Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist (translated by Ebba Segerberg).
Title: Let the Right One In.
Author: John Ajvide Lindqvist (translated by Ebba Segerberg).
Genre: Fiction, horror, vampire fiction.
Country: Sweden.
Language: Swedish.
Publication Date: 2004.
Summary: Twelve-year-old Oskar is a viciously bullied, overweight, and shy boy, who is morbidly obsessed by death and murder, especially the murder that's recently taken place in his neighbourhood. He spends much of his time eating candy, hiding from his bullies, and fantasizing of gruesome, gory revenge. Until he meets the new girl from next door. She's a bit weird, though, and she only comes out at night. Slowly, she begins to empower him, and make him believe he may be much more than just scared, beaten-down "Piggy". But as they grow closer, Oskar begins to realize that Eli may look like a little girl, but that is far, far from what she actually is.
My rating: 7.5/10.
My review:
♥ They could give a number of reasons for why they had to torment him; he was too fat, too ugly, too disgusting. But the real problem was simply that he existed, and every reminder of his existence was a crime.
♥ This sometimes happened when he was scared. His nose started to bleed, just like that. It had helped him a few times when they were thinking about hitting him, and decided against it since he was already bleeding.
Oskar Eriksson sat there curled up with a wad of paper in one hand and his Pissball in the other. Got nosebleeds, wet his pants, talked too much. Leaked from every orifice. Soon he would probably start to shit his pants as well. Piggy.
He got up and left the bathroom. Didn't wipe up the drop of blood. Let someone see it, let them wonder. Let them think someone had been killed there, because someone had been killed here. And for the hundredth time.
♥ His gaze stopped at an ad for women's underwear. A woman was posing seductively in black lace panties and a bra. It was crazy. Naked skin wherever you looked. Why was it tolerated? What effect did it have on people's heads, on love?
♥ He had done it twice before, and had messed up both times. Hadn't bungled it quite as much that time in Växjö but enough that they had been forced to move. Today he would do a good job, receive praise.
Perhaps a caress.
Two times. He was already lost. What difference did a third time make? None whatsoever. Society's judgement would probably be the same. Lifetime imprisonment.
And morally? How many lashes of the tail, King Minos?
♥ That was one of Oskar's dreams: to see someone executed in the electric chair. He had read that the blood started to boil, the body contorted itself in impossible angles. He also imagined that the person's hair caught on fire but he had no official source for this belief.
Still, pretty amazing.
He turned the page. The next entry was from the newspaper Aftonbladet and concerned a Swedish murderer who had mutilated his victims' bodies. Lame passport photo. Looked like any old person. But he had murdered two male prostitutes in his home sauna, butchered them with an electric chain saw, and buried them out back behind the sauna. Oskar ate his last piece of Dajm and studied the man's face closely. Could have been anybody.
Could be me in twenty years.
♥ The whole point of the picture, at least as he saw it, was that these two monumental bodies each came to an end in two index fingers that almost, but not quite touched. There was a space between them a millimetre or so wide. And in this space: life. The sculptural enormity and richness of detail of this picture was simply a frame, a backdrop, to emphasize the crucial void in its center. The point of emptiness that contained everything.
♥ A girlfriend who was pregnant. A young man who wasn't going to take responsibility. That's how it was. Happened all the time. No one thought of anything but themselves. My happiness, my future was the only thing you heard. Real love is to offer your life at the feet of another, and that's what people today are incapable of.
♥ He jumped in place and slapped his arms to get warm. Please let someone come. Someone who was alone. He looked at his watch. Half an hour to go. Let someone come. For life's sake, for love.
♥ The apartment was quiet. Nothing happened. The concrete walls sealed themselves around him. He sat on his bed with his hands on his knees, his stomach heavy with sweets.
As if something was about to happen. Now.
He held his breath, listening. A sticky fear crept over him. Something was approaching. A colorless gas seeping out of the walls, threatening to take form, to swallow him up. He sat stiffly, holding his breath, and listened. Waited.
The moment passed. Oskar breathed again.
♥ The knife would have the last word and the earth would drink his blood.
Oskar had read those words in a book and liked them.
The Earth Shall Drink His Blood.
..On his way to the forest the fantasy had gripped him and now it felt like reality.
He saw the world through the eyes of a murderer, or so much of a murderer's eyes as his thirteen-year-old's imagination could muster. A beautiful world. A world he controlled, a world that trembled in the fact of his actions.
He walked along the forest path looking for Jonny Forsberg.
The earth shall drink his blood.
It was starting to get dark and the trees closed around him like a silent crowd, following his smallest movements with trepidation, fearful that one of them was the intended target. But the killer moved through them, past them; he had already caught sight of his prey.
♥ He went inside to work on his scrapbook, to cut out and paste the articles about the Vällingby murder. There would probably be a lot of them, in time. Especially if it happened again. He was hoping a little that that would be the case. Hopefully in Blackeberg.
So the police would come to his school, the teachers would be serious, concerned, that kind of atmosphere. He liked it.
♥ "I love you."
"Yes."
"Do you love me, even one little bit?"
"Would you do it again if I said I loved you?"
"No."
"I should love you anyway, you mean."
"You only love me to the extent I help you stay alive."
"Yes. Isn't that what love is?"
"If only I thought you would love me even if I didn't do it..."
"Yes?"
"...maybe I would do it again."
"I love you."
"I don't believe you."
"Håkan. I can manage for a few more days but then..."
"Make sure you start to love me, then."
♥ "Did you hear me? You're going to have to clean this up."
Oskar stood still, unable to decide what to do. Of course Jonny didn't care about the sandbox. It was just the usual. It would take at least ten minutes to clear away all of the rocks that they had thrown and Johan wouldn't help. The bell was going to go off at any moment.
No.
The word came to him like divine inspiration. Like when someone says the word "god" for the first time and really means... God.
An image of himself picking up rocks after the others had gone back to class, only because Jonny had told him to do so, had flickered past inside his head. But something else had too. In the sandbox there was a jungle gym like the one in Oskar's courtyard.
Oskar shook his head.
"What's this?"
"No."
"What do you mean 'no'? You seem to be a little slow today. I'm telling you to pick this up and that means you do it."
"NO."
The bell rang. Jonny stood there looking at Oskar.
"You know what that means, don't you? Micke."
"Yes."
"We'll have to get him after school."
Micke nodded.
"See you, Piggy."
Jonny and Micke went in. Johan got up, finished with his shoes.
"That was pretty dumb."
"I know."
"What the hell did you do that for?"
"Because..." Oskar looked at the jungle gym. "Because I did, that's all."
"Idiot."
"Yes."
♥ Oskar. That guy in the mirror. Who is he? A lot of things happened to him. Bad things. Good things. Strange things. But who is he? Jonny looks at him and sees Piggy whom he wants to beat up. Mom looks at him and sees her Little Darling whom she doesn't want anything bad to happen to.
Eli looks at me and sees... what?
Oskar turned to the wall, to Eli. The two faces peeked out from between the trees in the wallpaper. His cheek was still swollen and tender, a crust had started to form on top of the wound. What would he tell Eli, if Eli came out tonight?
It was all connected. What he would tell her depended on what he was to her. Eli was new to him and therefore he had the opportunity to be someone else, say something different from what he said to other people.
What do you do anyway? To make people like you?
♥ He sat on the swing like before, kicked off. With each pump of his legs, with every arc a notch higher, something grew in his chest: freedom.
The illuminated apartment windows went past like multicolored, flowing strands and he swung higher and higher. He didn't always manage to do this trick, but now he was going to do it, because he was as light as a feather an could almost fly.
When the swing got so high that the chains loosened and started to jerk on the back swing he tensed his whole body. The swing went back one more time and then at the top of the next forward swing he let go of the chains, and pushed his legs forward, as high as they would go. The legs went around half a turn and he landed on his feet, bending over as far as he could so the swing wouldn't hit him in the head, and when it had gone past he stood up and stretched out his arms. Perfect.
Eli applauded, shouted: "Bravo!"
♥ Eli leaned over and lightly planted a kiss on his cheek. Håkan blinked and looked at Eli's face for a long time.
I'm lost.
Then he went to work.
♥ She leaned her head against his shoulder and they stood like that. Her breath against his shoulder. They held each other without saying anything. Oskar closed his eyes and knew: this was big. Light from the outside lamp filtered in through his closed eyelids and created a red membrane in front of his eyes. The biggest.
Eli nuzzled her head in closer toward his neck. The heat from her breath grew more intense. Muscles in her body that had been relaxed grew tense again. Her lips nudged his throat and a shiver ran through his body.
Suddenly she shuddered and broke away, took a step back. Oskar let his arms fall. Eli shook her head as if to free herself from a nightmare, turned, and started walking to her door.
♥ Staffan nodded. Was this boy... the victim? He had wanted to ask this, but in his haste couldn't think of a reasonable way to put the question. Had to assume Holmberg had taken the boy's name and other information, judged it best to let his mother come in and take over, accompanying him to the ambulance, crisis intervention, therapy.
Protect these Thy smallest.
♥ Oskar and Staffe were grouped together, which was good since Staffe was the only kid in the class who was worse at gym than Oskar. He had raw strength but was clumsy. Chubbier than Oskar. Even so, no one teased him. There was something about the way Staffe carried himself that told you if you messed with him something bad would happen to you.
♥ Mr. Ávila waved go! and Oskar ran.
Somewhere during his run up to the pommel he made up his mind.
He would try.
♥ There was something that felt slightly different when he went down to the kiosk, something that wasn't how it normally was, even if you overlooked the snow.
On his way home with the newspaper he suddenly thought of it. He wasn't keeping a lookout. He just walked. He had walked all the way down to the kiosk without keeping an eye out for someone who would be able to hurt him.
He started to rum. Ran home all the way with the paper in his hand while the snowflakes licked his face. Locked the front door from the inside. Went to his bed, lay down on his stomach, tapped on the wall. No reply. He would have wanted to talk to Eli, tell her.
♥ Virginia stood still and watched him. There he was, the man she loved and whom he could never live with.
She had tried.
♥ Now it was a little after midnight and he stood next to his window with a hole in his gut. He cracked the window, breathing in the cold night air. Was it really for her sake that he had decided to fight back? Wasn't this really about him?
Yes.
But for her sake.
Unfortunately. That's how it was. If they went after him on Monday he wouldn't have the energy, the desire to stand up to them. He knew it. Wouldn't show up for the training session on Thursday. No reason.
He left the window cracked with the vague hope that she would come back in the night. Call his name. If she could go out in the middle of the night she could come back in the middle of the night.
♥ Osak looked at her white back. Did he dare? Yes, now that he wasn't looking at her he could do it.
"Eli. Will you go out with me?"
She turned around, pulled the covers up to her chin.
"What does that mean?"
Oskar stared at the spines of the books in front of him, shrugged.
"That... you would want to be together with me."
"What do you mean 'together'?"
Her voice sounded suspicious, hard. Oskar hurriedly said: "Maybe you already have a guy at your school."
"No, I don't... but Oskar, I can't. I'm not a girl."
Oskar snorted. "What do you mean? You're a guy?"
"No, no."
"Then what are you?"
"Nothing."
"What do you mean, 'nothing'?"
"I'm nothing. Not a child. Not old. Not a boy. Not a girl. Nothing."
♥ Then he saw the note. Folded and left under the clock of his desk. He took it out and unfolded it.
THEN WINDOW, LET DAY IN AND LET LIFE OUT.
A heart, and then:
SEE YOU TONIGHT, ELI.
♥ Since Jocke had... disappeared. Jocke had been good. The only one among all his acquaintances he counted as a friend. This thing about his body being missing was fucked up. It wasn't natural. There should be a funeral at least. A corpse that you can look at, that prompts you to say: yes, there you are, my friend. And you are dead.
♥ Now he sometimes came here alone, sat a while by the gravestone, and ran his fingers across the carved letters that formed his father's name. That was what he came for. Not the box in the ground, but the name.
The distorted person in the hospital bed, the ashes in the box, none of that was Dad, but the name referred to the person he could remember and therefore he sometimes sat there and rubbed his finger over the depressions in the stone that formed the name MARTIN SAMUELSSON.
"How beautiful it is," his mom said,
Tommy looked out over the graveyard.
Small candles were lit all over. A city viewed from an airplane. Here and there dark figures moved among the gravestones. Mom walked in the direction of Dad's grave, the lantern dangling from her hand. Tommy looked at her thin back and was suddenly sad. Not for his sake, or his mom's sake, no: for everyone. For all the people walking here with their flickering lights in the snow. Themselves only shadows that sat next to the headstones, looked at the inscription, touching it. It was just so... stupid.
Dead is dead. Gone.
♥ "Either they made a mistake or else she was running around like that even though she was dead."
Tommy nodded. "Exactly. And you know what? I don't think these dudes make those kind of mistakes. Do you?"
"No, but..."
"Dead is dead."
"Yes."
Tommy pulled a thread out of the armchair, rolled it up into a ball between his fingers, and then flicked it away.
"Yes. At least that's what we like to think."
♥ Of course Gräddö Island would be crawling with skating enthusiasts if the waters froze, but that was in the daytime. Mr. Ávila preferred to skate at night.
With all due respect to the Vasa Race, it did make one feel like one of a thousand ants in a colony that had suddenly decided to emigrate. It was quite different to be on the open ice, alone in the moonlight. Fernando Ávila was only a lukewarm Catholic, but even he could feel in those moments that God was near.
The rhythmic scrape of the metal blades, the moonlight that gave the ice a leaden gleam, above him the stars vaulted in their infinity, the cold wind streaming over his face, eternity and depth and space in all directions. Life could not be bigger.
♥ Håkan's thoughts now returned to more significant matters. Which circle was he destined for? The circle of child murderers? That was the seventh circle. On the other hand, maybe the first circle. Those who sinned for love's sake. Then, of course, the sodomites had their own circle. The most reasonable thing would be to assume you went to the circle that represented your worst crime. Therefore: if you had committed an absolutely terrible crime you could thereafter sin away all you liked with the crimes punished in higher circles. It couldn't get worse. Like murderers in the USA who were sentenced to three hundred years in prison.
The different circles whirled in their spiral patterns. The funnel of Hell. Cerberus with his tail. Håkan imagined the violent men, the bitter women, the proud ones in their boiling pots, in their fire rain, wandering among them, looking for their place.
One thing he was completely sure of. He would never end up in the lowest circle. The on where Lucifer himself chewed on Judas and Brutus, standing in a sea of ice. The circle of traitors.
♥ A magical thought, inspired by the books he had read. But magic... surely there was a little magic in the world. The people who denied the existence of magic, they were the ones that it went badly for.
♥ Oskar fiddled with the Band-Aid on his palm. He didn't want to see her anymore. She was scary. What happened in the basement was-
She showed her true face.
-there was something in her, something that was... Pure Horror. Everything you were supposed to watch out for. Heights, fire, shards of glass, snakes. Everything that his mom tried so hard to keep him safe from.
Maybe that was why he hadn't wanted Eli and his mom to meet. His mom would have recognized it, forbidden him to get near it. Near Eli.
♥ He had never reflected much over the actual tools of production-the roof of the mouth, lips, tongue, vocal chords-in this way. To coax speech from this shapeless raw material with a scalpel.
But it was meaningless anyway. He did not intend to speak. In addition, he suspected that the doctor was talking that way for a special reason. He was considered suicide-prone. Therefore it was important to imprint him with a linear sense of time. To recreate the feeling of life as a project, a dream of future conquests.
He didn't buy it.
If Eli needed him he could consider living. Otherwise he could not. Nothing indicated that Eli needed him.
♥ Seek and thou shalt find, sure. But then you probably also had to know exactly what you were looking for.
♥ It defied description. It reminded her of when she was twenty-two and had been informed that her father had fallen from the roof of their summer cottage and broken his neck. That time she had also walked around and around as if there was not a single place on earth where her body could rest, where it didn't hurt.
♥ There was a light gurgling sound as Dad poured out the shots. The delicate upside-down cone of glass was filled with transparent liquid. It was so little and fragile in Dad's hand. It almost disappeared.
And still it ruined everything. Everything
♥ Then Dad would pace up and down in the kitchen for a while, and finally decide he needed to talk to Oskar.
He would come into Oskar's room and he would no longer be Dad. Just an alcohol-stinking, clumsy mess, all sentimental and needy. Would want Oskar to get out of bed. Needed to talk for a while. About how he still loved Mom, how he loved Oskar, did Oskar love him back? Slurring about all the wrongs he had ever experienced, and in the worst case scenario get himself worked up, become angry.
He never got violent or anything. But what Oskar saw in his eyes at those times was the absolutely scariest thing he had ever seen. Then there was no trace of Dad left. Just a monster who had somehow crawled onto his dad's body and taken control of it.
The person his dad became when he drank had no connection to the person he was when he was sober. And so it was comforting to think about Dad being a werewolf. That he in fact contained a whole other person in his body. Just as the moon brought out the wolf in a werewolf, so alcohol brought this creature out of his dad.
♥ There are no vampires.
The night was a black cover over the window. Oskar shut his eyes and thought about the route to Stockholm, raced past the houses, the farms, the fields. Flew into the courtyard in Blackberg, in through her window, and there she was.
He opened his eyes, stared at the black rectangle of the window. Out there.
The Deep Brothers had started a song about a bicycle that got a flat tire. Dad and Janne laughed much too loudly at something. Something fell over.
Which monster do you choose?
♥ Håkan reached us arm, his healthy hand, through the window toward Eli. Eli pulled herself up onto the window ledge, took his hand between hers and kissed it. Whispered: "Hello, my friend."
Håkan nodded slowly to let her know he could hear her. Took his hand out of Eli's and stroked her over the cheek. Her skin like frozen silk.
Everything came back.
He wasn't going to rot in some jail cell surrounded by meaningless letters. Harassed by other prisoners for having committed the-in their eyes-worst of all crimes. He would be with Eli. He would...
Eli leaned close to him, curled up on the windowsill.
"What do you want me to do?"
Håkan moved his hand from her cheek and pointed to his throat.
♥ He had never taken the subway this late before. Were these the same people who in the daytime sat quietly and stared in front of them, or read newspapers? Or was this a special group that only appeared at night?
♥ He looked at all sides and tried to think up a strategy but couldn't get past thinking of Eli's face.
What will she look like?
He wasn't afraid. He was in a state of... yes... he could not be here, at this time, could not be doing what he was doing. It didn't exist. It wasn't him.
I don't exist and no one can do anything to me.
♥ Then he could see Eli tomorrow evening, like normal.
But it won't be like normal.
He stared at the doorbell. Things would not simply return to normal. Something big had to be done. Like running away, hitchhiking, making your way home in the middle of the night to show that it was... important. What he was scared of was not that maybe she was a creature who survived by drinking other people's blood. No-it was that she might push him away.
♥ "Are you kind of... dead?"
She smiled for the first time since he had arrived.
"No. Can't you tell?"
"No, but... I mean... did you die once, a long time ago?"
"No, but I've lived for a long time."
"Are you old?"
"No. I'm only twelve. But I've been that for a long time."
"So you are old, inside. In your head."
"No, I'm not. That's the only thing I still think is strange. I don't understand it. Why I never... in a way... get any older than twelve."
Oskar thought about it, stroking the arm of his jacket.
"Maybe that's just it, though."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean... you can't understand why you're only twelve years old, because you are twelve years old."
♥ "I'm never going to hurt you."
"I know that."
♥ Benke Edwards had wheeled all sorts through these corridors, to cold storage. Men and women of all ages and sizes. Children. There was no particular gurney for children and few things made Benke feel as uncomfortable as seeing the empty spaces left over on the trolley when he was transporting the body of a child; the little figure under the white cover, pushed up against the headboard. The whole lower half empty, the sheet smooth. That flat sheet was death itself.
♥ But did it matter?
Benke saw himself as a philosopher of sorts. Probably came with the job. He had seen so much of what people really were, when you got down to it, and he had developed a theory and it was relatively uncomplicated.
"Everything is in the brain."
His voice echoed in the empty corridors as he stopped the gurney in front of the doors to the morgue, entered in the code, and opened the door.
Yes. Everything is in the brain. From the beginning. The body is simply a kind of service unit that that brain is forced to be burdened with in order to keep itself alive. But everything is there from the beginning, in the brain. And the only way to change someone like this man under the sheet would be to operate on the brain.
Or turn it off.
♥ 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 be.
♥ I'm not completely normal.
And he couldn't deny it: there was something in him that was actually hoping that... that the bleeding had continued, that he would have to call the ER, that there would be a hoopla. However much he wanted to go home and sleep. Because it would make a better story, that's why.
No, he was not completely normal. He had no problems with the corpses: organic machines with the brains turned off. But what could make him a little paranoid were all these corridors.
Simply the thought of this network of tunnels ten meters underground, the large rooms and offices in some kind of administrative department in Hell. So large. So quiet. So empty.
The corpses are a picture of health by comparison.
♥ "Eli? Are you in there?"
Nothing. But when he said her name aloud he remembered that it was wrong. That was the last thing she had said as they lay together on the couch. That her real name was... Elias. Elias. A boy's name. Was Eli a boy? They had... kissed and slept in the same bed and...
Oskar pressed his hands against the bathroom door, rested his forehead against his hands. He tried to think. Hard. And he didn't get it. That he could somehow accept that she was a vampire, but the idea that she was somehow a boy, that that could be... harder.
He knew the word. Fag. Fucking fag. Stuff that Jonny said. To think it was worse to be gay than to be a...
He knocked on the door again.
"Elias?"
A weird feeling in his stomach as he said it. No, he wasn't going to get used to it. She... His name was Eli. But it was too much. Regardless of what Eli was, it was too much. He just couldn't. Nothing about her was normal.
He lifted his forehead from his hands, held the pee back firmly.
♥ 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 hear 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.
♥ "This sounds a bit... but..." the corners of Eli's mouth twitched, "...I haven't had a ... normal friendship with anyone in two hundred years."
He looked at Oskar with a sorry-I'm-saying-such-silly-things smile. Oskar widened his eyes.
"Are you really that old?"
"Yes. No. I was born about two hundred and twenty years ago, but half the time I've slept."
"That's normal, I do that too. Or at least... eight hours... what does that make... one third of the time."
"Yes. But... when I say sleep I mean that there are months at a time when I don't... get up at all. And then a few months when I... live. But then I rest during the daytime."
"Is that how it works?"
"I don't know. That's how it is with me at any rate. And then when I wake up I'm... little again. And weak. That's when I need help. That's maybe why I've been able to survive. Because I'm small. And people want to help me. But... for every different reasons."
♥ "If you got away with it. If it just happened. If you could wish some one dead and they died. Wouldn't you do it then?"
"...sure."
"Sure you would. And that would be simply for your own enjoyment. Your revenge. I do it because I have to. There is no other way."
"But it's only because... they hurt me, because they tease me, because I..."
"Because you want to live. Just like me."
Eli held out his arms, laid them against Oskar's cheeks, brought his face closer.
"Be me a little."
And kissed him.
♥ In a few days the garbage truck would come and collect the sack. It came early in the morning. The orange, blinking lights would flash onto Oskar's ceiling at about the same time as he generally woke up and he would lie there in his bed and listen to the rumbling, masticating crunch as the garbage was crushed. Maybe he would get up and watch the men in their overalls who tossed the big bags with habitual ease, pressed the button. The jaws of the garbage truck closing and the men who then hopped into the truck and drove the short distance to the next building.
And it always gave him such a feeling of... warmth. That he was safe in his room. That things worked. Maybe there was also a longing. For those men, for the truck. To be allowed to sit in that dimly-lit coach, drive away...
Let go. I have to let go.
♥ To be separated from everything.
Leave. His mom, dad, school... Jonny, Tomas...
To be with Eli. Always.
He heard the TV go on in the living room, how the volume was quickly lowered. Distant clatter of the coffee pot from the kitchen. The gas stove being turned on, rattle of a cup and saucer. Cupboards opened.
The normal sounds. He had heard them a hundred times. And he felt sad. So very sad.
♥ He walked to a corner of the room, where there was an armchair, a small table with a plastic flower. Sat down, looked around the room. Bare walls, shining floor. Fluorescent lights in the ceiling. Virginia's bed of metal tubing, over her a pale yellow blanket printed with COUNTY ADMINISTRATION.
This is how things end up.
In Dostoevsky, illness and death were almost always dirty, impoverished affairs. Crushed beneath wagon wheels, mud, typhus, bloodstained handkerchiefs. And so on. But damned if that weren't preferable to this. Slow disintegration in a polished machine.
Lacke leaned back into the armchair, closed his eyes. The chair back was too short, his head slumped back. He straightened up, put his elbow on the armrest, and leaned his head in his hand. Looked at the plastic flower. It was as if they had put it there simply to emphasize the fact that no life was allowed here; here order reigned.
♥ Virginia was lying on her back, restrained by the straps, with her face turned toward him. But her face was much too still. Not a flicker of recognition, joy... nothing. Her eyes didn't blink.
Dead! She is...
Lacke flew up out of the armchair and something cracked in his neck. He threw himself on his knees next to the bed, grabbed the metal tubing, and moved his face close to hers as if to will her soul back into her face, from her depths, by the sheer force of his presence.
"Ginja! Can you hear me?"
Nothing. And yet he could have sworn that her eyes in some way looked back into his, that they were not dead. He looked for her, all the way through them, casting hooks from deep within himself, into the holes that were her pupils, in order to reach through the darkness for...
Her pupils. Is that what you look like when you...
Her pupils were not round. They were stretched lengthwise, to little points. He made a face when a cold stream of pain washed over his neck, put his hand on it, rubbed.
Virginia blinked. Opened her eyes again. And was there.
♥ A silence fell between them. The kind of silence that is particular to hospitals and that stems from the fact that the very situation-one person in the bed, sick or injured, and a healthy person at her side-says it all. Words become small, superfluous. Only the most important can be said. They looked at each other for a long time. Said what could be said, without words.
♥ They lay like that for a long time. Then came the words. "Lacke. I love you."
And Lacke did not reply. Simply let the words hang in the air. Become encapsulated and grow until they were a large red blanket that floated around the room, that lowered itself onto him and kept him warm all night.
♥ Only once after he had been infected did Eli meet another infected person. A grown woman. Just as cynical and hollow as the man with the wig. But Eli received an answer to another question that had been nagging him.
"Are there many of us?"
The woman shook her head and had said with theatrical sadness:
"No. We are so few. So few."
"Why?"
"Why? Because most of us kill ourselves, that's why. You must understand that. Such a heavy burden, oh my." Her hands fluttered; she said in a shrill voice: "Ooooh, I cannot bear to have dead people on my conscience."
"Can we die?"
"Of course we can. All you have to do is set fire to yourself. Or let other people do it; they are only too happy to oblige, have done so through the ages. Or..." She held her index finger and pressed it hard into Eli's chest, above the heart. "There. That's where it is, isn't it? But now my friend, I have a wonderful idea..."
And Eli had fled from that wonderful idea. As before. As after.
Eli put his hand on his heart, felt the slow beats. Maybe it was because he was a child. Maybe that was why he hadn't put an end to it. The pangs of conscience were weaker than his will to live.
♥ If he had been able to feel joy, he would have. But in the weak light from the lighter everything suddenly became mercilessly real. It was no longer possible to escape into some fantasy that he was really not here at all, that this wasn't happening to him.
He was locked into a soundproofed room with the thing he was most afraid of.
..Didn't want to be left in the dark with this...
A movement.
And Tommy felt how something important, something he needed in order to be Tommy, left him when the creature lifted its head again, and started to get up.
An elephant balancing on the little, little thread of spiderweb!
The thread broke. The elephant fell through.
And Tommy hit again. And again.
After a while he started to think it was fun.
♥ "No. I know. The day the Communists are pushed out of parliament is the day I start believing in vampires. But of course: there's always the conservatives. Bohman and his lot, you know. Talk about bloodsuckers..."
♥ In the elevator up to Larry's apartment on the sixth floor he started to cry. Not quietly, no, he wailed like a kid, but worse, more. When Larry opened the elevator door and pushed him out onto the landing the cry deepened, started to reverberate against the concrete walls. Lacke's scream of primal, bottomless sorrow filled the stairwell from top to bottom, streamed through the mail slots, keyholes, transformed the high-rise into one big tomb erected in the memory of love, hope. Larry shivered; he had never heard anything like it before. You don't cry like this. You're not allowed to cry like this. You die if you cry like this.
♥ He had been expecting something... terrifying. Something in proportion to the horror he had experienced at the hospital. But this little bloody rag of a person didn't look as if it could ever get up again, much less hurt anyone. It was only a child. A wounded child.
Like seeing someone you love wasting away with cancer, and then being shown a cancer cell through a microscope. Nothing. That? That did this? That little thing?
Destroy my heart.
He let out a sob, his head falling forward until it hit the edge of the bathtub with a dull, echoing thud. He could. Not. Kill a child. A sleeping child. He simply couldn't. Even though...
That's how it managed to survive.
It. It. Not a child. It.
It had attacked Virginia and... it had killed Jocke. It. The creature lying in front of him. This creature who would do it again, to other people. This creature that was not a person. It wasn't even breathing, and even so its heart was beating... like an animal in hibernation.
Think about the others.
A poisonous snake living among people. You think you shouldn't kill it, simply because for the moment it appears defenceless?
But in the end that wasn't what helped him make up his mind. It was when he looked at the fact again; the face covered in a thin film of blood, and he thought it looked like it was... smiling.
Smiling at all the evil it had done.
Enough.
♥ Eli turned his face to Oskar's, said:
"I..."
Closed his mouth. Then a pressed a kiss on Oskar's lips.
For a few seconds Oskar saw through Eli's eyes. Ad what he saw was... himself. Only much better, more handsome, stronger than what he thought of himself. Seen with love.
For a few seconds.
♥ Most of all he would have liked to go home.
...no...go...
Just go.