Harbor by John Lindqvist (classic novels for teens txt) 📕

pushed himself up, with the blanket around his shoulders like a coat, and walked over to the window.

He could see them down on the rocks like dark shapes. Henrik was in the saddle and Björn on the platform. Anders undid the window latch and pushed it open. Henrik cut the engine, down to a muted chugging.

‘What do you want?’ asked Anders.

‘We may be dead,’ said Henrik. ‘But we will be right by—’

‘Stuff all that. What do you want?’

‘We’d like to smash some teeth—every single one in your head actually—because you’re bothering us. You have to stop bothering us. If I were you I wouldn’t bother. Really.’

‘Why?’

‘Because something bad could happen to someone you care about. Or put it this way…’ Henrik went on with his manic paraphrasing, but Anders was no longer listening.

He had turned away from the window and was looking for the torch. Björn had something in his arms, and it if was what Anders thought it was…

The torch was in the drawer where all the rubbish was kept. Hegrabbed it and switched it on, hurled himself at the window and directed the beam at Björn as Henrik droned on with esoteric references to ‘Girlfriend in a Coma’ and how there were times when he could have murdered, on and on.

The light fell on Björn. He was sitting cross-legged on the platform, and in his arms he was holding the body of a child dressed in a red snowsuit. The reflector strip along the side glowed white and it was Maja’s snowsuit, the one she had been wearing that last day.

Anders may have spent hours doing nothing but thinking, but now every thought was swept away in a second, and there was only action. He ran through the kitchen into the living room as the moped engine behind him began to race once again.

The door to the veranda was stuck and he lost a couple of valuable seconds when it refused to open. He hurled himself at it shoulder first and stumbled out on to the veranda just as he saw the lights of the moped bouncing across the rocks, on its way down to the sea.

Now I’ve got you, you bastards. You’ve got nowhere to go.

If he had stopped to reflect for a moment he might perhaps have realised that Henrik and Björn weren’t stupid enough to think that he would simply stand and watch as they rode off with his daughter. That the fact they were heading for the sea was rather strange.

But he didn’t stop to reflect. He had seen that Björn had Maja in his arms, he had heard Henrik threaten to harm her and he was acting in accordance with those two facts. With only his socks on his feet he took the veranda steps in two leaps and saw that Henrik and Björn were down by the shoreline.

Anders’ lips curled up in a predatory grin. They had nowhere else to go. Even if they were ghosts, the moped was an ordinary moped and a moped cannot travel across water. It didn’t occur to him that he had met them before, that he had no weapons to use against them now either. The only thought in his head was: I’ve got you now, and the knowledge in his body, the wormwood’s knowledge, that they couldn’t harm him either.

He was only five metres behind them when they rode out on to the water. Anders’ body continued moving forward of its own volition until he fell over on the shoreline. The moped moved across the surface of the water past the jetty, and Henrik waved goodbye to him. Anders was left standing on the shore with clenched fists and the blood rushing through his head.

That’s impossible! They can’t do that!

‘Stop, you bastards! Stop!’

Henrik waved his fingers over his shoulder again, and in a blind fury Anders raced out into the water. Which was not water. He had travelled a couple of metres before he realised he was standing on ice. For a moment he stopped dead in sheer physical amazement. He was still holding the torch, and shone it around him, ahead of him.

The sea had not frozen yet, but behind Henrik and Björn stretched a causeway of ice just wide enough for the moped to run along, a bridge of frozen water extending from the point where they had ridden into the water and set off.

Anders ran.

Under different circumstances he would have been astonished at the fact that he was running past his jetty with little waves lapping on either side of him, but the only thing he could see was the straight line between his body and Maja’s, the distance he had to cover before he had her in his arms.

He ran with long strides and with every step his wet socks froze on to the ice a fraction before they were pulled free, which give him an excellent grip, and he was gaining on them, he was gaining on them. Before he set off on the water they had been twenty metres ahead of him. Now the distance was shrinking a little with every step he took. The moped was not travelling fast, and he would be able to catch up with it.

And then?

He wasn’t even thinking about that.

The moon was high in the sky, creating a silvery path that fell diagonally across the causeway of ice. The beam of the lighthouse onGåvasten was flashing directly towards him. That was where they were heading, but they weren’t going to get there. He would take them. Somehow he would take them.

He had run approximately three hundred metres from the shore. He could no longer feel his feet, they were nothing but a pair of frozen lumps moving him forward. He was so close to the moped that he could see individual strands of Henrik’s hair in the moonlight, and he was trying to urge his body to make one final spurt when something fell from the platform.

Anders slipped, stumbled, fell to his knees