A Time For Monsters

by Gareth Worthington

  A drunk and abusive, the article reported.

  Rey’s skin tingled hot.

  He had knocked Aslaug about for several years, according to her testimony. The woman had admitted putting up with it, believing that it wasn’t really him, but a consequence of his job—coming home drunk because he couldn’t deal with the horrors of being a homicide detective.

  A stone in Rey’s gut formed. A familiar anger. Her mind worked overtime, forming the scene as she read the words. Now no longer ink on a page, Rey could see, hear, and smell everything as if she were there.

  Huakaas had come home particularly belligerent and beer soaked. Any restraint he’d had in the past was gone. His eyes wild and dark as he stormed around the room, shouting about how he worked all day to keep the city safe, and she couldn’t even put a meal on the table. Huakaas went on about how she was a terrible wife, who only took his money, refused to fuck him, and poisoned their daughter against him. She would never understand what it was like to see dead bodies and plow the depths of a killer’s mind. Aslaug had called him a drunk and a loser. His back fist had caught her across the face, sending her sprawling into the fireplace. She’d suffered burns to both hands, and the force had smashed her right cheekbone and dislocated her jaw.

  Rey slammed the phone over and over against the thin mattress.

  How was this cunt still a cop? How was he allowed to hold a position of authority and be seen as a protector of the people? Why hadn’t he been fired? She drew up the phone again to read further, her hands shaking with adrenaline. The case had gone to court, but there was no evidence of previous abuse. No prior police reports. He had an impeccable record. The incident was a one-off, and an apparent accident. He’d managed to get the charges reduced to domestic battery. He’d been suspended and fined but served no jail time. Aslaug had gotten her divorce.

  That was where the article ended, and no other mention of him in that respect.

  Rey’s heart beat fiercely, her mind awash with this coincidental crossing with Huakaas. The cop was chasing her for the murders of men just like him—abusers who somehow got away with it and moved on without any real consequence. She already had the last victim picked out. Carefully chosen. Was this some dark fate? Rey didn’t believe in such things—destiny, fate, karma—but somehow the universe had dropped him in her path.

  It would completely fuck with her plan and her timetable, but as she lay there in her hospital bed, anger pulsated through her limbs and aggravated her injury. A wave of drowsiness washed over her, the result no doubt of such emotional excursion. She’d sleep on it but already knew her mind was made up. Rey switched off her phone, closed her eyes, and tried to allow the deep, black, oblivion of sleep to envelope her. At least for a few hours.

  There was much to do.

  Oslo, Norway, 2016

  Arne sat in Huus’s car, parked on the street around the corner from his apartment. All in all, he’d had an unbelievably shitty day. The King Kubb Killer had struck, there were no real leads—again—and he’d mowed down a woman while inebriated in his partner’s car. If Hansen found out about this, Arne might as well put cuffs on himself and walk into a cell.

  Another painful cough and hack, his flaccid lungs begging to not be choked with another cigarette, but Huakaas’s anxiety won out. He lit up and took a long drag, then realized he wasn’t in his crappy Saab. This was Huus’s vehicle. Arne lowered the window and wafted the smoke out with his free hand. For the remainder of his cigarette, he purposefully blew the smoke through the open window.

  His father always hated cigarettes.

  Happy to disappoint, Arne thought, then laughed involuntarily, which elicited another bout of coughing. How had his life come to this? How did he have such bad luck when it came to women? Aslaug, Clara, and now this Georgina Thompson. Another woman who’d blow a minor incident out of proportion. Maybe she’d go to the newspapers or report him to his captain. For what? A minor lapse in concentration? He was sure he’d been under the limit—hadn’t he? It had been hours since his last drink by the time he’d run her over, hadn’t it?

  She was the one buried in her phone. Not his fault. She was a snarky one to boot. Needed to be taken down a peg or two. All those questions? Psychoanalyzing him? He’d been a cop for thirty years. He knew how to analyze people. Dig out from them what he needed. She thought she had him figured out from a few minutes in that cubicle.

  Yes, he’d been in the hospital with Aslaug. After the accident. After he’d lost control—once. The only time he’d lost control that badly. His temper had been like a volcano erupting. That day, that one time, he’d not been able to contain his rage anymore. A psycho had gone free. Lars Emmerson. A skinny, ragged toothed, letch of a man. Let off on a technicality because the jury couldn’t say for sure the evidence pointed only to him. Something to do with degraded DNA samples. Lars had been accused of raping, murdering, and mutilating a thirteen-year-old girl, not much older than Clara at that point. The perp had cut her face, removed her teeth, and burned her fingers to a crisp in an attempt to stop anyone from identifying her. Arne knew it had been Lars. The way the fucker had sneered in court as the atrocities were read out, as if proud of himself. He had been acquitted all the same.

  So, of course, Arne had been pent up when he got home. Who wouldn’t be? Aslaug hadn’t cared about his day. She’d stopped caring years before he’d lost his shit. She’d launched into a tirade as soon as he’d walked in the door that day. He didn’t even remember hitting her. That whole moment was an alcohol-fueled blur in his memory. He’d lashed out, but it had been too hard—he knew that much. That time it hadn’t been a warning shove, or a love tap, like the ones his own father had doled out when he’d felt disrespected. No, Arne had struck Aslaug hard. Hospitalized his wife.

  Arne sucked his cigarette down to the filter and savored the last puff, then flicked the stub away into the street. The car window slid back up, trapping him inside with a lingering wisp of smoke. He fixed his stare on the steering wheel.

  The full week after the incident, Huakaas had spent every day at the hospital with Aslaug. Tending to her as she drifted in and out of morphine-induced sleep, making sure she was turned over from time to time to avoid bed sores from developing, changing her flowers every day. She liked lilies. Playing her favorite music on a portable phone dock plugged into the socket near the heart monitor. As Arne mused over the last days with his wife before she’d awakened and demanded a divorce, it occurred to him there was one thing he hadn’t done.

  He’d never said he was sorry.

  Was that pride? If he’d apologized, that would have been admitting his culpability, and to his mind, losing his temper was as much her doing as his.

  If you provoke a bear, does it not maul you? he thought.

  Besides, he’d watched many abusive men beg and plead with their wives to stay after beating them shitless. Sorry didn’t mean anything. How would it have been different, for having said just two words? Arne rubbed at his old craggy face, massaging his eyeballs with the heels of his palms until bright colors streamed out of the dark. There was no use in thinking about these things. What was in the past should stay in the past. He couldn’t change anything about it now.

  He could, however, change how the story unfolded with Georgina Thompson. Perhaps if he apologized to her or if he explained that he was chasing the King Kubb Killer and that he had been distracted. Maybe it would resonate with her and she’d forgive him or—at least—not report him. Perhaps that’s all he could ask for. The best outcome.

  Arne nodded to himself, sealing the deal with his own conscience that tomorrow he’d go visit her in the hospital and offer some sort of apology. The self-deal made, Huakaas pulled on the handle, opened the door, and stepped out of the car into the cold. As the detective ambled past his own Saab parked on the curb, his phone pinged. Huakaas opened the message app. The text was from Huus:

  Manufacturers of akevitt not even in country.

  On family retreat in the S
outh of France.

  Going to check out the store owner now.

  CSI told me to fuck off with profiling the liquor store.

  Arne rolled his eyes. He should have told Huus that at the time. Would have saved some time and effort at least. Rather than play the I told you so game, he texted back:

  Keep on the store owner.

  Figured on the CSI team.

  His fingers hovered over the keyboard for a moment as he contemplated the next sentence. Arne quickly tapped it out.

  Your car is parked at my place. Come get it when you want.

  He pressed send, knowing he’d have to explain the damage to Huus’s vehicle at some point, then shoved the phone back into his pocket and ambled to the steps at the base of his apartment. He gazed up at the decrepit building and his heart sank at the thought of going back inside to sit in the dark with a giant rabbit and a metric ton of shit. Maybe he should just drive for a while? He shook his head. No, probably not a good idea. So, instead, he backed away and started down the street with no particular direction in mind.

  A walk would hopefully clear his head.

  An hour of mindless tramping through the cold streets and Arne found himself somewhere painfully familiar: Boltelokke Skole—Clara’s School. At least it had been more than a decade ago. Huakaas had always considered it to resemble some kind of psychiatric ward from a bad movie. Neo-gothic style with a Romanesque flair, built in the late nineteenth century. All pillars, and statues, and miserable. As if to drive home the oppressive atmosphere created by the macabre architecture, the school’s curriculum also required the students to learn of the site’s painful history—its requisitioning by German forces in the Second World War, to later be used as accommodation for those evacuated during the liberation of Finnmark. He was sure the screams of the dying could still be heard in those hollow halls. No place for children.

  Yet, when Clara had been small, none of the horrid stories revolving around the building seemed to bother her, and Arne would take great pleasure in surprising her at the gate on a sunny summer afternoon. She’d run up, smiling, and crash into his arms. All the while yelling to her friends that her police daddy was there, and he was the bravest person she knew.

  He protected everyone.

  Huakaas tried to swallow away the stone in his throat and placed a hand on the thin metal bars of the fence surrounding the school. This was also where he’d been arrested, by two of his own colleagues—right on this spot, right outside the school, in front of his Clara. Aslaug’s first task upon leaving the hospital had been to file assault charges.

  The look in Clara’s eyes that day would forever be burned into his memory. Confusion, hurt, anger—but most of all, disappointment. She hadn’t even fought to keep him there, a sad recognition in her face. Maybe she’d blocked out the fights between him and Aslaug. Compartmentalized them. Inside, Mom and Dad fought and shouted. Outside, her dad was a super cop. That day, though, her daddy had no longer been a superhero.

  Arne gave the fence a defiant smack with an open palm.

  Home life was just that—home life. Nothing about it was meant to be aired in public. What happened behind closed doors was supposed to be sorted out at home, wasn’t it? Or at least the children should not have to endure the embarrassment.

  Arne lit up a cigarette and took a long drag.

  A woman in a thick down jacket, walking a dog considerably smaller than his rabbit, tottered past muttering about adults smoking outside of a school. Arne grumbled, and imagined organizing a fight between Bamse and the rat-sized mutt to decide whether or not he could smoke anywhere he bloody liked but decided she was probably right and headed back the way he came.

  With his head hung low and jaw set, forced to relive painful memories and irritated by dog woman, anger grew inside Huakaas. He’d missed so much of Clara’s life. The school years where she had really started to blossom. The turning point where she’d moved from child to young woman. He’d not been allowed to attend parent-teacher evenings and share in the joy of her successes or failures. Be there to offer comfort when she fell in the playground. See her first gymnastics performance or scrutinize her first boyfriend. Eventually, Aslaug had moved them across the country to Bergen. It might as well have been Venezuela—both were too far to travel when his job kept him so busy. He’d been absent for so many smiles, laughs, and tears. Why? Because Aslaug had decided their fight should bleed into his relationship with Clara.

  A glance back at the old school, dark and foreboding, made Arne’s already papery, frigid skin prickle. He’d known that place was bad. An omen. He should never have let Clara go there at all.

  Plymouth, England, 1988

  Class Five. Mrs. Webster was the teacher. Rey liked her. She was a lady in her late forties, slight of build and with black cropped hair. She had an enthusiasm for knowledge that rivaled Rey’s own. She would often set Rey’s assignments beyond what the rest of the class was learning, to test and push. Science was the go-to subject, anything Rey could get her hands on.

  Today, however, Rey had to suffer the normal curriculum. They were reading Roots as a class. Written by Alex Haley, the story told of Kunta Kinte, his life as a slave in the USA, and the subsequent lives of his daughter and her family. The story was sad, one that made Rey inherently uncomfortable. The characters’ lives were much harder than even hers, and she found the idea that one human could use another, even mutilate them—Kunta’s right foot was mangled—to be abhorrent. The other kids didn’t seem to comprehend or care about the subject matter. The book was a story to them, made up, impossible to be real. Meanwhile, Rey absorbed the characters’ pain as if it were her own.

  As such, the day’s exercise nauseated Rey. The class had to act out a scene from the book. Rey was to play a slave driver, a member of the Waller family. Standing at the front of the class, she clutched the book close to her white school shirt. She was supposed to shout, “Move, Toby!”—the name given to Kunta by his master—and then pretend to whip another child, who played the young African boy.

  Many pairs of eyes stared at Rey, their expectant gawp boring into her: shout the line, crack the whip. Rey froze. Whispers grew among the children, giggles, and snorts at her incompetence. Mrs. Webster touched her arm and nodded silent encouragement. Another boy, Karl, laughed out loud.

  Didn’t they understand? Didn’t they see what this was? Who would want to be a slave driver? Who would even want to pretend to be a slave driver? Hot tears welled in her eyes. The young boy on his knees, who played Kunta, looked up to Mrs. Webster, confused as to what he should do.

  “Go on,” Mrs. Webster said.

  Those two simple words broke Rey’s resolve, unleashing a torrent of sobbing. She dropped her book and turned away from the class to face the blackboard. A pair of bony arms slipped around her shoulders.

  “What’s wrong, my love?” Mrs. Webster asked in that motherly Devonshire accent.

  “I don’t want to be slave driver,” Rey said, weeping through her fingers. “I don’t want to hurt anyone. Mum says you shouldn’t hurt anyone.”

  The teacher pulled Rey close to her scrawny chest and held her there a moment. Despite there being no flesh to snuggle, Rey felt safe and warm.

  “It’s okay,” Mrs. Webster whispered. “Go sit down.”

  Rey eagerly ran back to her seat at a shared table and watched the rest of the class act out scenes comprising of one or two sentences. She sniffed away her tears and studied her classmates. They were the same age as her, but they didn’t understand things the way she did. They didn’t see the details, the meaning behind everything and everyone. Each action had a specific purpose, every action had a reaction. Nothing ever happened by chance. Stories were not stories at all, but allegories.

  The bell rang. It was time to go home.

  Rey slipped on her coat and headed for the door.

  “Rey?” Mrs. Webster called.

  Rey spun on her heel and waited, expecting a lecture or a thousand questions as to her
performance today. Instead, her teacher crouched down to Rey’s level and offered a weak smile. Her hazel eyes held Rey’s gaze for an eternity. The woman seized her breath, damming a tide of words—but, in the end, none actually flowed.

  Eventually, her teacher exhaled purposefully then gave a big smile. “Do you remember I told you about Chernobyl?”

  “The nuclear power station,” Rey replied. “Yes.”

  “Well, I thought you might like to learn more about it.”

  The kindly teacher handed Rey a large but thin book with a metallic, matte silver cover with the word Chernobyl on it. Rey pawed at it in wonder, flipping through the pages filled with photos of the wreckage following the meltdown.

  “Also,” Mrs. Webster said, “I have a couple of other books on nuclear fission for you. One is for children closer to your age and the other is for older children, but I know you’ll be okay.”

  Rey took the two extra books. One was indeed aimed at kids probably ten years old—a bit older than she was—since the protons and neutrons had drawn-on faces and even little wings to represent their movement. Rey knew the book for older children would be more helpful.

  “Thank you very much,” Rey said, then stuffed the books into her satchel and headed for the door.

  She skipped down the corridor, happier than she’d felt in a long time. Mrs. Webster understood her. Though she had to do the same boring lessons as everybody else, she also got to learn about cool things, like the splitting of a Uranium-235 atom by bombarding it with neutrons resulting in gamma radiation, free neutrons, and kinetic energy. This was not a topic to talk about with other children. Not even a topic to bring up at home. Who would she tell? Mom was good at English, but it was her father who had a head for science, even though he never applied his innate talent. No, better to keep this to herself. This was something just between her and Mrs. Webster.

  Rey exited the large double doors of the school, past the four white pillars of the entranceway, down the five or so steps and onto the driveway toward the green gate that led onto the road. As she stepped out onto the tree-lined, cracked pavement, Rey was grabbed from behind. Her satchel slipped from her shoulder and plopped onto the concrete. Two girls held her by the arms, splaying her out like the statue of Jesus in the foyer.