The Crooked Letter (2 page)

‘Me? Are you serious?’ Hadrian faced Seth’s accusing stare. He could feel his cheeks reddening.

‘You’re the one who gets us into this shit. You never think. You just stumble from one disaster to the next.’

‘I wouldn’t call El a disaster,’ said Seth.

‘She will be, the way you’re handling it.’

‘And you could do better, I suppose?’

‘If you’d given me the chance!’

‘I’m right here, you know. Jesus!’ Ellis pushed them back into the gap between the cars. Seth’s hate-filled stare didn’t leave Hadrian’s as the clanking, roaring sound enclosed them.

‘At least I get something done.’ Seth had to shout to be heard. ‘If I hadn’t let you tag along, you’d still be sitting at home on your arse, jerking off over some deep and meaningful crap.’

‘You
let
me tag along?’ Hadrian pushed aside the finger stabbing at his chest. Although he and his brother were the same height, he felt as though Seth was bearing down on him, trying to intimidate him into submission. ‘I’m always cleaning up after you, picking up your pieces. You wouldn’t have lasted a week out here without me.’

‘And you’re handling things so beautifully, Hadrian. When I saw you with her —’

‘What? You stopped to ask yourself what she was doing with me, if what you have is so bloody good?’

‘Fuck you, brother.’ Seth shoved him. ‘She’s only with us at all because of me.’

‘Don’t “brother” me.’ Hadrian shoved back, ignoring Ellis’s attempts to keep them separated. ‘There’s nothing you can give her that I can’t!’

‘She saw me first!’

‘Right!’ Ellis backed out of the way, and the two brothers came together, startled. She raised her hands, absolving herself. ‘That’s it. I’ve had enough. You can beat each other senseless and spend the rest of your holidays in hospital for all I care.’

She turned away and crossed back into the carriage they had left. Hadrian gaped after her, startled out of his anger. He felt Seth against him, an exact mirror image of surprise and hurt.

‘Ellie, wait!’

‘Come back!’

Both of them went to follow her at the same time.

‘Stanna!’

The voice came from behind them, over the roaring of the train. Hadrian turned and grabbed his brother’s arm. Standing with them in the gap between the carriages was the elderly Swede Seth had confronted in Prague: the same pale skin, and hair so translucent it almost wasn’t there; the same air of formality, as though on his way to the opera. His white gloves looked totally out of place in the noisy, smelly darkness.

‘Who are you?’ asked Hadrian, his sense of unreality deepening. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Tiden har kommit, Seth och Hadrian Castillo.’

‘Stay out of this,’ said Seth. The use of their names made Hadrian’s flesh creep. How did he know them? How long had he been following them? ‘It’s none of your business.’

The Swede’s grey eyes regarded them coolly. ‘Tiden har kommit.’

‘You can say that as often as you like but I’m still not going to understand it.’

‘Your time,’ said the man in heavily accented English, ‘has come.’

The door behind them opened, and Ellis burst back out of the carriage.

‘Oh, my god,’ she said, seeing the man confronting them.

‘Håll dem.’ Three people had crowded after Ellis into the swaying space between the carriages. One grabbed Hadrian’s arms from behind him and wrenched them so he couldn’t move. When he tried to break free, it felt as though his shoulders were being torn apart. Seth cried out in pain as he was similarly restrained. Ellis kicked back and managed to slip away. With a cry, she pushed past the Swede and into the next carriage.

‘Stopp henne! Genast!’ The Swede’s voice cut through the train’s thundering with a commanding edge. Ellis’s assailant, a severe-looking woman in a crisp grey business outfit, went in immediate pursuit.

‘What is this?’ gasped Seth, bent almost double by the man who held him — well dressed, expressionless. ‘Who are you people?’

The Swede ignored him. He gestured, and Seth was forced to his knees. The person holding Hadrian grunted and Hadrian was driven down too.

‘We haven’t done anything wrong!’ Hadrian gasped.

‘Nej.’ The Swede shook his head and slid a knife from beneath his coat. The twenty centimetre blade was lethally straight, glistening in the dim light. The train jerked on its tracks, and the man steadied himself against Hadrian’s captor with his empty hand.

Hadrian was unable to wrench his eyes away from the tip of the blade, bobbing just centimetres from his chin. It was mesmerisingly sharp.

‘Sluta det nu,’ said the Swede. A look that might have been regret passed across his marble features. ‘Sluta det nu.’

‘Don’t,’ breathed Seth, then, louder: ‘Don’t you touch him!’

The blade swung aside. Hadrian caught a glimpse of the Swede’s thumb and hand as it went, gripping the black pommel tight. He wasn’t wearing gloves. He had no fingernails.

‘Du, då,’ the Swede told Seth.

The blade pulled back.

‘Det gör ingen skillnad till Yod!’

On the final syllable, the Swede buried the dagger in Seth’s chest, right up to the pommel. Seth’s eyes widened. A noise came from his throat that didn’t sound human. His back arched.

Hadrian howled wordlessly, filled with primal horror. The old man pulled the knife out of his brother’s chest and a torrent of blood poured from the wound, splashing all of them. Hadrian had never seen so much blood before. His whole vision seemed to turn red. He twisted with desperate strength in the grasp of his captor and almost pulled free. One arm flailed at the Swede, who batted it away as one would a child. Hands grappled with him, reeled him in, contained him. He kicked, stamped, writhed, lunged, to no avail.

Beside him, Seth sagged and fell limply into the spreading pool of his own blood. One hand landed palm down and clutched at the floor, as though trying to hang on.

‘No, no, no.’ Ellis sobbed in horror from the doorway of the fourth carriage, where she was firmly held by her pursuer. Her face twisted into a mask of anguish. ‘Seth, no!’

The Swede, slick with gore, turned to Hadrian. Hadrian twisted to one side, then the other. A hand went around his throat, pulling him back, exposing his belly. Ellis screamed. He tried to call her name, but his windpipe was closed tight. He couldn’t make a sound, couldn’t breathe. The moment crystallised around him. The train was rocking on its bogies. He could
feel
Seth dying on the floor beside him, life’s blood ebbing through the cracks. There was a window leading into the car behind them. Light shone through from another world. He imagined the other passengers just metres away, their heads down, consumed by whatever mundane thoughts sustained them on their journey home.

There would be no going home for Seth and Hadrian. The Swede nodded and turned away, a look of satisfaction on his face. Something tore in Hadrian, as though his life had been ripped in two. Had he been stabbed too? He wondered if he was dying at that very moment, blissfully unaware of his life’s essence gouting from his suddenly numb body.

Seth!

The last thing he saw, as darkness fell, was Ellis being dragged away from him and his twin brother, and the doors of the carriage closing between them.

* * * *

PART ONE

ARETIA

‘The world as we see it is not the world in its

entirety. If we cover our eyes with our hand, the

world does not disappear. Similarly, the world

does not end at the horizon, at the boundaries

of our country, at the outer fringes of family

and acquaintances, at death.

It continues where we do not.’

THE BOOK OF TOWERS,
FRAGMENT 97

adrian woke with a moan from the nightmare, flailing at the sheets. They felt like choking hands around his throat.

It took him a moment to clear the images from his mind and for reality to assert itself. His surroundings first. He was lying in a bed that wasn’t his, a high, sturdy affair with metal bars surrounded by a white curtain suspended from the ceiling on rails. The air smelled faintly of disinfectant.

A hospital,
he thought.
I’m in a hospital. Why?

Memories came next. He had been on holiday in Europe, visiting as many cities as he and Seth could fit into three months. Winter had been spreading across the land, bringing darkness and cold as he had never experienced before. The northern latitudes were as far from his antipodean world as the surface of the moon.

They had missed the film festival in Sweden, but there had been compensations. The royal palace, Riddarholmskyrkan, Grönalund and a suite they’d saved up for, instead of the usual cheap digs. A fellow traveller called Ellis ...

Emotions were the last to arrive, and they came in a flood. Surprise and anger accompanied his recollections of the confrontation with Seth, then fear as he had chased his brother through the streets of Stockholm. He had despaired while looking for Seth in the subway, then experienced genuine terror for the first time in his life as the Swede had confronted them with the knife.

And now grief, confusion, pain, futility ...

He curled up and wept. For a long while, he was incapable of anything else. It wasn’t a dream. His brother had been murdered, or at least grievously injured, and now he was in hospital. Maybe all three of them were.

He checked himself between sobs, looking for injuries. His throat was tender to the touch, and his vocal cords burned. There was a sharp, stinging pain in his wrist, but that faded the more awake he became.

‘Crazy weather.’

Hadrian froze at the voice from beyond the curtain, although it wasn’t clear whether the man had spoken to him or someone else. He didn’t want anyone to hear him blubbering.

‘I haven’t seen a storm that bad since I was a kid,’ responded a second voice, older than the first. ‘That’s what I’d normally say, but I’ve really
never
seen anything like this.’

‘Did you catch the forecast?’ The first speaker had an American accent that jarred against the second’s liquid Scandinavian.

‘Television’s out. Radio, too. Power’s been off most of today. The paramedics were talking about more cuts.’

‘Lucky the hospital has its own generator.’

‘It went off earlier,’ said a third male voice. ‘You were asleep.’

‘Really? Well, hell. Glad I missed that.’

‘Personally, I blame global warming.’

Footsteps sounded across the room.

‘Any word on lunch?’ asked one of the patients.

‘It’ll be late, boys, like breakfast,’ came a new male voice, high pitched with a faintly British accent. ‘Don’t worry. We’re all suffering.’

A shadow reached up to part the curtain. Hadrian wiped his eyes as the person casting it stepped into sight.

‘You’re awake.’ The statement came from a slight, finely featured man dressed in a light blue theatre uniform. His tan hair was parted neatly to one side. ‘We’ve been wondering when you’d come to.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Hadrian apologised for no good reason. ‘How long have I been asleep?’

‘It’s hard to tell. You’ve been unconscious ever since you arrived here.’

Hadrian looked at his watch. Its LCD face was blank. He was naked under the sheet apart from a pair of boxer shorts. There was no sign of his bloodstained clothes on the bed or on the chair beside it. The bedside cupboard was shut.

‘Where am I? Which hospital?’ The orderly’s nametag said BECHARD. He hadn’t moved except to step inside the curtain and let it fall behind him.

‘Don’t worry. You’re in good hands.’

‘Am I hurt?’

‘You haven’t been harmed at all. That’s good, isn’t it?’

Another shadow appeared behind the orderly, darker and larger. A throat cleared.

‘There’s someone here to talk to you.’ The orderly smiled, revealing white, perfectly even teeth.

‘Who?’

‘My name is Detective Volker Lascowicz.’

Hadrian was struck by the man’s physicality as soon as he stepped into the space around his bed. He was heavyset and bald, and imposingly tall. His eyes were deep-set and took Hadrian in with a single sweep. He wore a bone-coloured overcoat and no tie. Grey hair curled under his throat over the open collar of a white shirt.

The orderly nodded deferentially and left them alone.

‘I can appreciate that this is a difficult time for you, Hadrian,’ said the detective, ‘but there are some questions I need to ask. Do you mind?’

A wave of indecision swept through him. He was so far out of his depth that he didn’t know what to do. His brother had been murdered before his eyes.

He was in hospital. A policeman wanted to interview him.

‘I want to know what’s going on,’ he said, fighting a second wave of tears. ‘I want to call my parents.’ He stopped, unable to go on. ‘
I
want to go home! I want everything to go back the way it used to be!
That primal naivety of his emotions was dismaying.