by Will Dean
I run some more, then stop to look back. I’m dizzy from the pain.
He’s not following. Dragonflies and clouds of black bugs. But he’s not coming after me.
A bird of prey hovers above the hoarder’s house and its head is completely still. Its wings flap strong and even, but its body, its beak, its eyes, they are all motionless in mid-air. Watching all this unfold. Waiting.
I squelch as I run, my ankle throbbing.
Hoarder’s house is boarded up. It’s going to be auctioned in the autumn. Probably for demolition and a new-build. I run to the poison ivy growing up the siding and the broken paving slabs and the wind chimes that serve as a doorbell, each metal rod hanging motionless in the humid June air.
I know I can’t make it to the main road, not with this ankle. Not with my running ability.
Poisonous spiky weeds taller than I am. An overgrown vegetable patch; the artichokes grotesque and gone to seed, the thistles strong as young birches.
The front door is boarded over.
The caravan is locked up.
No way inside.
I walk around the base of the house and there are bees or wasps everywhere. A furious swarm. Manic. A nest up in the eaves. The windows are covered with ten years of pollen. More.
I glance back up the road. Empty. Viggo hasn’t realised yet or else he’s decided to let me go.
At the back of the house, close to a stack of wooden pallets, I find another door. Boarded, but the base is loose. I heave at it and nails pull out of the rotten frame they’ve been driven into. The plywood bends and creaks as I pull it, and there it is. A little hole. A Tuva flap for me to crawl through.
The smell is unbearable.
Death and the droppings of some creature, some nest of creatures, and so much stuff I have to climb rather than walk. Piles of newspapers and bin bags and old furniture. A collapsed shelf, the prized porcelain figures slumped in a heap. Cardboard crates of typewriter notes curled with damp. Stinking. Something’s toilet.
I clamber up the garbage. When I crawl, pulling my damp swollen ankle behind me, I have to duck not to hit my head on the ceiling. The floor level is metres higher than originally planned. A shifting, soft floor of garbage and one man’s hopes and dreams. His collections. His belongings. His uninvited vermin houseguests.
Something moves.
Outside.
I squint and crawl slowly, carefully, to the window. I can see out of the top of it. Two figures walking towards me.
One big, one small.
Viggo carrying his hunting knife. Mikey carrying his red plastic voice-disguising loudhailer toy. Walking side by side. Walking, not running. Father and son.
I crawl up and over a slope of old magazines, bundles bound with twine, and slip under the top of a doorframe like a potholer might wriggle through a narrow limestone passage deep underground.
Must hide. And wait. Noora knows I’m in Utgard forest. My Hilux is still there, still at the red torp. Viggo hasn’t driven it away. Not yet.
There’s not much space in the kitchen. Not on the cabinets, they’re covered with stacks of yoghurt pots, towering up to the mould-speckled ceiling like the hydrothermal vents of some undersea ridge. I open a cupboard door but it is full of plates and knotted plastic bags and something dead or dying. Heaving. Hatching. Changing. I dry-retch at the stench of it all.
I crawl up the mountain of plastic boxes, each one containing more typewritten papers, and find the stairs. I think they’re climbable.
‘Hello,’ says Viggo from the back door I came in through. He’s speaking through the hole I made.
I freeze.
‘Hello,’ says Mikey, copying his father, his eight-year-old voice even deeper through the loudhailer toy.
Then I hear wood splintering. Is he using his knife? Or just pulling the plywood off?
I scramble up the stairs, dragging my ankle behind me. It’s swelling more now. On the right-hand side of each step is a pile of books and magazines, some piles reaching up to the sloping ceiling. I get to the top and there is one square metre of floor space. Pick a room, Tuva. They all look like death traps to me. No exits. Four doorways. Four separate destinies. All the doors are open and uncloseable. Too much debris. Which one do I choose? A wasp buzzes past me and I climb up a pile of dirty clothes and soiled sheets and they feel disgusting, they yield to me, they sag and compress and I find my face in the bedsheets and my hands deep down in the clothes like I’m crawling through quicksand.
That voice comes back, the Darth Vader voice disguised by the toy.
‘Hello,’ says Mikey in that robotic voice. A few gravelly breaths and then he says, ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are.’
I find a bedroom even more stuffed than the others, just an air gap up by the ceiling, maybe twenty centimetres high. A nightmare room. Tons of stuff layered up over the years like sedimentary rock strata. The acrid smell of animal waste. Decay.
I clamber up and my back scrapes the ceiling and I am sweating with the heat and the fear and the stink of this place. Hot air rises. I writhe like a worm and push myself, wriggling to get through, two metres up from the real floor, stuck between tons of someone else’s waste and an unyielding ceiling. I wriggle and I push and I fall over to the other side of the indoor rubbish heap.
Some air.
A tiny safe space in the corner of the room.
Then a face appears up by the ceiling. Over the rubbish. Looking down at me.
Clear blue eyes.
Smooth, shiny, unblemished skin.
51
Mikey’s staring right at me.
I hold my finger to my lips and he tilts his head as if to say, ‘but why?’
Mikey brings the voice disguiser toy to his mouth and inhales and presses a button so I scramble up and grab it and then I hold him by his upper arm and pull.
‘Let me go,’ he says, his voice childish again. ‘Pappa!’
I drag him and we slip down to my side of the garbage mountain and I start throwing old books and duvets and Pringle tubes up to fill the space between garbage mountain and the ceiling. I throw pillows stained yellow, and empty whisky bottles and rolled-up rugs. I need to build a wall. A barrier.
Then I see Viggo’s face appear above the garbage pile. His grey hair. His dark eyes. The green handle of his combat knife clasped in his hand.
Mikey’s watching his father pull away old suitcases and sheets, digging with his hands. I throw more up to plug the gap but he’s digging faster than I can refill.
And then I see a hatch up to the attic. I leap over a mattress with springs sticking out of it and push the hatch up and it opens with no resistance at all.
I look at Viggo’s crazed red face. He’s furious now. Blotchy. Snarling. I grab the boy and pull him and me up into the attic. Mikey doesn’t fight me. I close the hatch shut.
Darkness.
The smell of damp.
Something buzzing.
My eyes adjust. Some light from a crumbling chimney stack and some from a distant window. What do I do?
I try to push an old bookcase over to cover the hatch but it’s too heavy. I get it half-covered and then sit on it.
Mikey looks at me.
The air around us throbs with the beating of a thousand tiny wings.
Viggo is banging walls beneath me. Trying things. Climbing up rubbish.
A wasp flies past my head.
‘Am I in trouble now?’ says Mikey.
I almost laugh but then from below me, from the room full to the brim, I hear a roar from a father whose only child was just snatched away from him. A roar of pain and fury.
And then the tip of a knife stabs up through the floorboards between my feet.
52
The knife tip disappears and then stabs up again. It just misses Mikey’s Spiderman trainers.
I pull the kid close to me on top of the bookcase. We have some distance, some clearance from the reach of the blade.
I expected Mikey to fight me
or resist but he clings to me. He hugs me tight, his thin arms wrapped around my neck.
‘Where’s Lisa Svensson,’ I say to the kid.
‘Don’t know,’ he says, looking at me with eyes full of tears.
‘You and your dad took her and Tammy. In the container.’
‘Not Pappa,’ he says. ‘Pappa didn’t know.’
The knife comes up again and again, splinters flying, mostly hitting wood but sometimes finding the gaps between the wooded boards. Dust erupts up into the attic air with each stab.
The buzzing intensifies.
More wasps.
‘Who told you what to do? Who helped you?’
Another roar from Viggo below.
‘My friend helped,’ says Mikey.
‘Who?’
‘My friend, Viktor.’
‘Viktor made you do it?’ I ask.
‘No,’ says Mikey. ‘He helped me. I wanted to look.’
Viggo’s fingertips push up between the floorboards through the stab slits like a corpse pushing up from under the earth. I hold Mikey close to me and his skinny arms grip round my neck.
‘I’ve been bad,’ he says. ‘Bad boy.’
I want to say, yeah, very bad, but I swallow it down. Viggo goes quiet for a while. I can smell Mikey’s hair. Some kind of kid’s shampoo. I recognise it from my own childhood. Bottle shaped like a space rocket.
A wasp settles on my damp sleeve, turns around, flies away.
‘You did a bad thing,’ I say. ‘You’re not bad.’
Mikey squeezes me hard and I start to well up. Someone help us here, please. Dad, Lena, anyone.
No blade coming through the ceiling. No noise at all.
Has he gone?
‘You’re a child,’ I whisper, as much to me as to Mikey.
‘Young man,’ he says.
‘You’re just a child.’
I rub my hand over his hair and inside I am shocked I’m soothing this nasty kid after what he did to me. Did to Tammy. But I am. My thumb rubs over a dry brown line of blood running down from his ear.
He sobs from within my arms.
And then the knife bursts through the ceiling on the other side of us, from a different bedroom.
Viggo wiggles and heaves the knife to enlarge the hole.
The snake camera from before pokes up through the new gap like the tentacle of some predatory squid hunting its prey.
Writhing.
Wriggling.
Searching.
53
‘There you both are,’ says Viggo from beneath us.
I shuffle on top of the bookcase, waiting for Viggo to burst through the ceiling, burst up and take us both, but nothing moves.
Silence.
The dust in the air floats and the specks sparkle in the light from the distant attic window.
Mikey looks up at me, terror in his red eyes, his lip quivering against my neck.
The tip of the knife stabs up a metre from me. I hear dull thuds as the knife hits boards. It stabs up again and again and again. Then fists beating at the ceiling, weakening it, peeling back the plasterboards, trying to push through.
‘No, Pappa. Stop,’ says Mikey.
The knife erupts through and I can see the top of the handle, the top of Viggo’s bloodied knuckles.
‘You playing games up there, Tuva?’ he says.
A larger wasp flies past. Droning.
The hole he’s speaking through is fist-sized. He’s snarling up at me now. I can see his eyes.
‘You taking my own boy away from me now, that it?’
His fingers and wrists are covered with blood and plaster dust.
I shake my head and Mikey shakes his head from inside my arms. He won’t look at his father.
Viggo uses his green combat knife to widen the hole. Carving and slicing. Sawing. He’s standing on top of the banister at the top of the staircase.
‘Mikey and Viktor took Tammy,’ I say down to him.
‘Give me my son.’
‘I wanted to look, Pappa,’ says Mikey, still not facing his father. ‘Just looking.’
Viggo pushes a board up. The nails squeak and then the board bends and then flies up into the attic space and settles nails up. More dust. More buzzing. Throbbing. Viggo heaves himself up, coughing, gripping a horizontal beam. His head and shoulders are up in our space.
Mikey screams.
I pull him tighter to me.
Viggo lunges out towards us, towards Mikey, and the boy yells even louder.
Viggo’s eyes bulge.
I see the blade flash.
And then he is gone.
Pulled down from below.
There’s a cloud of dust and he drops back down through the hole he made like a man being sucked down into swirling water. I peer down, Mikey tight in my arms, and the two lumberjacks are there. The one with the diving board tooth has Viggo down on his belly, he’s kneeling on his back, Viggo’s arm twisted behind.
Sirens in the distance.
The dust starts to settle and a wasp flies down through the hole.
Mikey releases his grip a little.
‘Let me see,’ says Mikey, pushing me away so he can peer down the hole. ‘I want to look.’
54
I didn’t get much sleep last night.
After the police were done with me, Lena and Johan drove me back to their place in my own Hilux. Me in the back seat like the kid they never had.
I thought I might see Tammy at the cop shop after I’d given my statement but she was still in Karlstad. Waiting for her mum’s plane to arrive.
Yesterday’s a blur. I lay here in this bed last night, sunlight pouring in through the blood-speckled window, and I could not sleep. Too much to process. Finding Tammy but not being able to hug her or talk to her. Then the cold store. I know I was only locked up for hours compared to a whole week for Tammy, but still. Last night I stared up at this ceiling and just waited for the hose to start up, waited for ice-cold Utgard well-water to pour down over me, that synthesised voice, that boyish smile.
And then Viggo, the way he turned, the way his eyes changed. From saviour to predator in the blink of an eye. I can’t blame Mikey. I do, but I shouldn’t, I can’t let myself. He’s a kid and I can’t even imagine what hell his childhood has been. Worse than mine, even.
I reach over for my phone. It’s 10:40am.
I pull on my aids and music starts up straight away. From next door, the couple painting their timber siding. I feel sorry for hearing people trying to sleep through all this lawn mowing and barbecue music and leaf blowing, I really do.
The security bolts are still locked. Both bolts. And there’s nobody under the bed, I checked last night. Three times. I got Johan and Lena to check as well.
I peel off the masking tape and pull the curtains.
No blood.
Clean glass, just a few smears from a squeegee. Someone cleaned the window?
I sit on the bed and look out at the street, out at this well-kept suburb. Two raggare cars drive by, their chrome accents gleaming, and the second one looks like the burning turquoise car on the E6 I saw down near Malmö. Burning car on a burning June day. Seems like a lifetime ago.
There’s a Midsommar pole across the road and the leaves are brown and dry and crumbling away. They’re falling down from the cross like in a premature autumn.
I see Bertil the bee man. Father of thirteen children. He cycles past with his smoker and his gear and his mask. I’ve been thinking more about bees and wasps since Noora and I got stung. Their hives. Their queens. And about Bertil’s family. Me trying to make sense of what happened. Bees and wasps. Good and evil. Adults and children. The idea that family can take many forms. I escaped Gavrik after Mum died. After the last member of my nuclear family left me. I moved south, following a job and money and prospects and, to be honest, some big-city life. But what did I leave behind? I lie in bed now thinking about it, sun lighting up the pine wall of the compost-toilet room. Tam’s my family
. And Lena. Thord, even. I left them all behind and I started a new life down south and I felt lost. I just need to give it more time. Properly transition. And I need to visit Toytown more often.
I walk into Lena’s house and two faces look up at me.
‘Morning,’ says Johan from behind his glasses.
‘You sleep okay?’ says Lena. ‘You must still be in shock?’
‘I’m alright,’ I say. ‘Ankle’s swollen and I’m hungry as hell.’
They both smile and Johan hands me a plate of white, thick-cut toast. I slather the slices – one with marmalade, the pale, cheap kind I like, and one with Nutella. Ambrosia of the gods.
‘Can I see Tammy?’ I ask.
‘Karlstad,’ says Lena. ‘She’s called about twenty times making sure you’re okay. She’s picking up her mum, delayed flight. She’ll be back later today. Now,’ she says. ‘Two pieces of good news.’
‘Lisa?’
Lena nods. ‘Lisa Svensson made contact with police late last night. I didn’t want to wake you. She’s been holed up in a friend’s off-grid cabin near the Norwegian border. Claims she didn’t know of all the commotion, but Chief Björn wants a thorough word with her. Rumour is she hid away to try to boost her C-list celeb chances. Free publicity.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘But the main thing is she’s safe.’
Thank God.
‘And the second thing. I know you need to get back to Malmö, and it’s nothing urgent,’ says Lena. I beckon her to go on.
‘Nothing official,’ she says. ‘Nothing concrete, nothing you can talk about in public.’
I chew and frown at her.
Lena looks at Johan and he nods and she looks at me.
‘Visberg,’ she says. I frown some more.
‘Next town over, the one up the hill. You been there?’