, we’ve seen four people going to the same party. How could you not want that? Do you want me to be miserable?”

“Those people weren’t right, Dylan. You must have felt that too. You must know that. You do know that. You’re just lazy.”

“Lazy?” He felt satisfaction in giving in to his frustration and letting all of the anger that he had accumulated over the holiday colour his speech. “I went on this fucking hike, didn’t I? I’ve been walking fucking miles every day and sleeping in a tent. And now I want to have just a little bit of comfort. How is that lazy of me?”

“You went? You wanted to do this hike! My dad mentioned it and you said you wanted to go! And all you’ve done is moan and complain and wet the bed and smoke and sulk! I’m sick of it! I don’t know what makes you happy. Why can’t you just try and be happy?”

The vitriol in her response shocked him. He had to fight the urge to placate her, which he knew would be suicide in winning the argument.

“Happy? I’ve spent this entire holiday on my own with your family. Who are weird, by the way, and really uncomfortable to be around. And you’re asking me why I’m not happy?”

“What’s wrong with my family?”

“You left me!” And he shocked even himself at the force and shrillness of his shout, “You had your perfect little reunion with your friends and with your family and you barely even talked to me. You abandoned me with people I don’t know in a country I don’t know. I thought we were going on holiday together and you just left me alone.”

She looked at him a moment and he saw with fresh rage the disgust splashed across her features. “You embarrass me. You’ve been so rude and uncommunicative to everyone who has tried to talk to you, to get to know you. I couldn’t understand it. No one could. I told everyone you were just shy, and they were sympathetic, and I told myself that too, but you’re just the rudest man I’ve ever met. No one cares if you can’t swim well, or play football, or if you wear trunks in a sauna. I wear a bikini in there. But you can’t stand it, knowing that people are better at something, that they’re comfortable with who they are. That not everyone is as mediocre as you. I can’t believe I brought you here.”

Dylan stared at her, deflated. The balloon knot of anger in his chest had sunk into his stomach. He turned upon his heel, to walk up the mountain. “I want a bath. I’m climbing up to the Lodge”

She snorted. “As if you could.”

And in response, in an instance of sickening humiliation, Dylan’s ankle rolled out from underneath him as he took his first step off the path. He felt a spasm of pain that ran along his leg and tickled even his balls and collapsed messily where he had been standing.

“Fuck.” His breath came in gasps. “Fuck.” He was sick from pain and shame.

Anna stared for a moment, as if deciding whether or not he was serious, before dropping to a crouch next to him. “What is it?”

“My ankle” He rolled with difficulty his trouser leg up to the knee. A purple flower was blooming nauseatingly from flesh that had already begun to swell. “I think it’s broken.”

“It’s sprained. Get up. Lean on me. We can walk together.”

They could not, however. The slightest pressure upon the ankle was agony and Anna could not properly support his weight. After ten hopping half-steps he collapsed again in the grass, pale and sweaty. Anna sighed, “you really cannot walk, can you?”

“No.”

“I thought you were pretending, maybe. To go to the Lodge.”

“No. I couldn’t even make it that far.”

She frowned at the sun which was not very far away from setting. “You really cannot move at all?”

“No.” He wanted to be sick. His boot felt tight and hot around the puffed ankle.

“Okay.” She blew out a breath of frustration and looked at the map. “Okay. There is a tourist station not too far from here. I can walk down to it and ask for help.”

“You’re going to leave me here?” The anger of their argument still hung in the air and he feared ridiculously that she would not return.

“You’ll be fine. Just don’t move. You’re right in the middle of the path and the station is no more than a few kilometres away.”

“A few kilometres? You’ll be hours.”

“No,” She said. “You would be, maybe.” And with that, she began a quick trot down the slope. Dylan watched her go. “Bitch,” he murmured, underneath his breath. In another minute or two, he was completely alone,