Savage Spring (52 page)

‘Shouldn’t we take them with us?’ Henry had asked. ‘Use them as hostages?’

‘Any benefit would be outweighed by the fact that they’d slow us down, and if the police catch us we’ll spend a lifetime in prison,’ Leopold had replied, and Henry had realised that his brother was right. They had to do what they had to do.

The brothers had each sat down with one of the children in their laps, hugging them to calm them down. And then they had aimed their pistols at the children’s temples.

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They turned off to the right, down towards the sea, which should be just a few kilometres away to the east.

Empty country cottages in among the trees. They pass a sign pointing to an old summer camp for children, fifteen kilometres away.

Their satnav is pointing them in the right direction.

Their movement into the darkness is being registered on the colourful screen lighting up the interior of the car.

‘What do you reckon, then?’ Zeke asks. ‘Are they going to be there?’

Malin can feel the cold pistol against her chest. Says: ‘I don’t know, but it feels right.’

They drive past what should be the last house before number 37, the house that doesn’t exist, yet apparently does.

The headlights shine into the forest, the vegetation thickens, becomes almost tropical, but surely there can’t be palm trees here?

No: pine trees, firs, dense clusters of pitch-black ferns, and the sense of being in an ancient forest is tangible, then overwhelming, and they drive a few more kilometres before the road reaches the sea. It’s lighter here, and Zeke switches off the headlights to conceal their arrival, just in case anyone is looking out for them.

They drive around a headland, then into a small inlet, heading slowly along the uneven gravel track, and then the island rises up in front of them, and the tall fir trees surrounding the main house that they can just make out deep within the woods become the turrets and towers of an imaginary castle.

Lights in the windows.

Someone’s there.

The brothers?

The children?

Human beings, imposing themselves on nature.

Tearing out the vegetation, setting down their roots, then recreating the greenery they’ve destroyed in order to live in close proximity to monsters.

There’s something about this place. The vibrations the island is emitting.

No one should have settled here.

Nature should have been left in peace.

Malin and Zeke have parked some two hundred metres from the bridge leading to the island. Have crept up to the two-metre-high gate, surrounded by barbed wire.

Malin peers into the darkness, looking for surveillance cameras, but there aren’t any there.

No signs on the gate. No letterbox. Nothing to suggest who or what is hiding out on the island.

She can hear Zeke’s breathing beside her. Heavy, almost rattling, and if breathing can sound angry, then Zeke’s does now.

‘Bloody hell,’ he says. ‘What a fucking place, do you feel it, Malin? It’s like the sea itself smells sulphurous, not salty and fresh, but sulphurous.’

‘It feels humid as well,’ Malin says. ‘And warmer than it should do, doesn’t it? As if the spring night is somehow warmer here.’

The clock in the car had said a quarter to one as they left it at the edge of the forest.

No sign of anyone out on the island.

No one.

Her pistol.

Am I going to have to use it? Malin wonders.

Maybe. The children are here. The brothers. I can feel it, and Malin and Zeke haven’t discussed what to do, but without saying a word Zeke takes off his jacket and throws it over the barbed wire on top of the gate.

‘Do you think the fabric’s enough to cover the wire?’

Malin shakes her head, aware that they can’t stay here by the gate, exposed, they have to move on.

‘But we can’t shoot the lock off.’

‘Fuck it,’ Zeke says, then swings himself up onto the gate, grabs his jacket, and he’s lucky, there are no spikes where he puts his fingers, then he’s over.

Malin follows his example.

Manages to avoid the barbed wire, and they press on, across the bridge, towards the large house on the island, it looks like a huge sugarlump that someone has rammed into a steep rockface.

A jetty.

A large motorboat rocking, pale against the dark water.

Is there rain in the air? The sky above them is dark, no stars.

Outhouses to one side of the main house. One door is open, and is that the sound of scratching coming from the oblong buildings?

They run across the bridge, then they’re on the other side, on the island, Malin moving soundlessly behind Zeke, who’s drawn his pistol and tucked himself behind a tree trunk, and she sees something coming towards them, a large, slithering creature, and she feels like screaming, and sees Zeke switch on the pocket torch she saw him tuck into his belt before they left the car.

The creature’s red eyes burn in the night.

Its yellow teeth gleam.

Its striped body glistens.

She throws herself behind Zeke, and can feel how scared they both are.

A lizard.

A huge, live lizard with a black and yellow body, skin that looks impregnable.

And then another one, and the creatures hiss at them. Hungry prehistoric lizards. The brothers are here, Malin is sure of it now, and the animals move to attack them, and Zeke shines the torch right into the eyes of the largest lizard, and Malin wants to scream and run, but they stay where they are, stay silent, and Zeke moves the torch quickly, and a miracle happens.

The creatures’ bodies quiver.

Turn around.

And they head off into the darkness. Find somewhere to lie in wait. Wait for the next opportunity to tear someone or something to pieces.

The torch goes out.

Malin and Zeke look at each other in the darkness.

Shake their heads, before Zeke gestures towards the house and they set off.

The brothers are sitting on the sofa in the larger of the villa’s living rooms. Exhausted.

They’ve gathered their things, taken out the case with the money, and are grabbing a few minutes’ rest before making their way down to the boat by the jetty.

They need to get going now.

The bomb.

It ought to go off more or less as they get on the boat. In ten minutes.

Not with a bang, but a whimper, Leopold thinks.

They’ve closed the heavy white curtains, turned out the lights, and darkness has taken hold of the room.

They’ve put their pistols down. They’re shimmering blackly on the glass tabletop. They sit in silence, not talking to each other.

They listen to the room.

Was that something moving out in the garden just now? Have the lizards managed to gnaw their way out? God knows, they’ve tried.

And that light the brothers thought they could see has gone. Maybe it was never there?

They discussed whether to call their father, tell him everything, but is he even still alive? Or has the cancer taken him at last?

What have we done?

Who are we?

What are we?

They weren’t able to shoot in the end. Unable to do what they had forced someone else to do.

While they had thought they were united in decisiveness, all they found was indecision, then a deep, all-enveloping sense of shame.

They had put the children back in the room. Now they’ll be blown up along with the rest of the house. Buried among the rubble.

Then there’s a muffled thud from the terrace, and the brothers stand up at the same moment, go over to the glass wall and push the curtain aside.

The lizard is almost two metres long from nose to tail, and it shines darkly as it forces its body across the white stone of the terrace. It must have clambered up the rockface and somehow found its way onto the terrace.

It catches sight of them through the glass. Stops, turns its head towards them, then it opens its jaws, and they can almost smell the stench of the creature’s empty stomach, hear its claws scratching against the stone.

The creature remains motionless.

Stares at them with a dead look in its yellow eyes, and for a moment the brothers think it’s their father’s pet, the beast that used to scratch at the door of the cellar out on Lidingö, but they know that animal’s dead, was stuffed years ago, that its open jaws are now an empty gesture rather than any real danger or cause for alarm.

The animals in their cages. In order to get their hands on this place, they had to have them. But here at the house, on the loose, dangerous – they’re not supposed to be here.

‘Fuck off!’ Leopold yells.

‘Go away,’ Henry whispers.

And the monster crawls away, heaving its bulk over the edge of the terrace and down into the wilderness of the garden below.

Then it’s gone, but at that moment Leopold Kurtzon sees a shadow, faintly picked out in the light from the windows.

The shadow of someone moving across the terrace. Isn’t it?

But he can’t see anyone. Has Father died and come back as a ghost? Is everything too late now? Is it too late to run? And the bomb. There can’t be more than a few minutes before it goes off. We have to get out of here.

Get them now.

Kill them.

Wipe our horrible uncles and all that they bear within them from the face of the earth.

Complete our vengeance, Malin Fors, as you now approach the horror.

The core of cruelty.

The evil of evils, that which takes over when evil’s attempts at dissembling come to an end, the evil created when children are abandoned to their pain.

But don’t let yourself be content with that.

After you’ve destroyed them, dig downwards, dig out the truth.

Dig out the children, the goodness in yourself.

But kill our real mummy’s brothers, Malin. Kill them, they’re cruel, kill them for our sake, for Mummy’s, for Daddy’s.

Of course, perhaps they are to be pitied, but everyone has a responsibility towards all children, all people.

And be quick, Malin.

Because even if we’re envious of the captive boy and girl, we want them to carry on living.

The clock is ticking. Time will soon run out. Hurry, Malin, hurry!

‘They’re coming,’ Leopold Kurtzon whispers to his brother, ‘they’re coming. It must be the police.’

‘What are we going to do?’ Henry Kurtzon asks, nodding, aware that the animal-keeper would never enter their domain without ringing at the door first. And the gate on the bridge is locked.

It must be the police. Or someone else who wants to catch them.

Leopold whispers: ‘We carry on to the end, just as we planned. We shoot our way out, then we head straight down to the boat.’

And Henry follows him as they creep deeper into the room, pick up their pistols, take the safety catches off
the sub-machine guns, and barricade themselves behind the big white sofa and wait.

Then the shadow becomes a black outline through the white curtain. Something dark against the darkness.

One person, then another, and they aim their pistols at the shadows.

But they don’t fire.

They feel their fingers on the triggers, but they can’t fire, and then the first shadow comes back, or is it the second, and finally Leopold does squeeze the trigger, and the room shimmers with noise, and the glass in the sliding door shatters into a thousand splinters that rain to the ground.

Malin and Zeke had crossed the plot, creeping from tree to tree, peering up at the light coming from the uppermost of the house’s two terraces, and trying to keep an eye out for the nightmarish lizards that had appeared out of the darkness a short while before.

As they got closer they could see the splendour of the house in spite of the darkness.

It was built of concrete, cedar wood, and marble, a freeform style, with a number of subterranean levels blasted into the steep slope the house was built on.

Single-storey white outhouses down by the water.

Is that where they keep the lizards? Malin had wondered.

They had crept up to the front door on the ground floor of the house. Locked. No cameras there either.

Then they had scrambled up the rockface, and from there dropped onto the top terrace.

Are you here? Malin asked herself as she landed as quietly as possible on the white stone of the terrace.

Marko and Elena? Are you here? Or is this just a dream? The sudden exertion on top of her tiredness was making her feel giddy, her brain seemed sluggish, and she could hear Zeke panting from the effort.

The villa must have a floor area of at least five hundred square metres, she thought.

‘What do we do?’ Zeke had asked as she was catching her breath.

They had crept across the terrace with their pistols drawn, looking through the windows into an empty kitchen. The sliding door was locked and they didn’t want to make a noise trying to break in, or risk the sound of breaking glass. Then they had passed a glass wall covered on the inside by white curtains.

From there they had made their way down a flight of concrete steps to a second terrace.

More glass walls, curtains. A flowerbed some ten metres below them.

What’s behind this glass wall? Malin had thought. Is this house actually empty, is there no one here? Then they had crept back under the protection of the shadows, whispering their doubts to each other, and made their way back up to the top terrace, having agreed that they needed to break into the house.

As they were passing the white curtains a second time, the world exploded, and Malin felt bullets flying past her temple, then she heard Zeke cry out.

In the darkness, Malin can see Zeke lying on the white stone of the terrace, blood pouring out of him, but she can’t see where from, and she snakes her way towards shelter as bullets fly above her head, above Zeke, and she looks in past the shredded curtains, through where there had been glass just moments before, and sees a table, and a white sofa about twenty metres long lining the wall of the room.