The Shapeshifters Read Online Free PDF

it the fox?’ he asks.
    She has cupped her hands against the glass and is breathing hard.
    â€˜Mummy!’
    He tries to climb up on the table, but she pushes him back down. She does it so roughly that he almost falls backwards.
    â€˜No!’ she says.
    He is not sad. But he is angry.
    All he wants is to see what she is seeing.
    He makes another attempt to get to the window, and when she stands in his way he runs towards the door.
    â€˜Magnus!’
    She screams at the top of her lungs, a pleading howl that makes her voice crack. She tries to grab hold of him and knocks the kitchen table with her hip.
    But he has already run outside.
    He is already gone.
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    Because the first news picture of Magnus Brodin, carried in the
Gefle Dagblad
on 24 July 1978, takes up over four columns, there is no need to read the headline to realise that something bad has happened to the boy. That’s always the case when a large face appears in the paper.
    This picture was the only one to be published. A black and white passport photo, probably taken in one of those little booths you have to feed with coins. His hair is unusually thick and cut bluntly across his forehead. He isn’t looking at the camera but down to the side, and he looks a little uncertain, almost afraid, I think. You’d like to imagine that a sliver of fate would show in his eyes. A dark glimmer.
    Another news photo shows two men in grass up to their waists. They are wearing white short-sleeved shirts with epaulettes. Pilot sunglasses, bushy sideburns. One of them is carrying a black briefcase, and it looks odd, a case like that out in the forest.
    The caption tells us they are inspectors in the forensics division of the Falun police force. They look puzzled.
    You could say it’s a photo that speaks volumes.
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    At first the newspapers said Magnus had been kidnapped, but a couple of days later they weren’t so sure.
    Magnus’s mother, Mona Brodin, insisted that a giant had comeout of the forest and taken her child, and despite the fact that the Falun police inspectors found proof that oddly enough appeared to support her statements—footprints of an unprecedented size and depth had been found in the vicinity of the cabin—no particular importance was attached to the unlikely details of her testimony. People preferred to think that the boy had been kidnapped by a taller-than-average man who, in the eyes of the terrified mother, had grown to incredible proportions. A man who had then melted back into the pitch-black fir trees from which he had so threateningly materialised that July evening.
    Or had the trail come from someone not connected with the case? And if so, what had happened to the boy?
    Mona Brodin’s credibility was reduced to practically zero as a result of two things: the prescription for Librium in her handbag and the fact that she continually spoke about the forest animals. She insisted she had seen a hare and a fox showing no indication of their natural enmity on the same day the boy disappeared. It was as demented as it was irrelevant. It didn’t appear in the newspaper.
    Could medication have caused a hallucination? Was there no kidnapper? Could she have taken the boy’s life
herself?
These questions, especially the latter, lay like a repulsive slime over the story. The dreadful event became merely a tragedy, and when the newspapers ceased to write about Magnus it was almost as if he had disappeared for a second time.
    The newspaper clippings have been cut out neatly, if not to say obsessively so. It could have been Sven holding the scissors, but I think it was Barbro. After sitting hunched over the newspaper cuttings for goodness knows how many hours I hardly dare say anything about my recollection of Magnus Brodin’s disappearance,which, in the beginning at least, caused such a sensation in the press and on radio and TV.
The media
, as we call it now. A jigsaw puzzle of yellowing strips of