Let the right one in (55 page)

"Now look here, you're fucking going to have to cough up."

+

They made their way back to Blackeberg and Morgan was given one hundred and fifty to spend at the alcohol shop while Larry took Lacke back to his place.

Lacke allowed himself to be led. He had not said a single word the whole time they were on the subway.

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 highrise 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.
The neighbors. They're going to think I'm killing him.

Larry fumbled with his keys while thousands of years of human suffering, of helplessness and disappointments, that for the moment had found an outlet in Lacke's frail body continued to pour out of him. The key finally made it into the lock and, with a strength he had not believed he possessed, Larry basically
carried
Lacke into the apartment and closed the door. Lacke continued to scream; the air never seemed to give out. Sweat was starting to form on Larry's brow.

What the hell should I.. . should I. ..

In his panic he did what he had seen in the movies. With an open hand he slapped Lacke's cheek, was startled by the sharp slapping sound and regretted it in the same moment that he did it. But it worked. Lacke stopped screaming, stared at Larry with wild eyes, and Larry thought he was going to get hit back. Then something softened in Lacke's eyes, he opened and closed his mouth like he was trying to get some air, said: "Larry, I. .."

Larry put his arms around him. Lacke leaned his cheek against his shoulder and cried so hard he was shaking. After a while Larry's legs started to feel weak. He tried to untangle himself from the embrace so he could sit down on the hall chair, but Lacke hung onto him and followed him down. Larry landed on the chair and Lacke's legs buckled under him, his head sank down onto Larry's lap.

Larry stroked his hair, didn't know what to say. Just whispered:

"There, there ... there, there ..."

Larry's legs had fallen asleep when a change occurred. The crying had died down, and given way to a soft whimpering, when he felt Lacke's jaws tense up against his thigh. Lacke lifted his head, wiped away the snot with his sleeve and said:

"I'm going to kill it."

"What?"

Lacke lowered his gaze, stared right through Larry's chest and nodded.

"I'm going to kill it. I'm not going to let it live."

+

During the long recess at half past nine both Staffs and Johan came over to Oskar and said "great job" and "fucking awesome." Staffe offered him chewy candy cars and Johan asked if Oskar wanted to come with them and collect empty bottles one day.

No one shoved him or held his nose when he walked past. Even Micke Siskov smiled, nodding encouragingly as if Oskar had told him a funny story when they met in the corridor outside the cafeteria.

As if everyone had been waiting for him to do exactly what he did, and now that it was done he was one of them.

The problem was that he couldn't enjoy it. He noted it, but it didn't affect him. Great not to be picked on anymore, yes. If someone tried to hit him, he would hit back. But he didn't belong here anymore.

During math class he raised his head and looked at the classmates he had been with for six years. They sat with their heads bent over their work, chewing on pens, sending notes to each other, giggling. And he thought:
But they're just. . . kids.

And he was also a kid, but...

He doodled a cross in his book, changed it to a kind of gallows with a noose.

I
am
a child, hut...

He drew a train. A car. A boat.

A house. With an open door.

His anxiety grew. At the end of math class he couldn't sit still, his feet banged on the floor, his hands drummed against his desk. The teacher asked him, with a surprised turn of her head, to be quiet. He tried, but soon the restlessness was there again, pulling in the marionette threads and his legs started to move on their own.

When it was time for the last class of the day, gym class, he couldn't stand it any longer. In the corridor he said to Johan: "Tell Avila I'm sick, OK?"

"Are you taking off, or what?"

"Don't have my gym clothes."

This was actually true; he had forgotten to pack his gym clothes this morning, but that was not why he had to cut class. On the way to the subway he saw the class line up in straight rows. Tomas shouted

"buuuuu!" at him.

Would probably tell on him. Didn't matter. Not in the least.

+

The pigeons fluttered up in gray flocks as he hurried across Vallingby square. A woman with a stroller wrinkled up her nose in judgement at him; someone who doesn't care about animals. But he was in a hurry, and all the things that lay between him and his goal were mere objects, were simply in the way.

He stopped outside the toy store. Smurfs were arranged in a sugary cute landscape. Too old for stuff like that. In a box at home he had a couple of Big Jim dolls that he had played with quite a bit when he was younger.

About a year or so ago.

An electronic doorbell sounded as he opened the door. He walked through a narrow aisle where plastic dolls, krixa-men, and boxes of building models filled the shelves. Closest to the register were the packages with molds for tin soldiers. You had to ask for the blocks of tin at the counter.

What he was looking for was stacked on the counter itself.

Yes, the
imitations
were stacked under the plastic dolls, but the originals, with the Rubik's logo on the packaging, they were more careful with. They cost
ninety-eight kronor
apiece.

A short pudgy man stood behind the counter with a smile that Oskar would have described as "ingratiating" if he had known the word.

"Hello ... are you looking for anything special today?" Oskar had known the Cubes would be stacked on the counter, had his plan figured out.

"Yes. I was wondering ... about the paints. For tin."

"Yes?"

The man gestured to the tiny pots of enamel paint arranged behind him. Oskar leaned over, putting the fingers of one hand on the counter just in front of the Rubik's Cubes while the other hand held his bag, hanging open underneath. He pretended to search among the colors.

"Gold. Do you have that?"

"Gold. Of course."

When the man turned around Oskar took one of the Cubes, popped it into his bag, and had just managed to return his hand to the same place when the man came back with two pots of paint and placed them on the counter. Oskar's heart was beating heat up into his cheeks, across his ears.

"Matte, or metallic?"

The man looked at Oskar, who felt how his whole face was a warning sign on which it was written, "Here is a thief." In order not to draw attention to his red cheeks he bent over the tins, said: "Metallic . . . that one looks fine."

He had twenty kronor. The paint cost nineteen. He got it in a little bag that he scrunched into his coat pocket in order not to have to open his school bag.

The kick came as usual when he was outside the store, but it was bigger than normal. He trotted away from the store like a newly freed slave, just released from his chains. Could not help but run to the parking lot and, with two cars shielding him, carefully open the packaging, take out the Cube.

It was much heavier than the imitation he owned. The sections slid smoothly, as if on ball bearings. Perhaps they were ball bearings? Well, he wasn't planning to take it apart and examine it, risk destroying it. The box was an ugly thing made of transparent plastic, now that the Cube was no longer in it, and on the way from the parking lot he threw it into a trash can. The Cube looked better without it. He put it in his coat pocket in order to be able to caress it, feel its weight in his hand. It was a good present, a great. . . good-bye present.

In the entrance to the subway station he stopped.

If Eli thinks . . . that I
. . .

Yes. That he, by giving Eli a present, somehow accepted the fact that Eli was leaving. Give a good-bye present, over and done with. Good-bye, good-bye. But that wasn't how it was. He absolutely didn't want... His gaze swept across the station, stopped at the kiosk. At the rack of newspapers. The
Expressen
paper. The whole first page was covered in a picture of the old guy who had lived with Eli.

Oskar walked over and flipped through the paper. Five pages were devoted to the search in Judarn forest... the Ritual Killer ... background and then: yet another page where the photo was printed. Hakan Bengts-son .

.. Karlstad ... unknown whereabouts for eight months ... police turning to the public ... if anyone has observed ...

Anxiety dug its claws into Oskar.

Someone else who might have seen him, known where he lived. ..
The kiosk lady leaned out through the kiosk window.

"Are you buying it or not?"

Oskar shook his head, tossed the paper back into its place. Then he ran. It was only once he was down on the platform that he remembered he hadn't shown his ticket to the ticket collector. He stomped his feet on the ground, sucked on his knuckles, his eyes teared up.
Come on, please,
subway train, come on ...

+

Lacke half-lay on the sofa, squinting at the balcony where Morgan was trying to coax over a bird who was sitting on the railing—without result. The setting sun was exactly behind Morgan's head, spread a halo of light around his hair.

"Come on . . . come, come. I won't bite."

Larry was sitting in an armchair, half-watching a public education course in Spanish. Stiff people in obviously rehearsed situations walked across the screen, said:

"Yo tengo un bolso."

"Que hay en el bolso?"

Morgan bent his head, so Lacke got the sun in his eyes and closed them, while he heard Larry mutter:

"Ke haj en el balsa."

The apartment reeked of stale cigarette smoke and dust. The seventyfive was empty, lying on the coffee table next to an overfull ashtray. Lacke stared at a couple of burn marks on the table left by carelessly extinguished cigarettes; they slid around before his eyes like meek beetles.

"Ona kamisa y pantalanes."

Larry chuckled to himself.

". .. pantalanes."

+

They had not believed him. Or rather, yes, they had believed him but refused to interpret the events in the way that he did. "Spontaneous combustion," Larry had said, and Morgan had asked him to spell it.
Except for the fact that the case for spontaneous combustion is just
about as well-documented and scientifically proven as vampires. That is
to say, not at all.

But of two equally implausible scenarios you probably choose to believe the one that demands the least amount of action on your part. They were not going to help him. Morgan had listened seriously to Lacke's account of what happened at the hospital, but when he got to the part about destroying the cause of all this, he had said:

"So, like, you mean we should become ... vampire killers. You and me and Larry. With stakes and crosses and ... No, sorry, Lacke, but I'm having a little trouble seeing it, is all."

Lacke's immediate thought when he saw their disbelieving, dismissive faces had been:

Virginia would have believed me.

And the pain had sunk its claws into him again. He was the one who had not believed in Virginia and that was why ... he would rather have spent a couple of years in jail for mercy killing than have to live with the image he had seared on his retina.

Her body writhing in the bed as her skin blackens, starts to smoke. The
hospital gown that rides up over her stomach, revealing her genitals.
The rattle of the metal bed frame as her hips move, heaving up and down
in infernal copulation with an invisible being as flames appear on her
thighs, she screams, she screams and the stench of singed hair fills the
room, her terrified eyes on mine and one second later they whiten, start
to boil... burst...

Lacke had drunk more than half the contents of the bottle. Morgan and Larry had let him.

"... pantalanes."

Lacke tried to get up out of the couch. The back of his head weighed as much as the rest of his body. He steadied himself against the table, heaved himself up. Larry stood up in order to give him a hand.

"Lacke, damn it.. . sleep a while."

"No, I have to get home."

"What do you have to do there?"

"I just have to ... do something."

"But it's nothing to do with ... the stuff we were talking about, is it?"

"No, no."

Morgan came in from the balcony while Lacke was teetering out toward the hall.

"Hey you! Where do you think you're going?"

"Home."

"Then I'll walk you there."

Lacke turned around, making an effort to shore himself up, appear as sober as possible. Morgan walked over to him, his hands out in case Lacke fell. Lacke shook his head, patted Morgan on the shoulder.

"I want to be alone, OK. I want to be alone. That's all."

"Are you sure you can make it?"

"I'll manage."

Lacke nodded a few more times, got hung up on this movement, and had to consciously put an end to it so he wouldn't be stuck standing there, then turned and walked out into the hall, pulling on his coat and shoes. He knew he was very drunk, but he had experienced this state so many times that he knew how to unhook his movements from his brain, perform them mechanically. He would have been able to play pick-up-sticks without his hands trembling, at least for a short while. He heard the others' voices from inside the apartment.