stars.
Then she heard a vehicle rumbling behind her, she turned round, hoping it was the police.
It was a local Lulea bus, the number one.
It drove towards her and stopped. She realized that she was standing at the bus-stop and took a few steps to one side to indicate that she wasn’t waiting for it.
But the bus stopped a few metres away from her anyway, the back door opened and a thickset man stepped onto the street, moving slowly, heavily.
She looked at him and took a step closer.
‘Hans!’ she said. ‘Hans, hello; it’s me, Annika.’
Hans Blomberg, the archivist from the
45
‘What are you doing here?’ Annika said.
‘I live here,’ the man said, smiling cheerfully. ‘On Torsgatan.’
He gestured over his shoulder towards the housing estate.
‘Do you?’ Annika said as the bus pulled away. She took a step closer and looked into his eyes, and at that moment something clicked inside her head, suddenly she remembered when she had seen the drawing of the yellow dragon before, all of a sudden she knew where it was. She had thought it was a child’s drawing, a yellow dinosaur, on Hans Blomberg’s pinboard in the archive of the
‘Surely the real question is,’ Hans Blomberg said, ‘what are you doing here?’
The bus disappeared beyond the crown of the hill and the man walked towards her, his hands in his pockets. He stopped in front of her and in the moonlight his eyes were almost transparent.
She laughed nervously. ‘I’m up on a job and got lost,’ she said. ‘Foreningsgatan, which one is that?’
‘You’re standing on it,’ the archivist said in amusement. ‘Doesn’t anyone have a sense of direction in Stockholm?’
‘They’d run out by the time they got to me,’ she said, realizing she would soon be unable to speak.
‘Who are you meeting?’
She shrugged. ‘I’ve already missed my deadline,’ she said.
‘But then you must come inside and warm up,’ he said. ‘Can I offer you a cup of tea?’
She searched frantically for an excuse, the man took no notice of her hesitation and took a firm grip of her arm and started walking.
‘I live in a little two-room flat on the ground floor,’ he said. ‘It’s not much, but what can you do when consumer society has left you behind?’
She tried to pull her arm away and found it was held in a vice-like grip.
‘It’s not often a guy like me gets such a charming visitor,’ he said. ‘A lovely young lady all the way from the capital.’
He smiled genially at her, she tried to smile back.
‘Which one of them are you?’ Annika said. ‘The Panther, Tiger or Lion?’
He was looking straight ahead, pretending he hadn’t heard the question, just took tighter hold of her. The houses were disappearing behind them; they were approaching the no vehicles sign. She glanced over to the left, past the power cables and into the undergrowth.
‘So you live out here in the forest?’
He didn’t answer, and the next instant she was back in that tunnel. She felt the earth tilt, heard someone breathing hard, panting, and realized it was her, her mouth wide open.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to. Please.’
Her legs gave way beneath her. Hans Blomberg caught her with a smile.
‘You’re a reporter,’ he said. ‘A proper, inquisitive little reporter. Of course you want to get a good story, don’t you?’
Her memory flashed up the pipes in the roof of the tunnel above her, and she started to cry.
‘Let me go!’
She jammed her feet in the ice and struggled and was rewarded with a ringing blow to the head. She saw stars and Sven was there screaming at her and she ducked, sank to the ground and put her hands over her head.
‘Don’t hit me.’
The world slowed down and stopped, the ground stopped tilting and she could hear herself panting. She looked up cautiously and saw Hans Blomberg shaking his head anxiously at her.
‘God, the way you carry on,’ he said. ‘Up you get. The leader’s waiting.’
And she stumbled forward in the moonlight with the lights above the railway track swaying far off to the left. The angels were completely silent, where their anxious voices had been was now only dark emptiness.
They passed the Skanska building, it was completely black.
‘We’re going to the little brick building, aren’t we? The one beyond the viaduct?’
‘So you’ve already found our headquarters,’ the archivist said in his good-natured voice. ‘Have you been creeping around in the bushes? Very talented. Then I may as well tell you what to expect. The Dragon has called us together again. I don’t think everyone can make it, we’ve suffered something of a decline in membership recently, but Karina will probably be there, and Yngve, of course. He never misses a good party.’
The archivist laughed happily. Annika struggled against nausea.
‘Poor Yngve,’ the man went on. ‘Goran wanted me to look after him, but what’s a chap to do? To help an addict you have to change the whole apparatus of oppression, and I haven’t been able to do that. Unfortunately I have to admit that Yngve no longer has any hold on reality, it’s truly tragic. I have failed in my duty…’
A moment later she heard something heavy and rhythmic behind her. She glanced over her shoulder and found herself staring into the headlight of a huge diesel locomotive coming down the track.
‘Straight on,’ Hans Blomberg said.
Annika obeyed, peering at the great engine as it slowly rumbled past her towards the ironworks with its endless train of fully laden ore-trucks behind it.
Her heart was thudding. She tried to see herself from the train-driver’s perspective. She was dressed in black against a dark background of scrub, only lit by the cold moonlight.
She forced her heart to slow down; tried to see how long the train was without twisting her head, but couldn’t see the end of it.
They walked under the viaduct, the train thundered past,
Then the last one disappeared, the end of a long tail heading towards the fiery heat of the blast-furnace.
Annika swallowed hard and found that her hands were shaking.
They reached the transformer box where Goran Nilsson had hidden his duffel bag. She glanced at the box; it was closed, sealed up.
‘Down to the left here,’ Hans Blomberg said, pushing her towards the gap in the undergrowth.
She slipped and was on the verge of falling down the slope, but grabbed hold of some branches and managed to stay upright.
‘Take it easy,’ she said lamely and walked towards the brick building.
The windows were sealed with metal shutters, a half-collapsed flight of wooden steps led up to the door, which was slightly open. Annika stopped, but Blomberg shoved her in the back.
‘Go on, in you go. It’s just an old compressor shed.’
She took hold of the door and pulled it open, noting that its lock consisted of two welded metal hasps, one with a rusty old padlock hanging from it. The same terrible stench that she had smelled behind the pine trees poured out through the door.
