Red Snow

by Will Dean

  I need to be clear-headed if I’m to make it out of here and make it out I will. I must. My God, they’d never even know it. They’d just think I left, no manhunt, no search. Just a skeleton. Two birds: one large one small. Two sets of ribs. Three brains. I have no family left to worry why I never get in touch, never turn up for Christmas dinner. Aunt Ida would just think, oh, that Tuva, she’s an odd one, never calls, just like her mother. Everyone here believes I left for Skåne. I’ll just freeze. And then, when the thaw comes, I’ll rot.

  He thinks he’s so clever. When I do eventually rot the stench won’t even bother anyone, will it? The stink of me and that pink-grey brain slowly decomposing will waft up through a chimney specifically designed to make sure odours and fumes drift away, well over Gavrik rooftops, away to the forests and the wild places.

  The box is crocodile skin or snakeskin or something expensive. I open the lid. Reaching in with my numb fingers I pull out the papers, the pen torch lodged tight between my chattering teeth. Two documents: one short, one long.

  The first is a letter of sorts from David Holmqvist. The second is his printed manuscript, unbound, each page numbered, quality paper, double-spaced, Times New Roman 14pt. I take a sip of the ice-cold San Pellegrino water and I take a bite of salty dark chocolate, 90% cocoa, and read the letter.

  51

  By the time you read this I will be gone.

  No. Oh, Jesus. Who’s he told? Who knows I’m trapped down here? He mentioned to me once before about leaving the country, starting a new life, ghosting with a new identity. He hasn’t told anyone I’m locked in here. He doesn’t know anyone.

  You must try to understand, Tuva. This was my one chance, my one opportunity. For a writer like myself to pen in the names of others is like a mother raising someone else’s children, whilst yearning every day to give birth to her own, knowing she can conceive and carry the child and deliver it but finding no one to assist her. This book is my child.

  What the hell have you done? What is this bullshit? What the fuck does he know about yearning to give birth?

  I open two more heat pads and hold them in my hands while I read, the pen torch between my teeth, the air cold and dry inside my open mouth.

  I’ve left instructions with Third Way Publishing; detailed instructions because I won’t be able to contact them again going forward. The Liquorice Factory should be published next year. I’ve emailed cover design ideas, and my preference for the colour would be black, like a traditional Grimberg product. The end papers should be silver and I’ve insisted upon raised lettering. I think it’d be fitting. The chimneys should feature on the cover, perhaps with a black coin motif on the base of the spine.

  I am shivering reading this. Chills run from my coccyx up my backbone, cooling each stiff vertebra, all the way up to my neck. I compact myself, huddling, bringing my limbs in closer, squeezing myself into a new shape. And then I smell smoke. Further up the chimney, maybe ten metres up, there’s an angled opening from the right and smoke is rising into it. The tiled stove in the Grand Room. They can’t light it, it’s not safe, but they are burning something.

  ‘Help!’ I scream. ‘Karin! Anna-Britta! Help me! Cici, help me!’ My voice croaks and I sob. The air is faintly smoky and my tears roll down my cheeks onto my ski-jacket collar and I look up at the tiny white aperture above and plead to Dad. See me down here. Please see me, Dad. Help me.

  I scream some more and then I stop. I keep on reading, incarcerated in the tallest, coldest jail cell ever conceived. Perhaps there’s a clue, something to help me.

  I am more similar to the Grimbergs than you might imagine. They’re misunderstood by the Gavrik community. So am I. We’ve created something both historically relevant, and, vitally, commercially interesting. The book has intrigue, it’s packed with it. I made quite sure of that. So copies will fly off the shelves and that will mean we save jobs. You and I, we’ll keep the family in their home and we’ll help this place thrive even though we’ll no longer be living here to see it.

  My lungs weigh deep in my chest like lead bowls full of ice water. I’ve been working for a fantasist so I could rent a decent flat down south. I sold my soul.

  The snow skull’s still there. Part-human, part-thing. I cannot allow myself to look at it or to think about it.

  They’re burning something upstairs, probably some kind of precaution. I can smell a herbal tone, maybe rosemary. My belly rumbles. Roast lamb. Reminds me of my mother roasting a leg of lamb in the years before Dad died. With crispy garlic potatoes. She was a very good cook before the accident. She knew how to judge meat.

  I break a square of bitter dark chocolate. It snaps because it’s frozen and because there’s hardly any fat or sugar in it. It’s not chocolate really. And I suck it whilst reading on, the pen light illuminating a few lines at a time, the rest of the page dark around the glow.

  I’ve left instructions for your new notes to be assimilated into my work. Third Way are mercenary bastards and they’ll follow my advice to the letter if they think it’ll sell well. I’ve recommended three other ghosts to assist with the prose because you and I will be unable to continue.

  ‘Help me!’ I scream. I get to my feet and bang the metal doors leading out of this thing but they don’t clang so much as absorb the impact, a dull thud each time they’re struck. Tiny snowflakes of rosemary-scented ash float down from above and settle around me, on my face as I stare up at the miniscule shimmering light. I’m not usually claustrophobic, but this . . . I can run from one wall to the other in two strides. I can circumnavigate the area in less than three seconds. There’s so much space but it’s all above me. Teasing me. I’m a pea lodged at the base of some towering bamboo cane, with no hope of extraction.

  I read on, snot freezing on my upper lip, the balaclava itchy against my cheeks.

  I’ve helped this book evolve and events have assisted me along the way. I must confess all to clear my conscience. Please bear with me.

  I shake my head.

  The book was coming along reasonably well until Gustav’s untimely fall. I had nothing to do with his suicide, I assure you of that, on my honour. He was exhausted. The burden, the overwhelming burden, had finished him off. Then the women stopped talking to me. Well, they hardly spoke to me even before. The historical elements were in place and all reasonably interesting, but I’ve written enough thrillers and romance mysteries and misery memoirs to know that you need hooks to really sell. So I had to manufacture some.

  I rub my eyes, the heat packs clammy in my palms. I’m supposed to be in Skåne right now, starting work at a quality bi-weekly, making a new life for myself, new hairstyle, new health regime, and I’m locked inside a chimney in the disused side of a death factory.

  First, the tooth. The dog’s alive, don’t think that of me, he’s alive and very jolly living on an arable farm near Munkfors, but his tooth fell out before Christmas so it would have been a waste not to use it. I knew it’d get the papers interested, what with Medusa and the missing eyes and all the publicity that generated. I’m so pleased I relocated the dog well before I left.

  The chimney starts to spin. I drink water and my hearing aid beeps and switches off. So now I can’t hear. If rescue services or Anna-Britta or Noora were to yell my name, I’d never even hear it. All I have now is the taste of chocolate and salt, the sight of a pinprick of frozen light, the feel of heat pads scorching my skin in certain places, the smell of rosemary smoke.

  Shivering, I squint to focus on the pages.

  Gunnarsson was a monster, you see. I know the local police force investigated him as a bully and a school tyrant, but they made one fatal error, thank goodness. They focussed on children in his year and in the years below. I was teased by Gunnarsson for years but he was far younger than me. He was a beast and when I was forced to up the stakes, he became the obvious solution. I took my pestle to the back of his head. I learnt a lot from Medusa - that case caught the national imagination, and do you know why? Because of the eyes an
d because of the trolls. There were three major book deals signed on the back of the Medusa murders. Three. All with big publishers and none of them offered to me even though, as my then agent made perfectly clear, I had the inside knowledge. Anyway, Medusa taught me that we’d need drama to make this book sell. And we’d need a hashtag. That’s where the Ferryman came from. I waited for someone to come up with it but all I saw on social media was hashtag #LiquoriceMurder which was no good at all. So I got to work. I have twenty-seven separate Twitter accounts and eventually, after a night of hard graft, the hashtag began to stick. Then I researched automobiles; really I neither care nor know much about them. I researched corrosion of brake cables, what rodent damage looks like, how to saw through so that brakes work for a while and then shear away and fail. That story got some news coverage at least, some interest.

  The curse. The precautions. They were against Holmqvist, not the factory. I want to scream up to Anna-Britta and Cici and Karin. I want my voice to carry on the delicate ash flakes, up and through their chimney flue to the tiled stove and around the internal pipes and out through the doors. ‘It’s him,’ I want to say. ‘You were right.’

  The fire was all my idea. Something in the flavour of the Lake Vänern house fire, something to get people talking. Of course, I had nothing to do with the original blaze, and I made quite sure no lives were at risk from the root-barn inferno. I do feel bad for the taster. But she’s alive. She still has a life to live. The fire bought me some coverage and cemented the Ferryman hashtag. It did its job.

  I reckon I’ve been a full day now without real food. Only dark chocolate. I feel sick and I need to go to the toilet but all I have is this champagne cooler bucket and doing that in here feels like defeat, like I’m giving in to my fate. So I hold it.

  Awful about young Karin, but that was nothing to do with me. It runs in the family. However, I did do something that never quite sat right with me, it’s weighed heavy on my heart for some time. When you and I were in Anna-Britta’s office and we heard Cici scream, we didn’t actually hear her scream. What we heard was a recording of her scream, do you see? I pushed her down the stairs ten minutes before when you were in the bathroom, and I recorded her yelp on my mobile. Nobody else around. She’d talked before of being pushed at the lake house. I wanted to reopen that mystery, to leverage it. And also to divert suspicion away from me because I had an important book to finish, as you well know! The thick, archway doors and the sirens meant nobody heard the original yell. Then, when you came out, I played the scream back through my speaker. I’d perched it on the stairs, and then we ran through and saw Cici at the bottom near the arch door. Even though she’s always looked down on me, I accept it was a step too far, and I regret it.

  Bastard. How did I not see that at the time? Her lying there, her insisting she’d been pushed down. You don’t get to ‘regret’ that, David, and you don’t get to ‘apologise’.

  We need sales, you see. Essential. For my legacy, my name. As I mentioned to you, this is my first book written in my own name, the spine will read David Holmqvist from top to bottom, I’ve asked for it to be in larger print than the title, The Liquorice Factory, because I think it’ll help sales once news of all this breaks.

  I open four more heat pads because the pathetic pinprick of light is fading and I’m getting colder and colder. I stick them inside my socks and long johns and then I open eight more for my sleeves and my back and my neck.

  And the family need the sales, goodness, they really do need them. It’s not easy to build an income stream from one non-fiction book, you know. This thing has to take off, it has to market itself, there’s no advertising budget with people like Third Way, no help whatsoever. And this is my final strategy.

  A grand finale.

  The story of you, here, deep inside the liquorice factory.

  52

  I thought the blank light above me was maddening, but now I’d give anything to have it back. There’s still light up there but it’s slush-coloured. I’ve seen a bird, I think it was a bird, maybe a crow or a goose, I only saw a wing tip, how can I judge its size from all the way down here?

  The heat packs are keeping me alive. I have to ration them, not too many at once, not too many in one place, try to squeeze the last drops of heat from each disc before removing it and stacking it with the others in the corner. There are no fucking corners. I stack them at one point on the ground like a mound of clamshells by a grave. By my grave.

  ‘Help! Can anybody hear me?’ I just get a dull echo. I can feel it swirling around the chimney, my hoarse voice trapped down here close to the ground.

  The book’s actually quite good. I’m learning about the founding family and their children, about the difficulties they had sourcing the raw roots and signing trade contracts when political regimes were weak or in flux. Gavrik was much smaller back then, less than two-thousand souls. And the factory, the coffin I’m entombed inside of, was state of the art. It was mentioned in the press as far afield as Germany and Ireland. New machinery and stock systems and quality control methods. They were ahead of their time.

  Not anymore.

  I’m at the bottom of a dry well looking up at the cold, blank night. There are people close by at my level and people walking above my head, and the might of this chimney is keeping me from them and them from me. David Holmqvist’s probably in France right now working on his new identity, or maybe in Vienna, I can see him there, living a high-culture existence on his own terms.

  I change the batteries in the torch for fresh ones. The night freeze is draining their power.

  Torch, carpet, manuscript, salty chocolate, water bottles with heat pads, a red pen I store in my pocket to prevent the ink from solidifying. And a human brain in an ice skull.

  He’s dedicated the entire book to me, the bastard.

  Thanks to Tuva, my local friend and assistant, for your work and your belief.

  For all his talk of legacy and immortality through prose, he’s destroyed his literary reputation and taken my embryonic one down with it. I want to recall his email to Third Way Publishing and I want to burn this printed copy and dance on the embers.

  I look up and there are holes in the brickwork.

  They’re not large. Not big enough to push something through. They’re mouth-sized and a few metres above me and maybe they’re just nooks, not holes at all. I direct my voice at them and scream.

  Nothing.

  I read on. I try to listen out for people calling my name, then scold myself for my stupidity. No aids, no chance. I get up abruptly and, holding the manuscript in both hands, my skin so sore it’s bleeding, I beat the metal doors with the five hundred pages, over and over and over again.

  I sit back down.

  I’m exhausted. More salty chocolate. More thirst.

  I have no sense of time. I start to panic, to breathe too fast, and then I close my eyes tight, so tight I can see orbs of light on the insides of my eyelids, and I think back to Dad, to his hands, his voice, his goodnight kiss, and my breathing slows and I quell the panic and I go on.

  The sky, the tiny piece I’m permitted to see, is almost black. It’s like the pupil of some mythical thing looking back down at me, inspecting me; Tuva, the bug pressed between glass slides and slotted into the base of a gigantic microscope.

  What do you see, beast? An orphan? A lover? It could be Mum looking down, shaking her head at my stupidity, my blind ambition.

  I discard my boot heat-pads and throw them on the pile. I snap open more. I probably have two-hundred left.

  I count them.

  Two-hundred and seventeen.

  But how long will they keep me alive in this induced chimney coma? Is it better to stay warm and then just run out and stop, or to shiver on, rationing them for days or even weeks? I have enough chocolate to last me, enough water. And then I look at that silver champagne-cooler gleaming in the din.

  The sensation of Gore-Tex and merino wool long johns dragging down my bare legs as I squ
at over the bucket is unbearable. Too dark, too cold. Hideous. The skull’s there looking away, the rubber band of its ponytail holding its dead hair in place. I finish and wipe myself with David Holmqvist’s dedication page because fuck you.

  The smell sinks into the walls to join the others. It’s not bad, it’s too cold to be bad. You can buy freezer toilets in Sweden. I’ve seen them advertised in the Posten, next to my articles. You plug them into your cabin wall and then they freeze the family shit into neat little ice blocks for you to bury out in the nature.

  I huddle.

  I cup my hands to my cheeks.

  No noises, just salt on my tongue and the yearning for a hot bath with bubbles, not unscented ICA soap, I’d take Tammy’s fancy stuff, peonies and roses and peaches and froth. Lather. Hot water. So hot it’d numb my brain stem.

  Sleep is difficult. It’s not the mattress, that’s fine as it goes. It’s the fear of not waking. Makes a girl an insomniac, the lurking dread that you might close your eyes and only get discovered by some archaeologist three hundred years from now, theorising about the skeleton in the chimney and what it all meant.

  So, I read.

  How Grimberg Liquorice supplied the German troops in World War One. The Germans don’t mind a bit of salt liquorice. About their exports to Holland, and, for a time, to the Minnesota region of the United States. And then he writes about the first suicide, the first one they know of. And the business problems starting in the sixties, issues around modernisation, the building of the new part of the factory.

  Something catches my eye.

  There’s a mouse.

  It’s egg-size, plus tail, and it looks at me and scuttles around the curve of the chimney like I did when I woke up here and then it disappears into thin air. Poof. I scrabble around to investigate and find a hole the size of my eye. How the hell did it get through? I scream at the hole, crouching down, my cheek resting on wet leaf mulch. I get my lips so close to the damp old bricks I can taste them, the earth they were made from, the salt running through them. I scream and spit and holler into this tiny hole like Alice in Wonderland after she’s had the ‘eat me’ cake, only this is a fucked-up new version where I’m a giant Alice and a miniature Alice all at the same time.