Elin, angular in build and wrapped in a charcoal parka, walked with the precision of someone used to being watched. Her light blond hair, braided tightly, was tucked under a hard hat. Steel-gray eyes flicked between workers without slowing her pace.
Two men approached. One, a broad-shouldered local with windburned cheeks and a grease-smeared jacket, extended a gloved hand.
“Jonas. Site foreman.” His accent was thick, northern. “We didn’t expect you till tomorrow.”
“I moved the flight up.” Elin’s handshake was brief. “Let’s get this moving.”
Behind Jonas, the other man hovered—an older Sámi guide, wiry and watchful. His eyes were dark beneath the brim of a reindeer-hide hat, and his coat bore subtle traditional embroidery. He didn’t offer a hand, nor his name.
“We were going to walk you through the terrain again,” Jonas said, gesturing to the forest line. “But—”
“The terrain’s been surveyed,” Elin said, not glancing at the trees. “Twice. No need for another delay.”
The Sámi man cleared his throat, voice low and steady.
“You’re building on a crossing.”
Elin looked at him. “A what?”
“A path. Not meant for roads. Not meant for this.” He swept a hand toward the scaffolded data hall. “The Vittra don’t like being pushed.”
She didn’t laugh, but her brow twitched.
“With respect, I’ve read the risk report. Mythology doesn’t rate.”
His eyes narrowed. He nodded once, almost sadly. “They don’t care if you believe.”
Jonas stepped in, offering a half-smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Some of the crew won’t work nights. They’ve been hearing things.”
“Then we’ll rotate crews. Or replace them.” Elin turned, already walking toward the trailer. “I didn’t come up here to debate fairy tales.”
The trailer door groaned on its hinges. Inside, the lights flickered, then steadied. The air smelled of stale coffee and cold circuit boards. Lining the back wall, a row of monitors, most dark, fuzzed with static.
Jonas glanced at the screens. “Still getting interference. Might be the temp swings messing with the relays.”
Elin crouched by the server rack, checked a connection, and stood. “Northern glitches. Nothing a hardened system can’t handle.”
A loud crack split the air outside, like frozen wood snapping under pressure. Jonas flinched. The Sámi man didn’t move.
“Trees shift,” Elin said. “Nothing more.”
The guide spoke softly. “Until they don’t.”
Snow began to fall—light at first, then heavier. The forest watched in silence.
Days later, inside the site trailer, Elin sat hunched over her ledger, the scratch of pen on paper the only sound. Jaw tight, her fingers were stained with ink and frostbite around the knuckles. A half-empty thermos steamed beside her, untouched.
Outside, Övertorneå lay buried in a layer of white, moonlight threading through the trees like a blade.
Elin flipped through her notes: timestamps, outage logs, security footage summaries—every incident pinned down like a specimen. Still, the patterns refused to align.
Earlier, a hydraulic drill stopped mid-drive. No warning, no alarm—dead. A dozen tools had vanished overnight, some from locked storage. Jonas swore someone—or something—was sneaking onto the site. One welder had refused to return, claiming a whispering voice outside his bunk had called him by name.
That morning, Elin had stood before the crew, her breath fogging in the brittle air.
“This is not a haunted forest,” she said, voice clipped, eyes scanning their faces. “It’s a construction site. If you’re losing sleep, drink less and stop swapping ghost stories. Anyone spreading panic will be replaced.”
No one met her gaze, but they nodded, cowed.
Later, back in the trailer, she tapped the table, staring at a blank line in her log. Then the air shifted—slightly. She felt the pressure change. A sound: soft and metallic.
She looked up.
From the far corner of the trailer, they came. Four reindeer, ghost-pale and silent, stepped into the room one by one. Silver bells hung from leather harnesses around their necks, swaying without sound. Their eyes were dark and still—a knowing stillness. Snow dusted their backs, melting into the floor.
They passed her desk without pause.
Elin didn’t breathe.
The last one—the largest—turned its head toward her. A single bell swung forward and chimed once.
Then they walked, calm and unhurried, into the far wall and were gone, walking through it.
She stared at the wall, waiting for her mind to correct itself. To replay, to snap to reality.
It didn’t.
The thermos shook in her grip as she unscrewed it, took a long drink, and set it down with trembling fingers.
Then she reached for the recorder on her desk and pressed play.
“Time: 02:17. Subjective experience—visual and auditory. Four reindeer. Silver bells. No sound of entry. Passed through wall. Duration: ten seconds. I am lucid.”
She paused. Her voice sounded too even. Like she was trying to convince someone—herself, maybe.
“I am lucid,” she repeated, more quietly.
From then on, she recorded everything: every shift change, every dream fragment, every fluctuation in air pressure, temperature, or light.
Outwardly, she remained sharp—colder. She increased patrols, authorized floodlights, arranged for motion sensors along the north treeline.
But alone in the trailer, she slept less and circled patterns on maps until the ink bled through.
And always, just beneath her breath, she muttered the same question into the recorder: “Where do they go, when they vanish?”
#
The drone feed went black at 04:32. No warning—a shudder of static, then nothing. The unit had been scanning frost depth around Sector Nine, near the granite ridge where the augers had failed for the third time.
Elin reviewed the footage three times before zipping into her parka and leaving the trailer.
As thin as ash, the snow fell. Elin walked alone, cutting across the ice-glazed worksite, past dark equipment huddled under tarps. Her headlamp cast a narrow beam through the cold, slicing into the tree line until she reached the flagged marker where the drone had gone silent.
The ground was fractured, disturbed.
She knelt.
Beneath the frost, the drone’s rotors glinted—sheared and bent. Its nose had punched through a crust of rock, revealing a dark hollow below.
Elin slid her glove across the break, the air rushed out—dry, metallic, ancient, as she lowered herself through.
The chamber wasn’t deep but vast—its walls natural, yet smoothed with eerie intent. Crystalline soil crunched under her boots, and her breath fogged around her. The beam of her headlamp caught carvings etched into the stone—spirals, antlers, delicate lines radiating from small, faceless figures.
Pulse ticking in her throat, she turned to see something gleam in the dust near a collapsed ledge. A small, iron bell, its handle twisted like gnarled roots. She lifted it carefully, warmth radiating through her glove.
Beneath it, half-buried in glittering silt, was a skull—narrow-snouted and horned, but not quite a deer.
She straightened, heart pounding, throat dry.
When she returned to the trailer, her boots left fine crystalline prints across the floor. No one else had been inside—but the blueprints had changed.
They lay open where she hadn’t left them, creased and stiff with cold. Red lines snaked across the schematics, drawn with unsteady precision—mapping through walls, under foundations, away from roads and infrastructure.
Names were scribbled in the margins. Sámi names. Whispered ones. Mánnuväylä. Čuoikaidievvá. Invisible roads.
Elin stared at the lines. Her mouth twitched—not in disbelief, but recognition.
She stormed into the night and found the elder seated outside his hut, a thin trail of smoke rising from a fire pit. His coat was wrapped close, his eyes reflecting the flame.
“You knew this was here,” she said, voice edged like cracked ice. “The tunnels. The markings. That bell.”
He didn’t look at her.
“I told you,” he said. “They don’t want your steel.”
She stepped closer. “Then what do they want?”
He turned, slowly. Firelight caught the grooves in his face, every line like bark or weathered stone.
“They want silence,” he said.
A wind rose in the trees behind her, low and distant, breathing beyond the reach of light.
And for the first time since her arrival, Elin didn’t speak.
#
The call came after dusk. Drained from the sky, the last light left the world in bruised blue shadows. Elin stood in the trailer’s back corner, headset tight, fingers white on the console edge.
The board’s voices crackled through static—five of them, scattered across Stockholm, Oslo, and Brussels. Clean rooms and polished suits, no idea what winter meant.
“We’ve seen no benchmarks in three weeks,” one said—Nyström, all teeth and clipped vowels. “No internal updates. No drone mapping, no cooling grid, no fiber.”
“The budget is bleeding,” said another, a woman Elin couldn’t place. “We need traction, or the board will revisit your position.”
Elin stared at the monitor across the room. Playback looped in grainy monochrome: a crew member—Eriksson, maybe—walking calmly across the snow perimeter. Jacket open. No gloves. He never looked back. He never returned.
“I understand,” she said into the mic. Her voice was calm. Crisp. “Cooling trench two is complete. Fiber splicing begins tomorrow.”
A pause.
“Good,” Nyström said. “We’ll need photo confirmation by Friday.”
But Elin didn’t answer because her voice had echoed. Not in her headset—in the trailer. A second voice, smaller, drier, a breath behind hers. Imitating her cadence. Mocking it.
The board didn’t react. They hadn’t heard it.
She ended the call.
Standing still, she watched her reflection flicker in the dark glass of the powered-down screen. Her face looked thinner, her lips pale, and eyes darker.
Later that night, she queued another round of archived surveillance. She didn’t expect anything new.
She was wrong.
Four workers—two from the northern cable team, one engineer, and a young temp she’d never spoken to—walked out of view around midnight the night before. No panic. No radio call. They drifted into the trees, footsteps clean and unbroken, and never came back.
Elin rewound. Watched it again.
None wore coats.
She pressed her thumb to her temple, whispering the date, the time, the temperature. She pressed record.
“Footage log 5:47. Four disappearances. No evident coercion. Temperature: minus nineteen Celsius. Psychological compulsion?” She paused. “Unknown.”
The wind howled against the trailer walls. The bell sat in the drawer behind her. Sometimes it rang—softly, without touch.
She knew what the elder had meant now.
The Vittra didn’t bargain. They endured. Until they were crossed.
And then they answered.
The site wasn’t cursed. It was claimed.
She looked again at the blueprints with the red roads. The ones she hadn’t drawn.
The paths curved around certain spots—always curved. Avoiding, never crossing. Old lines. Silent places.
Elin stood, slow and deliberate. She pulled her scarf from the hook and reached for her flashlight.
She would go out alone. Dig up the trench markers. Move the lines. Let them keep what was theirs.
"Because steel could be bent.
And silence, if honored, might let her live."
Placing the charges with the precision of an engineer, not a saboteur, Elin moved with the same controlled efficiency she had brought to the first blueprint review, the first frost-cracked trench. Now, her gloves were gone. She worked barehanded, skin red and raw, fingertips trembling as she fit the final fuse into its housing.
The explosives were standard issue—NorrGrid didn’t take chances with permafrost. She’d requisitioned them under the guise of rock expansion. No one questioned her authority anymore. Most of the crew had fled or vanished. Those who remained stayed locked in prefab bunks, windows covered, pretending the wind didn’t speak.
Making her way inside the operations trailer, the overhead light flickered once more, as she stepped inside. She sat at the desk, facing the camera wired into the satellite uplink. Her parka hung on the back of the chair. Her face was pale, chapped, cut by cold. Her braid had loosened, blond wisps clinging to her jaw.
She pressed RECORD.
“My name is Elin Marklund. Site director, NorrGrid North, ID 421E.” Her voice was dry, but steady. “I am responsible for the termination of the Övertorneå installation. This is not sabotage. It is containment.”
She glanced aside, eyes narrowing, as if tracking something only she could see.
“I no longer know if what I witnessed is measurable. I’ve seen figures in the fog, heard voices in glass. I’ve watched men walk into snowdrifts as if they heard music. I heard it too. Bells, not metal, but bone.”
She raised the small rusted bell she’d recovered from the underground chamber. It didn’t ring—but the microphone caught a sound. Thin. Distant.
“I ignored them. I forced progress. I lied. And they waited.”
She leaned forward.
“I see them now.”
A pause.
“I think I always did.”
She set the bell on the table beside a folded map marked with red roads. The tape continued as she stood, walking to the door, not bothering to close it.
The tundra stretched beyond the threshold—gray-white, wind-burned, haunted.
She wore no coat and no boots, just a sweater and cargo pants.
Cameras caught her figure as she passed through the security perimeter. She paused, turning slightly to the lens. Lips parted. A whisper escaped.
“I see them now.”
Then she walked into the woods, slow and certain, as if answering a call only she could hear.
Twelve minutes later, the charges detonated in synchronized flashes beneath the foundation. Concrete cracked. Steel supports folded. Servers buckled and vanished into the pit. When the fire died, nothing remained but twisted metal and smoldering frost.
The board declared the site an operational failure. The official report cited “structural anomalies and executive negligence.” Elin was never found. Her confession file was corrupted—audio unstable, half of it lost in digital fog.
But in nearby villages, the old stories returned to quiet voices by candlelight.
They say the Vittra have their road back.
And that somewhere in the deep woods, if you listen at the edge of sleep, you can still hear a bell.
