Юхан Теорин - The Voices Beyond

Aron reached out, but not for the igniter. There were plenty of sharp pieces of stone lying around among the gravel, and he picked one of them up.

He turned to face Kent Kloss, raising his arm ready to throw as hard as he could.

He was aiming for the torch.

‘Run, Lisa! Don’t stop!’

Paulina was holding on to her arm, and she sounded so determined, so definite, that Lisa simply allowed herself to be dragged along, fleeing blindly through the night, away from the steep rocks and down towards the flat part of the inlet.

Lisa didn’t slow down, but kept catching her toes on the bigger stones sticking up through the gravel; she almost fell several times.

‘Wait,’ she panted eventually.

When they reached even ground, she stopped to catch her breath; she could see the lights of the campsite, perhaps three hundred metres away. She looked back one last time and saw that Aron Fredh had been joined by another figure up on the ridge. Kent Kloss, holding his torch high in the air. They shouted at one another, and then they came together.

Two shadowy figures seemed to merge into one, fighting on the edge just above the bunker.

Paulina had also stopped and turned. She was just as breathless as Lisa, panting and staring up at the ridge, where the beam of the torch was still whirling around.

‘I have to go back,’ she said, taking a step towards the ridge.

‘No!’

‘Yes. He needs help.’

‘Who?’

Paulina didn’t reply, and Lisa grabbed her arm. ‘He’s dangerous!’ she said, although she didn’t really know which of the men she meant.

For a few seconds, they stood there motionless, engaged in a static tug-of-war. Lisa thought she was gaining the upper hand, persuading Paulina to change her mind and stay.

But it was already too late. The beam of light disappeared — had Kent dropped the torch?

It looked as if there was only one figure left. It was moving along the ridge away from the cairn, swaying unsteadily. Paulina stared at it and let out what sounded like a curse, in a foreign language. Then she suddenly shouted, ‘Look out!’ She pushed Lisa to the ground; Paulina was strong, and practically covered Lisa with her own body.

A few long seconds passed. The entire coast seemed to be waiting.

And then the silence was smashed to pieces, and chaos broke out. The darkness disappeared in a flash of yellow light, and the night was split in two by an enormous explosion.

Aron had missed the torch with the stone, but he had hit Kent Kloss instead, on the right shoulder, and the sharp blow had made him drop the gun. Aron heard it land somewhere down below.

He didn’t wait; he spun around and crawled along on all fours, away from the cairn, pulling the plastic fuse behind him like an umbilical cord.

The gun was no longer a problem, but Kent Kloss certainly was. He was like a wild animal now, younger and angrier than Aron.

‘Stop right there!’ he yelled. Kloss hurled himself at Aron, gripping his arm, pulling at his jumper. ‘Stop, for fuck’s sake!’

Kloss was growling and swearing, but Aron fought back and managed to pull away. He carried on crawling along the edge. Kloss kicked out at his legs to try to knock him over, but Aron gritted his teeth. He was a soldier now; he could deal with pain. He kept on going.

Just a few more metres... The igniter was lying on the ground, a little metal tube with a round button at one end. He reached out, so close...

He felt a hard blow on his back. Kloss loomed above him, the beam of the torch pointing downwards.

‘Give it up!’ he shouted, lifting his foot to deliver a vicious kick with his leather boot.

Aron grabbed hold of the boot and twisted the other man’s leg like a joystick. Kloss lost his balance, his arms flailing. The torch flew out of his hand and the gravel crunched as he tried to regain his footing, but Aron didn’t give him any time. He punched Kloss in the chest.

‘Shit!’

Kloss screamed and seemed to hover for a second, clawing at thin air, before he fell backwards.

It wasn’t a long fall, only a metre or so down a scree slope, but the landing was hard. Aron heard a dull thud at the bottom, followed by gravel rattling down on Kloss.

Aron was free now and quickly covered the remaining distance along the ridge. He picked up the igniter, which was still attached to the fuse.

Kloss would be back once he had found the gun. Aron didn’t have much time.

He found a small hollow in the ground and lay down, flattening his body. He cupped his hands and held up the igniter. He knew that he was still close to the cairn — dangerously close, in fact.

He bent his head and pressed the button, producing a spark that ignited the thin layer of explosive inside the plastic tube.

The flame burned incredibly fast, faster than the eye could see. Moving at a speed of two kilometres per second, a lightning flash shot along the tube and into the bunker, where the spark ignited a series of detonators inside the hole that had taken Aron several weeks to dig out.

Deep inside the hole lay the main charge. The detonators did their job.

The month of August began with a dull roar over Kalmar Sound.

At quarter to one in the morning there was an explosion, a protracted boom that echoed across the bay. It could be heard as far away as the Småland coast and sounded like a thunderclap.

Aron was dangerously close. He pressed his body down in the hollow, less than fifty metres from the cairn; he had no idea whether he would survive.

The plastic explosive had been placed one metre down in the ground below the centre of the cairn, and the effect when it went up was as if a slumbering phantom had awoken and risen up from the depths of the earth.

Everything inside the bunker was destroyed.

The concrete walls cracked, the cement floor turned into gravel, and the locked metal door splintered into jagged shards that went whirling out into the dip.

The explosion caused a part of the ridge above the bunker to collapse and tumble down on to the shore. A huge rock trundled across the dunes like a steamroller, crushing the Kloss family’s boathouse and everything it contained: fishing nets, deckchairs, life jackets and cool bags.

But the main force of the blast went straight upwards, where there was no concrete — just soft earth, loose gravel and all those rounded stones that Sven Fredh had once piled up to build a cairn on the ridge.

They were lifted from the ground, up into the night sky, scattering through the air as if a volcano had erupted. The smaller stones were carried out over the Sound, plummeting down into the water, where Veronica Kloss was sitting in the family’s motor launch, waiting for her brother Kent to arrive with Aron’s body. Veronica kept her eyes shut and clutched the wheel as she heard the debris raining down on the boat; by some miracle, the boat escaped serious damage.

Aron stayed where he was, flat on the ground with his arms over his head; he could feel metal and stone whizzing past and landing all around him.

But most of the cairn went in a different direction: inland, in a dense shower.

Somewhere above the coast road, gravity took over from the blast, catching the stones one by one and dragging them downwards.

Gravel fell, earth fell. And the stones began to fall, too, like an invisible enemy in the darkness. Many of them headed straight for Villa Kloss, for the nearest house, which was Kent’s.

They came crashing down in his garden, on his freshly sanded decking, in his swimming pool and on to the tiles on his roof.