KULT: A dark and gripping crime thriller full of twists and suspense Read online

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  Peter smiled at her.

  “Well, think about this year, 1787. And try to get a picture, some mental image connected to this year.”

  Jenny hesitated, feeling like she had to respond.

  “Women in beautiful dresses,” she said. “A ball.” She giggled and looked at Peter.

  “Okay,” Peter smiled. “Where are you, then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Peter didn’t give up.

  “What thought popped into your head when I first asked the question?”

  “Hm. Paris, maybe?”

  “Great! Where in Paris? Do you see any buildings?”

  Jenny closed her eyes now. She took the first image that appeared in her mind.

  “A palace. Versailles.”

  “Good, Jenny! Who are you at the ball?”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. Do you see yourself? Who are you?”

  Jenny took her mug and sipped a little tea to give herself a moment.

  “I don’t know. One of the people dancing, maybe?”

  “Describe yourself.”

  Jenny closed her eyes again. On the inside of her eyelids, she saw a great ballroom, many people dancing around in ornate 18th century clothing. She saw a beautiful young woman in a white gown laughing and dancing.

  “I’m wearing a totally white ball gown. Big hair, it must be a wig. Pearls in my hair and a mask on my face.”

  She fell silent, a bit surprised by the detailed nature of what she just said. She had an idea where it came from, though. They read about the French Revolution in school last year. She was fascinated by Marie Antoinette’s fate and borrowed a book about her from the library. It was so quiet in the room, you could hear a pin drop.

  “Who are you?” Peter asked quietly.

  “A noblewoman at the court,” the answer came with lightning speed. “My duty is to calm the queen. That’s my job.” She smiled and looked around at the others. They smiled back.

  “Wonderful!” Peter said. “There may be a reason that you saw that particular image?”

  He leaned towards her. The music had stopped, and the room was silent. He asked, “Might it be that what you just told us about is a memory and not something you imagined?”

  Jenny glanced around the room. They looked back at her with interest. Clearly, this type of discussion wasn’t out of the ordinary for them. She turned towards Peter.

  “That I lived a past life as a noblewoman in Paris, you mean?” She gave a laugh. “Yes, maybe it is. But it could also be because a few months ago, I borrowed a book from the library about Marie Antoinette.”

  “Why do you think you were interested in her?” Peter responded quickly.

  There might be a point to what he was saying, she thought. She was truly interested in that historical era. When she read the book, she felt the desire to live in that setting, wanted to be part of it. She liked the thought of having lived at the palace in Versailles. And she was drawn to the idea of past lives.

  “A lot of people around the world believe in reincarnation,” Peter continued, leaning forward and extinguishing his cigarette in the heavy marble ashtray. “There are over a billion just within Buddhism and Hinduism. Who says that Westerners are right?”

  Jenny nodded.

  “Not everyone has lived such an exciting life as you seem to have,” said Max, one of the guys. “I was your average poor, lousy farmer in Skåne in the late 1700s.”

  Everyone laughed and the rest of the evening was filled with laughter, more talk of past lives, and loud discussions about the quality of Nirvana’s music and whether Mikhail Gorbachev should get the Nobel Peace Prize now that he was dead. Jenny was happy around these people. Despite being so much younger than they were, she felt like they respected and were interested in her. They were smart, pleasant, and not only focused on themselves. She wasn’t used to that.

  It was already 11:30 before Stefan and Jenny left the apartment and went to the bus stop to take the last bus to Karlskrona.

  “Those are pretty exciting friends Viktoria has,” Jenny said.

  “Yeah, they’re cool,” Stefan said. “It’s really interesting, all that stuff about past lives.”

  “I have a hard time accepting it,” Jenny said. “But the images that came to me grew so incredibly clear the more he asked. What if we are souls and just jump from body to body? I really want to believe that’s true.”

  They walked silently for a moment. They arrived at the bus stop and stood there to wait. The bus would be coming in five minutes.

  “How does Viktoria know them?” Jenny asked.

  “One of the guys, Max, is an old friend of Viktoria’s from elementary school,” Stefan answered. “I think he’s the one who first got to know the rest. Most of them are from Karlskrona, but a few went away for college and have now moved back home. My sister said that some of them are part of some sort of religious movement that believes we all have these past lives. Scientology, it’s called. It’s not about Jesus and Christianity, that sort of thing. I think they’re just interested in this reincarnation stuff and with getting better at communicating. Viktoria isn’t really into all that, but she likes the people a lot.”

  “Me, too,” Jenny said.

  “Yeah, I noticed,” Stefan said, smiling and laying his arm around her. “Did you think Peter was hot?”

  “Idiot,” Jenny said. “It’s not like that.” She looked away so Stefan wouldn’t see her blushing.

  4.

  Early Wednesday morning in Hogland Park. One and a half days since a father and his four-year-old daughter were found dead in an apartment eight hundred yards from the park. The sun was cautious. A quiet morning fog swept over the city, which was built on thirty-three islands. The fog prevented the sun from reaching all the way down to the few early-bird souls who left their houses on the largest of the islands, Trossö Island.

  One of them was Luke Bergmann. He didn’t care in the least whether the sun was shining or if it was storming. He didn’t notice.

  He was sitting on a bench in the park, looking at a small bag recently placed in his hand by a pusher. The bag contained relief. Possibly death, but above all, sweet relief. That was what he wanted.

  For sixteen years, he resisted the urge. Since he fled to Karlskrona he had not fallen down that hole even a single time. The urge had subsided, but it was always there.

  In his pocket was cigarette paper, Rizla brand. The pusher also gave him a box of matches. He had everything he needed.

  In his mind, he saw himself thirteen years ago when he smoked for the first time. It was the same day his mother died from a heroin overdose. He still remembered the feeling. Liberation. A warmth in his core that released all anxiety and angst and made the panic go away.

  After that, he stuck to marijuana. It was enough. The other guys in the gang took everything they could get their hands on; crack, ecstasy, heroin, alcohol. But Luke didn’t.

  He picked up the cigarette paper and rolled, twisting up the top. He refused the mouthpiece and didn’t want to have any tobacco mixed in. The sun began to spread its warmth. A group of young people in orange overalls working summer jobs were picking up garbage near the playground. Luke weighed the joint in his hand.

  The first night after Viktor’s and Agnes’ deaths, he hadn’t been able to sleep a wink. He lay there, tossing and turning. Sweating. He couldn’t tear his thoughts away. He spent the second night in a kind of purgatory between sleep and wakefulness. Dozing. Dreaming nightmares filled with death. The same theme every time. The first guy he killed in a gang fight on Troutman Street in Brooklyn twenty-four years ago—a sixteen-year-old black kid from the Black Stabbers—came running at him. Wide, staring, drugged eyes with a meat cleaver raised over his head. Luke watched as the sharp edge of the cleaver approached his face. He was paralyzed, waiting for the blade to split his forehead. He awoke in the moment of death, convinced it was all over. In his confusion, he jumped up o
ut of bed to run away and when he became fully conscious, he was panting, his pulse racing.

  Two young guys in overalls with black garbage bags in their hands approached the bench where Luke was sitting. He stuffed the joint into his pocket and got up. He decided to go home and smoke it there.

  On Tuesday, he called Åsa Nordin, his boss at Ekekullen, and told her what had happened and asked to take a few vacation days. Ekekullen was the group home in Rödeby for teenagers with a history of criminal activity and drug abuse where Luke just started working. Previously, he worked for eight years at a similar home in Listerby outside Ronneby. Amanda, his ex-wife, called the same day. She heard what had happened and was crushed. She also knew Viktor well and had met Agnes a few times. Luke hadn’t talked to anyone else in two days.

  It took him fifteen minutes to walk home to the little cabin on Björkholmen where he lived. It wasn’t big, and it had low ceilings. The shipyard workers who lived there in the late 1600s must have been pygmies. Luke, who was almost six feet six inches tall, hit his head on the beams more than once in the beginning, but he soon learned where he needed to duck. He fell in love with the little cabin the second he stepped into it for the first time four years earlier. It was as far as you could get from Williamsburg in Brooklyn where he grew up. His landlord had outfitted it with a jacuzzi, modern kitchen, woodburning stove and a fantastically beautiful little patio. And then there was the best feature: it included a private dock and rowboat just 50 yards from the front door. He discovered how peaceful it was to row and loved going out for a lap in the evenings when the weather was calm. Sometimes he took his fishing pole with him and brought home a pike or a perch to fix for dinner.

  Luke went into the bedroom, took out the joint and matches, and set them on the nightstand. He looked at the large black and white photo of himself in a wrestling pose from one of the competitions he was in. The photo was framed on the wall behind the bed. He was nineteen years old when the picture was taken and tried so hard to look tough. So ridiculous. He would take it down as soon as he found the energy.

  He was hungry. The joint would have to wait. He hadn’t eaten in two days. He went out into the kitchen, his thoughts spinning around in his head. He opened the freezer, took out a frozen dinner, and put it in the microwave.

  Luke and Viktor were close friends for ten years. They met six years after Luke came to Sweden, through their wives who worked together as teachers at a secondary school in Karlskrona.

  Both couples were childless, unlike most others their age, and they started to hang out together. Luke and Viktor took an immediate liking to each other. Although Luke had lived in Karlskrona for several years, he hadn’t got to know many people. In the beginning, he spent all his time learning Swedish and trying to acclimate to Swedish society. When they met in 2004, Luke was commuting 50 miles to Jämshög where he was in his last semester of his education as a social services assistant.

  He had never had a friend before who felt so easy and comfortable to talk to, despite that they seemed so diametrically opposite. Viktor was extroverted, social, and curious about other people. Luke was a lone wolf, quiet, and could be interpreted as sullen. Viktor had to fight to learn anything about Luke. Many conversations passed before Luke told him a secret only his ex was privy to before: his past included a life of drugs and crime in a gang in Williamsburg and a job as a guard for the Israeli mafia in New York, as well as the flight to London in 1997 where he fell madly in love in Amanda from Karlskrona who was working there as an au pair. The move to Karlskrona, his Swedish courses, adult education classes and then his education as a social services assistant in Jämshög. Viktor was fascinated by Luke’s personal journey and more than anything wanted to know about the therapy Luke had gone through. They spent an endless number of hours talking about the differences between various forms of therapy.

  2008 was a terrible year for Viktor. He and his wife Lotta tried to get pregnant for several years and they finally found out they were. They were going to have a baby. But at the same time, she started having vision trouble and terrible headaches. It turned out to be a brain tumor. She and their unborn child died only four months after the diagnosis. Viktor was crushed, went into a deep depression, and was only saved by meeting Therese a few months later. Therese was nine years younger, a vision of beauty, and Viktor fell deeply in love. After three months, Therese was pregnant and they got married half a year later, at the very end of Therese’s pregnancy. Then came the next blow. When Agnes was only six months old, Therese told Viktor that she didn’t have feelings for him anymore, that she realized she still loved her old boyfriend and was going to go back to him. She took Agnes and moved out. It was too much for Viktor. He went immediately to the emergency intake of the adult psychiatric center. This time, the depression was even deeper, and it took Viktor months of crisis therapy to return to himself in any recognizable form.

  Luke’s own marriage broke up a year before Viktor’s, after Amanda became tired of the fact that Luke was more involved in drug-addicted teenagers than in her. Besides, she wanted to have children, too, and when Luke refused, she gave him an ultimatum. He had to choose: children or a divorce. Luke had been clear from the start that he didn’t want children. He chose divorce. So when Viktor ended up in his second great crisis, Luke had plenty of spare time. He literally moved in with Viktor and helped him by making sure he got to have Agnes every other week. Luke was convinced that Agnes was the primary reason Viktor found any joy in life again. Viktor loved his little daughter more than anything else. Now they were both dead.

  While Luke ate the microwaved, tasteless chicken dinner, he thought about the two images burned into his mind: one of Viktor hanging from the bathroom door and the other of Agnes lying lifeless on her back on the turquoise rug. And he pondered the same thing he had been thinking since Monday, namely how could Viktor have taken not only his own life, but also that of Agnes? If he was capable of doing something so awful, how could Luke have missed the signals? Viktor was in an unusually good mood on Saturday evening. He talked about his trips to Russia and how he was heading to Kaliningrad again. He had something big on the way, the details of which he didn’t want to share. Was it only to hide his true plans? Why in the hell didn’t he say anything, if that was how he was feeling?

  Luke was furious when he thought about it. But he also knew he could never understand people who took their own lives. Who knows what’s going on in the head of a person who has decided to do something so irrevocable? Why had his friend hidden these destructive thoughts? Why didn’t he confide in Luke?

  Luke looked at the clock. It was nine in the morning. He went back to the bedroom and looked at the joint. He wondered if he should contact Viktor’s therapist the next day. He wanted to understand why.

  He decided he was going to do it, after he talked to the police. Someone from the precinct had called him and asked him to come on Thursday afternoon to read through his witness statement and to answer a few more questions about what happened. Luke hoped the therapist would be able to meet him after that. He had to do this, for Viktor’s sake. He took the joint and the baggie filled with green leaves. He went to the bathroom, emptied its contents into the toilet, and flushed. Back in the kitchen, he took out a large unopened bottle of Captain Morgan from the pantry, sat at the kitchen table, and started drinking. He could ensure a grand stupor without plunging into complete darkness.

  5.

  His balls were itchy again. That always happened at night, and it woke Thomas Svärd up every time. He rubbed the skin between his thumb and index finger and drew his fingernails over it in turns. It felt good. But after a while, he got worried that he would scratch the skin until it bled and then it would only be painful.

  He turned on the lamp, pulled down his boxers, and looked. He saw a faint redness and wondered if it was from the scratching or if he had a fungus. The stump of what was once his cock hung there, a little flap of skin a few centimeters long. He still felt sick when he looked, so h
e tried to ignore it.

  But he couldn’t. At times he managed to forget about it, but now thought that was just him in denial. Over the past few weeks reality sunk in. It was gone. He would never fuck again. Never again feel the pleasure of penetration. Never again have an orgasm.

  The shitty part of the misery was that the horniness remained, and just as strong as before. He especially felt it in the mornings. He often dreamed about fucking, reliving those moments with the children, and woke up horny. But now he couldn’t release it.

  It was insanely cruel. It would have been easier to be rid of the whole package, both his horniness and his cock. In fact, if he had got rid of the horniness he would have an easier time, even if it would have made life a little less worth living. But being rid of the instrument that gave him so many wonderful experiences was probably the worst punishment anyone could have subjected him to. The worst torture.

  When it bothered him the most, he felt like a lion in a cage. He had to move, and walked around restlessly, trying to force himself to think other thoughts. Uncomfortable thoughts. One thing that often worked was to think back to the bathtub incident from when he was twelve. A year or so earlier, he realized what happened when he pulled the skin at the end of it up and down. It was a complete surprise. He sat on the toilet and pulled on his wiener. It felt good. He started to pull more quickly and the pleasant feeling grew stronger. Suddenly, something white squirted out from the tip and landed on the rug. He must have made some sort of sound because his mom knocked loudly on the bathroom door, wondering what he was doing. He panicked and tried to wipe up the white stickiness with toilet paper.