Юхан Теорин - The Voices Beyond

Niklas Kloss was alone in the house. He was in bed in one of the guest rooms at the back, wide awake following the explosion. The windows had shattered, but as the sound of breaking glass died away he heard something else: a loud hammering on the roof. Tiles broke, rafters gave way.

Niklas lay there frozen in terror, waiting for the ceiling above him to collapse, but it held. Then suddenly the hammering stopped. An echo of the explosion bounced back and forth across the inlet, then that, too, faded away.

Everything went quiet.

In the dip below the ridge, Aron began to move. His clothes and skin were covered in dust, but he raised his head, realizing that he was still alive. Slowly, he got to his feet, thinking about the cheerful man from Esbo who had once taught him how to bury dynamite, how to adjust the angle. And how to set it off.

He glanced over at the coast road, at Villa Kloss, and saw black holes in the ground and in the roof.

The stones from the cairn had come crashing down like cannonballs.

John had been happy for him to stay over, and Gerlof had phoned the residential home to explain his absence. They had gone to bed at about eleven o’clock, but Gerlof hadn’t been able to get to sleep. He kept on thinking about Veronica Kloss.

His thoughts went round and round in circles, but at last he dropped off into a deep and dreamless sleep — until, all of a sudden, the ground shook.

The foundations of John’s little cottage vibrated, as if a tsunami had rolled through the bedrock. The windows rattled and the furniture shifted. Somewhere, a newspaper slid to the floor.

He heard John call out and stumble out of bed in the room next door.

Gerlof raised his head from the pillow and, at the same moment, he heard a dull roar. It was like a thunderbolt, but the sound didn’t come from the sky; it seemed to come from the south-west. From the shore. And it was followed by a series of smaller bangs, as if objects were thudding down.

An explosion?

Gerlof had always been afraid of mines when he was at sea, but he knew this wasn’t a mine.

He heard heavy footsteps. His bedroom door opened, and John appeared. ‘Gerlof? Are you awake?’

‘I am.’

‘Did you hear the bang?’

‘I did.’

They both listened for a moment, but everything was quiet. Very quiet.

John switched on the light, but nothing happened. The power was off.

‘What shall we do?’ he said, moving over to the window.

‘There’s not much we can do,’ Gerlof said. ‘It might have been gas cylinders... Can you see any sign of a fire out there?’

John shook his head. ‘It’s pitch dark.’

‘In that case, as I said, there’s not much we can do.’

‘No...’

‘Perhaps you could light some candles,’ Gerlof suggested. ‘And your old stove.’

‘Good idea,’ John said. ‘I’ll make some coffee.’

He hurried off to the kitchen. When John used to get stressed at sea, Gerlof had always given him a job to do. It calmed him down.

Gerlof stayed in bed, waiting for someone to phone or come knocking on the door, but everything remained quiet.

Something had happened in his village. Something terrible.

Aron Fredh, he thought. Aron had ramped up his war against the Kloss family, and Gerlof had been unable to stop him.

When he didn’t hear anything else from outside, Gerlof began to sink back into the darkness. He didn’t really want coffee. Not at this time of night.

Much later, after perhaps an hour, the sound of sirens began to approach from the main road, but by then Gerlof was fast asleep once more.

Lisa had been pushed to the ground by Paulina, but she saw the explosion split the darkness. And felt it.

The glow was like an intense, golden-red sun on the ridge behind her, a sun that flared up and died away in a second. The next moment, she heard the roar and experienced something that felt like an earthquake. The ground beneath her vibrated, and the entire coast seemed to shake.

Ragnarök , she thought as she tried to crawl forward, away from the chaos. It was impossible, because Paulina was in the way, so she put her arms over her head to protect herself instead.

A shock wave swept over them, then came the debris. The gravel didn’t reach them, but Lisa heard a cascade of tiny stones splashing into the water.

For a few seconds there was silence.

Almost complete silence.

Then came a series of loud noises up on the ridge, along the coast road and over at Villa Kloss. Something large and heavy was crashing down on to the ground, like the irregular beat of a bass drum.

The noise continued; Lisa could hear planks of wood creaking and breaking at Villa Kloss. The air was filled with great clouds of dust. She pictured a Roman warship out in the Sound, firing enormous rocks at the island. A cloud of black grenades.

‘Come on!’ a voice yelled in her ear.

A definite order. Paulina was no longer pressed against her on the ground; she was on her feet, tugging at Lisa’s arms.

The crashing had stopped, but Lisa still wanted to stay where she was.

‘Move!’ Paulina insisted.

In the end, Lisa obeyed; she got to her feet and staggered north along the inlet, afraid of more flying stones. However, they hadn’t reached this far; in the moonlight she could see that most had landed in the garden at Villa Kloss, and on Kent’s house.

Lisa held her breath and stumbled on. Paulina was a shadow moving determinedly beside her, pressing on.

‘What happened?’ Lisa asked.

There was a smell of burning in the air now, and in the distance Lisa could hear the roof of Kent’s house beginning to collapse as several load-bearing beams cracked under the weight of the rocks.

She couldn’t see a great deal; the electricity seemed to have gone off all the way along the inlet. The village was in darkness, and she tripped over a root or a stone on the ground and almost fell; she couldn’t even see her own shoes.

The explosion was still reverberating, but perhaps it was only inside Lisa’s head.

‘What happened?’ she asked again.

The shadow beside her uttered one single word with great calmness, as if she had control over the chaos surrounding them: ‘Ammonal.’

The Soviet Union has collapsed and Russia is an independent country, but it is a country that Aron Fredh does not recognize. Everyone in this new country is becoming more and more obsessed by money, or so it seems. Nightclubs have opened in the area around Lubyanka Prison where he used to work; men who shun the light park their black Mercedes nearby and step out with giggling teenage girls on their arm. Capitalist gangsters who would never have dared to show their faces in the days of the Soviet Union now go out of their way to be seen.

Aron and Mila’s daughter is twenty-five years old, a dark-haired beauty who still lives at home. She samples the nightlife of Moscow sometimes, goes to nightclubs run by Westerners, but returns home disappointed. She is bored by the nouveau riche and their courtiers. Aron is glad, because this new Russia is a dangerous place, where capitalism is king and none of the old rules seems to apply. There are no new rules either. Young men are shot dead, girls are raped.

He rarely goes out. It is too stressful; there are too many big cars. Moscow is no longer his city, and that makes him sad. He longs for Öland, for the old world, where everything was so simple.

Mila doesn’t go out either, but for different reasons. She can hardly breathe these days. Her lungs are worse than ever. Some days, she doesn’t even get out of bed. Their home is filled with the sound of coughing and, eventually, Aron manages to get his wife to see a doctor, who sends her to a specialist clinic at the Pirogov Hospital.