Read Online Strindberg's Star by Jan Wallentin - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Jan Wallentin
Tags: Suspense
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had called Don at home, sounding thoroughly dejected. It
really
had not turned out as he’d imagined, and no matter what that journalist had implied in the article, the story about the ankh had actually been true.
In addition, there was yet another thing he’d found down there in the mine. A document that was difficult to decipher, which Don could perhaps help him with. So once again, when would the researcher from Lund be able to come? Don answered with something evasive and hung up.
But then he suddenly felt the need, from deep within him, to go up to Falun after all, if only to put a stop to the diver’s endless nagging.
He had taped the usual note to the doorjamb of his office at Lund University: In illegible handwriting he had written the message “temporarily out” to all the tiresome students. And at the very bottom—if, contrary to expectation, someone managed to decipher all the digits—was the number to a cell phone that was permanently off. Then he had gotten into his Renault, outside the Department of History offices, and in some magical way, he got its motor to sputter to life.
D on took his eyes from the
Dalakuriren
article and slowly put down his cup. The ankh had caused his memory to start up, and it couldn’t be stopped: the ankh, a cross with a handle,
crux ansata,
the original cross, the symbol for the planet Venus. A hieroglyph that could mean vital force, water and air, immortality and the universe. Although those were only theories, of course; not even the Egyptologists knew what the ankh stood for.
One theory was that the ankh symbolized a womb; another was that it had originally been created as a picture of Egypt, where the vertical shaft was the Nile while the eye represented the delta of theNile valley. Someone who was more practical had suggested that the ankh quite simply depicted a sandal.
On the other hand, if the Rosicrucian Order was to be believed, the symbol of the enlightened, the ankh, could be used as a key to open the gates to the inside of the earth. But who believed the Rosicrucians?
Unfortunately, the answer was a surprising number of the students who came to Don’s seminars in comparative mythology. And for them, it wasn’t just the mysteries of the Rosicrucians that were tempting. Why not Atlantis or flying saucers in Roswell? Why not out-of-context theories about the ten Sephiroth that formed the tree of life in Kabbalah, or a day-long seminar on the lost civilizations of Lemuria and Agartha while you were at it?
W hen he left Karlskrona after his breakdown at the neo-Nazi demonstration up at the apartment buildings in Galgamarken, Don had stayed with his sister at first.
She had always been a loner, just like him, but by this time, she had become more or less a complete recluse. Once a brilliant student of mathematics at the Royal Institute of Technology, she had drifted into a shady programmer subculture that had gotten her a lot of money and some major legal problems, under the label of cybercrime. She had never been convicted, though, much due to the fact that she’d been able to vanish to a place where nobody could bother her anymore.
In her home, his sister had taken care of him during that phase when he had totally lost his grip. It was she who had forced him to find a way to challenge those inner demons, and now afterward, he realized that he had truly been saved by exchanging his medical career for the prolonged studies at the dusty history department in Lund.
B ubbe had filled her cabinet with Nazi symbols like a child who couldn’t stop picking at a scab. For Don, his studies became a way totear the wound open in order to find a way out of the darkness of that 1950s house. In his research, he had wanted to dig his way past the symbols that, for him, had been charged with such fear. By confronting them, he had hoped to be delivered from his past and to find some retribution for his grandmother’s fate.
He had devoted the first part of his
really
had not turned out as he’d imagined, and no matter what that journalist had implied in the article, the story about the ankh had actually been true.
In addition, there was yet another thing he’d found down there in the mine. A document that was difficult to decipher, which Don could perhaps help him with. So once again, when would the researcher from Lund be able to come? Don answered with something evasive and hung up.
But then he suddenly felt the need, from deep within him, to go up to Falun after all, if only to put a stop to the diver’s endless nagging.
He had taped the usual note to the doorjamb of his office at Lund University: In illegible handwriting he had written the message “temporarily out” to all the tiresome students. And at the very bottom—if, contrary to expectation, someone managed to decipher all the digits—was the number to a cell phone that was permanently off. Then he had gotten into his Renault, outside the Department of History offices, and in some magical way, he got its motor to sputter to life.
D on took his eyes from the
Dalakuriren
article and slowly put down his cup. The ankh had caused his memory to start up, and it couldn’t be stopped: the ankh, a cross with a handle,
crux ansata,
the original cross, the symbol for the planet Venus. A hieroglyph that could mean vital force, water and air, immortality and the universe. Although those were only theories, of course; not even the Egyptologists knew what the ankh stood for.
One theory was that the ankh symbolized a womb; another was that it had originally been created as a picture of Egypt, where the vertical shaft was the Nile while the eye represented the delta of theNile valley. Someone who was more practical had suggested that the ankh quite simply depicted a sandal.
On the other hand, if the Rosicrucian Order was to be believed, the symbol of the enlightened, the ankh, could be used as a key to open the gates to the inside of the earth. But who believed the Rosicrucians?
Unfortunately, the answer was a surprising number of the students who came to Don’s seminars in comparative mythology. And for them, it wasn’t just the mysteries of the Rosicrucians that were tempting. Why not Atlantis or flying saucers in Roswell? Why not out-of-context theories about the ten Sephiroth that formed the tree of life in Kabbalah, or a day-long seminar on the lost civilizations of Lemuria and Agartha while you were at it?
W hen he left Karlskrona after his breakdown at the neo-Nazi demonstration up at the apartment buildings in Galgamarken, Don had stayed with his sister at first.
She had always been a loner, just like him, but by this time, she had become more or less a complete recluse. Once a brilliant student of mathematics at the Royal Institute of Technology, she had drifted into a shady programmer subculture that had gotten her a lot of money and some major legal problems, under the label of cybercrime. She had never been convicted, though, much due to the fact that she’d been able to vanish to a place where nobody could bother her anymore.
In her home, his sister had taken care of him during that phase when he had totally lost his grip. It was she who had forced him to find a way to challenge those inner demons, and now afterward, he realized that he had truly been saved by exchanging his medical career for the prolonged studies at the dusty history department in Lund.
B ubbe had filled her cabinet with Nazi symbols like a child who couldn’t stop picking at a scab. For Don, his studies became a way totear the wound open in order to find a way out of the darkness of that 1950s house. In his research, he had wanted to dig his way past the symbols that, for him, had been charged with such fear. By confronting them, he had hoped to be delivered from his past and to find some retribution for his grandmother’s fate.
He had devoted the first part of his
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