Let the Old Dreams Die (54 page)

Death…

Yes, it was Death, just as he had imagined death ever since he was a little boy, when he used to think that this same figure used to seep out of his wardrobe at night when he was trying to get to sleep, the figure that had shot out of the train hurtling towards his mother and taken her away. Death.

Death stretched out her hand, and right at the end of her fingertips were glittering hooks. Thin hooks, not unlike fish hooks, but longer and more…perfect. One of the hooks reached down towards the caterpillar on Elvy’s breast, caught it and penetrated
the membrane. The caterpillar writhed as if it were in pain, and Kalle didn’t understand.

Why this…why is this…better?

Death raised her hand, and even Flora followed the movement with her eyes although they were brimming with tears. Then something happened. Instead of changing colour, swelling and bursting, the caterpillar began to open up, and it was no longer a caterpillar, it was a pupa. A pair of delicate wings emerged through the opening and a butterfly crept out. A tiny, fragile butterfly the same colour as the eyes of the one you love, a colour for which there are no words.

The butterfly flapped its wings a couple of times and then took flight, settling on Tore’s hand. Tore lifted his hand and looked at the butterfly from his sunken eye sockets. His mouth was hanging open. Then Kalle felt something inside his head, something that came from Tore, a spark of the same colour as the butterfly’s wings.

And he let go. It was impossible to explain how Kalle could feel it, but it was a bit like a hand loosening its vice-like grip on something it doesn’t really want, and is only holding onto because it’s
mine, mine, mine!
Tore let go and collapsed on the floor.

The Visitor had stepped forward. He was standing with clenched fists, watching what was happening. Death was whirling around him like irritating smoke, and for the first time the man looked unsure of himself.

The caterpillar crawled out of Tore’s chest. Death caught it, and the same thing happened again. Another butterfly emerged and joined forces with the one that had come out of Elvy; they fluttered around one another above the heads of the reliving. It was as if a sigh of relief passed through the room, a collective exhalation from deep inside hundreds of bodies.

The dead began to collapse. First one, then two, then a chain reaction, dominoes falling everywhere. The rows thinned out, gaps appeared, more and more fell to the ground and thuds could be heard
all around the room, like in an orchard during an autumn storm. They all fell down, and Kalle looked at the Visitor, revelling in the expression on his face.

You’re losing.

Hundreds of bodies had now fallen, and hundreds of caterpillars were on their way out. What Kalle didn’t understand was how Death was going to be able to catch them all. The Visitor seemed to have the same thought. He moved in among the mass of bodies with his mouth wide open, waiting for what must inevitably happen: some of the caterpillars would swell up and be destroyed before Death could get to them.

They’re just our strength, made visible in a way we can understand.

Death tossed her head and her hair flew wide, growing longer and longer, and the strands of hair swept over the bodies. At the very end of each strand of hair there glittered a hook. And the hooks found their mark, pierced the caterpillars and lifted them, leaving the Visitor’s mouth without nourishment. He clasped his hands and roared at the ceiling. His prey had escaped him.

As if his rage needed a direction, he turned to Sture. He stared at him and pointed at Kalle, yelling, ‘Your son! Your son and his whore!’

Kalle felt the stab of hatred, the command hurled into Sture, and he hauled himself to his feet. Sture seized the bolt cutters and ran towards Kalle, who tried to clear his head, to see the movements, but he was still feeling groggy. Sture swung the bolt cutters at his head and Kalle ducked; he felt them catch on one of his dreadlocks and yank it out, and blood trickled down his scalp.

A red mist descended. When Sture swung his weapon again, Kalle followed the movement and grabbed hold of the bolt cutters as they passed him, ripping them out of Sture’s grasp.

Sture’s consciousness was still pulsating with the order he had
been given, and he hurled himself at Kalle with his bare hands. Kalle didn’t think, he simply defended himself with what he had. He swung the bolt cutters, and they hit Sture squarely on the temple. Sture let out a muffled whimper and collapsed. Kalle dropped the bolt cutters.

The butterflies took off. They were perched on the ends of Death’s hair, hundreds of them, in every imaginable colour, and some colours that were indescribable. They were striving to get to the ceiling, to the space beyond, and they lifted Death off the floor. The entire ceiling was hidden from view by her hair, by the butterflies’ wings, an immense flower coming into bloom.

Kalle looked at his father. Blood was pouring from the wound in his temple, and his hand twitched a couple of times before falling limply to the floor. Death was biding her time, floating in the middle of the room.

When the caterpillar emerged from Sture’s chest, Death moved downwards. A hand reached out, the hooks coming closer. Kalle placed his hand over the caterpillar. Death hesitated. She was not allowed to touch him. Kalle could feel the caterpillar swelling beneath his hand. When it was about to burst he picked it up and threw it to the Visitor. The mouth opened and the caterpillar disappeared down his throat.

Kalle looked at his empty palm. It was no longer possible to change his mind. The choice had been made.

Flora came and stood next to Kalle; she put her arm around his waist and leaned her head on his shoulder. Together they watched as the butterflies let go of the hooks and drifted up towards the ceiling, a final glimmer of all the colours, fragments of a rainbow that passed through the ceiling and was gone.

Flora’s voice was a muffled whisper as she said, ‘Goodbye, Nana. You did well. In the end.’

Silence fell in the room. The dead bodies covered the floor like
a carpet of worthless flesh. Life had left them, and taken Death with it.

Only Flora, Kalle and the Visitor remained, along with his five henchmen. They weighed each other up. It wasn’t difficult to work out what was going to happen. They had destroyed something he had spent several years building up.

The doors flew open and four guards burst in. One of them was holding Hagar firmly by the elbow. When the guards took in the scene laid out before their eyes they froze, and Hagar seized the opportunity to pull free. She ran to Elvy. Flora followed her, and they fell into each other’s arms. Kalle could no longer hear any thoughts, but it wasn’t difficult to work out what Flora was telling Hagar. Her grandmother had taken her place among the greatest heroes, but no living person would ever hear her story.

The guards waved their submachine guns half-heartedly as if they had no idea where to start, or who the guilty parties might be.

Kalle was still gazing into the Visitor’s eyes. It was like looking through a knothole in a plank of wood. Beyond the hole you suddenly see the desert, or the sea, and it fills your field of vision. Eternity. He was incapable of looking away, and he asked slowly, ‘What. Are you. Intending. To do. With us?’

The Visitor appeared to consider the question. He looked away and gazed around the room, contemplating the ruins of his great idea. He shrugged.

‘Revenge,’ he said, ‘is a human invention. It serves no purpose.’

Then he was sucked into himself and was no longer there. Like something you think you see out of the corner of your eye, but when you turn around it’s not there. The Visitor disappeared. Kalle was free once more to fix his gaze wherever he wished. He fixed it on Flora.

She and Hagar were crouching beside Elvy’s body, wiping away each other’s tears.

It’s over.

A couple more guards joined the others. One of them was escorting Roland, whose face was still covered in blood from the myriad tiny cuts. He was alive, but it would be quite some time before he was ready for a photo shoot with any of the gossip magazines. Kalle went over to him.

Roland’s big blue eyes peered out through the crust of congealed blood. He asked, ‘Did it work?’

‘Yes,’ said Kalle, and just for a moment he glimpsed the rainbow as it disintegrated and drifted away. ‘Yes, it worked.’

When I saw the finished version of
Let the Right One In
at the Gothenburg Film Festival in 2008, I was dumbstruck.

I had visited the sets on three occasions, I had sat with Tomas Alfredsson and looked at various scenes, we had discussed the editing. I had seen a couple of rough cuts on large and small screens. And yet nothing could have prepared me for seeing the final edit, with all the sound effects, on the enormous screen in the Draken cinema.

It was a revelation. All the pieces had fallen into place, and the film was a small masterpiece, both within Swedish film and within the horror genre. This would later be confirmed by an unparalleled shower of awards from across the world, and I am eternally grateful to Tomas Alfredsson for the way in which he treated my story.

There was only one thing that nagged away at me when the film was over, and that was the ending itself. When Oskar is sitting on
the train with the box containing Eli at his feet, on his way to a different life.

In spite of the fact that I was the one who had written the manuscript, it wasn’t until after the showing at Draken that I actually realised what the ending implies. Which is that Oskar will become another Håkan. Someone who will take on the terrible task of being Eli’s human helper, supplying her with blood and a place to live and so on. That was what the ending said. The fact that I hadn’t realised it earlier is probably indicative of a certain level of stupidity in my brain.

The American version recently had its premiere, under the title
Let Me In
. I like that version very much as well, but what is only implied in the Swedish film is spelt out in the American one. Håkan has been with Eli since he was a boy the same age as Oskar. Therefore, it isn’t difficult to work out what fate awaits Oskar.

Don’t misunderstand me. I think it’s a perfectly reasonable ending, a fair interpretation of the story and the deliberately open ending I left in the book. But it isn’t
my
ending.

I readily admit that I wouldn’t have thought of writing the short story that gives this collection its title if it hadn’t been for the films. I wanted to give my version.

‘Let the old dreams die’ has been rewritten several times, but I was able to produce something good only when I accepted that it had to be a story which could stand on its own two legs. A version where Oskar and Eli play only a subsidiary role. A love story, but with different main characters.

And for those of you who are wondering about the title, it’s the next line in the song.

Rådmansö, October 2005

I CAN’T HELP IT…

I don’t know what you think about afterwords like this. Me, I love them. So now I’m writing one.

It might be a bit self-centred, but after a few novels I imagine I have a few readers who are curious about the way I think. Fourteen, maybe. The four of you who came to those two signings at the Science Fiction Bookshop, and another ten.

It’s you I’m talking to. The rest of you can go to sleep now. Goodnight, goodnight. Thank you for coming. Nice of you to join us. Sleep well.

There now. It’s just us.

Did you enjoy the stories? I hope so. My favourite is probably ‘Border’, but it’s led to divided opinions. When I’ve finished writing something I have a group of test readers who are kind enough to read
the relevant bundle of papers and give me their reactions. They’ve all had their own favourite. Except ‘To hold you while the music plays’. Nobody likes that one, apart from me.

Perhaps it doesn’t make sense? If I tell you the original title was ‘The Cross’, does that help?

A little bit?

Titles are a chapter all of their own.

The first horror story I wrote was about a man who is shipwrecked on an island in the Stockholm archipelago in the autumn. He’s freezing to death, and the situation gets even worse when his dead girlfriend floats ashore. And worse still later on, when she isn’t where he left her…

I called that one ‘Our skin, our blood, our bones’ after a line by Morrissey. (Which song? Anyone?)

Later on, when I wrote my first novel, it was called
The Only Friend
for a long time; I wasn’t very keen on that title, but I couldn’t come up with anything better. Until I remembered the title of my first story. Morrissey. I trawled through my memory and there it was:
Let the Right One In
.

For a long time
Handling the Undead
was called
When We Dead Awaken
, until I realised it was a play by Ibsen. Not good. In order to give the sense of those pages right at the back of the phone book, you know the ones: In the event of war…I renamed it
Instructions for Handling the Undead
, but that was a bit long, so…

The only title I’m really happy with is
Harbour
, which will be my next book. Then again, I haven’t written a word of it yet! But I’ve got ideas! Lots of them!

Enough about that.

Are you interested in these stories? How I came to write them?

(I write this in the knowledge that as I have been compared with Stephen King in various ways in the past, this is only going
to make the situation worse. But, as Vladimir and Estragon say: Nothing to be done.)

How many of you are still here? Seven?

OK.

These stories were written between spring 2002 and autumn 2005. The first one, ‘Eternal / Love’, was written just after I finished
Let the Right One In
, and the last one, ‘The final processing’, isn’t quite finished as I write this. I just need to sort out a couple of things.