The silence in the lab was not one of peace, but of interrupted chaos. Beakers sat with half-evaporated, iridescent liquids. A schematic on a large lightboard showed a device of terrifying complexity, parts of it angrily scratched out. On the main workbench, a polished metal sphere, humming at a frequency just at the edge of human hearing, pulsed with a soft, malevolent blue light. It was the heart of the room, and it was waiting. Its creator, Alvar Engberg, was gone. Not on a trip, not at the pub. Vanished. The only clues were a single, shattered vial that smelled of ozone and burnt almonds, and a single drop of a strange, mercury-like substance that refused to be wiped away. The local police took one look, knew it was beyond them, and made the call. It was a job for Inspector Mats Lundström.
* * * * * * * * * * *
The Volvo crunched to a halt on the gravel path, its solid Swedish engineering a stark contrast to the spindly, modern architecture of Alvar Engberg’s lakeside home and laboratory. Inspector Mats Lundström heaved himself out of the driver’ seat, his knees protesting with a familiar ache. He was a man in his mid-fifties, built like a worn-out oak tree, solid, but showing the weather of a long life. His face was a roadmap of lines earned from squinting at too many crime scenes and too few happy memories.
His partner, young Constable Eva Thörnblad, was already out, buzzing with an energy that made Lundström feel tired.
“Quite the place,” she said, nodding at the angular building of glass and steel. “Must have cost a fortune.”
“Engberg held over two dozen patents,” Lundström grunted, pulling his worn tweed coat tighter against the chill. “Mostly for things no one knew they needed. Self-heating shoelaces, a fridge that told you when you were out of milk… eccentric, they called him. A polite word for ‘difficult’.” He missed his son, David. A text about some obscure point of English history he was studying at Cambridge had been the only bright spot in his morning.
They were met at the door by Engberg’s assistant, a pale, nervous man in his thirties named Filip. “He’s never missed a day,” Filip stammered, wringing his hands. “Not once. He was working on the project… the big one. He was so close.”
“The big one?” Lundström asked, his tone deliberately flat.
“The Vortex. That’s what he called it. A… a localised atmospheric condenser. He said it could end droughts.” Filip led them into the lab. The air was thick with the smell of chemicals and something else, something electric.
Lundström’s eyes swept the room, taking in the controlled pandemonium. They settled on the humming sphere. “And that?”
“The core,” Filip whispered, as if afraid it might hear. “It’s active. I don’t know how to turn it off.”
As Thörnblad began taking pictures, Lundström’s gaze fell to the floor near the main workbench. A small, dark puddle gleamed, not like water, but like liquid metal. He crouched, his joints cracking a protest. He prodded it with a pen. It was dense, viscous. He tried to smear it, but it simply recoiled, reforming into its perfect droplet shape.
“Don’t touch that,” a sharp voice said from the doorway. A woman stood there, her face a mask of aristocratic annoyance. Lena Björkman, Engberg’s neighbour and, by her own account, his most beleaguered one. “That man’s experiments are a menace. Last month, it was a sonic bird-deterrent that shattered my greenhouse windows. The month before, a cloud of pink, sticky foam descended on my garden party.”
“You had a disagreement with Mr. Engberg?” Lundström asked, rising slowly.
“Constantly. I was suing him. This,” she waved a hand around the lab, “is an environmental hazard. I told him I’d have this place shut down.”
Lundström made a non-committal sound. A motive, clear and simple. Almost too simple.
The investigation plodded on. Engberg’s bank records showed no unusual activity. His computer was a maze of encrypted files. There were no signs of a struggle, no forced entry. It was as if the man had simply dissolved into the air.
Later that afternoon, Lundström stood by the lake, staring at the dark, placid water. Thörnblad joined him. “Filip’s alibi checks out. He was at a supplier in Kalmar all day. Lena Björkman was at a council meeting, confirmed by a dozen witnesses.”
“So, our two most likely suspects are in the clear,” Lundström mused. “Convenient.” He looked back at the lab. “He’s here. I can feel it. Either he’s in there, or the answer is.”
The break came from an unexpected source. The drop. The strange, mercury-like substance had been bagged and tagged, but the lab techs were baffled. “It’s not any known elemental metal,” one of them told Lundström over the phone. “It’s… complex. Organic, almost, but with a metallic structure. And it’s emitting a low-level radio frequency.”
“A frequency? To what?”
“We don’t know. But it’s constant.”
An idea, slow and deliberate, began to form in Lundström’s mind. He drove back to the lab, Thörnblad in the passenger seat. The evening was drawing in, and the lab, with its single lit window, looked like a lantern in the gathering gloom.
Inside, Filip was nervously monitoring the humming sphere. “The power draw is increasing,” he said, his voice tight with fear. “I don’t know what will happen.”
“Inspector,” Thörnblad said, holding up her phone. “I’ve been going through Engberg’s public lectures. He gave a talk last year on… get this… quantum-locked biological preservation.”
Lundström looked from Thörnblad’s excited face, to Filip’s terrified one, to the pulsating sphere. His eyes then dropped to the floor, to the spot where the strange drop had been collected. A clean patch, except… was there a faint shimmer?
He walked over, crouching again with a grunt. He wasn’t looking at the floor, but just above it. The air seemed to waver, like heat haze off a summer road.
“Filip,” Lundström said, his voice dangerously calm. “Engberg’s Vortex. It wasn’t for water, was it? A ‘localised atmospheric condenser’… that’s a lie.”
Filip’s face went ashen.
“It’s a field generator,” Lundström continued, rising and pointing a thick finger at the shimmer in the air. “It doesn’t condense the atmosphere. It twists it. It alters states. He wasn’t trying to make it rain. He was trying to move things. Or make things… intangible.”
A deafening crackle filled the room. The sphere’s hum rose to a piercing whine. The shimmer in the air intensified, solidifying into a shimmering, vertical oval. Through it, they could see a distorted version of the lab and the faint, terrified outline of a man, his mouth open in a silent scream. Alvar Engberg.
“He’s phased!” Filip screamed over the noise. “The initial test went wrong. It trapped him between states! The sphere is the anchor, but it’s unstable. The energy feedback is building!”
“Turn it off!” Thörnblad yelled.
“I can’t! The shut-down sequence requires a biometric key! Only Alvar’s handprint can do it!”
Lundström’s mind raced. The drop. The radio frequency. It wasn’t a by-product; it was a beacon. A piece of Engberg, still anchored to our reality. He looked at the trapped, ghostly figure, then at the sphere. The solution was insane. It was brilliant.
“Thörnblad! The evidence bag! The drop!”
She understood instantly, tossing him the small, sealed plastic bag. Lundström strode towards the shimmering vortex. The air crackled around him, snatching at his coat. He could feel a terrifying coldness, a pull that threatened to unravel him.
“Inspector, no!” Filip cried.
Lundström ignored him. With a final, grunting lunge, he thrust the evidence bag, and the anomalous drop within it, into the heart of the shimmering field.
The effect was instantaneous. The drop flared with brilliant silver light. The frequency it emitted synched with the sphere. The ghostly image of Engberg snapped into sharp, solid focus. There was a sound like a universe sighing, and the physicist collapsed onto the floor, gasping and solid. The sphere’s light died. The hum ceased. The silence that followed was absolute.
* * * * * * * * * * *
A week later, Lundström sat in his office, a cup of lukewarm coffee on his desk. The case was closed. Alvar Engberg was recovering in hospital, suffering from severe dehydration and shock, but alive. His story was one of a catastrophic experiment, a trap of his own devising. Lena Björkman had dropped her lawsuit. Filip was being hailed as a hero for his attempts to stabilise the machine.
On his phone was a picture from David: a stone cross in a Cambridge churchyard. Lundström smiled faintly. Some mysteries of history were safe, comfortable. Others, like the one in Engberg’s lab, were best forgotten. He took a sip of his coffee. It was bitter, but it was real. And for now, that was enough. The Vortex was sealed, the inventor saved, and the quiet, orderly world of Växjö was, for the moment, secure. Some days, that was the only victory worth having.
END
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