Free Siren Song: A Different Scandinavian Crime Novel by Erik Boman Page B

distract himself, and does his best to rack his brain for an answer.
    And just like that, the memory returns.
    It had not been an occurrence or a space of time, but an interest. In school, his need to escape the endless hours, the concrete and the clockwork regularity had turned him inwards, seeking for a way to vent himself. He had found it in the magic of shapes and colours.
    “Art,” he says.
    “Are you sure?”
    “Absolutely.” He has no memories of the experience beyond his certainty. A glance at the school and its clock cements the idea. He had loved art. Years of routines and repetition had pressed down on him until, one glorious day in his early teens, his psyche had found an emergency exit in pictures and drawings.
    “What kind?” Miriam asks. “Clay, plaster, crayons?”
    “I’m a painter.” John had meant to say ‘artist’, but the other word had sprung to his mind, and he knew it was true. Before finding himself here, at some other point in time, he had been painting. Hues and tints calmed him and revealed secrets. Now that he knows the answer to Miriam’s question, the urge to paint hovers there again, like a trapdoor beyond his reach.
    “Perfect.” Miriam licks her lips, a nervous tic that John finds both oddly familiar and strangely attractive. “I knew the penny would finally drop through your creative cranium.” Again, she looks over her shoulder.
    John looks at the tunnel from where they have come. No sign of anyone else, no sounds apart from a faint wind, but the sense of a closing presence is strong. He is reminded of the sticky, prickling heat that heralds thunderstorms, only here the air is cold and clings to him, stripping him of warmth.
    “I want to get out of here.” Shivering hard, John looks around one last time in hope of another door, but finds nothing. “Looks like the school is the only way onward.”
    “It is,” she says, but she does not move. “That’s your first journey. Past the thresholds, across the breaking point. The moment when you learned how to breathe. But the reason you’re here also wants you to stay. It is banking on your cowardice delaying you until it catches up.”
    John tries to focus. He wonders if he, in fact, is somewhere else, tied to a hospital bed in the real world or lying unconscious in a ditch, dreaming while those around him watch his comatose body. Perhaps his body is trembling with a fever that is projecting these horrific images on the screen of his mind.
    Yet he knows the truth does not matter. He might be lost in a fantasy, but he is present and aware. And at risk.
    “What’s at the top?” he asks. “A way out?”
    “It’s a path back to the captain’s seat,” she says. “A road to the rickety director’s chair.” She taps her head with her finger.
    “You mean back to me?” he asks.
    She nods.
    “That’s crazy. I’m here.”
    “Only bits and pieces of you. The rest is on the move, and it’s got a plan. And that’s a problem, John. A very big problem.”
    He is about to tell her to make sense when he hears a distant sound, like a long, frustrated exhalation. “Did you hear that?”
    “Unless it’s your subconscious telling you to hurry up,” Miriam says, “I don’t want to know.” She tugs at his sleeve. “Please, open the door.”
    “Hush.” He gazes at the school, up at the ceiling, and back down the tunnel. Only darkness. “I swear I heard a sound,” he says. “A kind of whoosh .”
    He turns around and takes a step back.
    Emerging from the tunnel are tendrils of dirty smoke, thin translucent strips that creep rather than drift over the ground. The smoke stops, as if hesitating, and spreads out, leaving patches of frost on the stone underneath.
    Transfixed, John watches the smoke slither towards him, a carpet of cold and filthy fog, almost invisible against the dark rock. A thin wisp rises, squirming and writhing. Sniffing, John thinks. Tasting the air. Searching.
    “What the hell is this?” he