The badger, p.32
The Badger, page 32
Annika saw Cecilia Wreede appear at the opening to the utility room. Cecilia’s gaze swept across the Badger and landed directly on Annika. Seconds later, Cecilia had slipped into the room, taking aim with her pistol.
“Stay back!” yelled Cecilia.
The Badger spun round, letting go of his sheets of paper. They fell to the floor like leaves as he flexed his knives like long claws and crouched down, ready to pounce. His head was moving from side to side between Cecilia and Annika.
“Police! I will shoot!”
Annika met the Badger’s gaze one final tenth of a second. There was no humanity left behind the mask anymore, just bloodlust. Yet he stood between her and Cecilia as if wanting to give her time to escape. She hesitated for a few seconds, then made off towards the hallway. She didn’t know whether she was fleeing the Badger or Cecilia Wreede’s line of fire. She just ran. Behind her she heard the heavy sound of work boots on the floor. She heard the grating of knives against stone. It could only mean one thing. He was after her. The Scraper. Apelgren. The Badger. Whatever it was, the creature wished her harm, just as it had always done ever since she was a little girl.
She didn’t dare turn around to see how close he was, but she wasn’t going to let him take her. She knew what she had to do to survive. She plunged headfirst into the black hole in the floor.
Damp earth coated her shoulders. Roots and stones scratched her body as she wormed her way further and further inside. The air was heavy with humus and decay. Lumps of earth, worms and burrowing insects were falling on the back of her neck, tickling her. Everything was crawling. The tunnel was solid terror squeezing against Annika’s body from all sides as she toiled and slithered forwards. The earth was getting into everywhere. In her hair, mouth and between her breasts. It squeezed beneath her nails, scrunched between her teeth and stung under her skin as she collected countless cuts and grazes.
Yet she fought on. Her lungs wanted to explode from her efforts. Her blood was boiling with adrenalin. Every breath was a reminder that it could be her last. The air was saturated with carbon dioxide, deficient in oxygen. But she had no choice. There was no way back. Even if she could reverse, she couldn’t be sure of coming up. Besides, he could be behind her in the tunnel. The Badger. The remains of what once had been Jan Apelgren, the author whose brief career success had paved the way for the maniacal creation he both became and penned. Annika’s eyes could no longer contain her tears. The only thing that was keeping her panic at bay was her determination to survive. Her muscles were screaming with the strain, yet she continued, keeping her eyes shut tight and gritting her teeth. Onwards into the darkness. Deeper, further.
Annika was alone with her terror, but she wasn’t alone in the earth. She felt something else moving in the ground. They were like jolts going through the soil, vibrations shaking the earth loose that weren’t of her own making. She imagined strong arms, hands like buckets with sharp claws, digging their way forward parallel to her. She felt pressure in the air like a presence. The tunnel walls were squeezing against her as her companion in the ground came closer.
Then she recognised the faint whispers. She had heard them before, when she was a little girl, in the basement. They enticed her and scared her all at the same time. The man who might have been chasing her, who might be grabbing hold of her ankle any second now, was far worse than those actually dwelling in the earth. He was simply a poor imitation. His claws weren’t even real, yet he was more frightening than the whispers were. The voices whispering to her in the earth had been waiting there all her life. Now she understood that they hadn’t been scraping on the walls to scare her, but to call for her. She didn’t fear them for who they were, but because she was longing to follow their siren song deeper into the earth.
As her strength waned, their whispers came through increasingly clearly. Clawed hands broke through the walls of the passage, urging her forwards. She felt the weight of soil over the backs of her legs as parts of the tunnel collapsed. Annika let out one last roar of effort and forced herself onwards.
Her head emerging out of the ground felt like breaking the surface of the water after far too deep a dive. She gasped for breath, kicking her way out until her arms were able to grab hold of the moss, pulling herself up from the underworld, out into the icy cold night air.
Annika rolled sideways out onto a mound among some thickly growing trees. The light of the full moon was flickering in between the needles and leaves. With her muscles cramping from the strain, she bawled her eyes out in harsh, panting breaths. But she wasn’t dead. She was very much alive, born again from the earth, like a babe in arms.
87
THURSDAY 24 NOVEMBER
Anyone reading this might be able to use my story to bring an end to the nightmare – even if I know deep down it’s futile.
A green bin for the shredding of confidential documents was in the middle of Cecilia and Jonas’s office. The desk was covered in box files. The whiteboards were stripped of information and the insulating tape which made up the timelines had been scrunched into a ball on the top of an overflowing paper basket next to the bin.
Outside, the sun was shining. The air was crisp and cold. The forecast had predicted a front moving in during the afternoon, possibly giving Gothenburg its first dusting of snow for the year, but so far the sky was light blue.
Cecilia was flicking through a pile of handwritten notes. Nobody was going find them very useful anymore, so she started feeding them through the narrow paper slot in the bin.
“What does it feel like?” said Jonas. He was sorting through photos from the Badger’s various crime scenes on the table in front of him.
What does it feel like to shoot a man? Cecilia knew about that now. If she closed her eyes, she could still see Apelgren before her. The Badger. Her hand recalled the gun springing back when the shots went off. It felt as if she had only left the firing range a moment ago. A faint vibration from the recoil of the gun still lingered in the base of her thumb.
“I’m not entirely sure,” said Cecilia. She paused her monotonous task. “Strange. This investigation’s all I’ve been doing for so many years now, but at the same time it’s nice that it’s finally over.”
“My sentiments exactly.”
Cecilia continued poking papers into the bin. How could Apelgren have lived like that, alone in the ground like a human badger?
The Badger had turned his anger to Cecilia as soon as Annika had vanished. Behind his smeared gas mask there was a glint of hatred in his eyes. He had growled like an animal, stamped on the ground and torn his long knives along the floor like claws as Annika disappeared out into the hallway. As if he was shielding her escape. Then he attacked. Cecilia had fired. Shot after shot, until the Badger fell to the floor.
“So… what are you going to do now?” asked Jonas.
Cecilia sighed, forcing herself back to the here and now. “I don’t really know. As soon as we’ve cleared out of here I’ll go up to Östersund and call in on my parents. Maybe head up even further north. Perhaps hike along the King’s Trail. We’ll see.”
“Brr, sounds chilly,” said Jonas. “What are you going to do up there in the cold?”
“I’ve always wanted to see the northern lights. Alone, up in the mountains where there aren’t a lot of streetlights spoiling the night sky.”
She had never felt this way before, but after those fatal shots she needed open skies and solitude in the wilderness to find her equilibrium again. The city felt short on air.
“I’d have never had you down as a wilderness person,” said Jonas. “No bloody way I’m going to be freezing my butt off in a bush somewhere, had enough of that on military service.”
“You asked,” said Cecilia, shrugging. “And anyway, what about you?”
“I’ve actually handed in my notice.”
Cecilia was taken aback. “What? You never said anything about that.”
“A job came up that I couldn’t say no to. So I felt it was time to do something new. I’m going to be a consultant, believe that if you will.”
“No way? I’d have never guessed. Some insurance company, I take it?”
“Nope. A digital forensics firm. You know, combing through hard drives that people have tried setting alight, stuff like that. So who knows, we may see each other in the future as well. My new boss says it has been known for NFC to call us in for support.”
“Well, maybe we will,” said Cecilia. Her eyes landed on a bundle of printed memos left from the investigation. She wasn’t sure if anyone was going to weed through them, so she placed them in one of the box files instead. A few bits of paper around and about, it wasn’t as if anyone was going to hang her for saving too much.
They continued working in silence for a while. Cecilia saw the sun disappearing behind the low clouds along the incoming front. The street lights were coming on outside. Some kind of match was taking place at Ullevi. Crowds were watching in the grandstands. They were at least something other than the ghosts she was accustomed to.
“By the way, do you think he was right?” she said, half to herself.
“Who?” said Jonas. He had finished with the photographs and was looking up from his computer. The screen was shining in his glasses as usual, like a white rectangle in front of his dark eyes.
“Our kleptomaniac, Bengt,” said Cecilia. “About the monsters below ground.”
“Scraping the concrete?” said Jonas, laughing. He shaped his hand into a claw and dragged his nails on the desk.
Cecilia smiled. “Exactly. I mean, they did make appearances here and there. In Apelgren’s book, for example.”
The fact that Jan Apelgren was the Badger was absolutely clear. The concealed rooms and the clothes he was wearing were covered in his DNA. At the same time, the securely-fitting garb, a wetsuit beneath an old oilskin coat, had ensured that he left no traces of himself behind at the crime scenes. Among the piles of bones in the basement forensic officers identified genetic material from all of the Badger’s victims, along with his souvenirs. The oldest came from his own wife. Cecilia had read the inscription on the wedding ring herself.
Jan Therese. 5 November.
Apelgren had taken his victims on the night of his own wedding anniversary. The post-mortem on his body revealed that he had subsisted on them. Eaten them. It turned Cecilia’s stomach every time she thought about it.
“I’m still wondering how the publisher was able to release the book seeing as those monsters scared her so much,” said Jonas.
In Jan Apelgren’s last work, the book which Annika Granlund and Eklund Press had turned into a bestseller, all the clues to the truth were more or less laid open. The book had been as much a biography as a cry for help, about and from a man who was beyond salvation.
“I don’t know,” said Cecilia. “They were desperate. Annika refuses to talk about it.”
The tunnel in the floor had been too narrow to venture into without oxygen. The emergency services had assumed Annika would have suffocated to death somewhere below ground. They would never have found her again if she hadn’t come stumbling out of the forest some three hundred metres away from the house, so severely traumatised that she didn’t even remember her own name.
“I completely understand her,” said Jonas. “But the book isn’t selling any less now that the case is solved.”
Cecilia shook her head. She would never understand the sort of things people would choose to read. After I am the Badger she had stopped reading thrillers altogether, they simply got baser and baser, as if the authors were contending with each other to come up with the most gruesome ways to do people in. She had decided on just reading what she found uplifting instead.
“Well,” said Jonas. His screen went dark and the fan in his computer stopped making a noise. “There’s no bloody way there are monsters in the earth. The real monsters are human ones. Everything else is just warped imagination.”
Cecilia nodded. “Isn’t it just?” she said, feeling a knot expanding in her stomach. “Of course there aren’t any monsters under the ground.”
88
FRIDAY 3 FEBRUARY
The only way to end the nightmare is to kill me. But even if I die, the creatures will still be there.
Annika closed the stairwell door behind her and pulled off her beanie. It was damp from the snow which was falling from the sky like large paws, wrapping parked cars up in thick blankets. The heat in the hall was defrosting her cheeks, turning them a beautiful red. “I’m home,” she said, unzipping her new down coat. She had got rid of her red one. It just reminded her of a previous life.
“I’m coming,” called Martin from the kitchen.
Annika smiled. They put their arms around each other for a long hug, ending their embrace with a kiss. Annika’s heart was fluttering, almost as if she had just fallen in love. This was going to work despite everything they had been through. She knew that now.
“Things go well with Helena?” said Martin, carefully placing one of her dark red curls behind her ear.
Annika nodded. She was going to the psychologist every other week. It had been once a week in the early days, but she was feeling that much better now. She was considering cutting back on her medication as well, but Helena had said it was too early. What she had been through was nothing to toy with. She needed all the help she could get. All the help, and all the love from her nearest and dearest. Maybe until the summer anyway. And in the near future she would be able to return to work part time.
She still didn’t remember everything that had happened. She was sleeping with the light on and was waking up every night, bathed in sweat. If it got too dark, it felt as if the walls were squeezing against her shoulders, like in the tunnel. That exact pressure on her shoulders from the tunnel walls, after getting away from the Badger, was the only thing she remembered with any clarity. The rest of it she had gleaned from others, after they had attended to her on the street outside the house.
She had discovered the Badger’s hiding place. It was concealed in her own basement which Jan Apelgren had bricked up when he had lost his sanity. That was where he had written his book about the Badger, telling a twisted biography about bloodied victims and creatures lying dormant in the earth whilst he was turning into a monster himself.
As soon as Annika had made enough progress on her recovery, she and Martin had found each other again. She was seeing things in a different light now, as if everything had somehow become clear after she emerged from the underworld. She was also pleased at her decision to have him back in her life again. It was all he had asked for too, and she needed the stability that he could afford her.
However, they didn’t need Jan Apelgren’s house. They sold it, at a substantial loss. The purchaser didn’t even want to live there, just wanted to knock it down and build a new one. They couldn’t care less and had only recently acquired the apartment they found themselves in now. They hadn’t even had time to unpack their moving boxes, but there was no hurry.
Martin smiled, looking deeply into Annika’s eyes. “Come here,” he said. “I’ve made us something to eat. There’s wine, too.”
“Are you trying to seduce me?” said Annika, smiling back.
“Maybe,” said Martin. “But let’s eat first.”
Annika undid the laces on her boots and stepped between the boxes on her way to the kitchen. The extractor hood was whooshing. The room was warm and smelt of spices. The table was set with fresh white candles and two large glasses of dark red wine. Martin placed an earthenware casserole dish on the counter and lifted the lid. New scents diffused in a cloud of steam, making Annika’s mouth water. She put her arms around him, leaning her cheek between his shoulder blades as he dished the food onto the plates.
“I love you,” she whispered, so quietly that she didn’t know if he had heard. She didn’t yet risk saying it any louder than that.
He stopped serving and held his hands over hers as they rested on his chest. “I hope you’re going to like this. I came home early to put it all together.”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she closed her eyes, holding him closer, tighter, so that she could hear his heart beating through his sweater. It was time to start afresh. This time they didn’t need a house. They didn’t need any children either, unless fate had other ideas. The only thing they needed was each other. She realised this now.
This time, things were going to go right. She could feel it in her heart of hearts. The person who had broken out of the earth was a brand new Annika.
89
SATURDAY 4 FEBRUARY
When I die, they will choose someone else, someone to take my place. You know that’s just the way it is. It’s your turn now.
Annika blinked at the light from the beside lamp. She had barely slept that night either. Martin was snoring softly beside her. She stretched out her hand and turned the light off, then sneaked out of the bedroom, closing the door behind her so she wouldn’t wake him. The light in the rest of the apartment was greyish white from the street lights reflecting on the falling snow outside. The moving boxes were casting tall shadows in the empty rooms. She tiptoed past them and opened the front door, out into the darkness of the stairwell. The stone floor was cold under her feet. She closed the door carefully so no one would hear. The key was hanging from a ribbon around her neck, the same one she would use when she was training.
It was just two floors down to the basement. Her footsteps were as quiet as whispers, yet it felt as if they were echoing between the bare concrete walls. The key rattled in the lock and the hinges squeaked as she opened the heavy door to the basement storerooms. Behind the fire door a long hallway led out to the second identical door. On one side were grey metal grilles in front of rows of private storage areas for each apartment. In the darkness she got a sense of the jumbled mess of objects people stored there. Boxes of books, old bikes, a surfboard and infinite amounts of off-season wardrobe items. Forgotten-about pieces of people’s lives that were over and done with, stacked on top of one another. She let the door bang shut behind her and took a few steps into the hallway.
