A Time For Monsters

by Gareth Worthington

  “Chemo,” Rey said.

  “You eat it?” the officer said, poking the tabs.

  “I do, yes, though I wouldn’t recommend you try one. Capecitabine has some shitty side effects.” Rey offered a weak smile that drew his attention to her sickly features.

  He quickly poured the tablets back into the bottle and handed it back to Rey. “Have a good evening, miss. Get some rest.” He waved for her to continue.

  Rey nodded, her lips tight, and shuffled past him, then headed to the hostel. She was right—he was a good man.

  Inside, safe from the cold, Rey surveyed the empty foyer. Everyone was probably out drinking until the early hours, or unable to come back due to the blockade. She sauntered through an industrial factory-inspired hall complete with exposed air-conditioning ducts, unshaded lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling from long black wires, and brick walls painted in a thin layer of off-white emulsion.

  One floor up, she opened the door to her room filled with only two simple beds covered in chocolate brown sheets, a single black square table and matching chair, and a tiny window to the outside world. Bare and bleak, as was all Nordic furnishing. A far cry from the throw pillows and flower-imbued textile of her mother’s couch. A little old fashioned, but Rey’s mom had been raised by her grandmother, and so old traditions—bread and dripping, Sunday roast dinner, knitted jumpers for winter—had seeped through more generations than perhaps they should. Still, bare and bleak was prescribed today. Easy to clean, easy to leave without fear of stray evidence lurking in some hidden corner or between unnecessary cushions.

  Rey dumped the bag on the bed and pulled open the drawstring. The bottle of tabs rattled as it hit the mattress. She slumped down as well, deflated. Empty. The adrenaline all but gone, her limbs hung heavy, her chest cavernous and devoid of all the things she thought she should be feeling—elation, joy, relief? Something. Anything. Rey decided it should be joy. After all, that had been a momentous kill, an important kill.

  Rey adjusted the earbuds, then skipped through her playlist. There were so few happy songs in her collection. Melancholy just struck a greater chord within her soul. She cursed herself. Then, she found it. Something from her childhood, a song not tied to pain.

  She pressed play.

  The opening drumbeats, primal and angry, were accompanied by a screechy guitar. An anthem, one with which to shout and dance. Joan Jett & the Black Hearts’ “I love Rock and Roll”. Of course, Rey only listened to Joan’s cover. Not Britney’s vanilla version. Joan was the original rock queen.

  Rey broke into an impromptu ax solo, hammering out strong power chords on non-existent strings, singing loudly along with a particular emphasis on “he was with me, yeah me!” However, her earlier exertion with that cunt combined with the meds had drained her for today. She sat on the bed, huffing out breaths, skin damp with sweat. For a while, she just remained still without even the thought to switch on a light, and instead let other people’s windows illuminate her room through the open curtains.

  Her stomach rumbled, an uncomfortable and unwelcome feeling halfway between nausea and hunger. She fished out her dinner—a Kvikk Lunsj and a can of Solo Super. Essentially the Norwegian equivalent of a KitKat and Fanta. Not the healthiest, but the chemo meant she couldn’t keep much down before it decided to make an abrupt reappearance and splatter the toilet bowl anyway.

  Rey examined the interior of the bag, searching for any blood, but it seemed clean. In the evening light, the officer would have had difficulty seeing anything. Had any blood still been wet he might have felt it. Her decision to offload and burn the overalls and kubb piece before heading to the hostel had been the right call.

  After finishing her meager meal, Rey splayed out on the bed, then pulled off the fur hat. The phone in her jeans pocket jammed into her hip, so she wriggled it out. A quick passcode entry and Rey was granted access. With a swipe of her thumb, a folder app opened to reveal the image of another man. She stared at it for a long time, the ceiling a blurred backdrop behind her phone.

  There he was. The last one.

  His thin face and soft brown eyes might—to the average person—portray a kindly man, but not to Rey. She knew better. He deserved to die, just like the rest of them. Leif Aaberg, husband to Anna Aaberg, and father to Magnus. That’s what his social media had revealed. He wasn’t a drunk or a drug addict. He wasn’t even unemployed. Leif was a landscape gardener at Frogner Park. A busy job, considering the hundreds of acres of land. Still, he seemed to enjoy the two million visitors who came to see the sculptures each year. Passersby would complement him as he tended to the fragile growths, caressing the plants and coaxing them to bloom, ensuring they were nourished and preened. His Instagram account told the world this tale.

  Leif’s wife had a different story.

  Her screams as the metal buckle of his belt welted her pale skin could be heard through the thin walls of their apartment. Rey had heard them herself, watching from the shadows. No-one had come to Anna’s aid.

  For a long time, Rey believed it was only in slums, like the ones from her childhood, that no one came to help a beaten woman. She learned, however, that even those cul-de-sacs with green gardens and Mercedes in garages could host horrors to which neighbors were seemingly deaf and blind.

  Rey shuffled onto her side, her gaze locked on the image on her phone.

  It had occurred to her that perhaps there were worse people to punish like murderers, rapists, and pedophiles. But that was the point. There was always someone else to punish. Some other crime worthier of attention. Domestic violence was an accepted way of life. Most turned a blind eye. Assaults were hardly ever reported. Women and children accepted this as their lot.

  “Pick yourself up, dust yourself down, and carry on,” Rey’s mom would say.

  Leif Aaberg wouldn't pick himself up.

  Soon, he would wake for the last time, unaware he would be clubbed to death for his crimes. His wife would never know why he’d died, but Rey knew the woman would weep in relief.

  Rey turned off her phone and scrunched into a ball. The sickness permeated outward, from her gut to her limbs. She closed her tired eyes and controlled her breathing. The side-effects took such a toll. Soon, it would be over. Soon there would be no more chemo and no more pain—and Rey’s work would be finished.

  Oslo, Norway, 2016

  Huakaas stumbled through Grønland, past the Tørg shopping complex, and headed toward his one-room apartment. Snow and ice bit at his craggy face. He cursed under his breath and shrugged his coat collar up around his neck. April was supposed to be warm. Spring had been in his youth, which somehow seemed both only yesterday and yet so many eons ago. The liberals would argue climate change had shifted some air current somewhere, pulling down artic vortices. Huakaas was no scientist and he couldn’t comment on weather changes. All he knew was at Easter the pretty flowers at Frogner Park he used to love so much weren’t supposed to struggle through a defiant film of frost.

  Someone crashed into his shoulder, nearly spinning him around, but Huakaas kept his balance. He glared at the offender who, he noted, was another ignorant foreigner and had failed to acknowledge the collision at all. Arne stared at the back of the man’s head for a few seconds before abandoning the desire to whip out his ID and give the guy a piece of his mind. Huakaas never considered himself racist, but statistics didn’t lie. Nearly twenty percent of crimes could be attributed to foreigners. Particularly in his neighborhood. Well not his neighborhood, but the one in which he now resided. Because of her.

  Grønland was notoriously criminal and busting at the seams with immigrants—mostly those of Middle Eastern or Northern African descent. As such, the landscape had become dominated by shops offering cheap phone calls to Mozambique and Somalia, ethnic fabrics, and aromatic foods that were a far cry from the less spicy fish-based meals he preferred. And with the spices came the felons. Teenagers sold drugs, carried guns, knives, and baseball bats. Gangs assaulted adults in the open. Muslims in the
valley had formed a parallel society, one in which kids weren’t afraid of the police. Arne couldn’t afford to live anywhere else. Not anymore. Alimony payments had seen to that. Drained him and his bank account of all he had accrued in his life.

  The only saving grace was a slew of inexpensive bars where he could hide in a dark corner and buy a beer for less than fifty Krone. Many a night, Huakaas stumbled home from one of these establishments along the River Aker. A scenic route, though not safe for tourists unless they were adept at avoiding the neighborhood drug dealers. Arne was known, though. He left them alone, and they returned the favor. The Section for Organized Crime could deal with them. He was Division of Violence and Sexual Crimes. Besides, some of these gjøk were useful informants. Best to let them believe he was on their side.

  He continued onward, his hands stuffed into his pockets, one hand clutching the thick, gnarly carrot Bjorn had fetched, the other toying with the pink slip from his captain—a written performance warning. Arne grunted and cast his gaze at the large gray building still buzzing with people. There were fresh fruit and veg stalls in the Tørg Mall, but frankly, Arne didn’t like shopping in there. Too many people. Too many foreigners.

  After a full thirty minutes of stumbling along, Arne arrived at his old stone apartment building. He ambled up the few steps and through a door that was supposed to be keypad locked but wasn’t. It led him immediately to his apartment.

  Being on the ground floor, he’d been broken into three times in his first year until the perpetrators had finally gotten it into their thick skulls, he didn’t own anything of value. Arne slid the key into the lock and pushed the door open, which creaked in protest. The kitchen and living room were one space, bathroom another, and lastly, there was a single bedroom.

  “Honey, I’m home,” he called, as he did every time he came back, though there was no one to laugh.

  A ruffle from the corner of the room, followed by heavy rhythmic thuds of soft pads on newspaper and wood. From the shadows, an excessively large rabbit hopped forward to greet Arne. At least seven kilograms in weight, and steel gray in color, the Flemish Giant rabbit could easily have been mistaken for a dog.

  “Hey, Bamse.” Huakaas fished out the carrot and dropped to his haunches with a groan. He held the gnarly carrot out for the rabbit to nibble.

  Bamse’s nose twitched, almost cartoon-like, as she gnawed her way down the length of the carrot in seconds. Arne stroked her massive head. The damn rabbit had been named after a Saint Bernard, a symbol of freedom during the Second World War. A naval captain, whose name Arne had forgotten, had taken the dog to sea. Bamse the dog had been credited with saving a lieutenant commander from an attacker, breaking up quarrels among the crew, and was even said to have caught the bus to the Bodega Bar and brought crew members back to base. Rabbit Bamse had never dragged Huakaas home from the bar.

  Arne cursed himself for not remembering the name of the captain.

  Clara would remember, he thought. She loves that story. Or loved it, at least.

  He meandered to the simple desk wedged under the only window to the room, kicking dry rabbit droppings from his path. They rattled along the woodwork like smelly pebbles. Streetlight streamed through the window, giving him all the illumination he needed—or perhaps all he wanted. Arne preferred to work half in shadows. The darkness helped him get into the mindset of those he chased. They hid part of themselves to function in society. To buy groceries and pay bills. Talk to their neighbors. Their darker personas had to remain in the gloom.

  Anders Breivik had done just that. Even though he’d joined a known right-wing anti-immigration party, and had a history of arrests, he’d flown just under the radar to be taken seriously as a plausible threat. No one, not even his fascist friends, would have guessed that he would issue a manifesto against Islam and feminism on July 22nd, 2011, then murder eight people with a car bomb in Oslo and gun down sixty-nine youths in a summer camp on the island of Utøya. Huakaas had worked the horrible case. All those kid’s bodies, riddled with bloody holes, still haunted his dreams. He couldn’t begin to imagine what it was like for the devastated parents who had crumpled into weeping heaps. Oslo wasn’t such a big city and he’d see those mothers and fathers from time to time. They never made eye contact.

  The killer was clearly insane, eventually declaring himself a follower of Odin and simultaneously a Nazi. Yet, his motives had been clear—the consequence of a psychotic mother and his hatred of an influx of foreigners that seemed to overrun and even suppress Norwegian culture. He’d decided he was the antithesis to both.

  But the King Kubb Killer? Murdering middle-aged white men? What the hell was this about? Huakaas took a seat and pushed away the mountain of papers, documents, sketches and forensic photos on the table. All his notes and thoughts. He slipped off his coat, pulled the sleeves inside out, and shrugged it onto the back of his chair. He shoved his glowing laptop to the side, then rummaged around the inner pocket of his coat and pulled out the Polaroid of victim number five this year—eleven in total. He dropped it onto the desk with the others.

  The cold vacant stare of the man peered out from the image. Thick eyebrows. Gray eyes that might have been blue once. Brush-like hair that, even in his late fifties, still clung to some color. Not like Arne who had gone white by thirty-five.

  Hazard of the job.

  Arne fingered the image. The victim seemed to will him the answer, silently screaming the name of the person who’d killed him, but of course, didn’t. The corpse couldn’t tell Arne anything. Henrik Knutsen, fifty-eight years old, married to Elsa Knutsen. A single joint bank account in his wife’s name, and that was it. No children of his own, though she had a son, Jacob, who was grown and lived in Thailand. A quick follow-up had already verified Jacob had been in Bangkok for the last six months and hadn’t left. No stepdaddy issues there.

  Henrik had had no real job to speak of. Instead—according to Elsa—he’d worked with her on her magazine, occasionally taking photos and writing up pieces for her to edit. A pity job for a man with seemingly no skills.

  Bjorn was on the case to dig up more details on the guy, hunting for anything to connect the victims.

  Arne rifled through the pile of papers, pulled out a photo each time he came across one, then lined up the victims’ faces in order of their deaths. He didn’t need notes to do this. Arne knew their order as if they were dear friends.

  Christoph Jacobson was the first. Fifty-seven years old. Wife: Aase. Daughter: Abigael. A round man with a rounder face. Clean-shaven. Banker. Traveled a lot. House in Aker Brygge, with an expensive car to match. Bludgeoned to death in his home with a single strike near the left temple, the pterion to be exact. Docs in the lab had explained the anterior division of the middle meningeal artery runs underneath the pterion. What Arne understood was that trauma to the pterion could rupture the artery and cause an epidural hematoma. The pterion was so weak it could also be fractured indirectly by blows to the top or back of the head. The killer knew this. The strike was efficient and precise.

  Arne touched another photo. Olaf Erhardt. Fifty-nine years old. Wife: Elizabet. Twin boys named Lars and Thomas. Jobless, living not far from Grønland in a small two-bedroom apartment. A skinny man and a known drug dealer. But his death was not gang related. The bottle of akevitt protruding through the hole in his head was a testament to that.

  Huakaas continued to lay out the pictures. All of the victims were similar in profile, but only due to their age and gender, yet each one seemed somehow vaguely familiar.

  He huffed out an irritated sigh and focused on the glass of the window. His muted reflection stared back. Old and tired. He’d be fifty-five this year. He looked dead, just like those in the images of the victims. In fact, only a trail of thick blood and a bottle of akevitt in his cranium were missing. This case was hard not to take personally.

  The world had become strange, one where the tables seemed to have turned against white men his age. Being male and a baby boomer meant you ha
d a target painted on your back. In this case, literally. Someone was picking off guys like him, one by one.

  His laptop pinged, the website permanently open now flashed with an update.

  Shit.

  Arne clicked on the article.

  Arne Huakaas up to his old tricks?

  The article rambled a bit about five suspicious crime scenes in the space of two weeks, the police department saying nothing. It was all fluff, mostly personal digs at Arne referring to his past. No facts. Thank God that little shit is ignored by mainstream reporters.

  Oliver Hansen. A wannabe news anchor and continual pain in Arne’s ass. The dogged conspiracy theorist had nearly blown the lid off it all last year by snapping a pic through a grimy kitchen window after ducking the police tape and running past the uniforms holding the line. Only a sworn threat from Huus, up close and personal, had made the little shit hand over his phone and back off. Still, just in case, Arne monitored Oliver’s blog. Can’t afford to be in the papers, again, he thought.

  Arne’s stomach roiled. Whether he was hungry or nauseated at the thought of being strung up by the media wasn’t clear. Huakaas stood and meandered to the old fridge that rattled with a faulty compressor. He pulled the door open but was greeted by a meager selection—a plastic packet of processed meat and week-old lettuce, half of which was turning bad and would be fed to Bamse anyway. He pulled them both out, closed the fridge, and dumped the ingredients on the side. His carelessness knocked the only picture in his apartment into the sink. His heart faltered as he grabbed it up, inspecting for cracked or broken glass.

  It was fine.

  He let out a measured breath and placed the picture back in its position. A happy young girl with blonde tresses and brown eyes, clutching a much younger Bamse, beamed up at him. Arne held her pretty gaze for a few more seconds, then went about constructing his limp sandwich with cheap sliced bread.