Acts of Vanishing Read online

  Slowly, William felt himself moving to a state of readiness.

  It was already five past four by the time the Arlanda train rolled in to the platform. The driver’s cab stopped by the buffers just in front of him, the train’s hundreds of yellow tons puffing and dripping as the passengers wove their way past each other to board or alight. Gradually the swathes of people formed streams in various directions–to the main hall, the taxi ranks, other platforms–and gradually too it emerged that there were some who weren’t going anywhere at all.

  The discreet man with the headset, for one–and then someone else. He stood on the same side of the tracks as William, further down the platform, and he too was wearing a headset, sporting the same bland clothing, and having the same kind of conversation, short, sharp responses into the mic: they were talking to each other.

  Something was wrong. William had been instructed to be in situ at precisely four p.m., and the word ‘precisely’ bothered him, because five minutes had passed and no one had shown up–no one, but for the two with the headsets. Were they waiting for the same person as he was? Or worse still–waiting for him?

  He looked around. The crowds along the platform had slowly thinned out, and everyone not boarding was heading somewhere else. William had noticed the men with the headsets because they weren’t doing either, and now he was making the same mistake.

  He hesitated for two seconds before making up his mind. The meeting, as far as he was concerned, was cancelled. He looked for a gap in the stream of passengers, sidled in and turned to follow the crowd towards the station hall.

  He managed a single step.

  ‘Amberlangs?’

  The man blocking William’s path had a chest so broad that it might have looked funny in another situation. Now, though, it was too close for comfort. He was wearing the day’s third improbably discreet outfit–maybe they’d bargained for a discount–and now he stood massively still, with his legs apart and arms ready at his sides. But ready for what?

  ‘And you are?’

  In his mind, he bit his tongue as he was saying it. Shouldn’t he be playing dumb?

  ‘Nice and calm,’ the man replied. Northern accent, a cold, curt order. ‘You come with us and nothing will happen to you.’

  Us? Who were they?

  ‘When you say “happen”,’ William said, to buy some time. ‘Would you care to elaborate on that?’

  When the Northerner slid his jacket to the side, the weapon across his chest was all the elaboration William needed.

  The days that change your life for ever start off like all the others. Everything normal, right up until the point when it isn’t.

  When the power went, at six minutes past four, leaving vast tracts of Sweden in total darkness, it was just like any other day. A damp, cold afternoon in the no-man’s-land between seasons, neither autumn nor winter. At Stockholm Central Station the lights went off, the waiting locomotives lost power and lapsed into silence, screens and signs went dark. At hospitals and airports, emergency generators swung into action, on the roads and rails the lights and the signals disappeared, causing jams and confusion. It was irritating, for sure, and a bloody scandal too–with people getting stuck in lifts or on trains with no signal and what kind of society do we live in anyway. But for most people, that was all it was.

  For William Sandberg, on the other hand, it was the start of an evening that would see his life lose its meaning.

  For the men in the white van up on Klarabergsviadukten, it was confirmation that things were getting worse.

  2

  It hit the city centre first.

  In the metro tunnels, the lights and the motors died at once. Darkness enveloped carriage after carriage, and passengers toppled en masse as the automatic brakes slammed on, forcing the trains to a halt in a few dozen metres. Above ground the street lights and the advertising hoardings fell dark. Escalators stopped, espresso machines died in the middle of filling cups, swearing and frustration everywhere. In a matter of moments the darkness marched out in a widening circle, from one neighbourhood to the next, out from the city, through the peripheral concrete estates and further on across the country. At the centre lay Stockholm, like a pitch-black maze in the pitch-black afternoon.

  Everything stood still. And in the middle of the junction between Sveavägen and Rådmansgatan sat Christina Sandberg in the back seat of a taxi.

  Her driver had spent the first part of their journey from Sollentuna endangering both of their lives, sitting with his eyes fixed on his yellow monochrome display, frenetically tapping away at various codes in the hope of landing his next fare, whilst simultaneously displaying an impressive range of expletives every time a fellow motorist happened to distract him from it.

  They had just turned off Birger Jarlsgatan when Christina thought to herself that maybe she had better put her belt on. The next minute, though, it was too late.

  At first she didn’t grasp what was going on. It was as if they’d just entered a tunnel, but there were no tunnels on Råd­mansgatan, and she looked up, out at what seemed to be a blacked-out version of her home town. No illuminated window displays, no Christmas decorations, no traffic lights, no visible lighting anywhere. That was the last thing she managed to discern before everything, suddenly and without warning, was replaced by blurred perpendicular lines.

  It wasn’t the HGV that hit them, the one that came roaring from their left, whose driver must have interpreted the disappearing red light as the signals turned green. Say what you like about the world-class swearer in the front, but there was nothing wrong with his reflexes. He slammed on the brakes and spun the wheel in a single manoeuvre, flinging Christina across the back seat as she felt the car jolt and shudder across the slush beneath them, and maybe it was professionalism, maybe just good fortune, but whatever it was it gave the lorry room to sneak past them with just millimetres to spare.

  But when the bus came at them from the opposite direction, they didn’t have a chance. It appeared behind the vanishing lorry, speeding flat out and straight ahead, and now there was no time to react. The collision with the taxi’s offside wing was like two pool balls smashing into each other, and Christina felt herself sailing along the leather seat, weightless and in slow motion, helplessly floating like a crash-test dummy in a blazer and immaculate make-up.

  So there she was, sitting in the middle of the Sveavägen–Rådmansgatan junction, alive but dazed, squashed into one corner of the back seat and with a view of a bonnet with a heavy bus wedged across it like a huge red vice.

  The silence was almost overwhelming. All she could hear was the sound of her own breath, blending with the breathing from the front seat, and the quiet static hum seeping out of the car stereo.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked.

  She saw a nod, two shocked eyes in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Are you?’

  When she confirmed that she was, he mumbled something about terminating here and all change please and that she didn’t need to worry about the fare.

  The first thing she noticed as she clambered out was the way the darkness seemed to stretch in all directions. The sky was black, below it the street lamps loomed invisible and dark, and then below them the leaden fronts of buildings spreading in all directions, disappearing into nothing.

  One direction led towards the high-rises around Hötorget’s marketplace. The opposite direction was towards the tower of the Wenner-Gren Center. But none of it could be seen. The sole relief came from the cold, dimmed lights of the cars that had stopped around them, the fine drizzle drifting through the headlight beams and the odd driver still behind their wheel, face glowing faintly in the light from the dashboard.

  Out of nowhere, she could feel the darkness closing in around her, her pulse racing for no reason. An almost paralysing terror, a wordless, exhilarating sensation that reality had ceased to operate: someone had flicked a switch on all the world, and from now on, this was how things were going to be.

  She knew that
feeling far too well, and shook it off. It was just a power cut, she told herself, someone had drilled through a cable somewhere or forgotten to calibrate a fuse. There was no reason at all to release a load of pent-up thoughts that weren’t going to lead anywhere.

  Instead, she looked around her and tried to turn her thoughts somewhere else. A quick assessment of the news value: Central Stockholm Plunged into Darkness. Wasn’t that your headline right there?

  Of course it was, and she pulled out her phone to ring the news desk, then stopped as the display lit up.

  No signal.

  She braced herself as the fears came back at her, focused even harder on the job. This, she thought to herself, was more than a headline. This was a massive story. If the inhabitants of Sweden’s capital were stuck without electricity, with no means of calling for help, and if it was also going to stay this way for a while… This was a security issue. This was about society as a whole. That made it worth whole tanks of ink.

  Christina Sandberg looked around her. She raised her phone above her head, fired off a few shots with the camera pointing straight at the darkness, the junction with all the stationary cars, crumpled bodywork strewn around, the odd motorist using the light from their phones to inspect the damage.

  She’d already composed the first few lines by the time she passed Tegnérlunden’s open space on her way to her office on the island of Kungsholmen.

  Across the platforms and trackbeds at Stockholm Central Station, darkness fell like a cupped hand. Pupils that had accustomed themselves to the artificial light struggled to see again, and at once all points of reference disappeared–contours, colours, everything.

  Hearing, though, was a different matter, and what William could hear was the cocking of a gun.

  Just a few inches in front of him, the Northerner had raised his weapon, and William closed his eyes in a pointless reflex, utterly sure that he was about to die.

  But in that case, what did he have to lose? The darkness was his saviour, he told himself, and flung himself headlong into the crowd, not knowing who he fled from, or why, but determined to try.

  He raced towards the station building, his arms like snowploughs, dislodging anyone in his path, determined that if he could just get into the big hall he’d be able to melt into the crowd and get away. He could hear footsteps coming after him, voices calling him to stop, as if they thought maybe he would change his mind and turn around if only they suggested it loudly enough.

  Ahead of him, the main building was getting closer. He could see the weak light sources in there, the green phosphorescent EXIT signs telling him he was on the right track, and he picked up the pace—

  The glass doors into the hall could not be seen in the darkness, but they could be felt. The pain was so intense that he was convinced at first that he’d been shot. He’d been sprinting for what seemed like safety, and in the darkness the plate-glass doors had been completely invisible, with the motors that should’ve slid them from his path as dead as everything else.

  He felt his whole body scream in pain, heard his neck crick, and his face and his ribs and a metallic taste in his mouth; maybe this was what dying felt like… It took him only a second to realise that he must be still alive. Otherwise he wouldn’t have felt the pain redouble as they grabbed him from behind. First as the stranger’s hand grabbed his, then as he pushed William’s forearm up between his shoulder blades, and then again as his face and chest slammed up against the glass for a second time and were held there.

  Ahead lay the dark main hall of the station, on the far side of the door. Behind him were three invisible men in discreet clothing, and in between he could feel his face squashed ever flatter against the glass as if to yield a vacuum-packed version of himself. And whatever he might’ve been expecting by the airport express at precisely four o’clock, it sure as hell wasn’t this.

  Sandberg had allowed himself to hope. Now the hope was gone. Slowly, he stopped resisting.

  Christina Sandberg had got as far as the bridge over to Kungs­holmen before she stopped for the first time.

  From there, the whole of Stockholm should have been visible, in all directions. The city centre with Södermalm as the backdrop. The TV masts in Nacka that should’ve been pulsing with sharp, white flashes behind the silhouettes of hotels and office blocks. They weren’t though. Wherever she looked she could see nothing but darkness. Kungsholmen, Karlberg, Solna, Vasastan, invisible, lost in a dense, impenetrable night.

  For a second, she felt her mind wander. From out of nowhere came the thoughts of her, the guilt and the sorrow that always waited just around the corner. She would be out there somewhere, too, she who had turned her back on them, betrayed them, and, to be honest, who had helped force her and William apart. That kind of thinking was forbidden, yet she couldn’t help it. It was impossible not to lay some of the blame onto her, and the mere thought of doing so spread a new layer of guilt on top of all the others, set the anxiety spinning like a child pushing a roundabout in the playground and not stopping until it’s going way too fast.

  She was out there somewhere. In all likelihood so was he, always on the move, running from whatever it was that kept him moving, himself or his conscience, or maybe from Christina, and–fuck it. She was the news editor at one of Sweden’s largest tabloid newspapers, and to stand here feeling sorry for yourself gets nothing done.

  All around, the city lay in darkness. She set off again, over the bridge, then on between the buildings. This, she reminded herself, was big news.

  3

  The girl who was about to die but didn’t know it yet was struggling against two different things at once.

  First was the struggle against her own body, this body that couldn’t quite manage to hold her upright, or move as fast as she wanted. The one that had aged so grossly–though it was only twenty years old–that it made people recoil, as much as she wished they wouldn’t. This body that right now was elbowing its way through the vast and impenetrable darkness of the metro station under Hötorget’s marketplace.

  Then there was the struggle against the tide of pumping panic. What the fuck had she done?

  Everything was in darkness. Everywhere, invisible puffer jackets seemed to be heading at random in all directions, the only things visible being the EXIT signs, glowing in feeble pale green along the walls. How could all this have been her fault?

  She shouldn’t even have been here. She should have stayed home–whatever home meant–home where she could keep out of people’s way and live her own so-called life. The amusement park had closed for the winter in September, so if you managed to avoid the security guards and the builders, if you knew the hideouts no one bothered to check, you could sort yourself a place to live for six months–nicely enclosed, and under a roof and with heating. What more could you want?

  Home, she could have replied, if anyone had asked, was on the exclusive island of Djurgården. Quite the hotspot.

  No one asked though.

  Home was where she’d loved to be as a kid, where lamps had flashed their gaudy colours, where cars rattled along the roller coasters and voices screamed with happiness–and from time to time one of the voices had been her own.

  Now the lamps were off. Tarpaulins were stretched over the rails and over the metal and fibreglass cars. It was like the aftermath of a party when everyone’s gone home. And in the middle of all that, behind thin wooden walls and corrugated iron, was her home. Cold, damp, insecure–and yet it still made her proud in a way she couldn’t quite explain. She had her own life–a shitty life, okay, but it was her shitty life and not theirs, and that was all that mattered.

  At least that’s how she’d used to feel. But things change. Now she was here, struggling through the pitch-black metro station, up the motionless escalator, out into the cold damp evening air. The darkness went on up here too. It was daytime, but also night: rows of vegetables and cut flowers lined up under unlit awnings, and on the far side of the square the giant cinema’s glass frontage l
ooked like an empty black cube.

  How could she have caused all this?

  Maybe, she told herself, she hadn’t. Maybe this was her distorted perception of reality, and she was pushing it all too far. She hadn’t taken anything for days, so maybe all this anxiety was a kind of symptom, a new version of that grating, sweaty restlessness that was always overtaking her, and that sooner or later always pushed her off the wagon.

  But not this time. That was a promise she planned to keep.

  She walked on past the stalls, away from the square, on the alert for voices or shouts or footsteps catching up with her. It was just a matter of time till they came looking, she was certain of that, and as long as she roamed around the town like this, dirty and shaking from cold turkey, and with the thin nylon rucksack ready to fall apart under the weight of the twenty-thousand-krona computer inside it, it wasn’t going to take an expert criminologist to work out that she was the one they were looking for.

  What choice had she had, though? She had cut the power off. She didn’t know how, or why, but it had to be her. And still, that wasn’t what bothered her most. Nor was it the darkness, or even the fear of being caught and arrested for what she stole. None of that.

  The worst thing was knowing what she should have done.

  It was ten past four on the afternoon of the third of December.

  Everything was darkness and ink and wet, heavy snow. There she ran, Sara Sandberg, the girl who was about to die, and somewhere in the cold leaden hell that was Stockholm was a man who called himself her father.

  In her rucksack she carried a warning for him.

  Now whether he would receive it or not was all down to her.