Anna Bergstrom has disappeared.

The snow has taken her.

Runa rests her chin in her hands and looks into the whirling blizzard outside. This is yrsnö, the snow brought by a raging storm that whips its razor sharp finger nails against the outsides of the window, and thumps its shoulder against the frame of the house making the timbers flex and groan.

'Can I go out, Nana?' little Freja asks, turning from the glass so the remnants of her misted breath fades to nothing. 'To help them search?'

'No, stay inside my little one until your parents get back.' Nana reaches down and rests her brittle hand on Freja's head to distract her from her thoughts. 'Go and get a game, we'll play together while we wait.'

'Do you think a Nökken has taken her, Nana?' Freja asks tipping the wooden pieces onto the board and rattling the dice in the cup.

'Don't be stupid Freja,' Runa nudges her sister, 'there no such things as the Nökken, are their Nana?'

Nana rocks in her chair. Her unblinking gaze seems to penetrate the mass of shifting whiteness and see the new fallen snow clogging the passageways between the houses like the snow in an old man's beard. 'The Nökken live in the lake dear, they don't come to the village.'

Runa can see Freja's mind working, working through all the dark things in her head that might steal a child playing in the snow. 'Could it be a myling, Nana? They take people don't they?'

'Why would you say that, Freja?' Nana turns her head and her eyebrows crease. 'You should feel sorry for them, they don't want to hurt anyone.'

'That's not what they say at school.' Freja thrusts out her bottom lip. 'Petter Hallstrom said the ghosts of dead children come back to steal other children in revenge for what has happened to them.'

'Petter Hallstrom is a foolish boy, he says stupid things.' Nana mutters, pulling her rug closer. 'You should ignore him. Come on now, let's play your game, quickly now, before it's time for bed.'

While Nana and Freja roll the dice and count the pieces across the board, Runa goes back to the window. The snow pelts across the glass, testing it, to find its way in. The Swedes have another name for it. Lappvante, the snow that is thick, white and impenetrably dense. If she were outside she could not see her gloved hand in front of her face. Nana is wise, she is very old. She's seen many winters and knows the darkness and the harshness of the early winter fall. Nana believes in the Nökken monster. The shape shifting young man who lives in the lakes. The one who watches, dark eyes hovering just above the water, like a crocodile lurking in the murky water for his prey. When he sees a child he changes into the shape of a white horse to entice them onto his back and then jumps back into his watery underworld taking them with him far into the freezing depths.

The door bursts open with a howl of tormented wind. Papa and Mama struggle in, pulling off coats whitened with lace snow and gloves dark with damp. Soon they settle round the stove, drying clothes hanging off the strings like last year's Christmas decorations. Runa and Freja sit on the rug watching Papa spinning his tin cup around and around before it cools and he can sip his bitter tasting coffee. Mama, her hair still damp from the snow, stares unseeing at an uneaten cinnamon bun on her plate.

'We'll rest and go out again at two,' says Papa. His eyes are dark and recessed, like hot pebbles dropped through the melt ice.

'Do you think Abisko will be able to send some help?'

'Not until the storm has cleared. We'll have to make do. It could be too late before they come.' He sucks up his thick coffee and cuts up the last bun and offers it around. 'I hope the Bergstrom's are coping.'

'I know what they must be feeling.'

'We all do,' he squeezes her hand. 'Come on let's get some sleep, we'll need to help with the search again tomorrow.'

'The poor boy, out on a night like tonight.' Mama stands up and brushes the imaginary crumbs from her dress. 'Off to bed now everyone, it's late.'

The next day the snow has cleared a little. While the villagers assemble to continue the search, the children go to school. They form a chain of hands. Runa at the end holding Freja's hand, they twist their way up the narrow streets between the cluster of steep roofed lodges. From above they look like a black snake rolling on glistening, moonlit sand. By the school they stop and stare. To the North a red light pulses in the darkness. The sky is afire with the guovssahasah, a great blaze of flickering crimson, like a wall of unquenchable flame reaching up to envelop the Northern horizon.

At school Runa sits at the back with Freja and fidgets while Mrs Wallin teaches them with a nervous energy, constantly glancing to the mountain's snow swept peaks and the little dots of torchlight marking the villagers as they make their way up the lower slopes searching in the drifts with their long poles.

No one talks about Anna.

The snake makes its way back through the village, shrinking at each house it stops at. Runa and Freja stand on the steps by the door. The fire in the sky has grown. Like the intense glow deep within the embers of the fire under the freshening wind, it simmers and breathes like a thing alive.

Mama and Papa are not back from the search. Nana puts Freja to bed.

Runa is woken by a banging on the door. Downstairs, urgent whispers, a woman is crying. The Cederblom boy, Erik has disappeared. Into the snow, into the blinding whiteness, to take Death's icy cold hand. Papa, his voice weary from today's search, bangs about pulling on heavy clothes and cold boots, the door slams shut. She imagines Mama sitting there, alone by the stove warming coffee for his return, the creases in his jacket clogged with veins of snow, his face worn red from the freezing air.

She lies awake, the ceiling of her box room lit by the reflective light of the sky outside. There are fifty Eskimo names for snow. That's what they taught in school, but it's a myth like so many things you hear in Sweden, like the Nökken, the Huldra, Fossegrimen, Draug, the frightening things of the woods, lakes and seas. The monsters from the otherworld, here to entice, to lure the unsuspecting into the white depths of the cold, featureless wasteland.

Only the old people believe in them and the very young like Freja who hear the stories and shiver excitedly at their telling. Of the unlit hinterland in the deep mid-winter and the creatures that supposedly dwell out there. Runa is older; she knows the reality of the bitterest of the winds and the creeping paralysis that comes with the advancing snows of the sunless winters. She gets up, climbs into bed with Freja to try to soak up the warmth from her little body and closes her eyes.

Papa has returned. In the darkness Runa sits on the top step of the stairs and listens. The scent of Reindeer salami and jam waft up to her.

'Nana, this has happened before hasn't it? When you were young.' Papa stops blowing his hot coffee and waits for Nana to reply.

She hears the creak of the rocking chair halt. Nana says, 'That was a long time ago, I don't remember.'

'Please try Nana, for Anna and Erik, we have to find them.' Mama implores.

There is an audible sigh. 'It was a long time ago, I was small maybe five or six. It was like this, the early snow, heavy asksnö snow. The lights in the sky were brilliant. People stopped in the street in amazement, there hadn't been anything like it in living memory. The school closed early and we went up to the ridge to watch them.'

'Yes, Nana.'

'And when we retuned the Peterson twins were missing, the two girls, my friends Emilia and Inga.'

'What happened?' Papa's voice is cold.

'They searched. Mr Ohlson bought his blood hounds up from Abisko and tracked them across the snow field by the old church. They'd wandered away from the path and then the trail just disappeared. The local hunters were baffled.' Runa can hear Nana breathing heavily. 'The next night Henning Hjertsson disappeared.'

'Nana, who took them? Someone must have said something.'

'They say the people from the far North,' Nana has her story telling voice..., 'only have fifty words for snow, far more than us, and we have lived here for ...so, so long. But it's not true, they have far more, they just don't tell outsiders. Up in the Northern lands, it comes. So infrequently that one generation tells the next of the signs. It takes the children. And when it cannot find what it wants, it comes further south. Not often, but then the Northern people are spared, for they know their children are safe. Why would they warn us?'

'What comes Nana, what!'

'Something out there, beyond the mountains.'

'What is it Nana, the wolves?'

'It wasn't the wolves. I don't remember.' Nana starts humming an old song to herself.

Silence. Runa lifts herself quietly from the step and creeps into her sister's room.

Later they go to the church and pray for Anna and Erik. Runa who always gets bored and kicks the pews sits outside on the bench in the foyer and watches the caretaker clear the snow off the steps. She knows all the Swedish words for snow but the Northern people must know more, like Nana said. Words like astrila for the snow that sparkles in the starlight and talini, the snow that looks like angels. She wonders what else Nana knows.

The congregation leaves, and the search resumes.

Runa wakes with a start and climbs from the bed. The guovssahasah has changed, a huge veil of white violet light traverses the sky, throbbing like living things resting on the roof of the sky itself. Like the souls of the long since departed.

Freja is standing by the window in the dark looking out at the mountains. She whispers. 'I hear someone calling me, someone far away, like they are trapped in an ice cave. It's so sad.'

In the condensation on the window Runa traces a tiny finger trail, 'Go to them.'

'I do not know the way.'

'I will guide you.'

Freja and Runa go to the door, Freja dresses in her down jacket, tugs on her little boots and searches for the door keys. They walk past the houses, where the searchers lie exhausted, dreaming the dreams of the tormented. Then up into the birch trees and along the ridge into the dipping depression of the snow bowl beyond.

Far off Runa sees them. She and Freja scramble up the crumbling snow bank to them.

'This is the third?' Says the boy.

'This is Freja, my sister.'

'Runa, you have guided them to us. We thank you.' Henning Hjertsson is still the boy Nana knew, not grown old but young, with a thin face and faraway blue eyes. 'You can still come with us you know.'

'No, I want what you promised me.'

The Peterson girls, skin pale as new fallen snow, take Freja by the hand and they walk with Henning down the side of the ledge watching the snow crumble and fall before them in wide crescents of tumbling white waves.

At the side of the churchyard they stand by the twisted gate.

'Freja, your sister is here. She says goodbye.' Henning says.

Freja looks through Runa. 'Goodbye Runa.'

'Goodbye, Freja,' Runa turns and walks into the churchyard.

On the snow crest Henning calls back down to her. 'Runa, we'll look after her, we'll look after them all. We always do.'

Runa holds Grandpa's hand, it is so warm. She lets go and wraps her arms round his waist and pulls him close. He's so, so warm. The guovssahasah has changed again, long curves of red blue light race down from the sky like vast blades, threatening to cleave their world of ice in two. It leaches upward toward the heavens and in a flash of green, it is gone.

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According to Swedish myth, the myling are ghosts of children left out in the wilderness to die usually because the parents didn't have the means to support them. As such children were unbaptized they would not be allowed into Christian churchyards and would take residence in the houses of those who had killed them. They only get to rest when they are guided by the living to a churchyard. Or presumably, strike a deal to get someone else to do it.

A bit of a cross over into the Twilight Zone I think!