A Time For Monsters

by Gareth Worthington

  Huakaas rubbed his bedhead and yawned in the way only fathers do, long and loud—like a lion announcing they have awoken and now needed feeding. No lioness appeared. No little woman to meet his needs. Instead, Huakaas ambled to the fridge and yanked open the door. There he stood, in some kind of stupor, hovering.

  The fridge light illuminated the room some, yet it revealed nothing more than what Rey had already seen. A moth-eaten couch propped against the back wall. A field of rabbit shit scattered across the floor. Rey’s gaze roved over the pauper’s abode, searching for the new life Huakaas had made for himself but found no sign. She squinted harder, but then the fridge light extinguished as he closed the door.

  Huakaas shuffled back toward the animal and slowly lowered to his knees where he came to rest. His stiff movements were more reminiscent of a man twenty years his senior. Huakaas looked frail and broken—as pathetic as the light in which he bathed. Was he too cheap to turn on the lights, or did he enjoy living like a mole?

  The old detective jerked into a flurry of activity, seemingly expending all the energy he had to launch himself from the floor because once on his feet, he slowed back to his glacial pace. He meandered over to the sink and placed both hands on the porcelain rim, head hung low. There he stayed for what seemed an age.

  Rey studied him, willing his thoughts to come to her also. What was he thinking about? What was he mulling over with such intensity? The King Kubb Killer? Rey—Georgina—who he’d mowed down in the street?

  Rey considered the little man, alone and in the dark, surrounded by shit and not much else. A life deserved after what he’d done to his wife. Could it be the universe had gotten this one right? Was it possible he’d actually been served his just desserts?

  Huakaas grabbed up the lonely picture frame and drew it into the light emanating from under the cabinet. Now Rey could make out the image of a little girl, perhaps ten-years old, clutching a rabbit nearly as large as she was—a huge grin on her face. Rey’s gaze momentarily flitted to the oversized rodent lumbering around the floor, then back to the detective. The girl must be his daughter, Clara. Her pale, sweet face flashed bright behind the glass of the frame.

  It sent a fresh swell of anger through Rey.

  Whether or not this man was now living in squalor, sad and alone, was not the point. That little girl was forever scarred, damaged from paying witness to the atrocities her father had committed. That frail, pathetic man still got to pretend to uphold the law. He still got to run down Rey and cover it up.

  The song in Rey’s ears ended and the splatter on her hood now took the foreground as the rain came down harder, drawing her back to the world outside. She’d been hovering at that window for a long time. Probably too long. She scanned the area. An umbrella-covered someone stormed along the pavement on the other side of the street, probably hoping to make it home without drowning.

  “Are you doing this, Rey?” she whispered to herself. “Dark bedroom. Shitty neighborhood. Make it look like a break-in. Take this fucker out once and for all. Maybe even better if the King Kubb Killer investigation is stalled with him dead.” She checked on Arne again. He’d replaced the picture and was now making his way back to the dark doorway at the back of the room.

  The door to the building popped open, startling Rey. She instinctively turned her face away. The tenant ducked beneath an umbrella and trotted down the stairs, out into the street. Rey jammed her foot in the door before it could close and slipped inside.

  The interior was shittier than the outside. The rotted carpet was steeped in years-long cigarette stench, and the once-white walls were yellowed and peeling. There was no elevator, only a rickety staircase with missing struts.

  No time to hang around.

  Rey stepped cautiously to the first door, which had to be Huakaas’s unit, and slipped her fingers around the cold doorknob. Gently, with breath held, she twisted. It slid with the ease of a worn and useless mechanism. The door swung slowly inward without so much as a creak. Rey stepped inside and closed the door behind her. From under her jacket, she pulled the Kubb piece and held her weapon high.

  The smell of cigarettes now melded with animal shit.

  Rey gagged.

  On the table under the window, Rey could now see the screen of the laptop, displaying an open webpage. It was in Norwegian, so Rey couldn’t read it, but it had a picture of Henrik’s house, a blurry photo of Huakaas on it, and large flashing letters. The media might not have caught on yet, but someone had.

  From the corner, the dog-sized rodent hopped forward, nose twitching to greet Rey. She shooed it away with her foot, careful to keep her back to the far wall. She slid along silently, wary of creating more boot prints than necessary, and certainly to navigate between the shitty pebbles.

  Rey’s shoulder reached the doorframe to what she assumed was the bedroom. There she paused, breathing shallow, Kubb piece ready. Stepping into the room would be foolish. Striking him as he came out was the best option. Right in the temple. Single blow. Clean. Efficient. Fatal. No chance for retaliation.

  But she needed to draw him out.

  Rey scanned the floor. In a flash of inspiration, she kicked a pile of dry droppings. They rattled across the floor and newspaper. Nothing. No movement, except for the damn rabbit that came for a close inspection.

  Shit, Rey thought.

  She clenched her jaw and tried something a little more drastic. Her short toe-punt caught the rabbit in the nose. The issuing noise could only be described as a scream, a terrible pained cry, the likes of which Rey had never heard let alone imagined would come from an animal.

  A creak of floorboards at the doorway. Then a click, the undeniable metallic sound of a gun’s hammer cocking.

  “Hello?” came a withered voice from the room.

  Rey pulled back her Kubb wielding arm, wound up like a baseball pitcher.

  Come on. One more step out, you fucker.

  Oslo, Norway, 2016

  Arne sat on his uncomfortable, squeaky, sprung mattress. He had to sleep on the left side because the right had somehow gone awry and the springs jammed into his back. Not that he’d slept properly in years, anyway. An affliction his father suffered, too. Insomnia. Perhaps that was why they were both grumpy fuckers.

  His head swam with the events of the last couple of days. A year of chasing the King Kubb Killer had turned up nothing and now there was a literal explosion of activity spreading a debris of clues, evidence, and theories across the landscape of the case. In his gut, Arne knew the fragmented puzzle pieces would all lead him to Georgina Thompson.

  Arne rubbed at his face in frustration.

  “Think Arne,” he said out loud. “Think! She’s pissed at men. Probably a victim of abuse. She’s picking men who abused their wives or families, too. She has to be trained in some way not to leave a trail. Maybe she was a cop, knows crime scene procedure, and can take care of herself. Need to remember to follow up with the Met in London.” The problem was, while he knew her face and name, that’s all he had. Not much for his department, let alone London’s Met, to go on. There was no Georgina Thompson on an INTERPOL wanted listed. Searches of the name returned a list of hundreds of women in the United Kingdom. He spent the last few hours trawling them, none of which looked like the woman he had hit with his car. Not that her current physical state may resemble any picture he’d seen anyway. Her bald head and sickly features didn’t appear on a single social media site.

  He climbed off the bed and began pacing in the dark, only the glowing ember of his cigarette providing any light. “So, she kills Henrik, but through some shit fate gets in the way of my car,” he said, pushing aside his London Met idea. “That means she’s now exposed. She flees the hospital and is forced to go off the grid. Ends up in Tøyen. Some unlucky bastards think they can mug her and meet their end.”

  He stopped pacing and took another long drag on his cigarette. Maybe the trick wasn’t finding out who she was or where she’d trained, but where she’d be next. “So, w
hat is next for her? The MO would play out that she has another kill to make. Same number every year ... then she disappears. Probably back home, which means she’d need a flight out of Oslo. Huus sent out a BOLO, so a search of upcoming airline manifests might pull her name or likeness. He could also flag her to airport security.”

  A shiver, electric and sharp, crackled down his old spine. He’d completely skipped the part where Georgina would bludgeon another man to death. On the one hand, letting her get away with it would move her to the last phase—the flight, where Huakaas might catch her. In fact, it was reasonable to assume that trying to intercept her before she killed her last target might force her hand, change her plan and he’d lose her. On the other hand, a fifty-something-year-old man would die.

  If she was choosing abusive men, did they deserve it? Could he justify it? Arne shook his head. Justifying one death to arrest her for all the others was insane. Besides, who was she to decide these men deserved death? They were just men, fallible like all humans. How would she know if their intentions had been evil or malicious?

  A pang of familiar guilt crept into his chest.

  Arne’s mind wandered to Aslaug again. She had always been a harsh woman. Not one to give love or affection—even when he’d needed it most. Dinner would sometimes be cooked. House would be relatively clean. But a touch of his hand? A gentle caress at the end of a painful day? These little acts were not in her repertoire. And it wasn’t a man’s place to ask. He couldn’t talk about active cases. He had to bottle up the horror—the bodies, the wounds, the blood—and keep it for himself. She would have known that—should have known that. A touch, a kiss to ease his suffering would have thawed the icy shield he wore every day to survive.

  But she hadn’t.

  So, the ice wall had become thicker, more impenetrable. It had pressed down on him and compressed all that he hid from his family for their sake. Until, like any man, he’d exploded. Surely, it wasn’t his fault.

  The image of Aslaug crashing into the fireplace made him pinch his eyes shut, but the scene was not for masking. The back of his hand tingled where it had connected with her jaw. Arne’s old heart cramped then burst into frenzied life.

  Men reap what they sow.

  “Me? Am I the last one?” Was hitting Georgina with the car enough of an insult to add him to her list? Or was it more? Could she know about Aslaug? His stomach knotted, dread crawling its cold way across his skin. He shook his head, cursing his own paranoia. “You’re not that important, Arne,” he told himself.

  Huakaas stubbed out his cigarette in a glass ashtray and sauntered into the living-cum-kitchen area. Bamse came to greet him, lumbering along on the dirty newspaper. Huakaas shuffled toward the animal and clumsily got down to his knees. His joints felt stiff and old, probably older than they actually should, but the weight of his life pressed down on him as if he were Atlas condemned to shoulder the heavens for eternity.

  “Help me, old friend,” Huakaas whispered.

  Bamse twitched her nose.

  “What do I do? Even if I wanted to apologize, Aslaug would never listen.”

  The old rabbit looked up, dark round eyes holding no semblance of comprehension. He snuffled Arne’s hand, probably in the hopes of receiving a fresh carrot. Arne had none.

  Huakaas pushed up with as much force as he could muster to stand. These days, launching himself up seemed the only way to rise. Too slow, and he feared he’d not make it.

  Once upright, Huakaas slowed again, meandered to the sink and placed both hands on the porcelain rim. There he paused, head low, mind awash with flashbacks—everything from Clara helping him to decorate their Norwegian Pine Christmas tree with wooden toys, to the first time he’d met Aslaug twenty years before in Copenhagen while on a day trip. Of course, each good memory, each warm smile that attempted to shine from the darkness of his mind was squashed by the same ugly image—his own face. Weathered and beaten. Cold and unloving—unlovable.

  Perhaps he deserved his eternal misery in the shithole apartment with only a rabbit for company. Even the furry rodent was a reminder of everything he’d lost. Maybe he’d kept it around, not to comfort himself or to feel close to Clara, but to punish himself.

  Huakaas grabbed the solitary picture frame and pulled it into the light coming from under the cabinet. Clara stared back at him, her huge smile and viselike hug on the rabbit made a stone form in his throat. She’d be a woman now. A person with a job, and a partner, and friends, and vacations. Love and life, and laughter, all without him. He wasn’t necessary. Obsolete. Never to share her joys or heartbreaks.

  His heart cramped again, stuttering an irregular staccato.

  Arne put the picture back and turned to go lie down on his bed when his gaze briefly fell on the window by his desk. Though dark outside, rain thrashing against the pane, his mind told him something else was there. A shadow. A person lurking. Watching.

  Was she here? Georgina? Had she come for him?

  A cramp in his chest again, stabbing into the space between his biceps and triceps and finally into his elbow. A cold sweat broke out on his forehead, his breathing now labored—unable to draw enough oxygen to clear the vertigo sliding over his brain.

  Huakaas stumbled to the bedroom, hands trembling. His knees crashed into the wooden frame of his bed, gashing his shin through his trousers, and he fell awkwardly into the space between the bed and wall. With his arms twisted above his head, it took a moment to pull himself from the gap. Chest and lungs burning, Arne fumbled at the bedside table drawer. His numb fingers slipped around the handle of his police-issued Heckler & Koch P30. The weapon felt heavy in his weak hand. He checked the cartridge—full. With considerable effort, now huffing out his breath, Arne pulled back the slide, loading a bullet into the chamber.

  A click at the front door.

  Someone was inside.

  Arne’s heart thumped so hard and irregularly the organ felt like it might explode in his chest and crack his ribs open with the force. Shoulder pressed against the wall, pistol held ready, he edged to the doorway.

  Footsteps rustled the newspaper lining the floor.

  He peered into the living area and Bamse raised her head in curiosity. The rabbit hopped out of sight. A moment passed before a shrill scream filled his apartment. Bamse skidded across the floor, nose bloodied.

  “Hello?” Arne tensed his jaw. “I know you’re there,” he said in English. “You’ve come to kill me.”

  Silence, though he was sure he could feel the atmospheric change from the intruder’s breathing. The electrical stabbing into his arm muscle became stronger and vertigo turned his old legs to jelly, barely able to keep him standing.

  “You think you’re doling out justice, but you’re not. You’re just another murderer. Maybe something for a psychologist to write about when you’re locked up in a mental institution. A statistical anomaly, moving the needle just a little. But that’s it.”

  Speaking stole so much energy. He had to swap the weapon into his right hand, the left now weak and hanging by his side—pulsing with pain. “You think any of this changes anything?”

  The slightest shuffle on the floorboards.

  “And you think I’m like them? You looked me up and saw what I did to my wife. So now I deserve to die? Well, I’m already dead!” he yelled. “I have been for a decade. The day she left with my daughter, I died. I lost everything.” He slumped, his back to the wall, the pistol in his hand now hanging limp. Tears filled his eyes as pressure expanded in his chest—the truth of his evil erupting from inside like some insidious cancer that had festered too long and would now rip through him.

  “I’m ... I’m a dead man walk—walking,” he wheezed. “Just kill me. I’m done with it. Life. Just ki—”

  Arne’s chest cramped a final time as if God himself had heard his pleas and answered. Huakaas keeled over, dropped the gun and clutched at his shirt before stumbling through the doorway and crashing face down.

  Nose-to-nose with Bamse, carro
t-tainted breath wafting on his face, Arne rolled to his back so he could face his killer. Vision blurred, he could only make out a shadow, slick with rainwater, face concealed under a hood. Held aloft was a square object. The instrument of his death. Arne gurgled out a sound. He’d often hoped he’d die with dignity, but he would not. The sound was desperate, begging, sobbing accompanied by the warm wet pool of piss now soaking into the newspaper on which he lay.

  Huakaas closed his eyes and exhaled a painful breath—the kind that goes on forever so that the lungs never again feel as if they will inflate—and he knew with all his being it would be his last.

  Plymouth, England, 2002

  “A heart attack?”

  “Yep.”

  “He faked a heart attack?”

  “Yep,” Damien said again.

  “When you punched him?” Rey probed further, the absurdity of the situation almost comical.

  Damien shrugged. “Anything to not actually leave.”

  It was all so confusing, so anti-climactic.

  Rey had known Joe was supposed to leave, but now—one day to the next—he was gone. Where had Rey been to miss it all? The last couple of years had been strange. Of all the things she would have considered to save them from Joe, the internet had not been top on her list. They hadn’t had it long. Their Amiga computer wasn’t exactly state-of-the-art and, as far as Rey could tell, the internet was nothing more than a few chat rooms where weirdos lurked who couldn’t hold a conversation in person.

  As it turned out, chatrooms would rid them of Joe.

  Both Joe and her mom had embraced the internet, creating fake personas, pretending to be interesting, brave and outgoing. Chatrooms were every poor person’s dream—an escape from reality where you could be a castle-owning millionaire. Her mom in fact, didn’t go as far as to change her circumstance for the virtual world. Her handle was IceMaiden and in her chatrooms, she was strong and funny, sarcastic and flirtatious—all done with words. No photos. No images or video. Just words. She kept details of her life vague and enjoyed the power of having ten men online vying for her attention.