Let the Old Dreams Die (41 page)

Much of the research that has been carried out is available only in specialist books which can be difficult to get hold of, but science journalist Karin Johannesson takes a more accessible approach in
The
Revolt of the Enzymes.
The various schools of thought within what came to be known as ATPX research are presented very clearly; X stands for the mutation of co-enzyme ATP, which has not yet been mapped, and which is believed to be the cause of the phenomenon.

Jovan Sislek’s
In Death’s Boardroom
is a pure thriller, depicting the rise and fall of the Lifeguard pharmaceutical company. The scandal surrounding Lifeguard’s much vaunted ‘death vaccine’, which turned out to be no more than a bluff, is highly relevant, since the trial begins in Stockholm very soon. Exciting reading.

Very little has been written about current activities in the Heath. A tabloid journalist recently compared the Heath with North Korea. Almost nothing comes out. A small number of eye-witness accounts have been gathered together in
Slaves into Death,
published by Timbro, which unfortunately has a noticeable political bias.

It is also worth mentioning P. O. Enquist’s play
The Processing,
now available in the series of contemporary dramas published by Stockholm’s Dramaten Theatre. The play, which had a lengthy run in the city, is based on a large number of interviews with relatives of the reliving, and is absolutely gripping.

This is just a fraction of everything that has been written. In English alone there are another twenty books that I have chosen not to mention here.

Kalle Liljewall was a humper and the black sheep of the family. On his father’s side, more or less everyone was a member of SACO, the trade union for academics. Except for Kalle, who lugged gear for the dance band Tropicos, and wasn’t a member of a trade union at all.

Kalle couldn’t do much right in his father’s eyes: he was the drummer in a funk band that wasn’t successful enough, his
apartment was in Rinkeby, and his job had a title that didn’t appear in the Swedish Academy’s official list of words.

‘Humper?’ his father had asked, putting down his wine glass. ‘And what exactly does a…humper do?’

‘Drives stuff around. Carries stuff.’

His father tried to catch the eye of Kalle’s sister Rebecka, who was twenty years older, to see if she could help with the interpretation. Rebecka placed her index finger over her lips and pondered for a second, then asked, ‘Is it the same as a roadie?’

‘No. A roadie’s like…well, I do some roadie stuff as well. Plug in leads and so on, but mostly I drive stuff. And carry it in.’

‘So being a roadie is a somewhat more highly qualified role than a humper?’

‘I suppose you could say that, yeah.’

Rebecka nodded. It was all clear to her now. Kalle had the lowest-ranking job in the entertainment industry, and that was the end of that. Her father shook his head and sighed.

Kalle wasn’t upset. That was exactly the reception he’d expected. He’d only told them about his new job to wind them up, actually. And for the satisfaction of hearing his father utter the word ‘humper’, of course.

He had been a neglected child in a way, the result of a brief relationship between his father and one of his students at university. Kalle had lived with his mother Monica until he was thirteen, when she committed suicide by standing in the middle of the subway track and simply waiting. His father reluctantly took over his care.

Kalle had met his half-sister only a few times while he was growing up. Just after Kalle moved in with his father in Danderyd, Rebecka gained her PhD at the University of Stockholm. With her father’s help she subsequently became Sweden’s youngest ever female professor of philosophy, and took up a post at the University of Lund.

In connection with the awakening of the dead in 2002 she acquired a certain level of fame, or notoriety, as an advocate of a strictly utilitarian approach to the issue. Her father was delighted. Notoriety was often a sign of academic stringency.

But Kalle…Kalle was something else.

While living with his father, Kalle was under constant pressure to strive upwards, ever upwards. The conditions in his new home could probably have been described as ideal. But not for Kalle. He just wasn’t the right type.

You only have to look at the family photograph from Rebecka’s doctoral graduation ceremony. There stands his father, tall, slim and angular in a perfectly cut suit. Sharp as Ockham’s razor. Beside him stands Rebecka, in a simple but elegant sky-blue dress that accentuates the line between her shoulder and jaw, the line a male PhD candidate half-seriously, half in jest transformed into a logarithmic curve with the aim of extracting the equation for true beauty.

A short distance away stands Kalle, his arms dangling by his sides. He is looking into the camera as if he has just been caught doing something he shouldn’t be doing. He is fourteen years old, 163 centimetres tall, and he weighs seventy kilos. He wears his suit like a prison cell into which he has been forced with an electric cattle prod. In spite of the fact that he had shaved in the morning, his face is shadowed with stubble. His hair is thick and red.

A changeling. No other possible explanation. A mix-up on the maternity ward. But a DNA test has been carried out: Kalle is the biological son of Emeritus Professor Sture Liljewall. Sometimes genetics goes out of the window and that’s the end of it.

Ten years had passed since the photograph was taken; Kalle was now twenty-two centimetres taller and thirty kilos heavier. He wore his hair in dreadlocks, usually caught up in a knot at the back of his neck. He had a full beard which he trimmed with scissors to keep
it around five centimetres long. He was, to put it simply, a bear of a man.

Kalle carried within him a great pain, contained in the space of a hand’s breadth beneath his right collarbone. No, there was no tumour or anything lurking there, he’d had it checked out, but that was exactly where it started to hurt when life came over him. A black heart, pumping a feeling of powerlessness through his body. When it happened he hammered on the drums until the sweat was pouring off him, which usually worked. Sometimes he had to drink a lot of beer.

Life is for living. Kalle had worked that out a couple of years ago. It’s not necessarily obvious, it wasn’t obvious to Kalle, but for that very reason he had defined it in his own mind: I want to live. There was no need to say any more.

Kalle had been working as a humper for Tropicos for about a year when his father rang and offered him the chance to earn a bit on the side. He didn’t put it quite like that.
The possibility of supplementing your income somewhat
, or something along those lines. A few things needed moving. Technical apparatus.

‘Haven’t you got people who do that sort of thing?’ asked Kalle.

‘Do you want the job or not?’

‘I was just wondering.’

‘Well don’t. It’s a driver we need. Three hundred kronor an hour plus expenses. Cash in hand.’

‘Wow. I didn’t know you were into that kind of stuff.’

‘Do you want the job or not?’

‘Yeah, yeah. Sure. OK.’

Kalle was given a time and place, and the conversation ended with no fond farewells. He wasn’t all that keen on working for his father, but the money sealed the deal. He had a small monthly salary to remain on standby for whenever Tropicos might need him, plus he was paid for every job. Over the past few months it had been
only a couple of times a week. It was five years since the group had appeared in the Swedish charts, and although they had their circuit, there weren’t many new jobs.

Kalle got by, but no more. While he was waiting for Funkface to break through—which to be perfectly honest he didn’t believe would ever happen—a couple of thousand extra would go down very well.

He borrowed the small van, the one they used only for transporting equipment (he didn’t think it was a good idea to turn up in the bus with the name of the band airbrushed along the side with palm trees and a sunset) and presented himself at the goods entrance to the Karolinska Institute at nine o’clock in the evening.

In the loading bay stood seven metal boxes, their surfaces a matt sheen. In contrast to Tropicos’ battered sound system, these boxes looked as if they had never been used. Not a scratch. Each roughly one cubic metre.

Kalle switched off the engine and got out. A door opened and a man with small hands and small glasses emerged. He nodded to Kalle and gestured in the direction of the boxes, then folded his arms. Kalle estimated that he could probably throw the man about four metres. Tempting thought. Instead he set to work and loaded the boxes into the van. Some were light, a couple weighed in the region of eight kilos. They were so well packed that there wasn’t the slightest rattle from inside as he put them down.

When everything was loaded, Kalle stood beside the van and folded his arms too. The man hopped down from the loading bay and got in the van without a word. Kalle stayed where he was for a few seconds—
two metres up in the air, smack! Head first on the tarmac—
then slid in and started the engine.

‘Where are we going?’

‘The Heath.’

‘Where those dying people are?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are we actually going into the—’

‘Yes.’

Kalle put the van into gear and set off with an unnecessary jolt. The man put on his seatbelt. After a couple of minutes they were on the E4, and the man didn’t say a word. Kalle switched on the CD player and ‘Monkey Woman’ by King Kong Crew boomed out. When the man still didn’t say anything, Kalle turned up the volume and they funked their way along the E4, turned off onto the E18 and eventually onto the gravel track across Järva field.

As the approached the gates of the compound, the man touched Kalle’s arm and pointed first at the CD, then
dab-dab-dab
with his finger at the floor. Kalle pretended not to understand; he looked at the floor as if he were searching for something, then shook his head.

‘Turn it down,’ said the man.

Kalle slowed down. A guard came out of the booth next to the gates.

‘What?’

‘Turn it down!’ said the man more loudly, looking annoyed. Kalle turned it down. He’d got a reaction. Point made. The man opened the door and got out of the van, went over to the guard. He took a piece of paper out of the inside pocket of his jacket and handed it over. The guard looked at the paper, at the van, at Kalle. He didn’t seem very happy. He gestured at the man and went back into his booth. The man stayed put.

Kalle stared at the compound beyond the gates.

So this is what it looks like.

There must be hardly anyone in Sweden who hasn’t heard of the Heath, but after the events of 2002 very little was known about what actually went on in there. The living dead, or the reliving as they were called, had escaped and managed to take the lives of around a hundred people before being captured and returned to the Heath in an unconstitutional joint operation between the police and the
military. Since then the area had been closed to the public.

The official version was that they were undergoing rehabilitation, that the reliving were carrying out some form of therapeutic work, but for one thing no journalists were admitted to the compound, and for another public interest had waned since the situation had stabilised. The Heath had been left to its fate, and as long as the dead didn’t get out, hardly anybody cared about what happened there. The relatives who complained had given up, in the majority of cases.

Kalle just found the whole thing unpleasant. If he’d known the job involved a trip to the Heath, he might well have opted out. As he lived only a couple of kilometres away, he had once taken a stroll down there to look at the fence surrounding the half-finished living accommodation; his interest didn’t extend any further. But now he was here, he found he was curious after all. His heart was beating a little faster.

What does it look like in there?

The strange thing was that his companion also seemed nervous. He stood there moving his feet up and down on the spot, rubbing his hands together. A light drizzle had begun to fall, and in the floodlights the man looked trapped, alone in a deserted field.

Kalle sounded the horn and the man jumped. Oh yes, he was nervous all right. Kalle grinned as the man waved a hand to shut him up. He almost felt sorry for the jumped-up little bastard.

The guard came out and handed back the paper. Evidently everything was in order, but Kalle could tell from the guard’s body language that he wasn’t happy about the situation. He would have preferred to tell them to turn around. Instead he went back into his booth, and as the man got in the van the gates silently swung open.

Kalle drove through.

‘Which way?’

The man pointed. ‘Turn right up there.’

There wasn’t a single street lamp, and the beam of the headlights
swept over bare concrete walls, was reflected in lifeless windowpanes. It looked like a ghost town, appropriately enough, and Kalle’s foot was ready to hit the brake at any moment if a zombie should come staggering out in front of the car. He wasn’t feeling too good, there was a kind of buzzing noise in his head, a cacophony of voices in a room far away.