Let the right one in (37 page)

The money. She gave me money so I would stay.

He got up out of the armchair, took out the crumpled bills from his pocket, laid everything except a hundred kronor note on the table. Put it back in his pocket and said: "I'm going home."

She leaned over, grabbed his wrist. "Stay. Please."

"Why? All you do is lie."

He tried to move away from her, but her grip on his wrist hardened.

"Let me go!"

"I'm not some freak from the circus!"

Oskar clenched his teeth, said calmly: "Let me go." She did not let go. The cold arc of anger in Oskar's chest started to vibrate, sing, and he threw himself on top of her. Landed on top of her and pressed her backwards into the couch. She weighed almost nothing and he had her pinned up against the armrest, sat down on her chest while the arc bent, shook, made black dots in front of his eyes as he raised his arm and hit her in the face as hard as he could.

A sharp slapping sound bounced between the walls and her head jerked to the side, drops of saliva flew out of her mouth, and his hand burned. The arc cracked, fell to pieces, and his anger dissolved.

He sat on her chest, looked bewildered at her little head that lay turned in profile against the black leather of the couch as a flush bloomed on the cheek he had struck. She lay still, her eyes open. He rubbed his hands over his face.

"Sorry. Sorry. I. . ."

Suddenly she turned around, threw him off her chest, pushed him up against the back of the couch. He tried to get a grip on her shoulders, but missed, got ahold of her hips, and she landed with her belly right over his face. He threw her off, twisted around, and both of them tried to get ahold of the other.

They rolled around on the couch, wrestling. With tensed muscles and utter concentration. But with care, so that neither would hurt the other. They snaked around each other, bumped against the table.

Pieces of the black egg fell to the floor with the sound of raindrops on a metal roof.

+

He didn't bother going up to his room to get his coat. His shift was over.
This is my time off and this is something I'm doing for the sheer
pleasure
of it.

He could help himself to a spare pathologist's coat in the morgue if it was really . .. messy. The elevator came and he walked in, pushed the button for lower level two. What would he do in that case? Call the ER

and see if someone could come down and sew him up? There was no protocol for this kind of situation.

Probably the bleeding, or whatever it was called, had already ended, but he had to make sure. Would not be able to sleep otherwise. Would lie there and hear the dripping.

He smiled to himself as he got out of the elevator. How many normal people would be prepared to take care of this kind of thing without batting an eye? Not many. He was pretty pleased with himself for . . . well, for doing his duty. Taking responsibility.

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.

He punched in the code, automatically put his finger on the opener, which only answered with a helpless click. Pushed the door open manually and walked into the morgue, pulled on a pair of rubber gloves.
What was this?

The man he had left covered in a sheet now lay fully exposed. His penis was erect, pointing to one side. The sheet lay on the floor. Benke's smoke-damaged airways squeaked as he gasped for breath.

The man wasn't dead. No. He couldn't be dead ... since he was moving. Slowly, in an almost dream-like way, the man turned over on the gurney. His hands fumbled for something and Benke instinctively took a step back as one of them—it didn't even look like a hand—swept past his face. The man tried to get up, fell back onto the metal stretcher. The lone eye stared straight ahead without blinking.

A sound. The man was uttering a sound, heeeeeeeee. . .

Benke rubbed his face. Something had happened to his skin. His skin felt... he looked at his hand. Rubber gloves.

Behind his hand he saw the man make another attempt to get up.
What the hell do I do?

Again the man fell down onto the gurney with a moist boom. A few drops of that fluid splattered onto Benke's face. He tried to wipe it away with the rubber glove but only managed to smear it around.

He took up a corner of his shirt and wiped himself with it.

Ten stories. He fell ten stories.

OK, OK, you've got a situation here. Deal with it.

If the man wasn't dead, he was surely in the process of dying. Needed care.

"Eeeee..."

"I'm here. I'll help you. I'm going to bring you to the emergency room. Try to lie still, I will..."

Benke walked over and put his hands on the man's struggling body. The man's un-deformed hand shot out and grabbed Benke's wrist. Damn, he was strong. Benke had to use both hands to free himself from the man's grip.

The only thing at hand to put over the man to warm him was the standard-issue morgue sheet. Benke took three of them and spread them over the man, who was writhing like a worm on a hook, still making that sound. He leaned down over the man, calmer now since Benke had covered him with the sheets.

"I'll take you down to the emergency room, OK? Try to keep still." He pushed the stretcher to the door and, despite the situation, he remembered that the door opener wasn't working. He walked over to the head of the gurney and opened the door, looked down at the man's head. Immediately wished he hadn't done so.

The mouth, which was not a mouth, was opening.

The half-healed wound tissue came apart with a sound like when you skin a fish; single strips of pink skin refused to tear, stretched out when the hole in the lower half of the face widened, kept widening.

"AAAAAA!"

The howl echoed through the empty corridors and Benke's heart was beating faster.

Keep still! Be quiet!

If he had had a hammer in his hand in that moment there would have been a great likelihood that he would have smashed it right into that revolting, quivering mass with that staring eye, those strips of skin over the mouth hole that now snapped like overstretched rubber bands, and Benke could see the man's teeth glow white in all that reddish brown fluid that was his face.

Benke walked back to the foot end of the gurney again, started to push it through the corridors, toward the elevator. He half-ran, afraid that the man was going to twist so much he fell off.

The corridors stretched out endlessly before him, like in a nightmare. Yes. It was like a nightmare. All thoughts of a "good story" were gone. He wanted to come up to the surface where there were other people, living people who could rescue him from this monster who was screaming on the gurney.

He reached the elevator and pressed the button that would get it to come, visualizing the route to the ER. Five minutes and he would be there. Already up on the ground floor there would be other people who could help him. Two minutes and he would be back in real life.

Come on, damn you!

The man's healthy hand was waving.

Benke looked at it and closed his eyes, opened them again. The man was trying to say something, softly. He was indicating for Benke to come closer. He was clearly conscious.

Benke stepped next to the gurney, bent down over the man. "Yes, what is it?"

The hand suddenly grabbed hold of his neck, pulled his head down. Benke lost his balance, fell down over the man, the grip on his neck iron-hard as the hand pulled him down to that... hole.

He tried to grab hold of the metal bars at the top end of the stretcher in order to resist, but his head twisted to the side and his eyes ended up only a few centimeters from the wet compress on the man's neck.

"Let go of me, for ..."

A finger pushed into his ear and he
heard
the bones in the ear canal crackle and give way as the finger forced itself in, further in. He kicked out with his legs and when his shin hit the metal bars under the gurney he finally screamed.

Then teeth clamped down on his cheek and the finger in his ear reached a point where it turned something off, something turned off and... he gave up.

The last thing he saw was how the wet compress in front of his eyes changed color and grew pink as the man chewed on his face.

The last thing he heard was a

pling

as the elevator arrived.

+

They lay next to each other on the couch, sweating, panting. Oskar was sore all over, exhausted. He yawned so wide his jaws cracked. Eli also yawned. Oskar turned his head to her.

"Give it up." Excuse me?

"You aren't really sleepy, are you?"

"No."

Oskar made an effort to keep his eyes open, was talking almost without moving his lips. Eli's face was starting to appear foggy, unreal.

"What do you do? To get blood."

Eli looked at him. For a long time. Then she seemed to make up her mind about something and Oskar saw how something moved inside her cheeks, lips, as if she was swirling her tongue around in there. Then she parted her lips, opened wide.

And he saw her teeth. She closed her mouth again.

Oskar turned away and looked up at the ceiling, where a thread of dusty cobwebs stretched down from the unused overhead light. He didn't even have the energy to be surprised. Oh. She was a vampire. But he already knew that.

"Are there a lot of you?"

"What do you mean?"

"You know."

"No, I don't."

Oskar's gaze roamed the ceiling, trying to locate more cobwebs. Found two. Thought he saw a spider crawling on one of them. He blinked. Blinked again. Eyes full of sand. No spider.

"What do I call you, then? This thing that you are."

"Eli."

"Is that really your name?"

"Almost."

"What's your real name?"

A pause. Eli shifted away from him, against the back of the couch, turned around onto her side.

"Elias."

"But that's a ... boy's name."

"Yes."

Oskar closed his eyes. Couldn't take any more. His eyelids had glued themselves shut onto his eyeballs. A black hole was growing, enveloping his whole body. There was a faint impression somewhere far away at the very back of his head that he should say something, do something. But he didn't have the energy.

The black hole exploded in slow motion. He was sucked forward, inward, turned a slow somersault in space, into sleep. Far away he felt someone stroke his cheek. Didn't manage to articulate the thought that, because he felt it, it must be his own. But somewhere, on a planet far far away, someone gently stroked someone's cheek. And that was good.

Then there were only stars.

Part Four

We are the troll company, we don't let anyone go free!

—Rune Andreasson,
Bamse the Magic Forest
[popular Swedish children's comic book]

8 NOVEMBER

The Traneberg Bridge. When it was unveiled in 1934 it was hailed as a minor miracle of engineering. The longest concrete single-span bridge
in
the world.
One single mighty arc that soared between Kungsholmen and the western suburbs, which at that time consisted of the little garden cities of Bromma and Appelviken. The single-family-house movement's prefabricated prototypes were in Angby.

But the modern was already on its way. The first real suburbs of threestory apartment buildings were already finished in Traneberg and Abrahamsberg, and the state had bought up large areas further west in order to start constructing everything that would one day become Vallingby, Hasselby and Blackeberg.

To all this, the Traneberg Bridge was the link. Almost everyone who traveled to or from the western suburbs used the Traneberg Bridge. Already in the 1960s reports had started to come in about how the bridge was slowly disintegrating as a result of the heavy traffic it was subjected to. It was renovated and reinforced from time to time but the large-scale renovation and new construction that came up in talks was still a thing of the future.

So on the morning of the eighth of November 1981 the bridge looked tired. A life-weary senior, sorrowfully pondering the days when the heavens were brighter, the clouds lighter, and when it was still the longest single-span concrete bridge
in the world.

The snow had started to melt toward morning and snow-slush ran down into cracks in the bridge. The city didn't dare to salt it because it could eat away further at the aging concrete.

There wasn't much traffic at this time of day, particularly not on a Sunday morning. The subway had stopped running for the night and the occasional drivers who passed by were either longing for their beds or to return to their beds.

Benny Molin was an exception. Sure, he was looking forward to his bed at home but he was probably too happy to be able to sleep.

Eight times now he had met with various women through the personal ads, but Betty, whom he had arranged to meet on Saturday night was the first. . . that he had clicked with.

This was going to be something. Both of them knew it.

They had doubled over with laughter at how ridiculous it sounded:

"Benny and Betty." Like a comedic duo, but what can you do? And if they had kids, what would they call them? Lenny and Netty?

Yes, they had had a lot of fun together. They had sat in her place in Kungsholmen, talking about their worlds, trying to fit their puzzle pieces together, with pretty good results. Toward morning there were sort of only two alternatives for what to do next.