He gulped in the night air, saw the horror ship looming above him. But it was moving away, its engines still throbbing faintly.
Jonas was floating – his lifejacket was doing its job. The lifebelt was just a metre or so away; he managed to get hold of it and slipped it over his head and under his arms.
The jacket and the lifebelt carried his body, and when he turned his head he saw lights. They were a long way off, but they were glittering. The lights of Öland. His only option was to start swimming towards them.
He kicked his legs ten times, then rested for a while, using the belt to support him, then kicked out ten times more. Slowly, he made his way towards the shore. The lights were getting closer; he could see little houses now.
The dark coast came into focus, and at last Jonas felt the rocks beneath his feet. He had reached the shore.
He could hear a splashing sound; was someone following him? He looked around, but saw only black water. The Sound was in complete darkness; there was no sign of the lights of a ship out there.
But perhaps the dead had jumped in the water after him, perhaps they were slowly swimming towards the shore right now …
He crawled out of the sea, water pouring from his shorts and top; he wriggled out of the lifebelt and lay there on the pebbles. He was utterly exhausted, but terror at the thought of the dead made him get to his feet.
Where could he hide?
Whereabouts on the island was he?
The shore was less steep here, and he realized he was further north. He saw a row of boathouses up on the ridge, all in darkness apart from one small wooden hut with a faint light in one window.
Jonas stumbled towards it as quickly as he could and finally he made it. He tugged at the handle, but the door was locked. He started hammering and shouting for help, and at last the door was opened.
Not by a zombie, not by a madman wielding an axe, but by an old man who looked as if he had just woken up. He stepped aside, welcoming Jonas into the warmth and the light.
Jonas almost fell in. The water from his clothes dripped on to a soft rug beneath his feet, but he could do no more. He collapsed.
The man was still staring at him, the door still open to the night.
‘Shut the door,’ Jonas whispered. ‘Lock it! They’re after me!’
‘Who’s after you?’
‘The dead. From the ship.’
Gerlof
Gerlof had been woken by strange vibrations, a racket that made him think he was lying in his bunk on board a ship. Then he opened his eyes and remembered that he had decided to spend the night in the boathouse in order to get some peace and quiet. But the walls were actually shaking.
Could it be an earthquake? Slowly, he got out of the camp bed, but it was only when he put in his hearing aid that he realized what was going on. Someone was hammering on the door, and a high voice, somewhat muted by the wood, was shouting, begging to be let in.
‘I’m coming,’ Gerlof muttered.
He pulled on his trousers and his guernsey so that he would be warm and presentable, then opened the door.
Out of the darkness a boy came hurtling in; he almost fell over the doorstep. He was wearing a lifejacket and soaking-wet clothes; Gerlof had never seen him before.
‘Dear me,’ Gerlof said. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.
The boy was kneeling on the rag rug, shaking like a leaf. He looked over at the doorway with terror in his eyes.
‘Shut the door,’ he whispered. ‘Lock it! They’re after me!’
‘Who’s after you?’
‘The dead. From the ship.’
Gerlof closed the door and turned the key.
‘Someone’s after you? What are you talking about?’
The boy crawled further into the boathouse. He stopped when he reached Gerlof’s narrow bed, and clung to it, still staring at the door. He didn’t look at Gerlof; his expression was blank, trapped in fear. He was holding his breath, and appeared to be listening. Gerlof listened, too, but nobody tried the handle or knocked on the door.
He made an effort to stay calm. Should he be afraid? He was still half asleep.
Slowly, he lit several candles on the table, to chase away the shadows. Then he took a couple of steps towards the boy. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Jonas.’
‘And what exactly has happened, Jonas? Can you tell me?’
Finally, the boy met Gerlof’s gaze. ‘There’s a ship out in the Sound,’ he said. ‘A big ship … It came straight at me. I climbed aboard.’ Pause. ‘From my rubber dinghy.’ Pause. ‘But they were all dead.’ Pause. ‘All except one. He had an axe.’
‘And he’s the one who was chasing you?’
‘The ghost,’ the boy said, raising his voice. ‘The ghost was on the ship. He was fighting with the dead!’
The boy took a deep breath, and a single tear rolled down his cheek. Gerlof waited until he had taken a few more deep breaths before reaching out and gently unfastening the lifejacket. Then he said firmly, ‘That was no ghost.’
‘Wasn’t it?’
‘No. Shall I tell you why?’
The boy nodded.
‘Because ghosts can’t cope with water.’ Gerlof slipped off the lifejacket and carried on: ‘My grandfather always used to say that you should make your escape by boat if you saw a spirit of some kind. So, whatever you saw tonight, it was no ghost, Jonas. I promise you that.’
The boy looked doubtful, but seemed to calm down, even though he was still glancing anxiously at the door.
Eventually, Gerlof went over and opened it again. He heard a sharp intake of breath behind him, and said reassuringly, ‘I’m just going to have a look. And see if I can hear anything.’
There was probably nothing to worry about but, just to be on the safe side, he picked up a weapon. It was a long orthoceras which he kept as an ornament. He had found it on the shore; it was the shell of an extinct cephalopod that had become fossilized after several million years under extreme pressure on the seabed.
The stone felt pleasingly heavy, like a cudgel, as Gerlof stepped out into the darkness, into the mild night. The shore around the boathouse was dark grey, the water like a black abyss down below. He moved silently, listening hard, but he could hear only the lapping waves.
He walked away from the patch of light by the door and gazed out across the Sound. A few white pinpricks of light glimmered over on the mainland but, otherwise, there was nothing to see.
He switched his hearing aid to the setting for background noise, then straightened up and listened again.
Now he could hear something in the night, a distant rumbling sound out at sea. He recognized the dull throbbing – he had heard it just before he went to bed. But now it was coming from the north, and it was heading away. He fiddled with the hearing aid, trying to turn up the volume, but the rumbling slowly died away.
He waited for another minute or two, then he heard the waves splashing on the shore, rattling the pebbles as the swell of a vessel passing through the Sound reached the land.
He went back inside and locked the door.
‘There’s no one out there,’ he said. ‘No ghosts.’
Jonas didn’t say anything, so Gerlof went on, ‘My name is Gerlof.’
‘I know,’ the boy said. ‘You’re Kristoffer’s granddad.’
A friend of Kristoffer, Gerlof’s youngest grandchild. Now he recognized the boy. He had seen him just a few days ago, at the midsummer dance. He was a member of the Kloss family.
‘Are you Jonas Kloss?’
The boy nodded, staring at the door again. ‘He hit the dead people on the ship with an axe.’ Pause. He thought for a second, then continued, ‘And he asked about an old American. He said, “Where’s Aron, the Swedish-American?”’
A Swedish-American? Gerlof thought.
‘And the man who was holding the axe, Jonas … Did you recognize him?’
The boy shook his head. ‘I don’t know … I don’t know his name.’
Gerlof considered this response. ‘But you did recognize him?’
Jonas thought hard. ‘I think so.’
‘Where had you seen him before?’
‘I don’t know.’
The boy had lowered his gaze, and Gerlof didn’t want to press him, so he simply said quietly, ‘Just try to remember … What was the first thing that came into your mind when you saw the man on the ship?’
Jonas looked up at Gerlof and frowned, then said, ‘Africa.’
The Homecomer
The engines had fallen silent. The ship was drifting in the middle of the Sound now, almost motionless in the calm conditions, but it was still difficult for an old man with weary arms and stiff legs to disembark.
The Homecomer threw the bag containing his booty into the bottom of the launch. Then he tied the end of a long plastic cable around his wrist, climbed over the gunwale and managed to get his feet on the front seat. For a few seconds he was sure the two vessels were going to drift apart, but Rita was in control, revving the outboard motor and keeping them side by side.
The Homecomer slid down into the launch, the plastic cable still around his wrist; it was now the only connection between the ship and the launch.
Rita didn’t say anything. She seemed calm and collected, unlike her boyfriend. Pecka was sitting in the middle of the launch with his head down, mumbling to himself. As soon as he got in he had hurled his bloodstained axe into the water, far out into the darkness.
‘Fuck … fuck …’
The Homecomer slumped down in the prow and touched his knee. ‘Pecka. Look at me.’
Pecka raised his head. ‘Fuck,’ he said again. ‘They’re dead.’
The Homecomer nodded. ‘Yes, and now we need to remove all traces.’ He held up the cable in the darkness. ‘We’ve got one thing left to do.’
Pecka stared blankly at him. ‘We killed them,’ he said. ‘The whole crew.’
The Homecomer took his hand, which was ice cold. He knew what was wrong with Pecka. He was in shock, just like many soldiers when they have killed for the first time. The important thing was to get Pecka to focus on details now, to forget the wider picture. When he himself had started killing as a young man, he had thought only about his gun, about handling it correctly – nothing else. Then it had been quite easy.
‘They were sick, weren’t they?’ Pecka went on. ‘Because of something in the hold?’
The Homecomer shook his head. He had no answer to that.
‘They had only themselves to blame,’ he said eventually, passing the end of the cable to Pecka. ‘Let’s finish this. You can do it.’
Pecka looked at the cable, which ran up over the gunwale of the ship and disappeared into one of the hatches. He grabbed the end in his trembling right hand, clutched the small detonator and pressed hard.
They heard a dull thud from inside the ship. The darkness seemed to shudder, and there was a gurgling noise from beneath the waterline. They had blown a hole in the hull.
The Homecomer had been holding his breath, and now he let it out. ‘OK, let’s go.’
Rita turned the wheel, and the launch moved away from the ship, which had already begun to list. The Homecomer had placed the explosives in the bow, which went down first. The stern began to tip up, slowly to start with, then faster and faster.
The ship sank majestically but almost silently, with only the odd hiss of air forced out of the vents.
After less than fifteen minutes the surface of the water was empty, and Rita set off at speed, heading home through the night.
The black shape of the island quickly grew larger as they approached. From a distance the shoreline was made up of gentle curves, but as they came closer the Homecomer could see how rocky and jagged it really was.
They had reached the inlets and the headlands between the Ölandic and Stenvik, where they had parked the car. The shore was still dark and deserted; everything was going to be OK.
Just before they landed, the Homecomer reached into the bag and took out two rolls of banknotes. He gave one each to Pecka and Rita.
‘That’s to keep you going until we meet again.’
Pecka didn’t say thank you, but he seemed more composed now. He raised his voice above the sound of the outboard motor. ‘That kid who came aboard the ship … What was he doing there?’
The Homecomer stared at him. ‘A kid?’
‘Yes, when were were on our way out into the Sound … He just appeared by the hatch, all of a sudden. I was looking for you, but you’d gone, and then this boy turned up with the living dead behind him – one of the crew members, I mean – so I used the axe and—’
‘Calm down,’ the Homecomer interrupted. He looked at Pecka as the bottom of the boat scraped against the rocks in the shallows. ‘This boy – did he see you?’
‘Well, yes, he was only a metre away. Right in front of me on the deck. God knows where he came from; I tried to grab hold of him but he disappeared over the gunwale …’
Rita turned off the engine. ‘But you were wearing your balaclava, weren’t you?’ she said into the silence. ‘He couldn’t see your face?’ Pecka shook his head, looking distinctly uncomfortable.
‘I wasn’t wearing it at the time,’ he said after a while. ‘I got so fucking hot and sweaty.’
The Homecomer got to his feet and gazed out at the dark shore. ‘Do you know who he was?’
‘No.’
The Homecomer stepped ashore, but turned back to face Pecka. ‘Go straight home,’ he said. ‘And stay there. Don’t go out.’
Pecka seemed to understand the seriousness of the situation. He nodded. ‘What about you?’ he said. ‘Will you be going home soon?’
‘Home?’
‘Yes … Back to America?’
The Homecomer didn’t answer. He merely stared out at the black waters of the Sound. He was thinking about his voyage across the sea when he was a boy, when he still believed in the future.
The New Country, July 1931
Aron has left Sven in the cabin. There is nothing he can do. Sven’s skinny body is lying in his bunk, but his head is hanging over the edge of the bed as he vomits into an enamel chamber pot on the floor. The smell is indescribable. Aron can’t breathe in there.
Between the bouts of vomiting Sven mumbles to himself. He talks about the Kloss family, about the burial cairn and rocks rolling down and falling walls.
‘You always have to have the last word … He was like a pillar of stone, solid and erect … I should have gone home … should never have raised my fist to him …’
Sometimes, Sven seems to think he is back on the island, that he is lying on the shore at Rödtorp, but that is not the case. He is lying on board the long white ship SS Kastelholm, as she steams across a vast, choppy sea.
He and Aron are sharing a bunk, but Aron is rarely in the cabin. He doesn’t want to lie next to Sven in the middle of that stench; he spends most of his time on deck. Or on the bridge, where the captain has allowed him to come and watch how they sail the ship.
At the beginning of the voyage, Sven also wandered around SS Kastelholm. He would often stand on the foredeck, his hands resting on the gunwale as he gazed out to sea. But on the third day the waves began to get bigger and he took himself back to the cabin. And the chamber pot.
Aron is standing by the gunwale, watching the rushing water.
The sun is hidden behind a bank of cloud, the horizon has disappeared, and there is no sign of land or any other vessels. All he can see are the never-ending waves, racing towards the ship in long lines and breaking against the bow in a burst of spume.
Aron has lost all concept of time at sea, and he longs for them to arrive. To step on to dry land, any land at all. He can almost smell it.
Cold air, a stiff breeze. Aron can hear the sound of the steam engine out here, but he stays away from the machinery. He is happier with the wind and the sun, which reminds him of the shore by the croft.
He waits, and longs for the journey to
end.
After a while, he hears someone limping up behind him; Sven has made it. He inhales the sea air and positions himself in front of the short mast, his legs firmly planted on the deck and his gaze fixed on some distant point. On the unknown.
Aron looks at him. ‘Are we nearly there?’
Sven sighs. ‘The same question, over and over again …’ He swallows, belches quietly and keeps his eyes fixed on that distant point. ‘Can you see any sign of land?’
Aron screws up his eyes and peers into the wind. He shakes his head.
‘You will, before too long,’ Sven goes on. ‘We’ll soon arrive in the new country.’
Aron has a question. ‘Then can we write to Mum?’
‘Of course. When we get there. If you can find what you need … a pen and paper and a stamp.’
‘I’ll do my best.’
‘And if it’s not too expensive.’
Aron decides that he will find pens and paper and stamps when they go ashore, whatever they cost.
‘How long are we going to be there?’
‘Be there?’ Sven says. ‘We’re not just going to “be there”. We’re going to work, make a decent living. We’re staying for at least a year.’
‘And then we can come home?’
Sven sighs again. ‘We’ll come home when we come home,’ he says. ‘Don’t ask so many questions.’
Then he turns and heads back to the cabin and the chamber pot.
Aron stays where he is. He stares out to sea, waiting for the coastline to appear, the beginning of the new country, another world.
Gerlof
The sun rose over the island at half past four, but Gerlof didn’t wake until after seven. He blinked in the grey light of the boathouse and glanced over at the old nets hanging on the far wall. He remembered the hammering on the door and a frightened, soaking-wet boy tumbling in from the darkness. Was it all a dream?
The Voices Beyond: (Oland Quartet Series 4) Page 11