Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist
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 to concentrate on…in order to investigate how he has been able to proceed.’
The man is severely disfigured and at the time of his escape was dressed in a light blue hospital gown. The police ask that anyone with information regarding the disappearance contact them at the following number…
Sunday
8 November (Evening)
Public interest in the police search of Judarn forest was at an all-time high. The evening news realised 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. Only two days earlier the king and queen had informed the public that they were expecting their third child and decided that that would 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 organised. But all this had been seen before, in other contexts. The sheep picture was something new and it was this that people remembered.
The Expressen 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 cancelled.
And running right through this was an underlying anger at the fact that one person, one single person could 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 unfavourable 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 metres…’ 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, rumours 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 peoples’ eyes.
Lacke saw it when he bought a packet of red Prince cigarettes at the Lovers’ Kiosk with his last few kronor, on his way to Gösta’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 Gösta’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 Vällingby. 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 any more before the doors closed. At home there was a note on the kitchen table; his mum was going to dinner with the choir. 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 metres 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 Åkeshov. Someone there had referred to a colleague he didn’t know by the name of ‘the sheep man’ but he hadn’t got 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 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 handed him 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 photo-journalism, 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 of 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 control 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 it under a microscope, one would see something that all heart specialists would reject, having assumed that the sample had become contaminated, mixed. A tasteless joke.
Namely, the tumour in the sinoatrial node consists of brain cells.
Yes. Inside Virginia’s heart a separate little brain is forming. In its initial stage of development this new brain was dependent on the large brain. Now it is self-sufficient and what Virginia sensed during a terrible moment 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 pulled away.
Like…
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 for a couple of summers when Lena was little.
The rat’s nest they found 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 multi-coloured cardboard.
Virginia had felt a certain kind of guilt as she vacuumed up the little house. No, more than that. A superstitious feeling of transgression. As she inserted the cold mechanical hose of the vacuum cleaner into the delicate, fine construction the rat had spent the winter building it felt like she was casting out a good spirit.
And sure enough. When the rat was not caught in any of the traps but continued to eat their dry goods even though it was summer, Per had put out rat poison. They had argued about it. They had argued about other things. About everything. In July sometime the rat had died, somewhere inside the wall.
As the stench of the rat’s dead, decomposing body spread through the house that summer, their marriage slowly broke down. They had gone home a week earlier than planned since they could no longer tolerate the stench, or each other. The good spirit had left them.
What happened to that house? Does anyone else live there now?
She heard a squeaking sound, a hiss.
There is a rat! Inside these blankets!
She was gripped by panic.
Still wrapped up she threw herself to the side, hitting the closet doors so they flew open, and she tumbled onto the floor. She kicked with her legs, waving her arms until she managed to free herself. Disgusted, she crawled up onto the bed, into a corner, pulling her knees under her chin, staring at the pile of blankets and duvets, waiting for a movement. She would scream when it came. Scream so the whole house came rushing with hammers and axes and beat the pile of blankets until the rat was dead.
The blanket on top was green with blue with green dots. Wasn’t there a movement there? She drew a breath in order to scream, and she heard the squeaking, hissing again.
I’m…breathing.
Yes. That was the last thing she had determined before she fell asleep; that she wasn’t breathing. Now she was breathing again. She drew the air in tentatively, and heard the squeaking, hissing. It was coming from her air passages. They had dried out as she was resting, were making these sounds. She cleared her throat and felt a rotten taste in her mouth.
She remembered everything. Everything.
She looked at her arms. Strands of dried blood covered them, but no cuts or scars were visible. She picked out the spot on the inside of her elbow where she knew she had cut herself at least twice. Maybe a faint streak of pink skin. Yes. Possibly. Except for that, everything was healed.
She rubbed her eyes and checked the time. A quarter past six. It was evening. Dark. She looked down again at the green blanket, the blue dots.
Where is the light coming from?
The overhead light was off, it was evening outside, all the blinds were drawn. How could she possibly be seeing all the contours and colours so clearly? In the closet it had been pitch-black. She hadn’t seen anything there. But now…it was clear as day.
A little light always gets in.
Was she breathing?
She couldn’t figure it out. As soon as she started to think about her breathing she also controlled it. Maybe she only breathed when she thought of it.
But that first breath, the one she had mistaken for the sound of a rat…she hadn’t thought of that one. But perhaps it had only been like a…like a…
She shut her eyes.
Ted.
She had been there when he was born. Lena had never met Ted’s father again after the night her son was conceived. Some Finnish businessman in Stockholm for a conference. So Virginia had been there for the birth, had nagged and pleaded her way there.
And now it came back to her. Ted’s first breath.
How he had come out. The little body, sticky, purple, hardly human. The explosion of joy in her chest that changed to a cloud of anxiety when he didn’t breathe. The midwife who had calmly picked up the little creature in her hands. Virginia had expected her to hold the little body upside down, slap him on the behind, but just as the midwife picked him up a bubble of saliva formed at his mouth. A bubble that grew, grew and…burst. And then came his cry, the first cry. And he breathed.
So?
Was that what Virginia’s squeaky breath had been? A birth cry?
She straightened up, lying on her back on the bed. Continued to replay the images of the birth. How she had washed Ted since Lena had been too weak, had lost a lot of blood. Yes. After Ted had come out blood had run over the edge of the birthing bed and the nurses had been there with paper, masses of paper. Finally it had stopped of its own accord.
The heap of blood-drenched paper, the midwife’s dark red hands. Her calm, her efficiency in spite of all…the blood. All that blood.
Thirsty.
Her mouth was sticky and she replayed the sequence a number of times, zooming in on everything that had been covered in blood; the midwife’s hands to let my tongue glide over those hands, the blood-drenched paper on the floor, put them in my mouth, suck on them, between Lena’s legs where the blood ran out in a thin rivulet, to…
She sat up abruptly, ran doubled-over to the bathroom and threw open the lid to the toilet, her head over the bowl. Nothing came. Just dry, convulsive heaves. She leaned her forehead against the edge of the bowl. The images of the birth started to well up again.
Don’twantdon’twantdon’twantdon’twa
She banged her forehead hard against the porcelain and a geyser of icy clear pain spurted up in her head. Everything in front of her eyes turned bright blue. She smiled, and fell sideways to the floor, down onto the bathroom rug that…
Cost 14.90, but I got it for ten because a large piece of fuzz came off when the cashier pulled off the price tag and when I came out onto the square from Åhlen’s department store there was a pigeon pecking from a cardboard container where there were a couple of french fries and the pigeon was grey…and…blue…there was…a strong backlight…
She didn’t know how long she had been gone. One minute, an hour? Maybe only a few seconds. But something had changed. She was calm.
The fuzz of the bathroom mat felt good against her cheek as she lay there and looked at the rusted pipe that ran down from the sink into the floor. She thought the pipe had a beautiful shape.
A strong smell of urine. She hadn’t wet her pants, no, because it was…Lacke’s urine she smelled. She bent her body, moved her head closer to the floor under the toilet, sniffed. Lacke…and Morgan. She couldn’t understand how she knew that but she knew: Morgan had peed on the side.
But Morgan hasn’t even been here.
No, actually. That evening when they had helped her home. The evening when she was attacked. Bitten. Yes, of course. Everything fell into place. Morgan had been here, Morgan had used the bathroom and she had been lying out there on the couch after having been bitten and now she could see in the dark, was sensitive to light and needed blood and—
A vampire.
That’s how it was. She had not contracted some rare and unpleasant disease that was treatable at the hospital or in a psychiatric ward or with…
Phototherapy!
She started to laugh, then coughed, turned over on her back, stared up at the ceiling and went over everything. The cuts that
‘I am a vampire.’
It couldn’t be. They didn’t exist. But even so something felt lighter. As if a pressure in her head eased. A weight lifted from her. It wasn’t her fault. The revolting fantasies, the terrible things she had done to herself all night. It wasn’t something she was responsible for.
It was simply…very natural.
She sat up, and started to run a bath, sat on the toilet and watched the running water, the bath as it slowly filled. The phone rang. She only registered it as an indifferent noise, a mechanical signal. It didn’t mean anything. She couldn’t talk to anyone anyway. No one could talk to her.
Oskar had not read Saturday’s paper. Now it was spread out in front of him on the kitchen table. He had stayed on the same page for a while and read the caption to the picture over and over again. The picture he couldn’t let go of.
The text was about the man who had been found frozen into the ice down by the Blackeberg hospital. How he had been found, how the recovery work had been undertaken. There was a small picture of Mr Ávila as he stood pointing out over the water, towards the hole in the ice. In the quote from Mr Ávila the reporter had smoothed out his linguistic eccentricities.
All this was interesting enough and worth cutting out to save, but that wasn’t what he was staring at, couldn’t tear himself away from.
It was the picture of the shirt.
Stuffed inside the man’s jacket there had been a child-sized bloodstained shirt, and it was reproduced here, laid out against a neutral background. Oskar recognised the shirt immediately.
Aren’t you cold?
The text stated that the dead man, Joakim Bengtsson, was last seen alive Saturday the 24th of October. Two weeks ago. Oskar remembered that evening. When Eli had solved the cube. He had stroked her cheek and she had walked out of the playground. That night she and…the old guy had argued and the old guy had left.