Strindberg's Star by Jan Wallentin Read Free Book Online Page A

ring, when he had almost given up:
    “Hall?”
    “Oh, it’s just the local paper. Hey, can’t you call later this week, there are so many people calling right now.”
    “But we would really like …”
    “Wait,
Dalakuriren
… ?” Hall’s voice changed. “Weren’t you the one who claimed that I had said something about it being a woman down there? A little girl? In that case you don’t need to call at all, you with your shitty journalism.”
    Again the intern was sitting with a silent phone in his hand.
    He looked dejectedly down at the first page of the notebook. There, circled in black ink, it just said:
    Copper vitriol???
    The phrase “copper vitriol” got thirty-three hits in
Dalakuriren
’s index of articles, and apparently it was something you ought to have heard of if you worked at a local paper in Falun.
    He began to read the first fragment of a sentence that the search engine had found:
    … which was found in 1719, well preserved in copper vitriol . Fet-Mats was …
    According to the article, the man’s real name had been Mats Israelsson, a twenty-year-old mine worker who had lost his way and disappeared in Great Copper Mountain. It had happened one March evening, just before Easter, when he had just become engaged to a woman named Margareta Olsdotter.
    The intern rubbed his temples. In March of 1677, no one had spent much time on large-scale search-and-rescue operations in order to find one isolated missing mine worker. The only one who hadn’t given up was Mats’s fiancée, Margareta, who would have time to become aged and bent during her search.
    She had been waiting for forty-two years when by chance, in 1719, a team of miners had found a dead man at a depth of 480 feet. He had been lying in something called the Mårdskinn shaft, in a hole filled with water and …
copper vitriol!
    The intern’s eyes came to a halt. He read on:
    The deceased had looked as though he had drowned very recently, and his body was still completely soft. Those who had found him were surprised, because no one had been reported missing in the mine recently, and moreover, this particular shaft had been closed off since the great mine collapse of 1687.
    Once they had managed to carry him up into the daylight, their confusion increased—no one was able to recognize the dead man’s face. What they had before them was a large young man of about twenty, heavy and in good health (other than being dead) and with a body that seemed completely untouched by the passage of time. A week or so later, when there was a mine meeting and the corpse was displayed, an old woman stood up, shaking with sobs.
    Margareta Olsdotter had immediately recognized her betrothed, and three of the mine worker’s elderly friends also identified the dead man as Mats Israelsson. It had been recorded in the minutes of the mine meeting that the only thing that distinguished the youth who had gone down into the mine in 1677 from the one who had come up in 1719 was his hair, which had continued to grow after his death, meter after meter, shiny, wavy, and black.
    “This is starting to seem like García Márquez,” the intern mumbled. But at the next paragraph he stiffened.
    The key to the puzzle had been
the high levels of copper vitriol
in the air and water in the Mårdskinn shaft.
    Copper vitriol had long been known for its ability to preserve lumber—among other things, it was used as an ingredient in Falu red paint. Now it kept a corpse from rotting for forty-two years.
    The intern had a dry feeling in his mouth. What was it that the Stockholm policeman had said again?
The deceased has been downin the mine for several days, and maybe much, much longer
. He scrolled further:
    Mats Israelsson’s body had been so well preserved that it hadn’t even decayed when it was lifted to the surface. Year after year, the vitriol-brined skin had remained just as soft. The Royal Board of Mines had become so fascinated with the case that they had exhibited the