by Lars Kepler
Erik has raced after the bus in the darkness, his breath tearing at his lungs. The tail-lights glow red up ahead, and the pale beam of the headlights flickers over the forest. There is a sharp crack as one of the side mirrors smashes into a tree.
Erik hopes that the cold will protect his son. Temperatures below zero can lower his body temperature by perhaps ten per cent, enough to make Benjamin’s blood flow more slowly, maybe enough to enable him to survive in spite of the fact that he has been hurt.
The ground slopes sharply behind the house. Erik stumbles and gets back up. The hazards of the terrain, tree stumps and hillocks hidden beneath the deep snow, have been unearthed by the bus’s crazed advance. The bus is a shadow in the distance, a silhouette with a blurred glow surrounding it. It looks as if Lydia will attempt to drive along the shoreline, making her way round the lake to the old logging road Eric had seen on Joona’s copy of the Sami’s map. Instead, the bus brakes suddenly and pulls out onto the frozen surface of the lake.
Erik yells at Lydia to stop. As it shoots past the jetty, a rope dragging behind the bus catches on the rocks, and the tarpaulin is ripped from the roof.
The air is thick with the smell of diesel. By the time Erik reaches the edge of the lake, the bus is already sixty feet out onto the ice. Suddenly, it stops. There’s a loud rumbling and cracking sound. Erik’s throat constricts with panic as he watches the red tail-lights of the bus tilt upward, as if someone were slowly raising their eyes. The ice has given way and the bus has fallen through. Its wheels are spinning backwards but serve only to make the hole in the ice bigger.
Erik grabs a life belt from the jetty and begins running across the ice, his heart pounding. The lights inside the bus, which is still floating, make it glow like a frosted bell jar. There is a splashing sound, and heavy lumps of ice break off and whirl around in the black water.
Erik thinks he can see a white face in the rolling water behind the bus.
“Benjamin!” he screams.
The swell from the bus surges over the ice, making it treacherous beneath his feet. He knots the line from the life belt around his waist, so he won’t drop it, and hurls it into the dark water, but he no longer sees anything there. The engine roars. The bloody red glow from the tail-lights spreads across churned-up ice and snow.
The front of the bus sinks deeper, headlights disappearing beneath the water. Only the roof is visible now. The engine dies. There is no sound apart from the cracking and crunching of the ice and the lazy bubbling of the water. Suddenly Erik sees that both Benjamin and Lydia are still inside the bus. The floor tilts forward and they move towards the back. Benjamin clings to a pole. The roof over the driver’s seat is almost on a level with the ice.
Erik races toward the hole in the ice and jumps onto the bus. The whole vehicle bobs underneath him. From a distance he can hear Simone shouting something; she has reached the shoreline. Erik crawls over to the emergency exit set in the roof, stands up, and stamps hard on the glass. Shards of glass cascade over the seats and floor. All he can think of is getting Benjamin out of the sinking bus. He clambers down, swinging by his arms, manages to find a foothold on the back of a seat, and jumps onto the floor. Benjamin looks terrified; he is wearing nothing but pyjamas, and blood is trickling from his nose and from a small cut on his cheek.
“Dad,” he whispers.
Erik follows his gaze to Lydia. She is standing at the back of the bus, her face bloodied and completely closed down. She is holding the gun. The driver’s seat is now underwater. The floor tilts more sharply. Water pours steadily in between the rubber seals on the exit doors.
“Lydia, we have to get out of here!” Erik shouts.
Lydia merely shakes her head.
“Benjamin,” he says, without taking his eyes off Lydia, “climb up on top of me and get out through the roof.”
Benjamin doesn’t reply but follows Erik’s instructions. He moves unsteadily along the aisle, climbs up onto a seat, and then onto Erik’s back and shoulders. When he reaches the open hatch with his hands, Lydia raises the gun and fires. Erik feels no pain, just a blow to his shoulder so powerful that he is knocked off his feet. Only when he stands up again does he feel the pain and the warm blood trickling down.
Overhead, Benjamin dangles from the opening in the roof. Erik moves over and pushes him up with his uninjured arm, even though he can see Lydia pointing the gun at him once again. Benjamin is already out on the roof when the next shot comes. Lydia misses. The bullet whizzes past Erik’s hip and shatters a window beside him; icy water comes flooding in. As Erik tries to reach up to the roof hatch, the bus tips over onto its side and he ends up beneath the surging water.
107
sunday, december 20 (fourth sunday of advent): afternoon
The shock of the freezing water makes Erik lose consciousness for a few seconds. He kicks out with his legs in a panic, breaks the surface, and fills his lungs with air. Slowly and with a metallic creaking sound, the bus begins to roll and sink beneath the black water. It lurches; he feels a blow to his head and then is underwater once again. Through the window he can see the headlights still shining deep in the lake. His heart is pounding. His face and head feel as if they are being squeezed in a vice. He can see Lydia under the water, clinging to a pole with her back to the rear seats. His ears are filled with a roaring sound, and he is immobilised by the incomprehensible cold. He sees the open hatch and the shattered window; he knows the bus is sinking fast, knows he has to swim out. He has to fight, but his arms won’t work and he has no feeling in his legs. He is almost weightless. He tries to edge forward but finds it difficult to synchronise his movements.
Now Erik sees he is surrounded by a cloud of blood from the cut on his shoulder. Suddenly Lydia meets his gaze, staring calmly into his eyes. They hang there in the icy water, looking at each other. Her hair floats with the movement of the current, and small air bubbles emerge from her nose like a string of pearls.
Erik needs to breathe, his throat tightens, but he is fighting against his lungs as they struggle to take in oxygen. His temples are throbbing and a white light is flashing inside his head. His body temperature is so low he is on the point of losing consciousness. The ringing in his ears gets louder, rising and falling.
Erik thinks about Simone, about the fact that Benjamin is going to make it. It feels like a dream, floating freely in the icy water. With remarkable clarity, he realises that this is the moment of his death, and his stomach contracts with fear.
He has lost all sense of direction, of his own body, of light and darkness. The water feels warm, almost hot. He thinks that soon he will have to open his mouth and simply give in, simply let the end come as his lungs fill with water.
New, strange thoughts run through his mind as something suddenly happens. He feels the rope around his waist tighten. He has forgotten that he knotted the long line attached to the life belt around his body. It seems to be tangled in something. He is being dragged to the side. It is impossible to resist, he has no strength left. His slack body is hauled inexorably around a pillar and then up through the roof hatch. The back of his head thumps against something, one shoe comes off, and then he is out in the black water. He is carried upwards while the bus continues without him into the depths, Lydia inside the glowing cage as it drifts silently to the bottom of the lake.
108
thursday, december 24: afternoon
Simone, Erik, and Benjamin return to a grey Stockholm beneath a sky that is already dark. The air is heavy with rain, and the city is enveloped in a purplish mist. Everywhere, colourful lights are shining, on Christmas trees and garland-looped balcony railings. Advent stars glow in virtually every window. Santa and his elves are everywhere.
The taxi driver who drops them at the Birger Jarl Hotel has his Santa hat on. He waves at them gloomily in the rear-view mirror; they notice he even has a plastic Santa on his roof.
Simone glances at the lobby and the dark windows of the hotel restaurant, and says it feels odd
to be staying in a hotel when they’re only a few hundred feet away from home.
“But I really don’t want to go back to our apartment,” she says.
“No, of course not,” Erik agrees.
“Not ever again.”
“Me neither,” says Benjamin.
“What shall we do?” Erik asks. “How about the cinema?”
“I’m hungry,” Benjamin says quietly.
By the time the helicopter arrived at the hospital in Umeå, the bullet had gone straight through Erik’s left shoulder muscle, causing only superficial damage to the outer part of his upper arm. Once they stabilised his condition, he underwent surgery. Afterwards, he shared a room with Benjamin, who had been admitted for observation and rehydration, so his medication could be regulated. After only one day in the hospital, Benjamin started to ask about going home.
The psychologist assigned to assess Benjamin’s condition seemed unable to grasp the level of danger to which Benjamin had been exposed. After talking to Benjamin for forty-five minutes, she met with Erik and Simone and blandly announced that the boy seemed fine, under the circumstances; they should just keep an eye on him and give him time.
Did the woman just want to reassure them? His parents realised that Benjamin was going to need real help; they could already see him searching among his memories, as if he had already decided to ignore some of them, and they sensed that if he were left alone he would close up around what had happened like bedrock around a fossil.
“I know two really good specialists in adolescent psychology,” said Erik. “We’ll call them as soon as we get back to Stockholm.”
“Good.” Simone shuddered.
“And how are you feeling?” he asked her.
“There’s this hypnotist I’ve heard about,” Simone said.
“Just be careful of him.”
“I will.” Simone smiled.
“But seriously,” Erik said. “All of us are going to need to work through this.”
She nodded, and her expression grew very thoughtful.
“Little Benjamin,” she said softly.
Erik went and lay down again in the bed next to Benjamin’s, and Simone sat on a chair between the two. They looked at their son, lying there so pale and thin. They never tired of gazing at his face, as if he were their newborn baby.
“How are you feeling, little man?” Erik asked him tentatively.
Benjamin stared out the window. The darkness outside turned the glass into a vibrating reflection as the wind pushed and tapped at the pane.
109
sunday, december 20 (fourth sunday of advent): afternoon
Benjamin had just scrambled up onto the roof of the bus when he’d heard the second shot. He’d slipped and almost fallen into the water. At the same moment he had seen Simone in the darkness on the edge of the huge hole in the ice. She’d yelled to him that the bus was sinking and he had to get onto the ice. Spotting the orange life belt bobbing in the black water behind the bus, he’d jumped, grabbed hold of it, slipped it over his arms, and kicked toward the edge of the ice, even as he’d felt his legs growing numb. Lying flat on the ice, Simone had reached out towards the freezing water to find his hand and pulled him out, then dragged him a little way from the edge. She’d taken off her jacket and wrapped it around him, hugging him and telling him that a helicopter was on the way.
Benjamin sobbed. “Dad’s still in there!”
The bus had sunk quickly, disappearing beneath the surface with a groan, and they had been left in darkness. They could hear the splash of the churned-up water and the clucking of huge air bubbles, the sheets of ice shifting back into place. Simone held Benjamin tightly, shivering, trying to keep from screaming. All of a sudden, he had been yanked out of her arms. He’d tried to get up but had slipped and fallen. The line attached to the life belt lay taut across the ice, running down into the water, and Benjamin was being pulled towards the hole in the ice. He was struggling, sliding on his bare feet, and screaming. Simone had grabbed hold of him, and together they slithered inexorably toward the edge.
“It’s Dad!” Benjamin had suddenly shouted. “He had the rope around his waist!”
Simone’s face suddenly became hard and resolute. She grabbed hold of the life belt, hooked both arms through it, and dug in her heels. Benjamin grimaced with pain as they edged closer and closer to the water. The line was so tight it made a singing sound as it scraped over the edge of the ice, like a bow being drawn across the taut string of a violin. Then suddenly the tug-of-war shifted: it was still hard work, but they were able to move backwards, step by step, away from the water. And then there was almost no resistance at all. They hauled Erik up through the opening in the roof, and now he floated free of the doomed vehicle. A few seconds later, Simone was able to drag him up onto the ice. He lay there face down, coughing and breathing hard as a red stain spread beneath him.
When the police and paramedics arrived at Jussi’s house, they found Joona lying in the snow with a provisional pressure bandage around his thigh, his gun trained on a bellowing, handcuffed Marek. Jussi’s frozen corpse lay at the bottom of the porch steps with an axe in the chest. One survivor was found in the house: Annbritt had been hiding in the wardrobe in the bedroom. She was covered in blood, curled up behind the clothes like a child. The paramedics carried her out to the helicopter on a stretcher and gave her emergency treatment during the flight.
Two days later, Mountain Rescue divers went down into the lake to recover Lydia’s body. The bus stood solidly on its six wheels at a depth of two hundred feet, as if it had just stopped to pick up some passengers. One diver entered through the front door and shone his torch around the empty seats. The gun was on the floor at the back of the aisle. It was only when he directed the beam upwards that the diver saw Lydia. She lay with her back pressed against the ceiling of the bus, her arms dangling down and her neck bowed. The skin on her face had already begun to loosen and come away. Her hennaed hair billowed gently with the movement of the water, her mouth was calm, her eyes were closed as if she was asleep.
Benjamin had no idea where he had been for the first few days after the kidnapping. Possibly, Lydia had kept him at her house or at Marek’s, but he had been so dazed from the sedative with which he had been injected that he hadn’t really grasped what was going on. He might have been given further injections as he started to come round. Those first days were simply dark and lost.
It was in the car heading north that he had regained consciousness and found his mobile still around his neck. It was night when they’d taken him; it wouldn’t have occurred to them he would have one. Although he’d managed to call Erik, they’d heard his voice and the phone had been confiscated.
Then came a series of long, terrible days. Erik and Simone only managed to coax fragments from him. All they really knew was that he had been forced to lie on the floor of Jussi’s house with a dog collar and leash around his neck. Judging by his condition when he was admitted to the hospital, he had been given nothing to eat or drink for several days. He had managed to get away with the help of Jussi and Annbritt, he told them, then fell silent. Eventually he was able to explain how Jussi had saved him when he was trying to call home, and the terrible price he had paid for it; how Annbrit had attacked Lydia to allow him a chance to escape, and that he had heard Annbritt screaming as Lydia cut off her nose. Benjamin had hidden by crawling through an open window of one of the snow-covered buses. There he’d found some rugs and a mouldy blanket, which probably saved him from freezing to death. He’d curled up on a passenger seat and fallen asleep. He had been awakened a few hours later by the sound of his parents’ voices.
“I didn’t know I was alive,” whispered Benjamin.
Then he’d heard Marek threaten his parents. And he realised he was staring at a key in the ignition of the bus, and without even thinking, he’d clambered over the seat and turned it. And the headlights had come on, and the engine had roared furiously as he headed for the spot where he thought Ma
rek was.
Benjamin stopped speaking, a few fat tears caught in his eyelashes.
110
thursday, december 24: afternoon
After two days in the hospital at Umeå, Benjamin was strong enough to walk. He went with Erik and Simone to see Joona Linna, who was in the post-operative ward. His thigh had been badly damaged by Marek’s attack with the scissors, but three weeks’ rest would probably lead to a full recovery. A beautiful woman with her hair in a soft braid over her shoulder was sitting with him, reading aloud from a book, when they walked in. Putting it down, she rose and introduced herself as Disa, a friend of Joona’s for many years.
“We have a reading group, so of course I have to make sure he keeps up,” she said, in the same pleasing dialect as Joona’s.
Simone saw that she was reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.
“Mountain Rescue has lent me a small apartment,” said Disa with a smile.
“And you,” said Joona. “You’ll be given a police escort from Arlanda.”
Simone and Erik declined the offer. They wanted to be alone with their son rather than spend time with more police officers.
When Benjamin was discharged on the fourth day, Simone immediately booked tickets for the flight home. She went to get coffee for them all, but for the first time the hospital cafeteria was closed. In the day room there was nothing but a jug of apple juice and some biscuits. She went out in search of a café, but everything seemed strangely deserted. There was a peaceful calm over the whole town. She stopped by a railway line and followed the gleaming track with her eyes, seeing the snow covering the embankment. Far away in the darkness she could just make out the wide River Ume, striped with white ice and black water.
