A Time For Monsters

by Gareth Worthington

  A symbol perhaps? Huakaas thought. The answer refused to come. Fuck it all to hell.

  Arne sucked on his cigarette.

  The pool of potential victims ballooned every year. Recently, the foreigners had taken to Kubb in a big way. They called it Viking chess. The government had seen an opportunity to make money and so, although Kubb was traditionally a summer game, an open competition had been created to accompany Påskekrim.

  He exhaled the cigarette smoke just a little too hard, then broke into a fit of hacking and coughing.

  “You okay, Huakaas?” Bjorn asked, having handed over the wife to the counselor.

  “Yeah,” Huakaas said, wiping the spittle on the sleeve of his wool coat.

  “Can I bum a smoke?”

  Huakaas pulled the carton from his pocket and gave it a practiced shake to free a cigarette. Huus took one, then duly ripped off the filter, snapped the tobacco-holding paper tube in half and handed the mangled mess back.

  “What the fuck, Huus?”

  “Those things will kill you,” Bjorn replied with a satisfied grin.

  “We’re all gonna die of something,” Huakaas fired back, then launched into another coughing fit.

  “You should really get that looked at.”

  “I should do a lot of things.” Arne stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette and stuffed it back into the carton along with the broken mess he’d been handed. “We done here?”

  “Okay, so the wife was at work the whole time. I’ll check her alibi. She doesn’t know who would want to kill her husband, but then she’s a bit of a mess. Didn’t really have anything useful to say.”

  “I could have told you that.”

  “Hey, Huus?” a voice called from inside. “You got a sec?”

  Bjorn studied Arne for a moment as if waiting for him to move. After a prolonged awkward silence, Huus huffed and marched inside. “Coming, Christoph.”

  Half interested in what the tech was excited about, half too lazy to move, Huakaas stayed put and pulled out his phone to check his email and scan his Facebook account—though it was set to private and he never posted anything. He only had it so he could follow Clara. No new posts.

  A few minutes later, Huus reappeared, hands now gloved, carrying the glass bottle last seen screwed into the victim’s head. “Smell this,” he said.

  “What?” Huakaas choked and backed away.

  “Just fucking sniff it.” Bjorn shoved the bottleneck under Arne’s nose. “You know how the killer always scratches off identifiers on the bottle label and sterilizes it so we can’t see the brand or where it may have been bought? What does that smell like to you?”

  Arne took a tentative sniff. A faint, but distinct odor wafted from within: distilled grain and caraway seeds.

  Huakaas pursed his thin lips. “Akevitt?”

  Bjorn smirked. “Yeah, figured you’d be familiar with it.”

  Arne eyed his partner wearily, then pushed himself from the wall and began walking back to his car.

  “Hey, you don’t think this is big?” Bjorn shouted after him.

  “Nope,” Arne called over his shoulder.

  The volume of akevitt bought at Easter had grown exponentially in the last few years. Foreigners loved akevitt and came in droves from all over the globe to drink it and play Kubb. For Norwegians, beer was usually the drink of choice when playing Kubb in summer. In the colder Easter month, the tourists had taken to akevitt. Probably because it kept people warm. Arne couldn’t stand the damn stuff. A cold beer was good at any time of year. He salivated at the thought of taking that first gulp.

  “This is something, Huakaas,” Bjorn said.

  “It’s a needle in a haystack,” Arne called back. “You know how much akevitt is bought every day, especially this time of year?”

  “You’re not going to follow up on this?”

  “You’re young and bored,” Arne said, climbing into his old Saab 900. “Knock yourself out. I got a lady to get back to. Which reminds me. Did you bring it?”

  Bjorn sighed and fished around in his pocket. “Yeah, I brought it. Why don’t you just buy it yourself?” He approached Arne’s car door and waved the bright orange carrot through the window.

  “Do I ask you a lot of questions?”

  Bjorn shook his head. “No, I guess not. But you should. We’re partners. You don’t even know my wife’s na—”

  “Don’t care,” Arne said, then snatched the carrot and backed up the Saab. “Bring me another tomorrow.”

  Plymouth, England, 1984

  The kitchen had a curious set of doors. To Rey, they looked like cowboy doors. The kind found at the entrance to a saloon in a western movie. Though, she had no idea where she’d ever seen a cowboy or a western, or even how she knew what a saloon was. Her family didn’t own a television. Perhaps her best friend at playschool had told her?

  The double doors were a light brown and sat in the middle of the door frame—that was to say, they left the top and bottom of the doorway completely open to someone who wanted to either crouch or stand on tiptoes to peer into the room. Yes, they were very odd doors, but Rey liked them. Crawling underneath them was fun. Her own private entrance into the kitchen.

  There were never any sweets in the house, but her mom always had a bag of sugar in the cupboard. Rey found it easy to take a spoon, climb inside the cupboard with the bag and close the door behind. She’d mastered scooping out big spoonfuls in the dark and could munch down in secret. The crystals were sweet and crunched between her teeth.

  But today, as Rey got down on all fours to crawl underneath the doors, the kitchen wasn’t empty. She peered through the gap and was greeted by a pair of folded bare legs. Rey climbed back to her feet and pushed through. Her mom sat on the floor, big curls of chocolate hair tousled about her red face, her shoulders heaving and shuddering with each sob. The cold returned to Rey’s skin and pain radiated out from her stomach.

  Why is mummy crying again?

  “Mummy?” Rey walked over and put her arms around her mom’s neck.

  Soft hands slid around Rey’s waist and pulled her close.

  “Mummy, why are you crying?” Rey asked.

  Her mom didn’t reply. Instead, she shook her head, fits of sniffs and choked tears preventing her from speaking.

  “C’mon, Mummy, let’s go. Get up.” Rey pulled on her mom’s arm. She could help because she was three and a half now. She was strong.

  Rey’s mom shrank back to the floor, shaking her head, fresh tears running down her soft face. She ran a hand along her turned-up nose and wiped away her tears. “No, sweetheart,” her mom managed. “I can’t.”

  More tears fell and Rey’s mom wept like she’d never heard before. The sound hurt Rey’s insides. Her tummy and her chest ached as she stared into her mom’s big, brown, wet eyes. Rey didn’t know what that look was, why her mom couldn’t—no wouldn’t—move, but it made her want to cry, too. Her mom was the best person in the world. Rey didn’t want her sad. She wanted to help. But no matter what she tried, her mom stayed fixed to the floor. Rey gave up and settled into her mom’s arms, head against her mom’s chest.

  The doors to the kitchen swung open. Rey’s mom stiffened, her limbs rigid and her chest still. Without lifting her head, Rey peeked through her sand-colored fringe. Her dad stood there, a nasty smell of cigarettes emanating from his skin and clothes. He wasn’t a tall man, but from the floor, he seemed to tower over them both. His dark hair was parted in the middle and fell about his face and ears, and his mustache looked like the letter n, tracking under his hook nose down either side of his mouth to his chin. His eyes were scary—bright blue—staring out from under thick black eyebrows. He always shouted a lot. Rey didn’t like it.

  “I thought I told you not to move,” he said.

  Rey’s mom, her whole body shaking, buried her chin into the top of Rey’s head.

  Dull thuds resonated through Rey’s mom and into Rey herself. They weren’t sharp slapping sounds, like when her dad spa
nked her bum or legs. These were muted—numb—as he struck Rey’s mom across the head. Her thick hair gave some kind of protection. Like a helmet. At least that’s what Rey thought. So, she scrunched into a ball and listened to the fierce beat of her mom’s heart through her bosom, seemingly in time with each strike of her dad’s fist. Clouds of ash from the cigarette clamped between his lips billowed around her head.

  Over her mother’s wails and her father’s onslaught, Rey focused on the radio. That song, her mom’s fun song, had come on again. Rey didn’t know who sang it, or what its name was. She knew it was supposed to be happy. Her mom always turned it up whenever it came on, calling to Rey to dance along. Something about it was sad. The bouncy melody contrasted with words that were somehow melancholy—scary even.

  Rey concentrated on the strange electric guitar and bouncy drumbeat paired with a chorus of men and women singing in unison. Their voices were tinny, but the more she focused on them, the more their words seemed timely and frighteningly accurate.

  Oslo, Norway, 2016

  Rey wouldn’t learn what that song was or who sang it for many years. Every time she heard the song playing, the opening bars would make the hair on her arms stand high and her eyes well. There were a few songs like that—ones that cut through her armor and dragged out the scared child kicking and screaming into the light. She hardly played those songs, though they did sit in her playlist—always lurking, waiting, to strike like a viper when she least expected it, injecting a dose of fear or sadness. Rey often mused on how the notion of inner emotion had once been an absurdity. Emotions were impressed upon humans by the gods or an outside force. Perhaps they had been right all along.

  The frigid wind bit into Rey’s cheeks and stabbed through the handkerchief and fur hat, stinging the naked skin of her head. Sleet blustered into her eyes, blinding her trudge through the old Ankertorget market square toward the hostel. A winter zephyr stole the breath from her lungs and made her skin prickle so badly it hurt. A taut, all-over pain. No matter how many times she visited the damn country, the soul-crushing cold was discovered anew.

  Rey’s mind was good at that. Poking holes in her memory like swiss cheese, leaving voids behind, those events that had caused heartache, cut out with surgical precision. The physical pain from being hit became trivial, the sting lasting only minutes—perhaps hours if it was a particularly powerful slap. It was emotional response her mind had learned to kill off. To become numb to the insults and the put-downs. The constant chipping away at the core until only the husk of a person was left. Her father had been good at that. She’d often pondered on this as a reason she remembered almost nothing before the age of ten, and very little until she became a teenager. Memories were irrevocably tied to feelings. Rey was numb, emotions an ethereal thing other people felt. The few recollections Rey did have were those burned into her psyche. Even then, they were almost exclusively tied to music. A single song in a single moment in time.

  When others talked about a friend they had when they were eight, or how their mom would sing to them, Rey’s mind would simply blip, a film reel bubbling and then turning to black. A void formed where a recollection should be, easily filled with thoughts and questions to which there were no answers—contemplating the meaning of the universe or the finality of death when no afterlife exists. Sinking into a vortex of such machinations was all too easy and often brought on a mild panic attack as Rey considered the vast nothingness that awaited upon her demise.

  Occasionally, ancient imagery popped up in her mind—faded and Bakelite-brown. Though it was nearly impossible to discern which memories were real, seen by her eyes and heard by her ears, and which were created by flipping through photos in dogeared photo albums, and told to her by her mom over a mug of special coffee—instant Nescafé made with hot milk, not water.

  Another blast of ice cut at her cracked lips. Rey sucked the air through her teeth, which only served to transfer the hurt from her flesh into her jaw and finally her brain. She screwed her eyes together and pulled the fur hat down again, ensuring a tight fit. Then, wireless earbuds wedged in, she cranked up the volume on her phone.

  “Riot” by Three Days Grace attacked her tympanic membrane, vibrating it with the band’s trademark angsty guitar riffs. Rey’s lips curled back into a snarl as she mouthed along to the words, bobbing her head to the beat. Adam Gontier, the lead singer, was rumored to have had an addiction to oxycontin. His struggle with rehabilitation bled into the music as if he had slashed his own wrists and emptied his lifestream onto a page. The whole album was drenched in his pain. “Never Too Late” was another of Rey’s favorites, but too melancholy now. At this moment, she needed him to be angry for her. Riot was about rising from the ashes, hitting back after being stepped on. Today, she’d hit back. Hard.

  Ahead, blue lights flashed, and a small crowd bustled not too far from the hostel. Rey’s heart beat faster. Her gait slowed and she cautiously approached the clamor of people. Several police officers were spaced evenly across the road, which was now blocked with short pylons. Cars were stopped and searched as they tried to squeeze through Oslo’s cramped city center.

  Rey removed her earphones and peered over the shoulder of a man with Viking-esque proportions to listen in on the conversation between one of the officers and a tall woman in a dark coat and red wool hat. The strange Norwegian language rolled off their tongues in an almost melodic fashion. Rey understood little, but the musicality of Nordic dialects had always appealed to her. Not like English, hard and spat out through the teeth. She mused on what it must be like to feel as if you’re singing everything.

  “Hvor skal du?”

  “Huh?” Rey replied.

  “Hvor kommer du fra? Har du identifikajon?” the officer with a strong, clean-shaven face asked.

  “Oh sure, sorry. I’m British.” She fished inside her coat pocket, then produced a passport, which she handed over.

  He thumbed through it until he reached the photo page, then held it up to compare it with her face.

  Rey slid off her hat. The cold clawed at her skin like a bird of prey might clasp onto a rodent. She watched the officer’s expression wilt as he addressed her pallid skin, sunken eyes, and hairless head, then compared it with the long brown curly locks and sun-kissed skin in the passport.

  “Cancer,” Rey said after a beat.

  The officer’s sad gaze flitted from the image to her face, and from those few seconds, she knew he was a good man, and likely not to be a threat as long as Rey played the situation carefully. The ability to read people was Rey’s superpower, if such a thing were to exist. A handy trick growing up where she did. At home or on the street, you could be mauled for merely glancing at someone the wrong way. Rey’s power was so acute, she could tell from only a brief moment with a person who they were and what they were about. The turgidity of their lips. A twitch in their eyes. The way they stood. The depth of their breathing.

  Doctor Crenshaw, a therapist she had visited briefly in her twenties, had referred to it as splitting. The inability to hold opposing thoughts, to see something or someone as both good and bad at the same time. When splitting, as explained by Crenshaw, Rey apparently saw someone as wholly good or wholly bad, and incapable of acting outside of their defined box. Of course, psychobabble spewed from the woman’s lips, issuing forth explanations such as “it’s a defense mechanism” to be able to entirely discard those people who hurt Rey.

  It wasn’t a defect or a mechanism.

  It was a power gained through a lifetime of experience that allowed her to see people for who they were. While those she grew up with had succumbed to drugs, gangs, prison, and death, Rey had survived because of her ability.

  That’s how she knew, how she chose them. Her victims would appear, to most people, as ordinary family men. Another innocent, brutally murdered. Rey knew differently. The way they walked, talked, moved. How they glanced at their wife or children. How on the street or in a park they said nothing, but the flare of their nostrils t
old of a violent reprimand the moment they arrived home.

  Yes, Rey could read anyone and see into their soul.

  The officer in front of her, for instance. A good six feet tall, broad and blond. His stance was wide and strong but forced. Rigid. Probably not a commanding personality by nature. He’d learned to stand like that as part of his training. His gloved hands were slender, not thick, indicating he likely had not spent any time performing manual labor. His eyes were kind, naïve even. He’d seen little violence in his life.

  He handed the document back to Rey. “Where are you going?” he asked in grammatically correct, but heavily accented English.

  “Just to the hostel,” Rey replied, nodding to the building past the blockade. “Is something wrong?”

  “There’s been a murder,” the officer said, now seemingly finding it difficult to look into Rey’s browless eyes.

  “Oh, how awful,” Rey said, then pulled the hat over her head again, the warmth a soothing balm. “Can I get past to my room? I really need to lay and rest. I can’t stay out here in the cold.”

  The officer scanned her skinny frame again, his gaze falling on the rucksack slung over one shoulder. He nodded at it, indicating his curiosity.

  “My bag?”

  He bobbed his head.

  “It’s just my meds.”

  The officer eyed her again and raised his eyebrows expectantly.

  Despite the cold, Rey began to sweat a little. The frigid air chilled her clammy skin. Running wasn’t an option. She shuffled the bag from her shoulder, untied the opening, and held it out for him to inspect.

  The man peered inside. A gust of sleet shimmering in the streetlight obscured his inspection. He reached in and grabbed at something closest to the top, pulling out a small, square, opaque bottle with a security screw cap and the word Xeloda, 500mg on the side. He rattled it once, then pressed down on the cap and twisted it. A quick shake and a few chalk-white oval tablets emptied onto his hand.