by Will Dean
‘This is a momentous day,’ he says, and I swear his voice is almost breaking. ‘I want to thank you for all your hard work. You’ve been an invaluable aide. You’ve made the Grimberg women open up and that is not a skill I possess. I would have written a far inferior book without you, Tuva.’
I nod and smile.
‘To my book. The Liquorice Factory,’ he says.
‘The Liquorice Factory,’ I say.
I move to chink glasses but he frowns and lifts his glass and drinks and sighs with pleasure. He must see the look on my face because he says, ‘it’s vintage, from ’96, an exceptional year.’
I nod. ‘Very nice.’ It tastes like piss and the bubbles have all gone.
‘The year my parents passed on, in fact.’
‘It’s very nice,’ I say, and then I feel completely tactless for using those words after what he just told me.
‘Hence the subdued mousse and the dark colour,’ he says. ‘Beautiful.’
Flat piss.
Then he turns his attention to stir whatever’s in the saucepan. From the fridge he pulls a stainless steel tray lined with chicken drumsticks, each one coated with breadcrumbs. Looks edible at least. I want to call Thord about Karin discharging herself but I have no signal, not even on the stairs.
‘Soup to start,’ he says. ‘Please be seated.’
I take my usual seat at his glass table and look down through it at my socked feet. Holmqvist brings over two glasses of water.
‘No Pellegrino left,’ he says. ‘Please excuse the colour and the sediment, it’s my well, it’s all the wells in the village in fact. If you wait for a minute, it’ll settle.’
I’m not going to miss this once I move to Skåne and everyone has municipal drinking water, all tested and homogenised and clean and filtered.
There’s a bang outside the window and David says, ‘Icicle’.
He brings two small bowls of soup.
‘Borscht?’ I say.
‘Black soup,’ he says.
Okay, I know what this is.
‘In honour of your migration south.’
I stare at him.
‘It’s goose, don’t worry. I’m not a philistine.’
So I take a spoonful of the goose blood, that’s what this is, sure there may be some spices and salt and pepper and vinegar but it tastes pretty much like a cut finger to me.
‘Nice,’ I say.
‘Isn’t it, though?’
He eats with gusto and his lips have taken on a dark hue on their innermost edges like lip-liner in reverse.
My mouth is all iron from the water and from the goose blood. It’s silky and the taste isn’t awful, but the texture . . . it coats the inside of my mouth like a heavy hot-chocolate and it’s slightly too warm so I can feel it travel down to my stomach, blood hitting acid. I imagine what that looks like and all I can see in my mind’s eye is a huge red clot.
I eat half and he clears away the bowls. I wash mine down with the expensive flat champagne and the well water.
The drumsticks are sizzling on the hob.
‘Savour the champagne,’ he says. ‘Sip it slowly. We both need to drive later.’
‘What are you cooking?’ I ask.
‘Not so easy to say.’
He lifts each drumstick with a pair of tongues and places it on a large wooden board. He sprinkles sea-salt flakes over the lot. The warmth of the house is making me tired, making my eyelids heavy.
‘Himalayan sea salt,’ he says. ‘Lightly smoked.’
They look great; crispy fried things still sizzling.
‘Help yourself,’ he says. ‘This is my death-row meal as some would call it, my favourite things in three courses.’
I lift two of them and place them on my plate. They’re not chicken.
‘What are they?’
‘Divine is what they are.’
He takes five.
‘Some think the term sweetbread refers to the thyroid gland. Others argue vehemently it’s the pancreas. Some idiots talk of the windpipe or the spleen. These are what I consider the most delicious of the offal family. These are little thyroids, pig thyroids.’
Never a lamb chop here, is it?
There’s a flash of white outside by the cars. Snow falling from a spruce tree.
I cut into a sweetbread and my knife sinks through the soft pink insides like it’s liver but even more loose. I lift it to my mouth. And actually, if I can refrain from looking at Holmqvist’s Adam’s apple with its mole moving up and down, they actually taste quite lovely. Tender and delicate.
I ease into the meal. I drink a little more champagne and then I remember what the wood-carving sisters told me in the bank: don’t fall at the final jump. I push the glass away.
‘Quite so,’ he says, removing his own glass at the same time. ‘Water for both of us. Now, dessert.’
‘I really am full.’
‘But it’s my favourite.’
I smile and he looks excited.
‘Have you ever eaten Casu marzu, Tuva?’
I frown.
‘No, I agree, I don’t think you have.’ He steps over to his fridge. ‘It’s a Sardinian delicacy. I’ve had it there twice over the years, just exquisite. Have you had pecorino?’
‘Yes, I like it.’
‘Good, well this is a kind of pecorino infested with the larvae of the cheese fly. They digest the surface of the cheese, breaking down the fats and creating the most delicious creaminess.’
No.
He brings out a tub of vanilla Häagen Dazs ice cream and a punnet of strawberries and a slab of dark chocolate with sea salt.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t resist. In fact, I do enjoy Casu marzu, but berries and ice cream is my favourite dessert, even when the fruit’s so scandalously out of season.’
We smile at each other, him pleased with himself, me relieved.
The berries are a little hard, sent by airmail apparently, but the ice cream’s delicious. The chocolate is that 90% cocoa stuff so I let him get busy with that.
There’s a scratching or tapping noise. It’s coming from the floor, maybe from the utility room. ‘Can you hear that?’ I ask, pointing over to that corner.
He looks worried.
‘What?’ he says.
‘Something scratching?’ I say. ‘Knocking?’
‘Mice,’ he says, embarrassment in his voice. ‘Rodentia. They’re in the walls I’m afraid.’
I pull a hair from my mouth and it drags tight against my lip. It’s a bright red hair.
‘Thanks for a lovely goodbye lunch,’ I say, and I feel like I need a nap.
He looks almost sad.
‘I have one last gift, just a small token of my appreciation.’
He picks up the little digital speaker and places it on the table.
There’s a shadow at the window.
‘Oh, you needn’t have.’
‘Close your eyes,’ he says.
I close my eyes a little but I can see him take a dark blue jewellery box from a drawer. It has gold edges. I see him walk behind me with the jewellery box in one hand and his phone in the other. There’s some static from the speaker and the music fades away. I hear sirens. Is he climbing the stairs? A door slams somewhere in the house, and the room begins to spin like I’ve had too much to drink but I haven’t. And then there’s a hand over my face. I struggle, my chair squeaking on the floor, my arms flailing, my shouts stifled. I kick against the glass table but a strong hand pushes me down into the chair and I can feel knuckles by my nose and a palm tight against my face. My vision blurs and darkens and I can hear Cici somewhere in the house and she is screaming for her life.
49
I wake up shivering.
Blood in my mouth.
I’m thirsty in a dark, dark room, alone on the floor on some kind of mat. I rub my eyes and feel a balaclava entombing my head.
It’s not mine.
I pull it off, dizzy, like I could fall but I’m already o
n the floor. The room smells damp and I listen. Nothing. Complete silence. I check my aids and they’re both in, my ears sore, the hard skin at the top rubbed raw.
Wherever I am, I have to get out.
And then I remember Cici’s scream. Is she here? Is Karin here? I try to stand but it’s too difficult, my legs are like ribbons falling from a birthday balloon. I hold my palms to my cheeks to warm them. I have never been this cold in my life.
There’s a noise by my feet, a rustling. I retract my knees under my chin and taste salt in the air, salt like they spread on the roads and the pavements. My right hearing aid beeps its final battery warning and I check my pocket for my key fob and spare batteries. I’m wearing my ski coat and it’s zipped right up under my chin, higher than I like to have it, and my keys are missing.
I kneel and the room spins. I can’t see anything much except a faint light bulb hanging from the ceiling, some low-watt bullshit that doesn’t do its job. My feet are hot and my breast pocket feels warm through the material. I reach down and pull off a boot and there’s a hot disc in there, one of those heating pads you stick in your gloves when you go skiing. I pull the boot back on and reach out. Nothing. No furniture, no TV, no door.
Am I in Holmqvist’s attic? Some basement I never knew about? The memory of that hand at my face, the palm pressed into my nose, comes back and my head clears. I stand up and sway. The room feels wrong and the air feels wrong. Unfamiliar. A cobweb sticks to my cheek and I pull it off but it keeps on coming, some never-ending spider thread, and I pull and throw it away but it just comes back to me.
I crouch down.
What happened? I check my pockets again and my left hand’s cut. My ankle hurts and my head hurts and my shoulders hurt. I feel like I’ve slipped on the ice and fallen on my backside, and there’s a wound on my forehead. Hard, crusted blood. A bump. I’ve lost most of my things and gained plenty of somebody else’s things but at least this is my jacket. In my right pocket is a pen and a folded piece of paper, and in my left pocket is another pen.
My hands are on a mattress.
I have to think now. I have to get out of here and I have to help Cici.
It’s inflatable, quite flat, the kind of mattress you have under a sleeping bag; my God I wish I had a sleeping bag right now. I am so, so cold. I reach around and the room’s carpeted. I can feel the tight hard weave underneath the mattress. I lock my jaw. My teeth grind together, scraping. I shuffle along on my knees to the end of the mattress and reach out for a wall but there’s nothing. I brush my hands across the floor and touch something and recoil like a boxer evading a punch.
It feels like leaves or wet pieces of newspaper. Maybe tissue paper. And I can feel matchsticks. Or are they just sticks? Toothpicks? Needles? I won’t put my hands there but I smell in that direction. It’s musty.
I pull back and push my hands out in front of me like a zombie finding prey. There must be a door or a wall. I get to the other end of the carpet and it’s uneven underneath, some papers stuffed down there, maybe cardboard. Is this a shed? A hut? A garage? I find the balaclava with my hands and pull it back on. It smells of a person and that person is not me but I need its warmth. I reach out my arms to the sides and there’s a box and it is soft on my fingers. It’s leather, I think. I open the lid and there are papers inside. I can’t really see the box but I can feel it. Like a leather container for printer paper. And beside it are books, thin books. No, they’re not books, they’re cardboard, they’re chocolate bars, the broad, flat ones, foil-wrapped, like cooking chocolate. Is this a basement kitchen?
I stand up and step off the mattress onto the lumpy carpet. It’s uneven. I don’t like it. I reach out and one of my hearing aids dies but the other one’s still working.
No walls, no real floor. No heating, that’s for damn sure. I get to the end of the carpet. I can feel its tasselled rim at my toes. A blanket? I feel like if I step off I’ll fall a mile into darkness. I move one boot. Slowly. The floor is like an autumn park, a thick layer of leaves and something else. I reach out and my hands touch a wall and that’s brilliant news. It is cold. Feels like an outside wall. It’s brick. I reach along it to find the door. The bricks are rough; the mortar joining them together is missing in places and lumpy in others, nothing like the wet slime wall of the Grand Room in the factory. I move along the wall. It’s curved. I move along some more and look up and feel the bricks at my hands and the light bulb on the ceiling brightens a little and it dawns on me that I am locked inside the base of a Grimberg chimney.
50
‘Help!’ I scream, the noise ricocheting off the round walls and spiralling up and then back down to me. ‘Help me!’ I scream for minutes or hours, like a toddler wanting its mother. Needing her. I yell until my throat gets sore. I shout until my working aid rings with the abuse it’s taking.
Nothing.
I bang on the concave brick walls and they just stand there. I have no idea how thick they are, how impenetrable they are, but right now I feel like I’m the bullet stored in the trigger end of an upended hunting rifle. I have no power. It’s someone else who gets to fire the gun. I just sit here waiting, my face staring up at the pinprick of sky above me.
Is it still Monday afternoon? Tuesday morning? I’m hungry enough for it to be Tuesday.
I scream again, volleys of desperate pleas, but it’s as though my voice can reach so far up this stack of freezing air, maybe ten metres up, maybe twenty, but then it weakens and floats back down to me here at the base. I check my pockets again. I need my phone but I just find the two pens. I pull them out. One’s a biro, I can’t see the colour. The other, the one in my left pocket, has a button on it. It’s a pen torch. I click the button and a small beam of light hits the red brick wall.
I wave it around, starved for details of where I am and how I get out. It starts to slot together.
Oh my God.
I’m crouched on a thin mattress, which itself lies atop the circular carpet from Holmqvist’s hallway. Under that is a layer of debris: old compacted ash mixed with twigs and leaves. The thing I touched before, the wet newspaper, is in fact a dead bird. It’s mostly gone now but the beak is still pristine at the very tip of the sunken corpse. The ribs are as fine as curved needles.
The torchlight is so pathetic, the beam so concentrated, that it takes me time to fill in all the gaps. Like I’m looking at my surroundings through a huge sheet of cardboard with a pinhole cut out of it. There’s the leather box. Looks expensive. Next to it is a silver bucket, the wine cooler from Holmqvist’s house, and it’s full of heat pads, hundreds of sealed chemical heating elements. I open two more and slide them down into my trousers. My thighs are too cold. My skin’s starting to perish, ice crystals eating into my flesh. And then I open two more disc-shaped pads and stick them into my sleeves by my upper arms. I get my gloves and open another two and leave them inside to warm up. I should have mittens, not gloves, mittens are better. It’s maybe minus ten down here. Or worse. The bird next to me is what I’ll become if I don’t think straight. The beak. The curved needle ribs.
The chocolate bars look frozen solid. It’s dark chocolate with sea salt, the same as David served at lunch. There are maybe twenty bars, and behind them are three big green water bottles with heat pads sellotaped around them.
I’m being kept here, kept alive. He’s keeping me here like Karin keeps that rabbit in the Grand Room.
I shine my torch around to fill in the darkest corners and I see a flash of white. A pile of snow mounded up by the bricks. I pull myself closer to it. It’s round. Smooth. And it is far, far too big. This is human size, not snowball size. I shuffle closer and my torchlight picks out blonde hairs stuck to the back of the snow like the patchy ponytail of a month-old corpse. And there’s something else. Something wrong. I scream with all my might and my voice echoes around this frozen column and sinks back down to taunt me. The top of the hideous life-size skull is flat. Like it’s been operated on. A guillotine execution gone wrong. A scalpin
g. The top is a sheet of centimetre-thin ice and there’s something underneath it.
I approach from the side, my arms outstretched. The heat pad in my glove is scorching the skin on the back of my left hand. The skull, purest white, has a black rain beetle pressed into each eye socket. It has a piece of liver for a tongue, a bulging shiny offal tongue sitting in its mouth hole. And through the clear ice lid that caps its head I can see the unmistakable outline of a brain.
I’m starting to lose the feeling in my cheeks. I touch the skin and I’m numb. Numb in my fingertips and numb in my face.
I crouch down and lift the lid because how could I not.
The brain looks fresh. It’s grey-pink and it has blood-filled valleys and troughs and a deep groove down its middle.
It smells like out-of-date steak.
I want to vomit. I want to die.
I’m being kept here, in this chimney, kept alive. What for? I turn my back on the skull. I cannot destroy this one. It’s too human. I don’t know who the brain belonged to. I try to ignore it. I turn my back.
There are packs of ICA Maxi batteries, the skinny triple-A type, next to the chocolate. I use the torch to look for a ladder or footholds but I just find two metal doors. I dart for them, the pen torch gleaming on their steel surface. They’re locked. I pull on them and bash at them and yell, ‘Help! Can anybody hear me?’ and I scream a mad uncontrolled scream which only frightens me more.
How deep are the walls down here at the base? It’s the thickest section, has to be to support the weight. Janitor Andersson did tell me. A metre thick? More?
It’s night-time. Probably still Monday night. My train’s probably leaving Karlstad right now, my cosy sleeper-berth empty. The Grimbergs will think I left without saying goodbye. Poor Karin, innocent Karin, the girl who asked me for help, she’ll think I ran off when in fact I’m ten metres below her bedroom being kept alive on twisted life-support.
I try to slow my breathing.
There are two liquorice coins in the leather box. One for each eye. What the hell does he expect me to do?