Stallo by Stefan Spjut Page A

online?
That was in the mid-nineties, when I knew nothing about the internet. I knew it was something that existed on computers but that was as far as my knowledge went.
Susso started searching, and in actual fact she did it like Dad.
Because the search engine she used was called Altavista.
And that means ‘view from above’.
*
She didn’t find any trolls but she did come into contact pretty quickly with other people who were looking for the same things as herself, more or less. They were cryptozoologists. She introduced the word to me, wanting me to accept it. I didn’t. To be honest, I was irritated by her lively interest in that troll. It had only brought unhappiness. I thought it was childish of her not to understand that. But she hadn’t known Dad before he’d seen it. Before he became the person he became.
It was Cecilia who came up with the idea of setting up a website for the troll. It was Easter, and Susso had come up from Kiruna.We were sitting on the terrace, all three of us, and Cecilia’s daughter Ella was sleeping in her pushchair. The sun was floating on the lake and we were drinking coffee and eating biscuits we had baked using Dad’s recipe. The wind rustled playfully among the willows down the slope. The mountain tops were sharp against the sky. There was a constant dripping from the roof, and from time to time huge sheets of snow came sliding down the roof tiles. I enjoyed every minute of it. Until Susso started talking about the troll, that is.
She wanted to know what we really thought about it.
I didn’t say I didn’t believe it, but that’s the not the same thing as believing. It’s something more evasive and perhaps cowardly, and she latched onto that. You could say she had my back against the wall.
‘But do you think he forged the picture?’
The look I gave her made her understand that obviously I didn’t think that.
‘So what do you think then?’
‘I don’t know, Susso.’
‘You don’t know what you believe?’
‘No. Actually I don’t. Sometimes it’s like that.’
Cecilia had been sitting quietly but now she moved, making the recliner creak.
‘If there’s one,’ she said, ‘there’s got to be more.’
‘More trolls?’
She shrugged under the fleece blanket she had wrapped around herself.
‘Granddad can’t be the only one to have seen something. That means there are more people out there thinking about it. Really thinking.’
‘So why haven’t they written about it on the internet then?’
‘Well, you haven’t.’
The answer silenced Susso.
‘You can search, Susso. And you also can make people search for you .’
Susso was sitting in a ray of sunshine. She screwed up one eye and looked at Cecilia with the other.
‘A website, Susso. That’s what you ought to have.’
Once Susso had made up her mind things happened quickly. She has always been like that. She probably got it from Dad. When something interests her she puts all her energy into it, and her energy is considerable. It took no more than a couple of weeks for her to learn the programming language, buy a domain name and create a website.
I was worried at first, I have to admit. How would it affect our business if it became common knowledge that Dad had believed in trolls? It could only be positive, according to Cecilia, but I didn’t like the idea of everyone knowing . I thought that a website could attract a lot of critical attention, which would be bad for business.
As it was, nothing much happened. The website came up and you could read about Dad’s photo and trolls and wraiths and everything Susso had unearthed through the year, but the business was not affected in any way, as far as I could see.
Not many people visited it. Susso could see that on a web counter.
There was a bloke from Gunnarsbyn who sent an email about a wraith that had saved his life in the forest, and then there were some people in Östersund who said they had ‘excavated’ an authentic wraith burrow in their garden. Susso actually