Blood Cruise Read online

That damn dream won’t leave him alone. Anxiety is purring darkly, deeply in his chest.

  And Albin is missing.

  Mårten takes another swig. A few drops fall onto his stomach; annoyed, he wipes them off and stares at the glass. There’s a thin, straight crack in the plastic.

  What has got into Abbe?

  He shouldn’t be allowed to spend time alone with Lo.

  Mårten is sure they have talked about him. Lo obviously believes everything Linda tells her. And Abbe is so impressed with his cousin he will take anything she says on faith.

  It goes without saying Mårten won’t be allowed a chance to defend himself.

  All the things he has tried to keep under control have grown too big. Soon, he won’t be able to contain them. How long will he be able to hold on? When is it time to give up? He can trust no one but himself. Do Cilla and Linda really believe he doesn’t notice all the knowing looks they exchange? They have probably spent all night bitching about him. Complaining to the kids. It is not like he hasn’t noticed Albin pulling away more and more.

  He turns the glass to make the crack face away from him, takes another sip. He would do anything for Abbe, but they are trying to turn his son against him.

  Mårten finally allows the tears to come. He sounds like a wailing animal. He is so tired of trying and trying and it never being good enough.

  Everyone feels so sorry for Cilla for being in a wheelchair, but what about him? No one asks how it makes him feel. No one ever says, Hey, you’re a bloody good bloke, Mårten. Hanging in there. Staying, even though Cilla is no longer the woman you married.

  He is trapped. If he left her, it would unequivocally confirm what a bastard he is.

  Mårten glances furtively at the curtains, hanging there so still. He listens to the patter of rain behind them. The screams, if they were ever really there, have stopped.

  But he can hear something else on the other side of the wall: a door opening.

  He steps out into the corridor. The door to the next cabin is open a crack. He empties his glass and walks across.

  Lo is kneeling next to the bed, looking like she is searching for something under it. Mårten clears his throat; her body starts.

  ‘Where’s Abbe, then?’ he says when she peeks out.

  ‘Shit,’ Lo says, and tries to smile. ‘You scared me.’

  Maybe she can trick Abbe into thinking she is all grown up now, but she is still just a child: a child who was never given proper boundaries.

  ‘Where’s Abbe?’ he says again.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I think you do,’ Mårten says, and takes another step into the room.

  Lo’s eyes narrow. ‘Even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you. Maybe he doesn’t want to see you right now.’

  Mårten tosses the empty cup aside and walks over to her, grabs her by the shoulders and hoists her up off the floor.

  Her impertinent attitude falls apart almost immediately.

  ‘Why wouldn’t he want that?’ Mårten says, and starts shaking her. ‘What lies have you been telling him?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Lo says, and wriggles out of his grasp.

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Fine. So don’t.’

  He blocks her way when she tries to push past him. ‘I could tell something was going on when I came in here earlier tonight.’

  ‘Is there anything in particular you’re worried about him knowing?’ This time the disdain in her voice is unmistakeable.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he says, tears burning in the corners of his eyes. ‘I knew it.’

  He wipes his eyes so he can see Lo clearly again. She is staring at him, looking uneasy.

  ‘Aren’t I lucky to be surrounded by such flawless people? What would happen if I weren’t around, I wonder? Then who would you blame?’

  Lo shakes her head and pushes past him, pulls something off a hanger by the door and turns to him in the doorway. ‘No one has to lie to Abbe, you know,’ she says. ‘The truth is bad enough. You don’t even understand that we had to move to get away from you.’

  Rage wells up inside him, pushing out new tears. ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

  ‘Get help,’ she says.

  ‘Maybe I should have done what your dad did instead,’ he roars. ‘Just abandon my child.’

  ‘Yeah!’ Lo screams. ‘I would pick no dad at all over a dad like you every time!’

  She slams the door shut and he feels the sound in every part of his body. It’s as though she has shot him.

  Dan

  Dan hears a door slam shut nearby. The shouting has stopped. He is on all fours in Alexandra’s cabin, stroking the carpet. He can feel every fibre beneath his fingertips. Every once in a while he moves his bandaged hand to Alexandra’s pallid body and digs around in it, licks blood from his fingers. But there is nothing he wants in it any more. If anything, it sickens him. The blood no longer has any power, any life in it.

  Dan stops moving. His hand is itchy under the bandage, which is sodden with Alexandra’s fluids. He is breathing heavily, even though he no longer needs to. Just a reflex lingering in the muscles of his ribcage. He can feel Alexandra’s blood spreading through his body with each contraction of his heart. She is part of him now. They have become one, the way he was never able to become one with anyone before. This is what he was searching for but never found. It was so simple. The instincts were already in him, telling him to rip out her throat to silence her.

  It must have started with the man who bit him. He wanted blood as well, but this new power was too much for him. He was too weak, unable to handle it. He wasn’t like Dan.

  Dan rips the bandage from his hand, licks the crusts from his knuckles. The cuts from the man’s teeth have healed. Nothing is left but smooth pink bumps. He smiles.

  He is invincible. Maybe immortal.

  He is more than human now. He is something better.

  Dan studies the raindrops on the window. They are so beautiful he has to walk over for a closer look. He reaches out to touch the glass. Cold against his fingertips. He puts an ear to the window, listens to the rhythmical patter, but he can also refocus his ears, listen to each individual drop, in the same way that he can see them trickle along separate courses down the glass. Even the vibrations of the ship, which he used to hate so intensely, are singing through him now, as if they have become one.

  He turns around, immensely curious to find out what his new senses can do. A couple of his old teeth crunch under the soles of his shoes when he walks towards the door, ground deeper into the blood-soaked carpet.

  Dan leaves the cabin, blinking in the sharp light. The smells. The sounds. The sixth-deck hallway is one of the Charisma’s longest. The air is heavy with the scents of all the people who have passed by; his senses get mixed up so that he can almost see the smells billowing like sheets of vapour in the air. And in one of them, there is a hint of someone young. A girl. She was here just a moment ago.

  He follows her trail. New smells waft from the carpet with each step he takes. He can hear a man sobbing in one of the cabins. Music behind a closed door further down. An old person’s laughter turning into a coughing fit. So many lives.

  A couple of suits appear around the corner. They give Dan funny looks when they pass. He is tempted to lunge at them, but he can wait. Their blood is too stagnant, thick and viscous from dehydration. He continues down the hallway, turning the same corner they came from.

  His right hand is itching and burning. He stares at it. The scars are almost completely gone.

  A loud gaggle of teenagers pass him on the stairs. They smell of fresh air and cigarette smoke. Just like with the drops of rain on the window, he can tell them apart if he focuses. He can feel what they have drunk. What they have eaten. They smell so different. So many different things are going on inside them: nervousness, joy, horniness. The feelings permeate their muscles, ooze out of their pores, cover their skin. The smells remind him of vinegar, soap, wet moss, honey, yeast.


  He reaches deck seven and is greeted by fresh smells of sex and spilt beer somewhere in the hallways behind him. The tax-free shop is dark and quiet. The synthetic perfume scents seep through the glass, stinging his nostrils, and he loses the young girl’s trail. He curses loudly. The arcade game screens flash and he pauses for a minute in the corridor, watching them, hypnotised by the colours.

  A middle-aged couple walk past. She is shouting something in Finnish, apparently furious. The man is calm and unperturbed on the surface, but his blood is pumping harder than hers.

  A woman in a wheelchair is parked by the information desk. Mika is on the phone, putting on important airs. Dan can feel the woman’s fear all the way to where he is. And he understands why the man in the karaoke bar singled him out. It had nothing to do with him being Dan Appelgren. It was his hatred, his frustration, the coke making his veins froth. The smell of him must have been irresistible.

  So many feelings everywhere, and Dan wants them. Wants to devour them, make them his. This hunger he has, it can never be satisfied. He feels bottomless. And yet he is more content than he has ever been.

  Dan has realised where he is going. Ahead of him, the hallway ends in the double doors leading to the karaoke bar.

  The Baltic Charisma

  The man at the information desk is exceedingly tired of the woman in the wheelchair. He tells her again that he has alerted the on-board security officers, that CCTV cameras are being used to look for them. ‘That really is all we can do,’ he says.

  *

  Henke and Pär are searching the karaoke bar, but the children they are looking for aren’t there. But Dan Appelgren is. He is standing in a dark nook by one of the windows. He closes his eyes. Beer is flowing out of the taps at the bar. Glasses are clinking against one another. The faint, constant rocking of the floor. The smell of perfume and breath and ammonia and sweat, salt, leather, wine, inflamed tissue. Oil and powder and sweet milk. Dan is intoxicated by the sensations, by the incomprehensible thing that has happened to him.

  *

  One of the lifts stops on the seventh floor. The boy who is not a boy cautiously peeks out before stepping off. He doesn’t want to be seen. Doesn’t want anyone asking questions about what a child is doing out in the hallways on his own. But he has mastered the art of making himself invisible, and it helps that most of the people still awake are drunk.

  Everything about the ship disgusts him: the synthetic smells; the artificial music; the imitation wood and leather and marble. He muses that the only real thing on board is the gluttony: the greed, the insatiability. Humans are destroying the planet, sucking it dry like parasites. They are killing themselves and each other in a hundred different ways, for a thousand pathetic reasons. Yet they would call him a monster, if they knew. If they believed.

  He will make them believe. It has already begun. Expectation makes his face look even more childish. He steps out into the hallway, noting the doors to the karaoke bar before letting his eyes rove on. They linger on the small, glass-walled room with rows of benches. People who haven’t reserved a cabin are sleeping there. He sneaks in and lies down under one of the benches. A perfect hiding place. If someone were to discover him, he can always tell them he was playing hide and seek with a friend and fell asleep. He listens to a few muffled snores, wonders if his mother has been back to their cabin yet. If she has figured it out.

  *

  The dark-haired woman is looking for him on deck two. She can smell the blood and death. She has figured it out, been forced to realise that nothing bad has happened to her son. Quite the opposite. He has crossed every boundary. She is afraid of what this could lead to, of the fury of the Old Ones. She has to avert this disaster. She can feel it coming in every part of her body. It is everywhere on board. All these people, still so oblivious … She is responsible for them now. She has to save them, and by so doing, herself and her son. The Old Ones will mete out terrible punishment if she doesn’t. And she will no longer be able to protect him.

  *

  Olli the lorry driver is sprawled on the floor of one of the cabins she passes. He is burning with pain from head to toe. He is locked inside the pain. Only blood can quench his thirst.

  Albin

  Albin is sitting pressed against the wall under the steel staircase leading up to the observation platform. The wind can’t get to him here, but the air is full of tiny droplets. His hoodie is damp, and even though he has tugged his sleeves down over his hands, they are speckled with red spots from the cold. He has pulled up his hood as well, dragging the drawstrings so tight only his face is peeping out.

  Albin ponders how long he can stand to stay here. Where he might go next.

  He hopes they are worried. He hopes they think he is dead. He hopes they are sorry.

  ‘Good thing it’s so warm outside.’

  He looks up.

  ‘Can I sit down or what?’

  Lo holds out a black jumper. Albin has never been so happy to see anyone. In his heart of hearts he was hoping Lo would figure out he’d gone back here. He just nods.

  ‘You look like that guy in South Park,’ she says, and giggles.

  She quickly glances around before crouching down and crawling in next to him. Albin pulls the jumper on over his hoodie. It smells strongly of Lo’s perfume, but is baggy enough on him that you can’t tell it is a girl’s jumper.

  Lo conjures another mini-bottle of booze from the sleeve of her jacket. ‘Still don’t want any?’ she says, and unscrews the top. ‘It’s the last one.’

  ‘No.’

  Lo leans back against the wall, takes a sip and shakes her head with a disgusted look on her face. Her tongue very nearly reaches her chin.

  ‘Good thing that’s delicious,’ Albin says.

  She giggles, wipes her mouth.

  They sit in silence, watching people moving about the sun deck. A man is walking his little furball of a dog, talking to it in a baby voice. Albin is surprised Lo doesn’t have anything mean to say about him.

  ‘Your dad came into the cabin when I was there just now,’ she says instead.

  It feels like a cannonball is sinking into his stomach in slow motion. Lo hesitates. She pushes away a strand of hair that has come loose from her ponytail and blown into her eyes.

  ‘Was he weird?’ Albin asks. ‘The way he gets?’ It’s so strange talking about it openly.

  ‘I think so,’ she says. ‘Well, yeah, I suppose he was. I think he could sense something had happened. But he didn’t know. So you don’t have let on if he asks. I mean, if you don’t want to. It’s all the same to me.’

  Albin looks at her. He thinks about his dad. About his mum and Linda. It is too late for lies now. Having said it once makes it impossible to keep pretending. His mum will never be able to say that his dad is tired again without knowing what Albin knows.

  Whatever happens, something has to change now.

  The dark sky is visible through the gaps between the steps. He squints against the drizzle.

  ‘Is it true you want to be an actress when you grow up?’

  Lo groans. ‘Did Mum tell you that? I love how good she is at keeping her mouth shut.’

  ‘So it’s true?’

  ‘Yes. But I know what it sounds like when she says it. Like I’m being a complete child for thinking it can happen. Just because she never had the guts to do anything with her life.’

  ‘Why do you want that?’ he says. ‘I mean, to be an actress?’

  ‘Why not?’

  Albin shrugs. It would be his worst nightmare to be on stage or in front of a camera, with lots of people watching, registering his every move.

  ‘Is it because you want to be famous?’

  Lo takes another sip. ‘No. It just seems great not to have to be yourself all the time.’

  She looks at him solemnly and he nods, but he doesn’t understand why Lo would want to be someone else, because there is no one else like her.

  ‘Either way, I’m not going to be li
ke my mum,’ Lo says after a while. ‘She is such a fucking coward. She’s, like, afraid to live. At least for real. She just exists. Know what I mean?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘It’s like she never does anything. Things happen, obviously, but she never makes them happen. I don’t even think she’s ever been in love properly, she’s more like, Oh well, what do you know, someone likes me so I guess we’d better go out, and then after a while he dumps her and she’s just like, Oh well, what do you know, and carries on existing.’

  Lo looks utterly bizarre when she’s imitating Linda. She juts her chin out to make an underbite and her eyes go completely flat. Albin isn’t sure if he is allowed to giggle, but he also isn’t sure he can stop himself.

  ‘I assume it was the same when she had me,’ Lo says. ‘She was, like, Oh well, what do you know, my belly seems to be getting big, maybe there’s a baby in there, oh well, I’ll just keep on existing then. I am so never ever going to be like her. I might as well kill myself. She’s not really living, you know. She doesn’t even seem to have feelings.’ Lo takes another sip and moves closer to him, so their upper arms touch. ‘If it weren’t for Soran, I’d run away to Los Angeles.’

  She is so determined, he believes her. Lo would be able to make it all the way to the USA on her own and not be afraid.

  ‘Can’t you bring me with you if you go?’ he says. ‘I don’t want to stay here either.’

  Not without you. But of course he can’t say that out loud.

  ‘All right,’ Lo says.

  ‘But are you sure that’s where you want to go? I hear it’s not at all as cold there.’

  Lo laughs. ‘I know. What a shame.’

  ‘Yep. Darkness and cold is my number one advice.’

  ‘Imagine if we went and did it,’ she says. ‘Imagine if we just left, for real. I wonder what Mum would say?’

  ‘Oh well, what do you know,’ Albin says, and Lo bursts out laughing.

  Dan

  Dan is still standing by the windows in the karaoke bar. No one has spotted him yet, not even Pär and Henke, who were in here, clearly looking for someone. Maybe it was him they were after. Maybe Alexandra’s friend came back to their cabin, discovered the body. Maybe they have figured out he did it, seen CCTV footage of him leaving her cabin just a short while ago. The thought doesn’t make him scared in the slightest, just excited. He is trying to keep calm, but his body doesn’t want to stand still. Every muscle is humming with energy.