Let the right one in (36 page)

So he swallowed, and folded the sheet down.

The man's face defied all description. Impossible to imagine how he had lived for a whole week with this face. Nothing there that looked even remotely human with the exception of an ear and an . . . eye.
Couldn't they have... taped it shut?

The eye was open. Of course. There was hardly any eyelid to close it. And the eye itself was so badly damaged it looked as if scar tissue had formed in the eyeball.

Benke tore himself away from the dead man's gaze and concentrated on the task at hand. The source of the stain looked to be that wound on his throat.

He heard a soft dripping sound and quickly looked around. Damn. He must be a little on edge after all. Another drip. That came from his feet. He looked down. A drop of water had fallen from the gurney and landed on his shoe. Plop.

Water?

He examined the wound on the man's throat. The liquid had formed a small pool underneath it and was spilling out over the metal rim of the stretcher.

Plop.

He moved his foot. Another drop fell onto the tile floor.

Plip.

He stirred the pool of liquid with his index finger, then rubbed his finger and thumb together. It wasn't water. It was some slippery, transparent fluid. He smelled his hand. Nothing he recognized.

When he looked down at the white floor he saw a veritable puddle had formed down there. The liquid was not transparent after all; it had a pink tinge. It reminded him of when blood separates in transfusion bags. The stuff that is left over when the red blood cells sink to the bottom.
Plasma.

The man was bleeding plasma.

How that was possible was a question the experts would have to deal with tomorrow, or rather, later today. His job was simply to patch it so it didn't make a mess. Wanted to go home now. To crawl into bed beside his sleeping wife, read a few pages of
The Abominable Man From Saffle,
and then sleep.

Benke folded the gauze into a thick compress and pushed it up against the wound. How the hell was he supposed to secure it with tape? Even the rest of the man's throat and neck was so damaged as to offer almost no area of undamaged skin to attach the tape to. But what did he care. He wanted to go home now. He pulled off long strips of the adhesive, weaving them this way and that across the neck, an arrangement he would probably be criticized for later, but what the hell.

I'm a janitor, not a surgeon.

When the compress was in place he wiped off the stretcher and mopped the floor. Then he rolled the corpse into room four, rubbed his hands together. Mission accomplished. A job well done and a story to tell in the future. While he made a last check and turned off the light he was already working on his formulations.

You know that murderer who fell from the top floor? Well, I was in
charge of him later and when I wheeled him down to the morgue I saw
something strange. ..

He took the elevator up to his room, washed his hands thoroughly, changed, and threw his coat into the laundry on his way out. He walked down to the parking lot, got into his car, and smoked a single cigarette before he started the engine. After he stubbed it out in the ashtray—

which really needed to be emptied—he turned the key in the ignition. The car was resisting as it always did when it was cold or damp. It always started in the end, though. You only had to keep at it. As the
wah-
wah
sound on the third attempt transformed into a hacking engine roar he suddenly thought of it.

It doesn't coagulate.

No. The stuff seeping out of the man's neck was not going to coagulate under the compress. It would soak through and then spill onto the floor .

. . and when they opened the door in a few hours . . .

Shit!

He pulled the key out of the ignition, thrust it angrily into his pocket, got out of the car, and headed back to the hospital.

+

The living room was not as empty as the hall and the kitchen. Here there was a sofa, an armchair, and a large coffee table with a lot of little things on it. A lone floor lamp sent a soft yellow glow over the table. But that was all. No carpets, no pictures, no TV. Thick blankets had been draped over the windows.

It looks like a prison. A big prison cell.

Oskar whistled, tentatively. Yes. There was an echo, but not too much. Probably because of the blankets. He put his bag down next to the armchair. The click when the bottom of it landed on the hard cork flooring was amplified, sounded desolate.

He had started to look at the things on the table when Eli came out of the next room, now wearing her too-big checkered shirt. Oskar waved his arm, indicating the living room.

"Are you two moving?"

"No. Why?"

"I was just thinking."

You two?

Why didn't he think of it before? Oskar let his gaze travel over the things on the table. Looked like toys, every last one of them. Old toys.

"That old man who was here before. That wasn't your dad, was it?"

"No."

"Was he also?. . ."

"No."

Oskar nodded. Looked around the room again. Hard to imagine anyone could live like this. Except if...

"Are you sort of. . . poor?"

Eli walked over to the table, picked up a box that looked like a black egg, and handed it to Oskar. He leaned over, held it under the lamp in order to see better.

The surface of the egg was rough and when Oskar looked more closely he saw hundreds of complex strands of gold thread. The egg was heavy, as if the whole thing was made of some kind of metal. Oskar turned it this way and that, looked at the gold threads embedded on the egg's surface. Eli stood next to Oskar. He smelled it again ... the smell of rust.

"What's it worth, do you think?"

"Don't know. A lot?"

"There are only two of them in the world. If you had both of them you could sell them and buy yourself... a nuclear power plant, maybe."

"Nooo?. . ."

"Well, I don't know. What does a nuclear power plant cost? Fifty million?"

"I think it would cost. .. billions."

"Really? In that case I guess you couldn't."

"What would you do with a nuclear power plant?"

Eli laughed.

"Put it between your hands. Like this. Cup them. And then you let it roll back and forth."

Oskar did as Eli said. Rolled the egg gently back and forth in his cupped hands and felt the egg ... crack, collapse between his palms. He gasped and removed the upper hand. The egg was now just a heap of hundreds .

. . thousands of tiny slivers.

"Gosh, I'm sorry. I
was
careful, I—"

"Shhh. It's supposed to be like that. Make sure you don't drop any of it. Pour them out onto this."

Eli pointed to a piece of white paper on the table. Oskar held his breath as he gently let the glittering shards fall out of his hand. The individual pieces were smaller than drops of water and Oskar had to use his other hand to wipe his palm free of every last one.

"But it broke."

"Here. Look."

Eli pulled the lamp closer to the table, concentrated its dim light on the heap of metal slivers. Oskar leaned over and looked. One piece, no bigger than a tick, lay on its own to one side of the stack, and when he looked very closely he could see that it had indentations and notches on a few sides, almost microscopic light bulb-shaped protrusions on the other. He got it.

"It's a puzzle."

"Yes."

"But... can you put it together again?"

"I think so."

"It must take forever."

"Yes."

Oskar looked at more pieces that were spread out next to the pile. They looked to be identical to the first, but when he looked closer he saw there were subtle variations. The notches were not in exactly the same place; the protrusions were at another angle. He also saw a piece was all smooth sided, except for a gold border a hair's width across.... A piece of the outside.

He slouched down into the armchair.

"It would drive me crazy."

"Think about the guy who
made
it."

Eli rolled her eyes and stuck her tongue out so she looked like the dwarf Dopey. Oskar laughed. Ha-ha. When he stopped the sound still vibrated in the walls. Desolate. Eli sat down on the couch and crossed her legs, looking at him with . . . anticipation. He looked away and looked at the table, and the toys that made a landscape of ruins.

Desolate.

All at once he felt tired in that way again. She wasn't "his girl," couldn't be that. She was . . . something else. There was a big distance between them that couldn't be ... he shut his eyes, leaned back in the armchair, and the black behind his eyelids was the space that separated them. He dozed off, gliding into a momentary dream.

The space between them was filled with ugly, sticky insects that flew at him and when they got closer he saw they had teeth. He waved his hand to get rid of them, and woke up. Eli was sitting on the couch watching him.

"Oskar. I'm a person, just like you. It's just that I have ... a very unusual illness."

Oskar nodded.

A thought wanted to get out. Something. A context. He didn't catch hold of it. Dropped it. But then that other thought came out, the terrible, frightening one. That Eli was just
pretending.
That there was an ancient person inside of her, watching him, who knew everything, and was smiling at him, smiling in secret.
But that can't he.

In order to have something to do, he dug around in his bag for the Walkman, took out the tape that was in it, read the title
KISS:
Unmasked,
turned it over,
KISS: Destroyer,
put it back.
I should go home.

Eli leaned forward.

"What's that?"

"This? It's a Walkman."

"Is it for ... listening to music?"

"Yes."

She doesn't know anything. She's superintelligent hut she doesn't know
anything. What does she do all day? Sleep, of course. Where does she
keep the coffin? That's right. She never
slept
those times she came over.
She simply lay there in my bed and waited for the sun to come up. I must
begone...

"Can I try it?"

Oskar held it out to her. She took it and looked like she didn't know what to do with it, but then put the headphones on and looked inquiringly at him. Oskar pointed at the buttons.

"Press the one that says 'play'"

Eli read the top of the buttons, selected play. Oskar felt a calm settle over him. This was normal; playing your music for a friend. He wondered what Eli would think of KISS.

She pushed in the button, and even from his armchair Oskar could hear the whispery, noisy jangle of guitar, drums, and vocals. She had ended up in the middle of one of the heavier songs.

Eli's eyes opened wide, she screamed in pain, and Oskar was so shocked he was thrown back in the armchair. It tipped back, almost falling over while he watched Eli tear the headphones off so violently that the cables became detached, threw them down, pressed her hands against her ears, whimpering.

Oskar gaped, staring at the headphones that had hit the wall. He got to his feet, picked them up. Completely destroyed. Both of the cords had been torn out of the earpieces. He put them on the table and sank down into the armchair again.

Eli removed her hands from her ears.

"Sorry, I... it hurt so much."

"Don't worry about it."

"Was it expensive?"

"No."

Eli took down the highest moving box, reached into it, and fished out a couple of banknotes, holding them out to Oskar.

"Here."

He took them, counted them out. Three thousand kronor bills and two one hundreds. He felt something akin to fear, looked at the carton she had taken the money from, back at Eli, back at the money.

"I.. . it cost fifty kronor."

"Take it anyway."

"No, but, it... it was only the headphones that broke and they . .."

"But you can have it. Please?"

Oskar hesitated, then crumpled the notes into his pants pocket while he mentally calculated their worth in advertising flyers. Around one year of Saturdays, maybe . . . twenty-five thousand delivered flyers. One hun-dred and fifty hours. More. A fortune. The bills in his pocket rubbed uncomfortably against him.

"Thanks."

Eli nodded, picked something up off the table that looked like a knot of wires but that was probably a brain teaser. Oskar looked at her as she fiddled with the knots. Her neck bent, her long thin fingers that flew over the wires. He went over everything she had told him. Her dad, the aunt who lived in the city, the school she went to. Lies, all of it. And where had she gotten the money from? Stolen?

He was so unaccustomed to the feeling he didn't even know what it was at first. It started like a kind of tingle in his head, continued into his body, then made a sharp, cold arc back from his stomach to his head. He was . .. angry. Not desperate or scared. Angry.

Because she had lied to him and then . .. and who had she stolen the money from anyway? From someone she had?... He crossed his arms over his stomach, leaned back.

"You kill people."

"Oskar..."

"If this is true then you must kill people. Take their money."

"I've been
given
the money."

"You're just lying. The whole time."

"It's true."

"What part is true? That you're lying?"

Eli put down the tangle of knots and looked at him with wounded eyes, threw her arms out. "What do you want me to do?"

"Prove it to me."

"Prove what?"

"That you are . . . who you say you are."

She looked at him for a long time. Then she shook her head.

"I don't want to."

"Why not."

"Guess."

Oskar sank deeper into the armchair. Felt the small wad of bills in his pocket. Saw the bundles of advertising flyers in his mind. That had arrived this morning. That had to be delivered before Tuesday. Gray fatigue

in his body. Tears in his head. Anger. "Guess." More games. More lies. Wanted to leave. To sleep.