Let the right one in (41 page)

Without thinking more about it, he opened the fridge in order to see what there was. Not much. An open carton of milk, half a packet of bread. Butter and cheese. Oskar put his hand out for the milk. But... Eli...

He stood there with the carton of milk in his hand, blinked. This didn't add up. Did she eat real food as well? Yes. She must. He took the milk carton out of the fridge and put it on the counter. In the kitchen cabinet above the counter there was almost nothing. Two plates, two glasses. He took a glass and poured milk into it.

And then it hit him. With the cold milk glass in his hand it finally hit him, with full force.

She drinks blood.

Yesterday evening, in his tangle of sleepiness and sense of detachment from the world, in the dark, everything had somehow felt possible. But now in the kitchen, where no blankets hung in the window and the blinds let in a weak morning light, with a glass of milk in his hand it seemed so ... beyond anything he could comprehend.

Like: If you have milk and bread in your fridge you must be a human
being.

He took a mouthful of milk and immediately spit it out. It was sour. He smelled the rest that was in the glass. Yes, definitely bad. He poured it out into the sink, rinsed the glass out, and then drank some water in order to get the taste out of his mouth. Looked at the date on the carton. USE BY 28 OCTOBER.

The milk was ten days too old. Oskar had a realization.

The old guy's milk.

The refrigerator door was still open. The old guy's food.

Revolting. Totally revolting.

Oskar slammed the door shut. What had that old guy been here for anyway? What had he and Eli... Oskar shivered.

She has killed him.

Yes. Eli must have kept the old guy around in order to be able to ... drink from him. To use him like a living blood bank. That's what she did. But why had the old guy agreed to it? And //she had killed him, where was the body? Oskar glanced up at the high kitchen cabinets. And suddenly he didn't want to be in the kitchen anymore. Didn't want to stay in the apartment at all. He walked out of the kitchen, through the hall. The closed bathroom door.

She's in
there.

He hurried into the living room, collected his bag. The Walkman was on the table. He would have to buy new headphones, that was all. When he picked up the Walkman in order to put it into his bag he saw the note. It was lying on the coffee table, at the same height as his head had been resting.

Hi. Hope you've slept well. I'm also going to sleep now. I'm in the bath-
room. Don't try to go in there, please. I'm trusting you. I don't know
what to write. I hope you can like me even though you know what I am. I
like you. A lot. You're lying here on the couch right now, snoring.
Please. Don't be afraid of me.

Please please please
don't be afraid of me.

Do you want to meet me tonight? Write so on this note if you do.
If you write No I'll move tonight. Probably have to do that soon anyway.
But if you write Yes I'll hang around for a while longer. I don't know
what I should write. I'm alone. Probably more alone than you can
imagine, I think. Or perhaps you can.

Sorry I broke your music machine. Take the money if you want. I have a
lot. Don't be afraid of me. There's no reason for you to be. Maybe you
know that. I hope you know that. I like you so very much.
Yours, Eli

P.S. Feel free to stay. But if you leave make sure the door locks behind
you.

Oskar read the note several times. Then he picked up the pen next to it. He looked around the empty room, Eli's life. The bills she had tried to give him were still lying on the table, scrunched up. He took
one
thousand kronor bill, put it in his pocket. He looked for a long time at the space on the page under Eli's name. Then he lowered the pen and wrote in letters as tall as the space YES.

He put the pen down, got up, and slipped the Walkman into his bag. He turned around one last time and looked at the by-now upside-down letters.

YES.

Then he shook his head, dug the thousand kronor bill out of his pocket, and put it back on the table. When he was out in the stairwell he checked that the door had locked securely behind him. He pulled on it several times.

From the Daily Update, 16:

The official search for the man who early Sunday morning escaped from Danderyd Hospital after having killed one person, has not yet yielded any results.

The police have searched all of Judarn forest in western Stockholm in the attempt to track down the man, who is assumed to be the so-called Ritual Killer. At the time of his escape the man was critically wounded and the police now suspect he had an accomplice.

Arnold Lehrman, of the Stockholm Police:

"Yes, that's the only logical explanation. There is no physical possibility that he would have been able to keep himself hidden this long in his... condition. We have had thirty officers out here, dogs, a helicopter. It's just not feasible, that's all."

"Will you keep searching Judarn forest?"

"Yes. The possibility that he remains in the area cannot be ruled out. But we will divert some of our forces from here in order to concentrate on ... in order to investigate how he has been able to proceed." The man is severely disfigured and was at the time of his escape dressed in a light blue hospital gown. The police ask that anyone with information regarding the disappearance contact them at the following number...

8 NOVEMBER [EVENING]

Public interest in the police search of Judarn forest was at an all-time high. The evening news realized they would not be able to print the composite picture of the murderer one more time. They had been hoping for images of an apprehended suspect but in the absence of this both evening papers ran the sheep picture.

The
Expressen
even put it on the front page.

Say what you will, there was undeniable drama in that photograph. The police officer's face twisted by exertion, the splayed limbs and open mouth of the sheep. You could almost hear the panting, the bleating. One of the papers had even tried to reach the royal court for comment, since it was the King's sheep that the officer was manhandling in this way. The King and Queen had only two days earlier informed the public that they were expecting their third child, and decided that that would have to do. The court offered no comment.

Of course several pages were devoted to maps of Judarn and the western suburbs. Where the man had been sighted, how the police search had been organized. But all this had been seen before, in other contexts. The sheep picture was something new and it was this that people remembered.

Expressen
had even dared to try a little joke. The caption said, "Wolf in sheep's clothing?"

You had to laugh a little, and people needed this. They were scared. This same man had killed two people, almost three, and now he was once more on the loose and kids again were subject to a curfew. A school field trip to Judarn on Monday was canceled.

And running right through this there was an underlying anger at the fact that one person, one single person, could have the power to dominate so many people's lives simply through his evil and his . . . ability to stave off death.

Yes. Experts and professors who were called upon to comment in newspapers and TV all said the same thing: it was impossible that the man was still alive. In answer to a direct question they then went on to say in the next breath that the man's escape was just as impossible. A professor of medicine at Danderyd made an unfavorable impression on the evening news when he said, in an aggressive tone of voice: "Until very recently the man was hooked up to a respirator. Do you know what that means? That means that you are not able to breathe on your own. Add to this a fall of about thirty meters ..." The professor's tone implied that the reporter was an idiot and that the whole thing was an invention by the media.

So everything was a soup of guesses, impossibilities, rumors and—of course—fear. Not so strange then that one used the sheep picture in spite of everything. That at least was concrete. The photograph was disseminated throughout the land and found its way to people's eyes.

+

Lacke saw it when he bought a packet of Red Prince cigarettes in the Lover's newsstand, with his last few kronor, on his way over to Gosta's. He had been sleeping all afternoon and felt like Raskolnikov; the world was hazily uncertain. He glanced at the sheep photograph and nodded to himself. In his present state it did not seem strange to him that the police were apprehending sheep.

Only when he was halfway to Gosta's place did the image come back to him and he thought, "What the hell was that?" but didn't have the energy to pursue it. He lit a cigarette and kept going.

+

Oskar saw it when he came home after having spent the afternoon walking around Vallingby. When he got off the subway Tommy was getting on. Tommy looked jumpy and wound up and said he had done something "fucking hilarious" but didn't have time to say anything more before the doors closed. At home there was a note on the kitchen table; his mom was going to dinner with the choir tonight. There was food in the refrigerator, the advertising flyers had been delivered, hugs and kisses. The evening paper was on the kitchen sofa. Oskar looked at the sheep on the front page and read everything about the search. Then he did something he had been lagging behind on: cut out and saved the articles about the Ritual Killer from the paper over the last few days. He took the pile of newspapers out from the cleaning closet, his scrapbook, scissors, paste, and got to work.

+

Staffan saw it about two hundred meters from where it had been taken. He had not been able to catch Tommy, and after a few brief words with a distraught Yvonne he had left for Akeshov. Someone there had referred to a colleague he didn't know by the name of "the sheep man" but he hadn't gotten the joke until a few hours later when he had a chance to see the evening paper.

Police management was ticked off at the newspapers' indiscretion, but most officers in the field thought it was funny. With the exception of

"the sheep man" himself, of course. For several weeks he had to endure the occasional "baaaaaa" and "nice sweater, is that sheep's wool?"

+

Jonny saw it when his four-year-old little brother—
half
little brother—

Kalle came up to him with a present. A wooden block that he had wrapped in the first page of the evening paper. Jonny shooed him out of his room, said he wasn't in the mood, locked the door. Took up the photo album again, looking at pictures of his dad, his real dad, who was not Kalle's dad.

A little later he heard his stepfather yelling at Kalle because he had destroyed the paper. Jonny then unwrapped the present, turning the block in his fingers as he studied the close-up of the sheep. He chuckled, the skin pulled taut around his ear. He stowed the photo album in his gym bag—it would be safest to keep it at school—and from there his thoughts turned to what the hell he should do with Oskar.

+

The sheep picture would start a minor debate about the ethics of photojournalism, but was nonetheless featured in both papers' end-of-year collage of the year's most unforgettable images. In the spring the tackled ram himself was let out into the Drottningholm summer pastures, forever oblivious to his fifteen minutes of fame.

+

Virginia rests rolled up in duvets and blankets. Her eyes are closed, the body completely still. In a moment she will wake up. She has been lying here for eleven hours. Her body temperature is down to twenty-seven degrees, which corresponds to the temperature inside the closet. Her heart rate is four faint beats a minute.

During these past eleven hours her body has changed irrevocably. Her Stomach and lungs have adapted to a new kind of existence. The most interesting detail, from a medical point of view, is a still-developing cyst in the sinoatrial node of the heart, the clump of cells that controls the heart's contractions. The cyst has now grown to twice its former size. A cancer-like growth of foreign cells continues unhindered.

If one could take a sample of these cells, put the sample under a microscope, one would see something that all heart specialists would reject with the assumption that the sample had become contaminated, mixed. A tasteless joke.

Namely, the tumor in the sinoatrial node consists of brain cells. Yes. Inside Virginia's heart a separate little brain is forming. This new brain has, during its initial stage of development, been dependent on the large brain. Now it is self-sufficient, and what Virginia during a terrible moment sensed is completely correct: it would live on even if her body died.

Virginia opened her eyes and knew she was awake. Knew it even though opening her eyelids made no difference. It was as dark as before. But her consciousness was turned on. Yes. Her consciousness came to life, and at the same time it was as if something else quickly withdrew.
Like...

Like coming to a summer cottage that has been empty all winter. You open the door, fumble for the light switch, and at that same moment you hear the rapid scuttling, the clicking of small claws against the floorboards, you catch a brief glimpse of the rat squeezing in under the kitchen counter.

An uncanny feeling. You know it's been living there in your absence. That it thinks of the house as its own. That it will come sneaking out again as soon as you turn out the light.

I am not alone.

Her mouth felt like paper. She had no feeling in her tongue. She continued to lie there, thinking of the cottage that she and Per, Lena's father, had rented a couple of summers when Lena was little. The rat's nest they found all the way in under the kitchen counter. The rats had chewed off small pieces of a milk carton and a packet of cornflakes, built what almost looked like a little house, a fantastic construction of multicolored cardboard.