Lars Kepler - The Nightmare

Joona’s gray eyes narrow. “I’m just dropping in for a little chat.”

Nathan starts heading back to the theater and coughs as he closes the steel door behind him. Joona stands alone in the empty hallway for a moment. He draws his pistol and checks that the magazine is full before he slides it back in his holster. He starts to walk toward another steel door at the other end of the hall.

He loses a few precious seconds as he picks the lock.

Someone has scratched “The Brigade” in tiny letters, not more than two centimeters high, into the blue paint on the door.

Joona presses down the handle and the door slowly opens. He’s met by loud, screeching music; it sounds like an electronically reprocessed version of Jimi Hendrix’s “Machine Gun.” The shrieking guitars have a dreamlike, surging beat. They drown out everything.

Joona closes the door behind him and keeps going, half running, into a space filled with junk. Mounds of books and magazines reach the ceiling. Although it’s dark in the room, Joona can tell the heaps of books are not just random but have been created as a kind of labyrinth leading to other doors. He quickly makes his way through it to a dimly lit area. The path forks there and he keeps going to the right, but swiftly backtracks. He thinks he saw hasty movement out of the corner of his eye. He’s not sure, though.

Joona walks on, squinting to see something more. A bare bulb sways at the end of its ceiling cord. Over the music, Joona suddenly hears a roar. Someone is screaming behind walls that dampen the sound. Joona stops, walks back, and looks into a thin passage where a stack of magazines have slid down and now are scattered across the floor.

Joona’s head is starting to hurt. He thinks he should have had something to eat. He should have taken something with him. A few pieces of dark chocolate would have been enough.

He steps over the magazines and reaches a spiral staircase leading down to the floor below. He can smell sweet smoke in the air. Holding tightly to the rail, he tries to sneak down as quietly as possible, but he cannot silence his shoes on the metal steps. On the lowest rung, he stops before a velvet curtain that has been drawn shut. He puts his hand on his holstered pistol.

The music is fainter here.

A plastic clown lamp with a red bulb for a nose is in the corner, and more red light leaks through a gap in the curtain. Joona tries to get a glimpse through it, but the gap is too small. He hesitates, then steps quickly through the curtain and into the room. His pulse thuds and his headache pounds as he sweeps the space with his eyes. On the cement floor, there’s a double-barreled shotgun and an open box of cartridges. The shells have lead slugs, the kind that would leave considerable damage. Sitting on an office chair is a young, naked man, smoking; his eyes are shut. This can’t be Daniel Marklund, Joona thinks. A blond girl with bare breasts lounges on a mattress, leaning back against the wall, an army blanket around her hips. She meets Joona’s gaze, blows him a kiss, and then, unconcerned, takes a sip of beer from a can.

From behind the only open door comes another scream.

Joona keeps his eye on the two as he picks up the shotgun, points the opening of the barrels down, and then steps hard on the barrels until they’re bent.

The woman puts down her beer can and scratches her armpit absentmindedly.

Joona gently lays the shotgun back on the floor. He continues past the woman and into a hallway with a low ceiling of chicken wire and fiberglass. Heavy cigar smoke hangs in the air. Intense lamplight shines right in his face, and he shields his eyes with his hand. The end of the hallway is obscured by strips of white industrial plastic. Blinded, Joona can’t see what’s going on. He can glimpse movement and he can hear an echoing voice filled with fear and terror. Someone close at hand suddenly screams loudly. It’s a deep-throated scream followed by rapid gasps. Joona makes it past the blinding lamp and now can see into the room behind the thick plastic.

Veils of smoke swirl through the air. A short, muscular woman in black jeans and a hoodie stands before a man dressed only in underwear and socks. His head is shaved, and on his forehead, there’s a White Power tattoo. He’s bitten his tongue and blood runs down his chin, throat, and thick stomach. “Please,” he begs.

The woman raises a smoking cigar overhead, then brings it down, pressing its glowing end right onto the tattoo. The man screams. His thick stomach and hanging breasts shake. He’s pissing himself. A dark spot spreads over his blue underwear and the urine runs down his naked legs.

Behind the curtain of protected plastic, Joona has pulled out his gun. He tries to spot if anyone else is in the room but he can’t see. He’s about to yell… then his gun falls from his hand to the floor.

It clatters against the concrete and slides to a stop next to the plastic. Joona looks down at his own hand, seeing it shake, and in the next moment, feeling the horrendous pain flood in. He loses all sight and feels only a heavy, breaking movement inside his forehead. He throws out a hand against the wall in an attempt to stay upright. He fears he’s about to lose consciousness. Still, he can hear the voices behind the curtain.

“Just admit what the fuck you did!” the woman with the cigar is yelling.

“I don’t remember,” the neo-Nazi cries.

“What did you do?”

“I bullied some guy.”

“Confess exactly what you did!”

“I burned his eye out.”

“That’s right! You used a cigarette to burn out the eye of a ten-year-old boy!”

“Yes, but I-”

“What did he do to you?”

“We followed him from the synagogue and down to…”

Joona doesn’t notice that what he’s grabbed is a fire extinguisher, a big one, and it’s coming down with him. He no longer has any sense of time or of where he is. The pain in his head and a fierce ringing in his ears is all he knows.

Behind the dark veils of pain, Joona can feel her hand on his back.

“What’s going on?” asks Saga Bauer in a low voice. “Are you hurt?”

He tries to shake his head but is in too much pain to speak. It feels as if a hook is being drawn through his brain: down through the skin, the cranium, the brain membranes, and the heavy, floating brain fluid.

He drops to his knees.

“You’ve got to get out of here,” says Saga.

He feels her lifting his face but he can’t see anything. His entire body is bathed in pearls of sweat that pour from his armpits, his neck, his back.

Saga is hunting through his clothes. She thinks he’s having an epileptic fit and is trying to find some kind of medicine in his pockets. Joona realizes she’s opening his wallet and looking for the sign of a flame, the symbol for epileptics.

The pain starts to recede. Joona wets his mouth with his tongue. He looks up. His jaws are tense and his whole body aches from the migraine attack.

“You guys can’t go in there yet,” he whispers. “I have to-”

“What the hell happened here?”

“Nothing.” Joona picks his gun up from the floor.

He gets to his feet and staggers as fast as he can through the plastic curtains and into the room. It’s empty. An emergency exit sign is lit on the other side. Saga has followed him and she questions him with a look. Joona opens the emergency door and sees a steep half set of stairs leading to a steel door at street level.

“Perkele,” he swears in Finnish.

“Talk to me!” Saga says angrily.

Joona always pushes the direct cause of his illness as far from his consciousness as possible. There was an incident many years ago… it keeps giving him this pulsing pain, this pain so severe that he almost passes out. But he refuses to think about the incident.