Let the right one in (44 page)

Lacke thrust his hands into the crawling, seething mass on Virginia's chest, grabbed skin that glided over tensed muscles, pulled off small bodies, and Virginia's blouse was ripped, she screamed and—

She's crying.

No; it was blood running down her cheek. Lacke grabbed the cat that was sitting on her head, but the cat dug its claws in even deeper, sat there like it was sewn on. Its head fit inside Lacke's hand and he yanked it from side to side until he—in the middle of all the noise—heard a
snap

and when he dropped the head it fell down lifeless on Virginia's head. A drop of blood trickled out of the cat's nose.

"Aaaaaah! My baby..."

Gosta reached Virginia and, with tears in his eyes, he started to stroke the cat that even in death stayed attached to Virginia's head.

"My baby, little darling . . ."

Lacke lowered his gaze and his eyes met Virginia's.

It was her again.

Virginia.

+

Let me go.

Through the double tunnel that was her eyes Virginia was looking out at everything that was happening with her body, Lacke's attempts to save her.

Let it be.

She wasn't the one fighting them off, her arms going out. It was that other thing that wanted to live, wanted that its ... host should live. She had given up when she saw Gosta's throat, taken in the stench of the apartment. This was how it was going to be. And she didn't want a part of it.

The pain. She felt the pain, the cuts. But it would soon be over.
So . .. let it be.

+

Lacke saw it. But he didn't accept it.

The farm ... two cottages ... the garden ...

In a panic he tried to tear the cats from Virginia. But they hung on, furry knots of muscles. The few he managed to get off took with them strips of her clothing, leaving deep cuts in the skin underneath, but most of them stayed put like leeches. He tried to hit them, he heard bones cracking, but if one came off another jumped on, because the cats were climbing over each other in their eagerness to . . .

Black.

Something hit him in the face and he stumbled back about one meter, almost falling, steadied himself against the wall, blinking. Gosta stood next to Virginia fists drawn, staring at him with tearful anger in his gaze.

"You are hurting them! You're
hurting
them!" Next to Gosta, Virginia was a boiling mass of mewling, hissing fur. Miriam dragged herself across the floor, got up on her hind legs and bit Virginia in the calf. Gosta saw it, bent down, and shook his finger at her.

"You can't do that, little lady. That
hurts]"

All sense of reason left Lacke. He took two steps, aimed a kick at Miriam. His foot sunk into her bloated belly and Lacke felt no revulsion, only satisfaction, when that sack of guts flew from his foot, was crushed against the radiator. He grabbed Virginia's arm—

Out, must get out of here

—and pulled her with him toward the door.

+

Virginia tried to resist. But Lacke and the will of her sickness were the same, and they were stronger than she. Through the tunnels in her head she saw Gosta fall to his knees on the floor, heard his howl of grief as he took a dead cat in his hands, caressing its back.

Forgive me, forgive me
—

Then Lacke pulled her out with him, and her ability to see was blocked as a cat climbed up onto her face, bit her in the head, and all was pain, living needles puncturing her skin, and she found herself in a live iron maiden as she lost her balance, fell, felt herself dragged across the floor.
Let me go.

But the cat in front of her eyes changed position and she saw the apartment door opening in front of her, Lacke's hand, dark red, that pulled her along, and she saw the stairwell, the steps, she was up on her feet again, fighting her way along, in her own consciousness, taking control and—

+

Virginia pulled her arm free of his hand.

Lacke turned around to the crawling mass of fur that was her body in order get a hold of her again, in order to—

What? What?

Out. In order to get out.

But Virginia forced her way past him and for one second the trembling back of a cat was pressed against his face. Then she was out in the stairwell where the cats' hissing was amplified like excited whispers while she ran toward the edge of the landing and—

Nonono
—

Lacke tried to reach her in time to stop her, but like someone convinced of a soft landing or someone who doesn't care if she crashes, Virginia relaxed and toppled forward, let herself fall down the stairs. Cats that were caught underneath her howled as she rolled and bounced down the concrete steps. Damp crunching sounds as slender bones broke, heavier thuds that made Lacke cringe when Virginia's head—

Something walked across his foot.

A small gray cat that had something wrong with its hind legs dragged itself out into the stairwell, sat down on the top step, and howled sorrowfully.

Virginia came to rest at the bottom of the stairs. The cats that survived the fall left her and went back up the stairs. Went into the hall and started to groom themselves.

Only the little gray one stayed where it was, mourning the fact that it had not been able to take part.

+

The police held a press conference Sunday evening.

They had chosen a conference room at the police station with room for forty people, but it had turned out to be too small. A number of reporters from European newspapers and television stations turned up. The fact that the man had not been recaptured during the day made the news more sensational, and a British journalist gave the best analysis of why the whole thing had attracted such attention.

"It's a search for the archetypal Monster. This man's appearance, what he's done. He is The Monster, the evil at the heart of all fairy tales. And every time we catch it, we like to pretend it's over for good." Already, a quarter of an hour before the appointed time, the air in the poorly ventilated room was warm and humid, and the only ones who did not complain were the Italian TV team who said they were used to worse conditions.

They moved the event to a larger room and at exactly eight o'clock, the Stockholm district's chief of police came in, flanked by the commissioner who was spearheading the investigation and who had questioned the Ritual Killer in the hospital, as well as the patrol leader who had directed operations in Judarn forest earlier that day. They were not afraid of being torn limb from limb by the reporters, because they had decided to throw them a bone.

They had a photograph of the man.

+

The investigation of the watch had finally yielded results. On Saturday a watchmaker in Karlskoga had taken the time to go through his index file of outdated proof-of-insurance forms and had come across the number the police had asked him and other watchmakers to try to locate. He called the police and gave them the name, address, and phone number of the man who was registered as the buyer. The Stockholm police entered the man's name into their register and asked the Karlskoga police to go to the address to see what they could find.

There was some excitement at the station when it turned out that the man had been prosecuted for attempted rape of a nine-year-old, seven years earlier. Had spent three years locked up in an institution, deemed mentally ill. Was thereafter determined to be recovered and subsequently released.

But the Karlskoga police found the man at home, in good health. Yes, he had had a watch like that. No, he couldn't remember what had happened to it. It took a couple of hours of interrogation at the station in Karlskoga, reminders that there were conditions under which a psychiatric certificate of good health could be subject to reevaluation, before the man recalled who he had sold the watch to.

Hakan Bengtsson, Karlstad. They had met somewhere and done something, he couldn't remember what. He had sold him the watch, at any rate, but he had no address and could only give a vague description of him, and could he please be allowed to go home now?

There was nothing on Hakan Bengtsson in the police records. There were twenty-four Hakan Bengtssons in the Karlstad area. About half of them could immediately be disregarded because of age. The police started to call around. The search was simplified by the fact that the ability to speak immediately disqualified someone as a viable candidate. Toward nine o'clock in the evening they were able to narrow the list to a single person. One Hakan Bengtsson who had been a Swedish teacher at the high school and who had left Karlstad after his house burned down under unclear circumstances.

They called the principal of the high school and were told that yes, there had been rumors about Hakan Bengtsson ... liked children a little bit too much, you could say. They had the prinicipal go to the school on a Saturday evening and produce a photo of Hakan Bengtsson from the school archives, taken for the school catalogue in 1976.

A Karlstad police officer, who needed to be in Stockholm on Sunday anyway, faxed over a copy and then started driving up with the original late Saturday night. It reached the Stockholm headquarters at one o'clock Sunday morning, that is to say, about a half hour after the man in question had fallen from his hospital window and been declared dead. Sunday morning was devoted to verifying through dental and medical records from Karlstad that the man in the snapshot was the same man who, until the preceding evening, had been bound to his hospital bed, and yes: it was him.

Sunday afternoon there was a meeting at the station. They had counted on slowly being able to unravel what the dead man had done since leaving Karlstad, see if his deeds were part of a larger context, if he had left more victims strewn in his wake.

But now the situation had changed.

The man was still alive, was on the loose, and the most important thing at this point appeared to be locating where the man had lived since there was a small chance he would try to return there. His movements toward the western suburbs seemed to indicate as much.

Therefore it was decided that if the man was not apprehended before the press conference one would turn to the somewhat unreliable but oh so many-headed hunting dog, The General Public.

It was possible that someone had seen him during the time when he still looked like he did in the photo and maybe had some sense of where he had lived. And anyway, of course it was only a secondary concern. One needed a bone to throw the media.

+

So now the three police officers were sitting there at the long table up by the podium, and a ripple went through the assembled journalists when the police chief—with the simple gesture that he well knew was the most effective, theatrically speaking—held up the enlarged school photo of Hakan Bengtsson, and said:

"The man we are looking for is called Hakan Bengtsson and before his face was damaged he looked ... like this."

The police chief paused while the cameras clicked and the flashes transformed the room into a stroboscope for a while.

Of course there were copies of the grainy picture on hand to be passed out among the journalists but, above all, the foreign papers were most likely to prefer the more emotionally expressive staging of the police chief with the murderer—so to speak—in his hand.

When everyone had gotten their photos and the investigative team had reported on their activities, it was time for questions. The first one came from a reporter from
Dagens Nyheter,
the big morning paper.

"When do you expect to apprehend him?"

The police chief took a deep breath, decided to put his reputation on the line, and said:

"Tomorrow at the latest."

+

Hey there."

"Hi."

Oskar went in before her, straight to the living room in order to get the record he wanted. Flipped through his mom's thin record collection and found it. The Vikings. The whole group was assembled in something that looked like the skeleton of a Viking ship, misplaced in their shiny costumes.

Eli didn't come in. With the record in his hand he went back into the hall. She was still standing outside the front door.

"Oskar, you have to invite me in."

"But. . . the window. You have already .. ."

"This is a new entrance."

"I see. OK you can ..."

Oskar stopped himself, licked his lips. Looked at the picture on the album cover. The picture had been taken in the dark, with a flash, and the Vikings glowed like a group of saints about to walk onto land. He stepped toward Eli, showed her the album.

"Check it out, they look like they're in the belly of a whale or something."

"Oskar..."

"Yes?"

Eli stood still, with her arms hanging by her side, and looked at Oskar. He smiled, went up to the door, waved his hand in the air between the door frame and the door jamb, in front of Eli's face.

"What? Is there something here or what?"

"Don't start."

"But seriously. What happens if I don't do it?"

"Don't. Start." Eli gave a thin smile. "You want to see? What happens?

Do you? Is that what you want?"

Eli said it in a way that was clearly intended for Oskar to say no: the promise of something terrible. But Oskar swallowed and said: "Yes. I do. Show me."

"You wrote in the note that..."

"Yes, I know. But let's see it. What happens?"

Eli pinched her lips together, thought for a second, and then took a step forward, over the threshold. Oskar tensed his whole body, waiting for a blue flash, or for the door to swing forward through Eli and slam shut or something like that. But nothing happened. Eli went into the hallway, closed the door behind her. Oskar shrugged his shoulders.

"Is that all?"

"Not exactly."

Eli stood still, in the same way as she had outside the door, her arms along her sides and her eyes glued to Oskar's. Oskar shook his head.

"What? There's nothing . . ."

He stopped when he saw a tear come out of the corner of one of Eli's eyes; no, one in each eye. But it wasn't a tear, since it was dark. The skin in Eli's face started to flush, became pink, red, wine-red, and her hands tightened into fists as the pores in her face opened and tiny pearls of blood started to appear in dots all over her face and throat. Eli's lips twisted in pain and a drop of blood ran out of the corner of her mouth, joined with the pearls emerging on her chin and, growing larger, trickled down to join the drops on her throat.