Siren Song: A Different Scandinavian Crime Novel (26 page)

Tom picks up the knife and looks down on John, wondering who the chubby, ill-dressed pretender hitman is. He has plenty of enemies, ranging from wealthy competitors vying for his circle of sub-dealers to former friends who feel cheated or betrayed for whatever reason.

But this?
Come on.

Whoever sent this would-be assassin does not know Tom. This man is a joke. Tom’s body is trimmed to perfection by countless hours in VIP gyms and three kinds of illegal anabolic substances, whereas this man looks like a car sales rep on a bad diet. The attack had been beyond clumsy, too; Tom had taken down better fighters a decade ago when he roamed the suburbs as a teenager.

Nevertheless, the man at his feet is a sure sign of trouble. So are the police. While a constant presence at Arlanda, there are many more officers around now than a few minutes ago. Tom wonders if they are searching for him, the useless knifeman, or both of them?

He looks out of the alcove. No one close. Cars drive past only a few steps away; however the space is too dark for any driver to see what goes on inside.

Tom crouches next to John, grabs John’s jacket, and hoists him off the ground. “Getting me out here was clever,” Tom spits in John’s face. “I should’ve known the texts were fake; Niklas’s spelling is even worse than yours. Now pay attention.” With a quick punch he breaks John’s nose.

“You’re going to tell me who sent you,” Tom says. “You have three seconds before I write my autograph in your puffy face with your own knife.” He waves the blade in front of John. “One. Two. Three. Your loss.”

Tom cuts a deep gash in John’s forehead. Blood wells up and runs back into John’s hair, but John does not make a sound. A calm stare is his only response while he shifts slightly in Tom’s grip. Tom frowns. Maybe the man is a professional after all, only a bad one.

“Let’s try again,” Tom says. “This time, I’ll take one of your eyes. Let’s see if you can stonewall that. One. Two. What was that?”

John mumbles a word and coughs blood; his broken nose has flooded his mouth. He shifts again and lies still.

“Speak louder,” Tom barks and slaps John’s face. Sirens blare in the distance. He has to move on soon. “Start talking. Who sent you?”

John mumbles again, but the sentence is lost in a wet gargle. “Who?” Tom demands and leans closer to John’s mouth.

John speaks again, and this time his voice is clear and level. He says one word, close to Tom’s ear.

“Molly.”

John twists and runs a hand-sized shard of glass into Tom’s face, through his cheek, and into his mouth.

*

John rolls away while Tom rears up and screams, his howl coming out more like a long, thick sneeze. The knife clatters to the ground. John tries to kick at Tom’s legs, but Tom stumbles away, rips out the shard of smudged glass stuck in his cheek, and stares at it with an incredulous look on his face, as if he has discovered a childhood treasure. Blood pours from the gash and down his shirt.

“Fuck,”
Tom gurgles.
“Oh my –
fuck
.” He stares at John with the eyes of a panicked animal.

John picks up the knife, rises slowly, and meets Tom’s eyes.

Tom turns and runs.

John staggers to his feet and follows Tom. Had it not been for the piece of glass that his fingers had found among the filth on the floor, he would have been too wounded to go on, but the thought is no comfort. Tom is alive. The balance is still wrong.

His forehead throbs with pain, and blood trickles into his eyes, but he keeps running. Ahead, Tom zigzags between cars like a stricken rat. John is seconds behind. People stop and stare. The police officers in the cars frown and point. Sirens moan between the buildings. A helicopter thunders above.

Tom screams in panic, and John runs faster.

John expects Tom to flee into the terminal, but instead he sprints along parked buses and cars, away from the lights. From behind comes the crackle of a megaphone, followed by high-pitched commands to stand still.

Tom passes a line of taxi cars, barrels through people queuing outside a coach, turns into the street, and disappears from John’s view. John shoves bewildered travellers out of his way and rounds the corner, giving it some berth in case Tom tries to ambush him.

When he catches sight of Tom again, Tom is dragging a man out of a car. John sprints towards the car, but before he reaches it, Tom hops in, slams the door, and speeds down the road in a spray of wet snow. The man whose car Tom stole stands next to John and mumbles incoherently.

More commands are shouted in the megaphone. The helicopter is coming closer. A few hundred metres away are flaring blue lights. Police cars, approaching fast.

John runs up to the last car in the taxi line and tries to open the driver’s door, but it is locked. The driver inside shouts and waves. John ignores him, runs to the next car, and tests the door. This one too is locked. He runs to the third car, and the driver’s door swings open.

The driver, a young, red-haired man, shouts out in surprise and looks up at John. A large newspaper is spread over the dashboard. The stereo plays heavy metal on low volume.

John shoves his knife under the man’s jaw and tells him to leave the keys and get out. The man blinks, nods, undoes the safety belt, and crawls out of the vehicle.

John starts the car, does a U-turn, and races after Tom.

*

John

John climbs through a whirlwind of ripping winds. Strong gusts try to pluck him from the tree and fling him into the night, but he clings on, keeping his eyes on the next foothold. Somewhere below, the creature of ice and loss is still coming for him. Above is an exit. A way out of his nightmare. A portal to sanity. The idea infuses him with strength.

A quick glance down makes him hold on tighter to the tree: The forest is a giant hemisphere of rustling gloom. The field is a small pale patch far below his feet. He climbs as fast as he can, but he cannot have come this far so soon. Stranger still is the heat: The air should be colder, but he is sweating with the effort.

And he is nowhere near the top; above him, the tree stretches away like a vertical path into the heavens. The crown is as wide as a landscape, a dizzying myriad of twists and forks. At the periphery of the crown, its naked branches thin out and puncture the clouds, giving him the impression that he is scaling a blood vessel that feeds into a heaving, organic mass.

He glances down again and almost loses his hold; climbing far below is the creature that posed as Molly. Moving snake-like along the tree, it comes nearer, slicing away twigs as it coils and curls around the trunk. It is still wearing the guise of her, but he knows what hides beneath.

Shutting out the sight, John climbs on, digging his fingers into the coarse bark. The fall to the ground would be as long as a lifetime. If the beast that poses as Molly snags his feet, he is doomed.

The sky brightens shade by shade, and the ground under him blends with the surrounding night until the forest no longer is visible. The tree could have grown from nothing into nothing. His world is simplified: Brightness above, darkness below, and an endless tree bridging the two domains. And, not far below, an entity bent on turning him into a frozen husk.

Sheer hunger for life keeps John going: He has seen too much to falter between abyss and absolution. Another urgency joins the first: Beyond the exit, on the other side of the strange sky, a catastrophe is in the making, and only he can stop it. If he gets there too late, there will be more pain.

The tree shudders, and John grips the branches hard. He looks down and sees the creature mere seconds behind him. For a second, a savage terror envelops him, but he channels the dread into strength and climbs furiously. Branch after branch passes by until he is inside the crown, surrounded by limbs arching away for miles into emptiness.

Grunting and cursing, he pulls himself onto the next branch and realizes the trunk is tapering. The branches around him become smaller and less stable. He pauses to look up only when he notices the change in the light: the grey dusk has changed into a restless pale sea, a map of boiling streams and whirlpools the colour of crushed ice. Either he is inside the clouds, or he has passed through them and is looking at another, more distant sky.

Snowflakes zip past his face while contours and movements emerge, faint, blurred shapes solidifying into outlines and objects. From somewhere comes the long rumble of massive engines. He shields his eyes and squints. Above him are sleek, oblong shapes; between them, straight lines of tiny glowing lights.

The sight is strangely familiar, but he is too light-headed to make sense of what he sees, and there is a tingling sensation in his stomach. He looks down at the tree’s magnificent crown. The network of branches has thinned out to a fine web around and below him. He has reached the top.

As if triggered by the epiphany, his world revolves.

John clings harder to the tree when, without warning, the ground’s pull alters to a push. Suddenly, the darkness of the abyss is above him, while the storming whiteness, the scents and the shapes are far below. He waits for the vertigo to pass, but the reversal of gravity stays. One moment he is trying to avoid falling down; the next he holds on to the topmost branches not to plummet into the sky.

He begins to climb back up, but slips and hangs dangling, suspended over the clouds by a twig. Far below is solid ground, or something akin to it, but a fall would be lethally long.

He tries to pull himself up, but his body could have been made of stone. A quick, heavy thudding rises on the air. Perhaps another beast coming for him. If that is the case, he wonders what he will face this time. A dragon of rose thorns, a chimera of barbed wire, a translucent wolf of grief. Nothing will surprise him ever again.

The roar keeps coming closer. He frowns and looks down; the sound is artificial, impossibly loud but also monotonous and wheezing. Images of winged shapes leap into his mind.

Airplanes.

The roar comes from a helicopter. He is hanging above an airport. The box-like shapes are terminals and hangars, the bands of pearls in the white haze are runway lights. Even this high up, the reek of jet fuel is strong. Small blurred dots mill on one of the runways: Cars and people, mites of black in the white.

It makes as much sense as anything else he has encountered lately. All he can do is roll with the whims and hope to survive. Nothing would matter if he drops down; the ground is closer than it had been moments before, though a fall will still be deadly.

He tries to pull himself up again and makes a strangled sound. A few metres above him in the now upturned trunk is the creature that poses as Molly. Its face a pale moon against the black sky.

“Bloody hell,” John whispers. He expects it to close the distance in a flash and lash out at him, but it stays still. The branch he clutches starts to slide through his fingers.

“Still trying to flee the inevitable?” Its sneer contorts the stolen features. “You never were one to pick the winning side.”

“Fuck off.” John gasps as one of his hands slips from the branch. He has seconds before his other hand will slip. With the creature barring his way, he cannot even attempt to climb up. “Where’s Miriam?”

“Gone.” The woman pauses. “Forever, this time.”

“Liar,” John says. The woman’s hesitation tipped him off, and her contemptuous smile convinces him.

At least Miriam is alive. That is something. As for exactly where she is, he does not care. Glancing down, he sees the ground even closer. Scattered among the jewel strings of the runways are people moving erratically, running, pausing and doubling back. Some way away is a large helicopter, its engine running.

The creature edges closer. “I’m your last chance now. You can have another chance by my side, or drop into endless pain.”

“Go away.”

“Come on, John. It mustn’t end like this.”

John turns away in disgust. Had the experiences from the nightmare version of Molly’s flat not still lingered with him, he would have been tempted to reach for the creature, to grasp for another chance to be close to the woman he had lost, no matter how perverted a shadow it was.

But Molly is gone. The spectre above him is a foul mirage. Under its mask is the sum of all that Molly hated: Coldness, malevolence, and apathy.

He draws the cold air into his lungs. “A drop to more pain?” he asks.

“And worse,” the creature promises. “Grief and disappointment. Broken ties and savaged hopes.”

John nods. “So going back means keeping on feeling.” He phrases his words like a question, but the answer comes to him before the creature replies.

“You get it at last.” It reaches down for him with a hand. “Now stop this idiocy, and come with me.”

John looks the creature in its eyes. “Then life,” he says, “is down there.”

It smiles. “Precisely.” The grin falters as it realises its mistake, but the realisation is too late.

John lets go of the branch.

The creature reaches out for John as he drops away, but its hands grasp air. John looks up as he falls and watches the creature’s face disappear behind the curtain of night. Its enraged grimace is the last he sees, but its scream follows him on his descent, ringing in his head until the sound is lost in the piercing whistle of the wind.

*