by Arne Dahl
Molly was sitting by herself on the bench near the door, trying to skim her geography textbook. She had forgotten they were having a test. She tried to make sense of the west coast of Africa beyond the dodgy bit that was Western Sahara. Was it Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia – Gambia was sort of squeezed inside Senegal – and then Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia? Then Ivory Coast, Ghana … Then a snowball hit the west coast of Africa and quickly melted, ruining the whole page. Molly looked up and saw Linda hurrying to form another snowball. She tucked her book away in her bag and made a snowball as fast as she could. She threw it, but it missed Linda and hit Maria behind her. Maria screamed and rushed forward to rub Molly’s face in the snow, but by then Molly had already taken cover behind the bench with Layla. Alma in turn attacked Maria from behind while Linda turned on Salma instead, with some pretty useless snowballs. In the end they were just laughing.
Then Salma stiffened and pointed: ‘Look over there. Isn’t that Samuel from Year 9? Sexy Sam?’ Their voices wove together, triggering each other: ‘What the shit, is that really the abortion next to him? What are they doing? Doesn’t he know ugliness is catching? That’s disgusting, being that close. Imagine having to touch that face. So fucking disgusting.’ By the time they crept towards them there were seven of them. Molly went with them but kept in the background. It didn’t feel good. But Sam and William didn’t notice a thing; they were just staring at something that looked like a little tub of chewing tobacco. Was that all they were doing, chewing tobacco for the first time? In the end the gang was close enough to launch a snowball. Everyone looked at Linda, their unofficial leader. Slowly and carefully she shaped a snowball, and in the background Molly heard some muffled giggling, though she couldn’t claim to be entirely innocent of that herself. But when Linda’s snowball struck and something that clearly wasn’t chewing tobacco rolled away from the tub – and both William and Sam started searching the snow – Molly suddenly saw an image of the Lucia celebrations, saw the chemistry teacher lead William from the stage, where, with the help of the school cleaner, he eventually had to cut off his long blond hair, his pride and joy, hacking off great clumps of it from his deformed head. Admittedly, she was running from the scene faster than all the other girls, but unlike them she couldn’t bring herself to laugh.
Sam avoided William at school as winter turned to spring, but when there were no witnesses he would occasionally go over to his house. William’s hair had started to grow out again, and they would lock themselves in his room in the flat in the centre of Helenelund where he lived with his mum, who smelled sort of sweet and always looked stressed. Sam was struck by a mark on the door of William’s room, four impressions, as from the knuckles of a fist, but he never asked about them. William would get his watches out. He kept them in threes, and when Sam asked why he replied: ‘The Ramans do everything in threes,’ and explained that it came from Arthur C. Clarke’s science-fiction novel Rendezvous with Rama. Then he started to show Sam his collection, everything from big wall clocks to the one that was probably Sam’s favourite, the ring clock. It was a very small timepiece placed on a ring that would fit a woman’s finger. But then William would show him plans and photographs of the complete opposite: gigantic tower clocks with big chains and heavy cogs, big pinions and springs, axles and pins, shafts, flywheels and spindles, pendulums, clicks and weights. When William showed him the pictures from inside the clock tower in Cremona in Italy – the largest medieval clock in the world – his eyes lit up. And Sam’s probably did the same.
Then one day William said: ‘The snow’s gone now.’ Sam must have given some sort of indication that he didn’t understand, because William went on: ‘Do you want to come and look at something I’ve made?’
Sam wasn’t sure if he wanted to be seen with William, so he pulled a hesitant face.
‘You can follow at a distance,’ William said, as if he understood exactly what Sam meant.
And they cycled off. William first, on his crappy bike with the ridiculously high handlebars, Sam two hundred metres behind on his extremely staid Crescent, which he had increasingly come to loathe. Then they arrived. They left their bicycles by a bus stop that seemed to have been forgotten about and ran out into a meadow where the tall grass had been flattened by the rain, and squelched past the aspen trees until a small building came into view by the water. A boathouse among the trees, right on the shore, greenish-brown and ugly and quite wonderful.
William went up to it and said: ‘It’s been abandoned.’
‘Are you really sure?’
William nodded and went down to the door by the water’s edge. Two steps up, then a padlock that he had the key to, and then in. Old-fashioned boating equipment lay strewn about, rusty boat engines and stiffened life jackets, stranded buoys and rusty anchors, but beyond all that was something that looked far newer. Chains. Cogs. Pinions. Springs. Axles. Pins. Shafts. Flywheels. Clicks. Weights. Dripping oil. The entire mechanism was fixed to two sturdy posts that were in turn attached to the floor of the boathouse and reached all the way to the roof. And somewhere in the middle of the confusion was a clock face. When Sam looked closer he saw that the minute hand was moving the whole time, slowly, clockwise. It showed a couple of minutes to three.
William said: ‘Just wait.’
Sam waited. They waited, for what felt like a long time, but was really only two minutes. When the clock chimed a heavy weight fell from above and made a circular depression in the wooden floor.
Molly was thinking about the exams. She squinted up at the strong spring sun and thought that there was one more year. One more year of childhood, then it would be over, right there, in that big schoolyard. She had just turned fifteen, in March, and life was moving in the right direction. On the way to adulthood. She had lost all interest in the boys at school. After thinking about it for a while – a good while, to be honest – she had come to the conclusion that she was not interested in the male sex after all. There may have been the odd boy at school who was still interesting – a Micke, an Alex, a Sam, a Svante – but mainly she was focused on the future. There were other things that appealed to her. She might not have wanted to call it politics, but social issues, certainly. She had become aware of something very recently: people were so different and it really didn’t matter. Difference was a good thing; interest in things we didn’t know about was what helped us to develop as people. She’d heard that somewhere in the world there was a big investigation into human genes, and it was unclear if you could actually speak about the human race, or if we ought instead to be talking about many races, several races, the way racism always had. Perhaps something was going on, a scientific investigation that could prove that we all – all five billion of us – belonged to exactly the same human race, in spite of minor variations in colour and culture. It was incredibly interesting that there had actually been human races that had become extinct. What were they called? Neanderthals, Java Man? Once they too had migrated from Africa and had their own civilisations, or at least tribal societies, and they had disappeared. They had simply been wiped out; there was no trace of them left. Except bones. The important thing was that it meant the rest of us were connected, regardless of our differences. And that was precisely the sort of thing she was thinking when the big, empty schoolyard was no longer completely empty, when a figure came into view, a figure that only just looked like it belonged to the collective human race she had been dreaming of. And she managed to force a smile when William sat down on the bench beside her and said: ‘Hello! Do you want to come and see something I found?’
The early summer that prevails in a desolate, grit-covered football pitch is strangely remorseless, no wind, the air laced with dust, the sun sharp and prickly. Sam sees a group of people at the other end of the pitch, by the far goal. He sees that they’re girls, lots of girls; he can hear their shrill voices but can’t make out any words. The emptiness above the dusty grit seems to filter out everything resembling language. Sam has become a different
person; time has changed. It feels as if he’s aged a couple of years in just a few weeks. These days he avoids this sort of gathering. He can feel that he has become a loner. But there’s something about the unarticulated yelling that draws him in. Against all his instincts he is drawn in that direction, and sees the back of one girl after another. They’re wearing summery clothes, dresses, skirts, and the merciless sun makes their long hair shine in all manner of hues. The dust swirls around them, and as they move Sam can see that they aren’t alone. Behind them a taller head rises up. Anton’s, and it’s moving. It disappears behind the curtain of girls, reappears, still moving. Then the curtain parts a little more, and against the goalpost, tied to the post, stands a figure. Its long blond hair hangs like another curtain in front of the figure’s face. His trousers have been pulled down, the lower half of his body exposed, and Sam turns abruptly and leaves before William has a chance to see him. All Sam can think, over and over again, manically, is: It’s almost the summer holidays. All this crap will soon be over.
26
Wednesday 28 October, 01.53
In spite of the downpour the aspen leaves were rustling. And even if the rain had flattened the occasional clump of grass, it remained almost head-high. It was lit up, jerkily, by the sweeping beams of two pocket torches. If anyone had seen the scene from above, it would have looked like two bioluminescent fish playing in the unexplored depths of the ocean.
It was unclear if anyone did see it from above.
A hand rose up above the grass. Berger ducked and moved towards it at a crouch. Blom’s index finger was pointing towards one of the aspens, and eventually Berger caught sight of the large security camera.
‘It looks ancient,’ he whispered.
‘Who knows?’ Blom whispered back, adjusting her bulletproof vest. Then she gave him a sharp look, as if she were evaluating his mental state. With evident reluctance, she held something out towards him.
Only when she snatched the object back from his outstretched hand did he realise that it was a pistol.
‘The way I see it, you could still be in league with William,’ she whispered, aiming her own gun at him. ‘You could have led me here so you can strap me to that fucking contraption one more time.’
‘Is that what you really think?’ Berger said.
Blom wrinkled her nose, then she handed him the weapon. He took it and weighed it in his hand, then nodded. Her face was wet, her blonde hair streaked with rain – and her eyes very clear. Then she set off, torch and pistol raised. Soon she was nothing more than a flickering beam of light winding its way through the greenery. He followed it.
Sometimes he lost sight of her, but she always popped up again, a light like elusive quicksilver through the still green grass.
Out of the darkness the clump of aspen trees rose up. He could detect the faintly brackish smell of open water, and behind the trees he could just make out a greenish-brown building.
The boathouse.
It shouldn’t be visible, he was thinking as he walked straight into her. She was crouching low in the grass with her torch switched off.
‘Turn it off,’ she whispered.
He did as she said.
‘Light,’ she said, pointing towards the trees.
He could see the vague outline of the boathouse but couldn’t make much sense of what he was looking at.
‘Where from?’ he asked.
‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘But we shouldn’t be able to see it yet. It ought to be pitch-black.’
‘Is it coming from inside?’
She just shook her head and sharpened her gaze.
They were about fifty metres away, and it was their last chance to hide in the tall grass. Just a metre or so in front of them the grass gave way to bare rock before the trees took over. Berger looked at her carefully and had to admit that Blom was more used to being out in the field than he was. He saw her reach a decision.
‘There’s a lot at stake,’ she whispered.
He nodded and stared at the faintly illuminated boathouse. Something seemed to linger there, life, perhaps death. Perhaps their deaths. He shuddered.
‘We need to split up,’ Blom said. ‘I’ll take this side. You go round to the lake.’
‘Look out for booby traps,’ Berger said. ‘You know how he likes contraptions.’
‘That hasn’t slipped my mind,’ she said darkly, and disappeared.
He set off. Felt himself get swallowed up.
He turned away from the water and entered the trees, keeping his torch switched off. He could just make out the short pillars the boathouse rested on. Saw the rock. Saw the slippery rock. Saw the window above the rock. Even thought he could see a twenty-two-year-old mark on the window. He had to ignore his feelings and act rationally.
If William Larsson had returned to where it all started, he was waiting in the pitch-black. Maybe he’d seen them coming a while back.
Maybe he was looking at Berger right now.
Berger had been frozen up until that moment. The tumultuous events of the past twenty-four hours had left him detached from the present. It was like he was moving through a really sick dream. But now, deep among the trees beside the boathouse of his childhood, reality caught up with him. He woke up. His frozen heart thawed; his pulse beat faster. He felt himself shaking. Suddenly he realised with his whole being, his whole body, what might actually be hidden behind that oddly luminous facade.
It could be hell itself.
Everything was in his hands, however much they were shaking. There was no shortcut. Concentration, focus. Clarity of vision. The ability to look evil in the eye. His hand stopped shaking.
Berger went down to the stony shore. A definite chill was coming from the black water. Pointing his torch at the ground, he managed to avoid the most slippery stones. He approached the boathouse from the water’s edge. He could see a window in a door, nothing more, but there was a crooked flight of steps leading up to the jetty that stretched from the building into the lake.
Berger was almost at the boathouse. His left hand aimed the torch straight at the ground while his gun rested in his right hand.
As he reached the steps he heard a rattling sound from the jetty above. It penetrated the night, followed by silence. He took the safety off his gun, shone the torch at the steps and went up with slow, silent footsteps. He pressed himself against the wall of the boathouse and paused. Cast a quick glance round the corner.
Nothing there. All he could see was some maritime junk on the jetty. On the far side of the building there was no equivalent flight of steps, only a half-metre-high railing and a two-metre drop to the rocks at the water’s edge.
No one had jumped down; he would have heard them. That left the door.
It was closed.
Berger heard his rapidly accelerating pulse like the ticking of a clock. A large clock, with a powerful clapper.
He snuck round the corner, treading cautiously on the planks of the jetty. They felt strong enough, didn’t creak. He took a couple of steps towards the door. Stopped. Listened.
Nothing but the rain.
A diamond-shaped window in the door was considerably darker than the door itself.
Then he heard the rattling sound again. It was coming from inside the boathouse. It was time. No way back now.
The sound wasn’t coming from the door itself, but from the side of it. There was a hole. The first thing he saw were odd pinpricks of light that his accumulated experience tried in vain to associate with known weapons. It didn’t work. A portal opened through time – into absolute chaos.
Then he saw teeth, sharp, bared teeth, and heard a strangely aggressive wheezing sound.
Then he saw the spines.
A hedgehog emerged from the hole. It spines were raised. It wheezed again, then turned and went back inside the boathouse with a rattling sound. Something inside shrieked. It didn’t sound human.
Berger reached his hand towards the door. He tried the handle. Locked. He backed aw
ay towards the railing and raised his foot to kick the door in. Then it was thrown open.
At the edge of his field of vision he saw his lowered weapon rise up. He saw it in an absurd series of images, a slightly blacker crooked line through the darkness until all he saw was an unexpectedly solid Glock at chest height. Only afterwards did he see the bare, raised hand.
Molly Blom didn’t lower it, even when she saw that he had lowered his weapon. Instead she gestured with her hand for him to follow her. He went over and stepped inside the boathouse. It stank of tar. He followed the beam of her torch to the corner. There were four small hedgehogs. Nearby an agitated parent hedgehog was moving about, wheezing and rattling.
He laughed, an unplanned laugh of relief.
‘No one here,’ Molly Blom said.
Their torches moved round the rest of the boathouse. Apart from the abandoned boat engines, buoys and a number of beer cans of varying vintage, there were a couple of carpentry benches and two tables, a crumpled tarpaulin, some cables and ropes in various shades of green.
But what made the strongest impression were the two pillars stretching from floor to roof some way from the wall. In the wall closest to the jetty were six mooring rings in two vertical columns, three in each, so that the two columns formed an imaginary cube with the pillars as the two other uprights.
Blom’s torch jerked and the circle of light sank lower.
‘Dear God,’ she said.
Berger stepped between the posts and looked away from the wall. On the opposite wall, some seven metres away, was a window. In the window he could see an ancient greasy mark. A wave of deep shame washed over him, and the shame quickly turned to pain. The gnawing, shooting pain of a wrecked conscience.
She came over to him. She was holding something in her hand. After a while he saw that it was a strand of hair. A long, blond hair.
