The Key (76 page)

He pauses. ‘It could be that Farnaz has been right all along,’ he says quietly, as if to himself. ‘Staying here is like staying on a sinking ship.’

Anna-Karin doesn’t know what to say to that.

‘Goodness, I sound quite morose,’ Erik says, and smiles. ‘I’ll just tidy up and then I’ll be on my way. Would you like a lift to school?’

‘No, thanks, I’ll be fine,’ she tells him, and he wanders off to the bathroom.

Nicolaus will pick her up but not to drive her to school. They are off to the Crystal Cave to try a little breaking and entering. The need to find clues as to where Mona might be.

The doorbell rings and Anna-Karin hurries downstairs. An ice-cold blast of wind hits her as she opens the front door and she shivers.

‘Hi,’ Gustaf says as he steps inside and takes his woolly cap off. ‘How did it go yesterday?’

He has asked the same question every day for three weeks and, for every day, looked less and less hopeful.

‘We got in touch with Ida and Elias,’ Anna-Karin says.

Gustaf looks surprised.

‘It lasted only a moment before breaking off,’ she continues. ‘But we’re going to try to find Mona and ask her to help us.’

‘Did they say anything about Rebecka?’

‘No. But it doesn’t mean that she isn’t there.’

Gustaf’s face has a closed-off look. Anna-Karin would so much like to say something to make him feel better. But she can’t even begin to understand how he feels. His dead girlfriend is probably caught between worlds and his living one is held in the clutches of the Council.

‘Then we know that Olivia did speak the truth,’ he says. ‘The Chosen Ones who died are still there and you are the ones who will close the portal. So, when do we go and get Minoo?’

‘I’d like to do it now,’ Anna-Karin says. ‘But the others want to find out more first.’

She sees his jaw clench.

‘I’m coming to the séance tonight,’ he says. ‘I’ll come with Rickard and Evelina.’

She nods. No one could deny him the right to be there.

When Gustaf opens the door, Anna-Karin sees Nicolaus’s car slow down outside.

Time to go to the Crystal Cave.

Linnéa crosses the parking lot outside the City Mall. The sky is a cloudy grey and the colourless morning light almost blinds her. They have only just got out of Nicolaus’s car but her face is already numb with cold.

Anna-Karin has pulled her hand-knitted cap well down over her forehead and Nicolaus has wound a thick scarf round his neck. Vanessa has put on her mum’s old padded jacket. It glows bright pink against the whiteness outside.

Linnéa does her best to keep her distance from Vanessa because she doesn’t want her to feel her anxiety.

After the others had left her flat last night, Linnéa couldn’t sleep. She stayed in the sitting room, smoking and thinking about Elias. How did the glass move? Was he in the room? If he was, why didn’t she sense his presence?

‘I must admit I feel uncomfortable about breaking in,’ Nicolaus says.

‘Mona has only herself to blame,’ Linnéa replies.

The automatic doors to the mall open infinitely slowly. Linnéa squeezes through and starts jogging across the tiled floor with the others following her.

The mall is dark, all lights are off. The further in they get, the murkier it becomes. Linnéa can’t even see the sign of the Crystal Cave. And then she realises that it isn’t there. It has been taken down.

‘Bloody fucking hell!’ Vanessa says behind her.

Linnéa goes to look in through the dirty glass pane in the door. Just outside the shop the smell of incense still hangs in the air. Inside, the shelves are empty. The till has gone and so has the red velvet curtain.

Linnéa releases her power and searches for contact with Mona’s thoughts. She hopes to hear a hoarse cackle in her head. But the only thoughts getting through to her are Vanessa’s.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fucking, fuck
.

Linnéa is close to tears. She kicks the glazed door and it rattles on its hinges.

‘Fuck!’ she says. ‘She’s taken off! That old bitch!’

‘I don’t get it,’ Vanessa says. ‘I came by yesterday and everything looked the same as usual. How could she clear out overnight?’

‘Let’s stick to our plan,’ Anna-Karin says. ‘She might have left some kind of clue.’

Linnéa steps back to give Anna-Karin room, but wishes she was the one doing it. She is in the mood for destroying something.

Anna-Karin puts her gloves away in her pockets and then drives her fist through the glass. With a creaking sound, a network of cracks spreads from the point of impact. She prods the pane and shards of glass tumble onto the floor inside the shop.

Nicolaus looks around nervously, but there is nobody around in the deserted mall and there is no sound of a burglar alarm going off.

Linnéa walks inside with glass crunching under her boots. The mixed smell of incense and cigarette smoke is the only trace of Mona.

‘We know there must be another entrance,’ Vanessa says. ‘I think it’s in here.’

She walks into the room where Mona used to predict her customers’ futures.

* * *

Vanessa turns the light on. The room is quite different now. The table looks naked without its dark purple tablecloth. A mug with the text
ENGELSFORS – CROWN JEWEL OF BERGSLAGEN
stands on the worn table. A lipstick mark has dried on it. The red curtains that covered the walls have been taken down. The worn, curling edges of the peach-coloured plastic flooring are exposed along the skirting boards. But the walls are quite smooth. There is no sign of a secret door anywhere.

‘She would never let me into this room alone,’ Vanessa says. ‘Do you think the door might be protected by magic?’

‘That’s perfectly possible,’ Nicolaus says.

He closes his eyes and moves his hands slowly over one of the walls. Takes a step, explores again. Vanessa notes how Anna-Karin intently observes his every move.

Linnéa shifts from foot to foot and Vanessa senses her impatience.

‘Can’t you listen out for Mona’s thoughts?’ Vanessa asks.

‘What do you think I’m doing?’ Linnéa replies curtly.

Vanessa looks away, feeling Linnéa’s frustration all too sharply.

Linnéa has been like this ever since she understood that Elias’s soul probably hadn’t passed on after all. Constantly tense, always on the brink of anger. Edgier than ever on the outside, and on the inside filled with a despair that pierces through Vanessa.

Vanessa tries to show her sympathy because she really is sympathetic. But it’s so tiring to be invaded by both Linnéa’s external anger and her internal desperation. And she can’t even tell Linnéa to stop. What could she say?

Please stop feeling so much
.

She still loves Linnéa but, just now, she can’t bear being around her more than absolutely necessary. Her defence against magic doesn’t work against the bond between them.

‘Here it is,’ Nicolaus says.

He reaches out with his hand, grabs hold of empty air and pulls back, looking like a mime artist pretending to open a door. And suddenly Vanessa sees a grey-painted steel door open, squeaking on its hinges.

She looks behind it. A steel staircase disappears downwards. A red light button glows in the darkness. She presses it. Strip lighting comes on and shows that the stairs lead down to a tunnel.

‘I can hear her!’ Linnéa exclaims. ‘She’s … fuck, she’s discovered me!’

She pushes past Vanessa and runs down the rickety staircase. Vanessa sets out after her. Large, white-painted pipes run along the ceiling of the tunnel. Linnéa’s stress flows into Vanessa; she can’t tell it from her own. Mona must not vanish again.

They pass several stairs and steel doors still bearing the name of long-since shut local shops.
FASHION GIRL. CHEAP CHARLIE’S. LILY’S MOVIE HOUSE
.

They turn a corner and Linnéa stops outside a door marked
BOMB SHELTER
.

‘She’s in here,’ Linnéa says. ‘She’s still blocking me but I can sense her.’

‘Piss off!’ Mona shouts.

Anna-Karin goes to stand by the door and pulls off her thick cap.

‘If you don’t open the door, I’ll rip it off.’

She says this in her mild-mannered, Anna-Karin-style, but leaves no doubt that she means it seriously.

It takes a moment, then another one.

And then the heavy door opens with a screeching noise.

In the doorway, Mona appears in all her glory. She wears a neon-yellow tracksuit with the trousers crammed into her cowboy boots. Her curls are newly permed and she has a cigarette in the corner of her mouth. She looks utterly fed up as she examines her visitors.

‘You lot are about as welcome as a boil on your arse on a cycling holiday,’ she says as she lets them in.

Vanessa scans the large room. Along one wall, boxes are stacked all the way to the ceiling. One of them has fallen over and china fairies have spilt on the floor. The fairies seem to be making a dash for freedom.

A chandelier hangs above an unmade bed. The bedstead has wrought-iron end-boards. There is also a red velvet-covered couch and a bookshelf packed full of Harlequin novels. A clothes rack stands next to a large mirror with an ornamental gilt frame. Mona’s denim suit with golden butterflies is on the front hanger on the rack. Mona was wearing it the first time Vanessa met her.

‘What are you doing down here?’ Vanessa asks.

‘I had to move my business activities,’ Mona tells her. ‘The Council-vibes were getting too strong for my taste.’

‘But do you
live
here?’ Anna-Karin asks.

‘Not for much longer.’ Mona taps the ash off her cigarette. Grey flakes float to the floor. ‘I plan to spend my last days some place where the beer is cold and the men hot.’

Then she smiles at Nicolaus, looks him up and down, and then back up.

‘Do you want to come? I could do with some company on the trip.’

Nicolaus looks ill at ease.

‘We are here because we need your help,’ he says.

Mona’s smile dies away and she pulls on her cigarette.

‘What a boring bloke. Still, I prefer younger men. A couple of hundred years old or thereabouts, max.’

She goes to stub out her cigarette in a red marble ashtray left among the rumpled sheets on her bed. Only now does Vanessa grasp what Mona said.

‘What do you mean, “your last days”?’ Vanessa asks. ‘What have you seen in the future?’

‘Tell you what, I see hardly anything anymore. The veil between worlds has grown so thin. Everything comes across completely bonkers.’

‘But if you’ve “hardly” seen anything, it means you’ve seen
something
,’ Vanessa persists.

Mona reaches out to take a strand of hair that has come loose from Vanessa’s ponytail and gently pushes it behind her ear. It’s a gesture completely unlike Mona and Vanessa realises that she is moved by it. But it scares her, too.

For what has Mona seen to make her feel that Vanessa deserves sympathy?

‘Just say it,’ Vanessa says.

‘You have a chance of closing the portal,’ Mona says. ‘I don’t know how you’re supposed to do it, but there is a chance and you must go for it.’

She clears her throat and looks distracted.

‘And now I’ll go straight to Stockholm Arlanda and take the first flight southwards. Business class, one way. No point in being thrifty, not now.
Carpe diem
.’

She glances knowingly at Nicolaus.

‘We need your help,’ Anna-Karin says.

‘What do you want? Ectoplasm? Sure, I’ll give you a jar. Or three.’

Vanessa feels nauseous. If Mona is giving stuff away, the prognosis must be terrible.

‘We need you to help us out with a séance,’ she says. ‘We’re trying to get in touch with the Chosen Ones who have died. We just got through yesterday, but then the contact was broken. We need them. To close the portal.’

Mona takes a cigarette from the pocket of her tracksuit top. Lights it, inhales and blows out a cloud of smoke. Vanessa waits for her.

‘The dead members of the Chosen Ones are stuck between worlds, are they? And does that include that stuck-up little blonde miss who came into the shop on the day of the spring equinox?’

‘Yes,’ Vanessa says.

A pleased grin spreads over Mona’s face.

‘So that’s why I saw that the year ahead would be dark and hard for her. I was flabbergasted when I heard she had been killed that same night. Almost did it for my self-confidence.’

‘Ida should have been more considerate and not had herself murdered like that,’ Linnéa says.

‘But if she exists between worlds, she isn’t properly dead.’ Mona goes on as if she hadn’t heard Linnéa. ‘So I was right after all.’

‘Yes, you were,’ Vanessa says. ‘What you saw was right. Because you’re the strongest metal witch in Engelsfors …’

‘In the whole of northern fucking Europe,’ Mona says.

‘Exactly,’ Vanessa says. ‘You’re the only one who can help us. And you know it.’

Mona smiles.

‘I enjoy the sweet-talking, but it won’t wash, dearie. I’m not going to stay for a second longer than necessary, not in this hellhole.’

She walks over to the bed, bends down and pulls out a leopard-skin suitcase.

‘I don’t believe you,’ Vanessa says.

Mona straightens up.

‘You’re psychic,’ Vanessa continues. ‘You must have seen that we’d show up here. But you stayed all the same. Because, in your heart of hearts, you want to help us. I don’t believe you are such a coward that you’d leave town now.’

Mona walks slowly towards her.

‘
Coward?
’ She nearly spits her cigarette out. ‘Who are you calling a coward, honeybun? I’m not the one who has left my friend in the clutches of Walter Hjorth.’

‘She went of her own free will,’ Linnéa says.

Mona snorts. Vanessa has a nasty sinking feeling about all this.

‘I happen to know a thing or two about that bundle of charm Walter,’ Mona goes on. ‘Why do you think I’ve crawled into a cellar and stayed there?’

‘What has he done?’ Anna-Karin asks.

‘I don’t want to give you nightmares, sweetheart.’ Mona blows out a cloud of smoke. ‘What you need to know isn’t what he’s done, but who he is. He doesn’t care for anybody else. No one matters to him. You can’t bribe him, you can’t tempt him with sex. He isn’t afraid of anything. He is only interested in one thing.’