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The Darkness Carried by the Beasts

by Maria Haskins

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Northern Sweden, March 1987, eleven months after Chernobyl

Torsten is dreaming of Gunvor, like he does every night. All these dreams are the same. He is searching for her in the woods, Ricky running ahead on eager paws with his nose to the ground, the elkhound a gray blur in untouched snow. Torsten’s chest aches and the air is hard to breathe, tainted by some unseen poison. A colorless void stretches out above the treetops, a menacing sky that holds no stars, but no matter how Torsten runs, no matter how he searches, he can never find Gunvor. Even there, even in his dreams, she is gone.

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When Torsten wakes up, it’s 07:32 according to his alarm clock, and the phone on the nightstand is ringing off the hook. He reaches across the sleeping shape of Ricky, curled up where Gunvor used to sleep, and lifts the receiver, pulling on the tangled cord.

It’s Bertil, from the police department, and Torsten knows even before Bertil explains what’s happened that he will need his rifle and his dog.

Ricky’s on the floor, tail already wagging, eager to get going, but Torsten slumps on the bed after the call. He feels dizzy. Maybe it’s the vodka from last night or his blood pressure or maybe some unknown disease or sickness has burrowed into him like it did with Gunvor.

No matter the reason, his body is too heavy to move, his head too empty to think.

Most mornings, when Torsten isn’t called out to search for traffic-wounded game, he thinks about walking away from the house, the town, everything, and never coming back. Most nights, he thinks about the rifle and going nowhere at all.

Reluctantly, he stands up and gets his clothes from the dresser: thermal underwear, undershirt, and two pairs of socks, including the last pair of woolen socks Gunvor knitted for him. They are gray with bright green stripes around the tops and toes, and every time he wears them, he thinks about her sitting in her favorite chair in the living room, watching TV, face illuminated by the floor lamp, knitting needles in her hands, yarn trailing down to the basket on the floor, and Ricky sleeping at her feet.

From a branch in the apple tree outside the bedroom window, a magpie watches him get dressed, its black eyes glinting. It sits there every morning, and like every morning, Ricky barks at it through the glass until the bird takes flight. Tomorrow it will be back.

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As soon as Torsten gets out of his car at the accident site, somewhere on that stretch of nondescript narrow highway between Skellefteå and Bastuträsk, it begins to snow. He looks up at the dull gray clouds and bites back a curse. The flakes are only a whisper on his face in the early-March cold, but it sure as shit would be easier to track an injured moose, whether it’s limping with a fractured leg or dragging half its guts behind it, without new snow.

“Moose, a big one,” Bertil said on the phone. It’s usually a moose when the police call Torsten. “The driver said it just appeared out of nowhere. He was likely going ninety around that turn, and at that time of the morning . . . Well, you know how it is.”

Torsten does know how it is. He knows how empty the unlit roads seem when the headlights carve a path through the darkness. He knows how the moose loom tall and silent beneath the eaves of the forest, heads held high as they observe the asphalt, waiting to cross. He knows what bones and flesh look like once steel and glass and tires have done their work. He knows how a moose sounds, just before the trigger is pulled.

Torsten makes himself move. He is not thinking about Gunvor. Not thinking of her in the hospital bed, her bald head covered by that blue headscarf, the IV drips hooked up to her veins to dull the pain. After twenty-five years together, that is the only memory of her that he is able to conjure, six months after he put her in the ground.

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He was on his way home after another call right here in the woods last year when he first heard of Chernobyl. A news item on the radio when he got back into his car after tracking and killing a moose yearling with a broken leg.

It barely even registered at first, just something about the Soviet Union. Radiation. It was the same day Gunvor got her diagnosis, and in the year since then, he’s learned more than he wants to know about radiation therapy, palliative care, radioactive material, becquerels, decay rate, cesium-134, and cesium-137. He knows, he understands intellectually that whatever happened at that faraway nuclear power plant didn’t cause Gunvor’s breast cancer, and yet the two events are entwined inside him, impossible to tease apart.

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Torsten’s hands are shaking when he places the orange warning triangles at the side of the road behind and in front of his car. He has to steady himself with a hand on the hood. Shouldn’t have been drinking last night. Never used to drink anything stronger than beer even on the weekends, but vodka helps numb the pain.

What’s the point of painkillers? Gunvor used to say. You’re still hurting, you just can’t feel it anymore.

It was her favorite joke, one her dad used to tell. Always made her laugh when she used it. She had a big laugh, big enough to make him laugh, too.

Torsten opens the Saab hatchback, letting Ricky scamper out. The elkhound is eager to track, curled tail wagging, and Torsten touches the dog’s head gently, sinking his cold fingers into the thick fur on Ricky’s neck. His hand lingers in the warmth and softness there.

In the pale light, the curved road is a smudge of bare asphalt and dirty sand-stained snow between the towering banks left by the plows. Beyond the banks, tall pines stand guard, the trees planted fifty-odd years ago to be harvested, destined for the saw and pulp mills. In another thirty or fifty years, someone will cut these trees down, not thinking of the radioactive dust that fell here, its deathly taint hidden beneath the bark.

The raspy chatter of a magpie startles Torsten. It’s perched in a birch tree across the road, and he knows it can’t be the same bird he saw outside his window but can’t avoid thinking it all the same.

Three cars drive by, stirring up a haze of old snow. Once they’ve passed, the magpie is gone, and the road is empty except for Torsten, Ricky, and the Saab. Torsten takes in the scene. The dent in the snowbank. The tracks in the compacted snow from the crash, the tow truck, the emergency vehicles. The blood. A dark smudge of it on the road, more smeared across the snowbank, trailing into the woods. There are a few clear hoofprints, dislodged snow, and deep imprints of the animal’s escape. Torsten can see how the animal struggled to gain its footing before it took off, bleeding, into the woods.

He adjusts the rifle’s strap, tightening it across his chest.

“Ricky, here.”

But Ricky doesn’t hearken to the sound of Torsten’s voice like he usually does. Instead, the dog is standing on top of the snowbank, staring in between the trees, sniffing at the air, his stance stiff and guarded. Torsten sniffs the air, too. There’s a tang to it, maybe. Something other than the smell of snow and car exhaust, other than the lingering smell of spilled oil and gasoline from the accident. Whatever it is, it tickles his nose and throat, tickles beneath his skin, too.

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After half an hour of trudging through the snow, the cold is creeping inside Torsten’s gloves, into his fingers, but Gunvor’s socks keep his feet warm inside his boots, and his body is warming up, slowly, in spite of the cold wind.

When they first headed into the woods, Torsten found what he expected to find: tufts of rough brown moose hair caught on branches, piles of droppings, blood on snow, hoofprints. But the tracks have grown more shapeless. In places, there are no imprints of hooves. Instead, it looks as if something heavy and bloody had been dragged across the snow.

Ricky runs ahead, but in a small clearing with a tumble of rough granite blocks, the dog stops, panting. There are still tracks and blood to follow, deep gouges in the snow, but something is wrong. Torsten feels it as soon as he enters that clearing with Ricky. It’s snowing harder, and the dog is staring between the trees, growling deep in his throat. Torsten puts his hand on Ricky’s head to reassure the dog, and himself. There’s nothing but shadows and snow here, and yet he can feel it, same as the dog can, the shape and presence of something, waiting.

Torsten has heard stories of bears and wolves, but while moose are plentiful, predators are few and far between in this part of Sweden, especially this close to the coast. He raises the rifle, pointing it in between the trees. His hands are shaking. He can’t remember the last time his hands shook while holding a weapon, but now they tremble.

“It’s okay,” he tells Ricky, but he knows it isn’t.

The cawing of a magpie comes from somewhere nearby, and Ricky takes off, running fast and sure on eager paws, nose to the ground, a gray shadow soon swallowed by the falling snow.

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Torsten follows, waiting to hear Ricky’s familiar bark ahead, marking the position of the moose, but there is no bark. He trudges on, the falling snow gathering on his jacket and knit cap.

He used to love the woods, no matter the season. But even that has been taken from him. The woods are tainted now. Those winds from Chernobyl brought their poison here—intruding, invading—and though the poison is invisible, Torsten feels the taint in every living thing, plant and beast, even in the soil itself. Last year, hunters and farmers were told to leave animal carcasses to be buried or burned. People were warned not to fish or eat berries or mushrooms. The threat will fade over time, that’s what the experts say, but Torsten knows it won’t matter. Everything is contaminated now. The trees he walks beneath, the moose he’s tracking. Himself, too. Death has come here, penetrating every strand and filament of his world.

There is still no sign nor sound of Ricky, but something is moving between the trees around him, flitting through the treetops. Magpies. A gathering of them, the glint of oil-sheen wings and sharpened beaks, black eyes watching him intently as if he is already carrion.

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After two hours, Torsten knows he’s lost even though it is not possible for him to be lost here. He knows these woods; knows them, whether they are covered in snow or not, but something has changed. It’s as if the landscape has shifted around him, or maybe the world has swallowed him whole, spitting him out elsewhere.

The air swirls thick and cold with snow, a maelstrom of icy flakes blotting out the sky and trees, erasing every feature except the thin boles of the pines, reduced to wavering lines of black. There is still no sign of Ricky, and Torsten knows he should stop, that he should wait for this uncanny snowstorm to end, but every now and then he sees another smudge of blood, another imprint in the snow, and keeps walking. Another few steps. Another few meters.

He calls for Ricky, but the dog is lost somewhere ahead, out of sight.

All Torsten hears in the muffled quiet of falling snow is the rhythm of his own heart and breaths, the rush of blood through veins. He looks up, but there is no sun nor any stars to guide him. The sky, heavy with snow, straddles the world, pressing down on him, and there is barely enough space for the trees or him beneath its white belly. His mind and thoughts tremble with exhaustion, and he thinks of stopping, of sitting down in the snow, digging a hole for himself and never getting up again.

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Gunvor was exhausted at the end. There was so little left of her, but Torsten didn’t want to let her go. Even after she was dead, he held on to her hand.

Later, at home, he would find the basket with her knitting, the last pair of socks she made him, and he would sit on the bed, holding on to the thick wool, looking at the tangled remainder yarn she had wound into a skein, and the abandoned knitting needles. His body crumpling under the weight of her absence.

How could she let go when he didn’t?

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Ricky is barking. The sound is coming from up ahead, and Torsten stumbles forward until a clearing opens around him. It’s a place where nothing grows except a few stunted pines, their branches cropped by the teeth of gnawing animals too soon after planting. The snow barely covers the ground beneath the crooked trees, though the drifts are deep in the surrounding forest and the granite bones of the land jut through a thin pelt of moss and lichen.

Dusk envelops him. It shouldn’t be this dark already, but Torsten feels no real sense of surprise. Time and space have slipped from his grip since he left the road. Maybe longer than that. Maybe since Chernobyl. Certainly since Gunvor left.

Ricky is standing in the middle of the clearing and the moose is there.

It must be the moose, but it’s hard to see it clearly. Darkness has gathered beneath the trees and clings to the animal, shadows quivering and deepening, darkness and beast bleeding into one another.

Torsten raises the rifle. The weapon feels clumsy and awkward in his hands, but he struggles forward, the dog still between him and the injured animal, and as he gets closer, the shadow around the moose seems to heave and rise up, taller than the tallest pines.

Ricky growls and rushes at the moose, into the darkness.

“Ricky!”

He calls, but Ricky isn’t stopping. Torsten tries to run, but he is too slow, too late, he doesn’t even see it happen, just hears Ricky yelp, then whimper.

When Torsten reaches the dog, Ricky is stretched out in front of the moose, gray body shivering. Torsten tries to raise the rifle and aim it at the moose, at its vast shadow, but the weapon is too heavy, his arms shaking, fingers too numb to find the trigger.

In the snow, the moose shudders beneath the weight of the gathering darkness, its legs buckling in the snow, its large head bowed until its muzzle rests on the ground. Torsten kneels, the rifle abandoned, his hands in Ricky’s fur. The dog whimpers at his touch, the sound mingling with the rattling breaths of the moose while. blood and darkness seep from the beast’s lowered muzzle.

Torsten reels. He knows this place, this place where death is about to descend. He’s been here before. He has raised his weapon before, has pulled the trigger, has brought death and called it mercy, has held Gunvor’s hand until it went cold. He has been here, where something that was once made will be unmade, and it is as it was with Gunvor: his hands are empty and there is nothing he can do.

The shadow around the moose rears up again. It looms above the dying beast, above Torsten and Ricky, above the tainted world, and it is crowned not by antlers but by distant stars. Torsten feels that darkness reach for him, for Ricky, and he cradles the dog in his arms. He closes his eyes as the darkness swoops down, as it finds him, as it slips through his rib cage and into his heart, grasping hold of his life and almost wrenching it loose before passing through him, rejecting him, rippling his flesh and his bones as it goes. Pain unfolds like a flower in its wake, petals like sparks and shadows devoured by the night.

Cowering in the snow with Ricky, Torsten sees his own life, Gunvor’s passing, Chernobyl, the whole world, all of it spread out before him like a city seen from a mountain: the light and dark, the people and the beasts, great and small, walking through their lives, carrying the darkness of their deaths with them.

That burden, that taint and darkness, did not arrive last year with the winds from Chernobyl. Those winds only brought new shadows—dust and radiation—to join the darkness already stitched into the world. The taint has always been here, inside and outside, within and without, and he carries the weight of it, same as Gunvor did, same as Ricky and the moose. Death is everywhere, all the time, inescapable. A car on the highway. A tumor in breast tissue. A nuclear reactor exploding. A rifle trigger, pulled. Death was already inside Gunvor long before any diagnosis, and it has been inside the world itself, in every strand and filament, since this world was knit together.

When Torsten opens his eyes, there is no looming shadow. There is only snow around him, only sky and trees above. The moose is close enough to touch, close enough that he feels the shudder of the beast as the life goes out of it, as the shadow of its death dissipates, and he can taste it on his lips, like dust and ashes, like the air in Gunvor’s hospital room, like the smell of antiseptic and decay, like a poisoned wind, like the stale breath in your mouth when you haven’t slept for days.

The moose is dead, the snow settling on fur and blood, and in the trees around the clearing, the magpies sit: waiting, watching.

Ricky stirs beneath Torsten’s hands. The dog struggles in the snow, finds his legs, and stands. Torsten runs his hands over Ricky’s body, fur and skin, finding no fractures or wounds. It’s hard to see, so maybe he is crying. They are both still alive and he doesn’t know why, but then, he never did.

Around him the world is settling back into its proper place, and he isn’t lost anymore, he can find his way. He picks up the rifle and starts the long trek back to the road, Ricky following with only a slight limp. Torsten knows he is not leaving the darkness behind in the clearing with the carcass of that moose. He knows

he carries it with him; he can feel the weight of it settle in his bones and marrow. It is heavy but not yet impossible to carry.

The snow is falling thick and soft, gathering on his sleeves and gloves, sticking to his eyelashes, trying to get into his boots every time he takes a step, but Gunvor’s socks hold the cold at bay.

A magpie watches them go, its black eyes glinting. Ricky barks and the bird takes flight. Tomorrow it will be back.

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Host Commentary

PseudoPod, Episode 964 for February 28th, 2025.

The Darkness Carried by the Beasts by Maria Haskins

Narrated by Ville Meriläinen; hosted by Kat Day audio by Chelsea Davis

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Hey everyone, hope you’re all doing okay. Happy New Moon! Got to love the darkness, right? I’m Kat, Assistant Editor at PseudoPod, your host for this week, and I’m excited to tell you that for this week we have The Darkness Carried by the Beasts by Maria Haskins. This story was originally published in The Sunday Morning Transport in 2023.

Author bio:
Maria Haskins is a Swedish-Canadian writer and reviewer of speculative fiction. She grew up in Sweden and debuted as a writer there and currently lives just outside Vancouver with her family, including several noisy birds, a snake, and a large black dog. Maria’s short fiction is available in her short story collections SIX DREAMS ABOUT THE TRAIN and WOLVES AND GIRLS. Maria’s work has also appeared in The Best Horror of the Year, Nightmare, Lightspeed, The Deadlands, and many others. Find out more on her website mariahaskins.com.

Narrator bio:
Ville Meriläinen is a Finnish university student, author, and Death Metal vocalist. His horror and fantasy short fiction has appeared in various venues online and in print, including Intergalactic Medicine Show, PseudoPod, and Cast of Wonders. His musical fantasy novel, Ghost Notes, is available on Amazon.

Before we continue, this story has a content warning for death of a loved one. And now, we have a story for you, and we promise you, it’s true.

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ENDCAP

Well done, you’ve survived another story. What did you think of The Darkness Carried by the Beasts by Maria Haskins? If you’re a Patreon subscriber, we encourage you to pop over to our Discord channel and tell us.

 

Maria had this to tell us about her story:
This story came to me, at first, with the image of a man and his dog in the woods, somewhere in northern Sweden where I grew up, confronted by a shadowy creature in a snowstorm. The other inspiration, of course, was Chernobyl. I’m old enough that I was around when that catastrophe happened, and I remember how much fear there was in Sweden with people wondering about the effects of the radioactive dust that spread from the nuclear site. That sense of an invisible poison literally falling from the sky. This might be the most Swedish story I’ve written since “Hare’s Breath”.

Note from me, here: you can find Hare’s Breath at Cast of Wonders, episode 362. Do head over there and listen. https://www.castofwonders.org/2019/06/cast-of-wonders-362-hares-breath

 

Like Maria, I also remember Chernobyl. I was a child of eleven, in the UK of course, but I still remember the sense of fear. I remember the television adverts in which a man explained, with immaculate received pronunciation, what to do if we heard the warning siren. I remember the children’s books. I was, like many of my generation, traumatised my Raymond Briggs’ When the Wind Blows. It was very real. We did fear nuclear disaster. We did fear nuclear war.

And, funny thing – I think about that time now and I think… it did get better. It was better, for a while. Everything was terrifying, but the world didn’t end, and then things weren’t so scary, for really quite some time.

And… perhaps we’re in another scary part, now, but we will come through it and the world won’t have ended, and things will get better again. We have hope.

For now there’s… finding ways to hold these things in our heads without exploding.

And then…

… there’s often a line in stories – in the ones we end up running, certainly – that snags my eye and sends my mind twisting off into a run of branching thoughts. Here it was…

“What’s the point of painkillers? Gunvor used to say. You’re still hurting, you just can’t feel it anymore.”

It reminded me, in that peculiar way that the human brain draws unpredictable lines between things, of a song. Fast Cars, by U2, which is on the 2004 album How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb. In particular these lines:

You should worry ’bout the day

That the pain it goes away

You know I miss mine sometimes

There’s something terrifying about that third line of lyrics. Pain is… well, pain is pain. It’s not meant to be nice, is it. But sometimes we need it. Sometimes, for all that it hurts, it’s absolutely bloody essential. We know, deep inside our souls, that we must keep sight of it because… because it is teaching us something important. Sometimes we don’t know what that is, but we know we’re learning it. Painfully.

Sometimes you don’t want to cover up the pain. You want to keep feeling it. Because it’s all you’ve got left.

The pain is the last link we have to what we’ve lost.

So… there will be moments of cold. There will be moments of burning fire. Our heads will not explode. The world will not explode. We are always in a cycle. Things will change, again.

And there is an idea in psychology that it can be helpful to mindfully put things down, sometimes. To put them in a box, in our minds, and consciously shut it. Focus on the thing right in front of you. Whatever task comes next, even if that is, simply, taking another breath. Taking another step. We will come back to the box, when time and space have rounded the corners and blunted the edges. This is not the time, and that is okay. It’s okay.

The cold is held at bay. Tomorrow it will probably be back. And tomorrow we will be back.

Keep going.

Now, onto the subject of subscribing and support: PseudoPod is funded by you, our listeners, and we’re formally a non-profit. One-time donations are gratefully received and much appreciated, but what really makes a difference is subscribing. A $5 monthly Patreon donation gives us stability and allows us to keep coming back, week after week.

If you can, please go to pseudopod.org and sign up by clicking on “feed the pod”. If you have any questions about how to support EA and ways to give, please reach out to us at donations@escapeartists.net.

Those of you that already support us: thank you! We literally couldn’t do it without you! And a reminder that Apple have changed the way charging works through App Store apps, and, long story short: if you are signing up you should go through a browser – including one on actually ON your phone – it’ll be cheaper than if you go through the official Patreon app.

And, if you can’t afford to support us financially, then please consider leaving reviews of our episodes, or generally talking about them on whichever form of social media you find yourself trudging through this week. We have a Bluesky account: find us at @pseudopod.org. If you like merch, you can also support us by buying goodies from the Escape Artists Voidmerch store. The link is in various places, including our latest social media posts.

PseudoPod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Download and listen to the episode on any device you like, but don’t change it or sell it. Theme music is by permission of Anders Manga.

 

Next week we have… The Ecstasy of the Saints by J.A.W. McCarthy, narrated by Dani Daly.

 

And finally, PseudoPod, and Christopher Paolini, know

“The trick is to find happiness in the brief gaps between disasters.”

See you soon, folks, take care, stay safe.