Johan Theorin - The Quarry

On his way into the hallway he saw the old axe lying in the bedroom, and went to pick it up. He pulled on his jacket and went out into the cold once more. He walked along the side of the cottage with the axe in his right hand, but suddenly he thought he could hear someone wheezing in the shadows.

‘Jerry?’

He turned his head quickly, but of course it was just his imagination. There was no sign of anyone by the cottage.

The car was still parked down in the quarry. It was seventy or eighty metres away from him, between two heaps of stone. It was a Ford, but if it was the same car that had killed Jerry, there were no traces of the collision. The bodywork looked as if it had been recently cleaned.

Per thought he knew why the driver was still sitting in the car; he was waiting for darkness to fall.

The trolls come out at night , he thought.

He stopped at the top of the rock face and heard the sound of the engine being switched off. Silence fell, then the window opened and the driver stuck his head out. ‘Hello?’ he shouted.

‘Hello,’ said Per.

‘Is this Stenvik?’ The voice sounded lost.

‘It is!’ replied Per, gripping the axe more firmly.

The driver’s door opened again, and the man stepped out on to the gravel. ‘Are you Per Mörner?’ he called out.

‘I am. Who are you?’

‘Thomas Fall from Malmö!’ the man replied. He held out a large object that he was carrying. ‘I just came to drop this off on the way to Stockholm. You did say you wanted it...’

Per nodded. ‘Excellent, that’s great. But you took a bit of a wrong turning, Thomas.’

‘Did I? But you said you lived by the quarry.’

‘Right idea, wrong track.’ Per pointed over his shoulder towards the cottage. ‘We live above the quarry, up there.’

‘OK... Well, anyway, this is Bremer’s briefcase!’

Per pointed at the steps and shouted, ‘I’ll come down!’

He made his way cautiously down the wobbly blocks of stone to the gravel at the bottom. It was a few degrees colder here in the quarry, as usual.

The car was still in the same place with its headlights on. They dazzled Per, and turned Thomas Fall into a black figure in a cap, walking towards him with a briefcase in his left hand and a bunch of keys in his right. He was rattling the keys nervously, but he was holding out the briefcase. ‘Here it is.’

Per looked at Fall and clutched the handle of the axe. ‘Put it down.’

‘What?’

‘You can put it down in front of you.’

Fall looked at him. ‘What’s that in your hand?’ he asked.

‘An axe.’

Thomas Fall took two steps towards him, but didn’t put the briefcase down. Or the bunch of keys.

‘Are those Bremer’s keys as well?’ Per asked.

Fall didn’t reply; he had stopped ten or twelve paces away from Per. It was still impossible to see his face clearly. Per pointed at the briefcase. ‘I don’t think that belongs to Bremer. I think it’s yours, but I suspect it amounts to the same thing. You were Hans Bremer, weren’t you? You borrowed his name when you worked with my father.’

Fall seemed to be listening; he didn’t move.

‘I think Jessika Björk tracked you down. I think she found Hans Bremer’s apartment so that she could talk to him about her friend Daniel, who became infected with HIV while he was filming under the name Markus Lukas. But when Bremer opened the door, Jessika didn’t recognize him. She saw a different, older Bremer from the one who’d been there when she was filming. And my father didn’t know or work with this Hans Bremer at all.’

Fall said nothing, so Per continued, ‘So the real Bremer admitted to Jessika that someone else had paid him money to use his name and that this man had started working in the porn industry. The real Bremer told her the truth about you. And then Markus Lukas got really sick, and Jessika Björk eventually tracked you down, demanding money to keep quiet. You had to burn down the studio to silence them both for good so that “Bremer” could disappear and become Thomas Fall again.’

Fall remained silent for a few seconds. Then he undid the straps on the briefcase, and answered in a quiet voice, ‘You’re right. I worked for your father for several years and he knew me as Hans Bremer. I emptied his bank accounts after he had the stroke... But I had a right to that money.’ He looked up at Per. ‘He was my father too... We’re brothers, you and I.’

Per blinked and lowered the axe. ‘Brothers?’ He stared at Fall, who was slowly slipping his hand into the briefcase.

‘That’s right — half-brothers, anyway. Jerry was only with my mother for one summer at the end of the fifties, but that was enough... He never recognized me and I didn’t say anything either, but I think he was happier with me than he was with you, Per. He didn’t know I hated him.’

Per listened as he gazed at Thomas Fall, trying to make out his face beneath the cap. Were they alike?

Then came the attack.

It happened fast. Dazzled by the headlights, Per couldn’t really see what Fall was doing, except that he opened up the briefcase and twisted something with his hand.

There was a sudden crackle from the case, and Fall hurled it at Per. It spun around and began to leak yellow flames, spreading fire all around. Per stepped backwards, but not quickly enough. Some kind of liquid was pouring out of the briefcase, sticking to his arm and burning fiercely with a hot, searing brightness.

His left arm was burning, and so was his hand. A clear, white fire, but although he could feel the heat, it didn’t hurt.

Per dropped the axe and staggered backwards; at the same time he heard footsteps running across the gravel, then the sound of a door slamming shut. The car engine started up.

The liquid splashing down on to the gravel split into long, red arms reaching out for him, but he turned away and they couldn’t get hold of him.

Thomas Fall floored the accelerator and Per tried desperately to put out the sticky fire on his skin.

There was no water in the quarry any more, only dry stone, so he hurled himself to the ground, rolling over and over in an attempt to douse the flames. With his right hand he dug down into the gravel, scooping it over his arm, over the yellow flames flickering along his sleeve. But it kept on burning, eating into the fabric and working its way inwards.

Then came the pain.

Don’t pass out , he thought. But his arm was throbbing and he was aware of the heat and the stench of it, the acrid smell of burnt skin. Thin, dark sheets seemed to be drifting down through the air around him. But he kept on scooping the gravel over his arm, and eventually both the flames and the glowing heat were extinguished.

He suddenly realized that the sound of the car engine was much louder; it was very close to him.

Per looked up, but only had time to see that Fall’s car was heading straight for him; he got up and moved to one side, but everything happened much too quickly. He couldn’t get out of the way.

The front right-hand side of the car caught him and lifted him into the air. His face hit the windscreen; he heard the thud and felt the crunch before he landed on the ground at the side of the car. His left foot and ribcage took the worst of the impact with the ground, but his head also received another blow and he lost consciousness in silent darkness for a few seconds.

Then he was awake again, curled up on the hard rock. Slowly he got to his knees, feeling the cold wind against his body and rivulets of warmth on his face as the blood flowed. A split eyebrow, or possibly a broken nose.

The car shot backwards in the darkness, and he heard a door slam shut.

Footsteps crunched towards him over the gravel. Thomas Fall stopped and lifted something in the air. When Per looked up he could see it was a can of petrol.