Let the right one in (27 page)

"No, Tommy and those guys might be there."

"Who are they?"

"Oh, some older guys who use a basement storage unit.. . they hang out there in the evening."

"Are there a lot of them?"

"No, three. Most of the time it's just Tommy."

"And they're dangerous?"

Oskar shrugged. "Let's check it out, then."

They walked out through Oskar's building into the next basement corridor, all the way into Tommy's building. As Oskar stood there with a key in his hand, about to unlock the last door, he hesitated. If they were in there? If they caught sight of Eli? If they... it could turn into something he wasn't able to handle. Eli held the plastic sword in front of her. "What is it?"

"Nothing."

He unlocked the door. As soon as they walked into the corridor he heard music coming from the storage unit. As he turned to her he whispered:

"They're here! Come on."

Eli stopped, sniffed.

"What's that smell?"

Oskar checked to make sure that nothing was moving around at the other end of the corridor, then sniffed the air. Couldn't smell anything except the usual basement air. Eli said, "Paint, glue." Oscar sniffed again. He couldn't smell it but he knew what it had to be. When he turned back to Eli to get her to follow him he saw that she was doing something with the lock.

"Come on. What are you doing?" I m just. . .

As Oskar was unlocking the door to the next basement corridor, their path of retreat, the door fell shut behind them. It didn't make the normal sound. No click, just a metallic clunk. On the way back to their basement he told Eli about glue-sniffing; how crazy those guys could get when they did that.

He felt safe again in his own basement. He knelt down and started to count the bottles in the bag. Fourteen beer bottles and a liquor bottle with no deposit value.

When he looked up to report this to Eli she was standing in front of him with the plastic sword held up as if about to attack. Used to sudden blows as he was, he flinched a little. But Eli mumbled something and lowered the sword against his shoulder and said, with as deep a voice as she could muster:

"I herewith dub you, Jonny's conqueror, knight of Blackeberg and all surrounding areas like Vallingby... um ..."

"Racksta."

"Racksta."

"Maybe Angby?"

"Angby maybe."

Eli tapped him lightly on the shoulder for each new area. Oskar took his knife out of the bag, held it out, and proclaimed that he was the Knight of Angby Maybe. Wanted Eli to be the Beautiful Maiden he would rescue from the Dragon.

But Eli was a terrible monster who ate beautiful maidens for lunch and she was the one he would have to fight. Oskar left the knife in his sheath as they fought, shouted, and ran around in the corridors. In the middle of their game they heard a scrape in the lock to the basement doors. They quickly piled into a food cellar where they hardly had room to sit hip against hip, and breathed quickly and quietly. They heard a man's voice.

"What are you doing down here?"

Oskar and Eli held their breath as the man waited, listening. Then he said: "Damn kids" and left. They stayed in the food cellar until they were sure the man had gone, then they crawled out, leaned against the wooden wall, giggling. After a while Eli stretched out on the concrete floor and stared up at the ceiling.

Oskar touched her foot.

"Are you tired?"

"Yes. Tired."

Oskar pulled his knife out of the sheath, looked at it. It was heavy, beautiful. He carefully pressed his pointed finger against the tip, then removed it. A small red dot. He pressed again, harder. When he took his finger away a pearl-shaped drop of blood came out. But this wasn't the way to do it.

"Eli? Do you want to do something?"

She was still staring up at the ceiling.

"What?"

"Do you want to ... enter into a pact with me?"

"Yes."

If she had asked him "how?" he would maybe have told her what he was thinking before he did it. But she simply said "yes." She wanted to do it, whatever it was. Oskar swallowed hard, gripped the knife so the edge was resting against the palm of his hand, shut his eyes, and pulled the blade out of his hand. A stinging, smarting pain. He caught his breath.
Did I do this?

He opened his eyes, opened his hand. Yes. A thin trickle of blood was revealed in his palm. The blood pushed out slowly, not as he had thought in a thin line but as a string of pearls that he stared at with fascination as they merged into a thicker, uneven mass.

Eli lifted her head.

"What are you doing?"

Oskar was still holding his hand in front of his face, staring at it, and said:

"It's easy, Eli, it wasn't even . . ."

He held his bleeding hand toward her. Her eyes widened. She shook her head violently while she crawled backward, away from his hand.

"No, Oskar ..."

"What is it?"

"Oskar, no."

"It almost doesn't hurt at all."

Eli stopped backing up, staring at his hand while she kept shaking her head. Oskar was holding the knife by the blade in his other hand, held it out to her handle first.

"You only have to prick yourself in a finger or something. Then we'll mix our blood. And then we have our pact."

Eli did not take the knife. Oskar put it down on the floor so he could catch a drop of blood that fell from his wound.

"Come on. Don't you want to?"

"Oskar ... we can't. You would be infected, you—"

"It doesn't feel like that, it..."

A ghost flew into Eli's face, distorting it into something so different from the girl he knew that he completely forgot about catching the blood that dropped from his hand. She now looked like the monster they had recently pretended that she was and Oskar jumped back while the pain in his hand intensified.

"Eli, what..."

She sat up, pulled her legs under her, crouched on all fours, and stared straight at his bleeding hand, took a step closer toward it. Stopped, clenched her teeth, and got out a gruff: "Leave!"

Tears of fear welled up in Oskar's eyes. "Eli, stop it. Stop playing. Stop it."

Eli crawled a bit closer, stopped again. She forced her body to contort itself so her head was lowered to the ground and screamed:

"Go! Or you'll die!"

Oskar got up, took a few steps back. His feet hit against the bag of bottles so it fell over, with a clinking sound. He flattened himself against the wall while Eli crawled over to the little smear of blood that had fallen from his hand.

Another bottle fell over and broke against the concrete floor while Oskar stood pressed against the wall and stared at Eli, who stretched out her tongue and licked the dirty concrete, whisked her tongue around on the place where blood had fallen.

A bottle clinked softly and stopped moving. Eli licked and licked the floor. When she lifted her face to him there was a gray smear of dirt on the tip of her nose. "Go ... please ... leave."

Then the ghost flew into her face again, but before it had time to take over she got up and ran down the corridor, opened the door to her stairwell, and disappeared. Oskar stood there with the damaged hand tightly wrapped. Blood was starting to well out around the edges. He opened it, looked at the cut. It had gone deeper than he had intended, but it wasn't dangerous, he thought. Some blood was already starting to congeal.

He looked at the by-now pale splotch on the floor. Then he gingerly licked a little of the blood on his palm, spit it out.

+

Night lights.

Tomorrow they would operate on his mouth and throat, probably in the hopes that something would come out. His tongue was still there. He could move it around in the sealed cavity of his mouth, tickle his upper jaw with it. Maybe he would be able to talk again even though his lips were gone. But he did not intend to talk again.

A woman, he didn't know if she was from the police or a nurse, sat in the corner a few meters away, reading a book and keeping an eye on him.
They allot so much of their resources when a nobody decides his life is
over?

He realized that he was valuable, that he meant a lot to them. Probably they were digging around in old records right now, cases they hoped to be able to solve with him as the perpetrator. A policeman had been in yesterday to take his fingerprints. He had not made any resistance. It didn't matter.

It was possible that the fingerprints would link him to the murders in both Vaxjo and Norrkoping. He tried to remember how he had proceeded there, if he had left fingerprints or other traces. Probably. The only thing that worried him was that by way of these events people could track down Eli.

People. . .

+

They had put notes in his mailbox, threatened him.

Someone who worked at the post office and who lived in the area had tipped off the other neighbors about what kind of mail, what kind of videos he received.

It took about a month before he was fired from his job at the school. You couldn't have someone like that working with children. He had walked away willingly, even though he could probably have brought it up with the union.

He hadn't actually done anything at the school; he wasn't that stupid. The campaign against him had increased in strength and finally one night someone had thrown a firebomb through his living room window. He had fled out onto the lawn in only his underpants, stood there and watched his life burn to the ground.

The crime investigation dragged on in time and therefore he didn't get the insurance money. With his meager savings he had taken the train, rented a room in Vaxjo. That's where he started working on trying to die. He drank himself down to the level where he used whatever was at hand. Aco acne-solution, T-Rod denatured alcohol. He stole wine-making kits and Turbo yeast from hardware stores and drank everything before it was ready.

He was outside as much as possible. In some way he wanted "the people" to see him die, day for day.

In his drunken stupor he became careless, fondled young boys, got beaten up, ended up at the police station. Once he sat in jail for three days and puked his guts out. Was released. Kept drinking.

One evening when Hakan was sitting on a bench next to a playground with a bottle of half-yeasted wine in a plastic bag, Eli came and sat down beside him. In his drunkenness Hakan had almost immediately put a hand on Eli's thigh. Eli had let it stay there, taken Hakan's head between her hands, turned it toward her, and said: "You are going to be with me." Hakan had mumbled something about how he couldn't afford such a beauty right now but when his finances allowed ...

Eli had moved his hand from her thigh, leaned down, and taken his wine bottle, poured it out and said: "You don't understand. You're going to stop drinking now. You are going to be with me. You are going to help me. I need you. And I'm going to help you." Then Eli had held out her hand, Hakan had taken it, and they had walked away together.

He had stopped drinking and entered into Eli's service.

Eli had given him money to buy some clothes and to rent another apartment. He had done everything without wondering whether Eli was

"evil" or "good" or anything else. Eli was beautiful and Eli had given him back his dignity. And in rare moments... tenderness.

+

The pages rustled when the night guard turned them in the book she was reading. Probably a dime store novel. In Plato's republic the "Guards" were supposed to be the most highly educated among the people. But this was Sweden, 1981, and they were probably reading Jan Guillou. The man in the water, the man whose corpse he had sunk. That had been clumsy of him, of course. He should have done as Eli said and buried him. But nothing about the man would be traced back to Eli. The bite mark in his neck would be regarded as unusual, but they would think the blood had been washed away by the water. The man's clothes were . . .
Her top!

Eli's top, the one Hakan had found on the man's body when he first came to take care of it. He should have taken it home with him, burned it, anything.

Instead he had tucked it inside the man's coat. How would they interpret that? A child's top, spotted with blood. Was there a risk that someone had seen this shirt on Eli? Someone who would recognize it? If it were displayed in the paper, for example? Someone Eli had met before, someone who...
Oskar. The boy next door.

Hakan's body twisted restlessly in the bed. The guard put her book down and looked at him.

"Don't do anything stupid."

+

Eli crossed Bjornsonsgatan, continued into the courtyard between the nine-story buildings, two monolithic lighthouses towering over the crouching three-story buildings scattered around. No one was outside, but there was light coming from the gymnasium and Eli slithered up the fire escape ladder, looked in.

Music was blaring out of a small tape player. Middle-aged women were jumping around in time to the music so the wooden floor shook. Eli curled up in the metal grating of the stairs, leaned her chin on her knees, and took in the scene.

Several of the women were overweight and their massive breasts were bouncing like cheery bowling balls under their T-shirts. The women jumped and skipped, lifting their knees so the flesh trembled in their tootight workout pants. They moved in a circle, clapped their hands, jumped again. All the while the music kept going. Warm, oxygenated blood streaming through thirsty muscles.

But there were too many of them.

Eli jumped down from the fire escape, landed softly on the frozen ground underneath, continued around the back of the gym, and stopped outside the swimming pool.

The large frosted windows projected rectangles of light onto the snow cover. Over each large window there was a smaller, narrow window made of regular glass. Eli jumped up and hung from the edge of the roof with her hands, looked in. No one was inside. The surface of the pool glittered in the glow of the halogen lights. A few balls were floating in the middle.

Swim. Splash. Play.

Eli swayed back and forth, a dark pendulum. Looked at the balls, saw them flying through the air, thrown up again, laughter and screams and splashing water. Eli relaxed her hold on the edge of the roof, fell down, and consciously let herself land so hard that it hurt, then kept going over the school yard to the path through the park, stopping under a high tree hanging over the path. It was dark. No one around. Eli looked up into the top of the tree, along five six meters of smooth tree trunk. Kicked off her shoes. Thought herself new hands, new feet.