The butterflies took off. They were perched on the ends of Death’s hair, hundreds of them, in every imaginable colour, and some colours that were indescribable. They were striving to get to the ceiling, to the space beyond, and they lifted Death off the floor. The entire ceiling was hidden from view by her hair, by the butterflies’ wings, an immense flower coming into bloom.
Kalle looked at his father. Blood was pouring from the wound in his temple, and his hand twitched a couple of times before falling limply to the floor. Death was biding her time, floating in the middle of the room.
When the caterpillar emerged from Sture’s chest, Death moved downwards. A hand reached out, the hooks coming closer. Kalle placed his hand over the caterpillar. Death hesitated. She was not allowed to touch him. Kalle could feel the caterpillar swelling beneath his hand. When it was about to burst he picked it up and threw it to the Visitor. The mouth opened and the caterpillar disappeared down his throat.
Kalle looked at his empty palm. It was no longer possible to change his mind. The choice had been made.
Flora came and stood next to Kalle; she put her arm around his waist and leaned her head on his shoulder. Together they watched as the butterflies let go of the hooks and drifted up towards the ceiling, a final glimmer of all the colours, fragments of a rainbow that passed through the ceiling and was gone.
Flora’s voice was a muffled whisper as she said, ‘Goodbye, Nana. You did well. In the end.’
Silence fell in the room. The dead bodies covered the floor like a carpet of worthless flesh. Life had left them, and taken Death with it.
Only Flora, Kalle and the Visitor remained, along with his five henchmen. They weighed each other up. It wasn’t difficult to work out what was going to happen. They had destroyed something he had spent several years building up.
The doors flew open and four guards burst in. One of them was holding Hagar firmly by the elbow. When the guards took in the scene laid out before their eyes they froze, and Hagar seized the opportunity to pull free. She ran to Elvy. Flora followed her, and they fell into each other’s arms. Kalle could no longer hear any thoughts, but it wasn’t difficult to work out what Flora was telling Hagar. Her grandmother had taken her place among the greatest heroes, but no living person would ever hear her story.
The guards waved their submachine guns half-heartedly as if they had no idea where to start, or who the guilty parties might be.
Kalle was still gazing into the Visitor’s eyes. It was like looking through a knothole in a plank of wood. Beyond the hole you suddenly see the desert, or the sea, and it fills your field of vision. Eternity. He was incapable of looking away, and he asked slowly, ‘What. Are you. Intending. To do. With us?’
The Visitor appeared to consider the question. He looked away and gazed around the room, contemplating the ruins of his great idea. He shrugged.
‘Revenge,’ he said, ‘is a human invention. It serves no purpose.’
Then he was sucked into himself and was no longer there. Like something you think you see out of the corner of your eye, but when you turn around it’s not there. The Visitor disappeared. Kalle was free once more to fix his gaze wherever he wished. He fixed it on Flora.
She and Hagar were crouching beside Elvy’s body, wiping away each other’s tears.
It’s over.
A couple more guards joined the others. One of them was escorting Roland, whose face was still covered in blood from the myriad tiny cuts. He was alive, but it would be quite some time before he was ready for a photo shoot with any of the gossip magazines. Kalle went over to him.
Roland’s big blue eyes peered out through the crust of congealed blood. He asked, ‘Did it work?’
‘Yes,’ said Kalle, and just for a moment he glimpsed the rainbow as it disintegrated and drifted away. ‘Yes, it worked.’
Foreword to the Swedish edition of ‘Let the Old Dreams Die’
When I saw the finished version of Let the Right One In at the Gothenburg Film Festival in 2008, I was dumbstruck.
I had visited the sets on three occasions, I had sat with Tomas Alfredsson and looked at various scenes, we had discussed the editing. I had seen a couple of rough cuts on large and small screens. And yet nothing could have prepared me for seeing the final edit, with all the sound effects, on the enormous screen in the Draken cinema.
It was a revelation. All the pieces had fallen into place, and the film was a small masterpiece, both within Swedish film and within the horror genre. This would later be confirmed by an unparalleled shower of awards from across the world, and I am eternally grateful to Tomas Alfredsson for the way in which he treated my story.
There was only one thing that nagged away at me when the film was over, and that was the ending itself. When Oskar is sitting on the train with the box containing Eli at his feet, on his way to a different life.
In spite of the fact that I was the one who had written the manuscript, it wasn’t until after the showing at Draken that I actually realised what the ending implies. Which is that Oskar will become another Håkan. Someone who will take on the terrible task of being Eli’s human helper, supplying her with blood and a place to live and so on. That was what the ending said. The fact that I hadn’t realised it earlier is probably indicative of a certain level of stupidity in my brain.
The American version recently had its premiere, under the title Let Me In. I like that version very much as well, but what is only implied in the Swedish film is spelt out in the American one. Håkan has been with Eli since he was a boy the same age as Oskar. Therefore, it isn’t difficult to work out what fate awaits Oskar.
Don’t misunderstand me. I think it’s a perfectly reasonable ending, a fair interpretation of the story and the deliberately open ending I left in the book. But it isn’t my ending.
I readily admit that I wouldn’t have thought of writing the short story that gives this collection its title if it hadn’t been for the films. I wanted to give my version.
‘Let the old dreams die’ has been rewritten several times, but I was able to produce something good only when I accepted that it had to be a story which could stand on its own two legs. A version where Oskar and Eli play only a subsidiary role. A love story, but with different main characters.
And for those of you who are wondering about the title, it’s the next line in the song.
Afterword
Rådmansö, October 2005
I CAN’T HELP IT…
I don’t know what you think about afterwords like this. Me, I love them. So now I’m writing one.
It might be a bit self-centred, but after a few novels I imagine I have a few readers who are curious about the way I think. Fourteen, maybe. The four of you who came to those two signings at the Science Fiction Bookshop, and another ten.
It’s you I’m talking to. The rest of you can go to sleep now. Goodnight, goodnight. Thank you for coming. Nice of you to join us. Sleep well.
There now. It’s just us.
Did you enjoy the stories? I hope so. My favourite is probably ‘Border’, but it’s led to divided opinions. When I’ve finished writing something I have a group of test readers who are kind enough to read the relevant bundle of papers and give me their reactions. They’ve all had their own favourite. Except ‘To hold you while the music plays’. Nobody likes that one, apart from me.
Perhaps it doesn’t make sense? If I tell you the original title was ‘The Cross’, does that help?
A little bit?
Titles are a chapter all of their own.
The first horror story I wrote was about a man who is shipwrecked on an island in the Stockholm archipelago in the autumn. He’s freezing to death, and the situation gets even worse when his dead girlfriend floats ashore. And worse still later on, when she isn’t where he left her…
I called that one ‘Our skin, our blood, our bones’ after a line by Morrissey. (Which song? Anyone?)
Later on, when I wrote my first novel, it was called The Only Friend for a long
time; I wasn’t very keen on that title, but I couldn’t come up with anything better. Until I remembered the title of my first story. Morrissey. I trawled through my memory and there it was: Let the Right One In.
For a long time Handling the Undead was called When We Dead Awaken, until I realised it was a play by Ibsen. Not good. In order to give the sense of those pages right at the back of the phone book, you know the ones: In the event of war…I renamed it Instructions for Handling the Undead, but that was a bit long, so…
The only title I’m really happy with is Harbour, which will be my next book. Then again, I haven’t written a word of it yet! But I’ve got ideas! Lots of them!
Enough about that.
Are you interested in these stories? How I came to write them?
(I write this in the knowledge that as I have been compared with Stephen King in various ways in the past, this is only going to make the situation worse. But, as Vladimir and Estragon say: Nothing to be done.)
How many of you are still here? Seven?
OK.
These stories were written between spring 2002 and autumn 2005. The first one, ‘Eternal / Love’, was written just after I finished Let the Right One In, and the last one, ‘The final processing’, isn’t quite finished as I write this. I just need to sort out a couple of things.
‘Eternal / Love’ was born out of a feeling that for some reason became acute. I started thinking about the fact that we don’t live forever, however much we love someone. Obvious, of course, but suddenly I saw it so clearly, and I was horrified. We can keep our love burning, but at some point we still have to part. The first sentence in the story just came to me in all its simplicity, then the pieces of the puzzle came one after another. It’s just occurred to me that thematically it’s a kind of epilogue to Let the Right One In.
‘Majken’ was special in that it began with a name. I got the name Majken, and it sat there in my head. One day on the way to Arlanda I passed a house with a silver Volkswagen Beetle parked outside, and I knew it was Majken’s car. This then linked up with the idea of ‘Shoplifters of the World, Unite’, and there you go. Perhaps I should also mention that I’ve adapted the security system at the NK department store slightly to suit my purposes.
I started to write ‘The final processing’ mainly to make use of the grandiose final scene I had planned for Handling the Undead, but for which there was no room. I planned a short novella of perhaps thirty pages, but it ran away with me. Which is actually quite consistent, because I had originally intended Handling the Undead to be a novella as well.
I won’t go through all the stories. That’s enough. There are only five of you still listening to me. I don’t really know what to do to hold your interest until I’ve got the acknowledgements out of the way.
Oh yes, I could tell you about the novella I did the most work on, but it isn’t in this collection because I didn’t manage to finish it. Would that be of any interest?
Actually I think this is the best format for that particular story, because more than any of the others it was based on an idea, on the fact that I had such a bloody good idea. And sometimes that can be a problem. The idea is so good it proves impossible to realise.
I should have smelled a rat, because I actually carried this idea around in my head for perhaps eighteen months without it ever poking its nose out and demanding to be written. However, in the end I decided to try to put it together, and after a month of dithering between different variations, narrative techniques, tempos and perspectives I gave up. It just wouldn’t work, it was all wrong however I tried.
But what about the idea?
Well, it went like this:
A number of people are locked in a chamber a hundred metres underground. Let’s say it was intended for the long-term storage of nuclear waste, but it has been left to its fate. Why are they locked in? For TV, of course. A large number of cameras document their every movement. What they call a reality show.
Not particularly original? Well, a film called My Little Eye came along at the same time.
But I haven’t finished.
The people in the underground chamber are totally isolated. Everything the cameras pick up is stored on a hard drive which is also in the chamber. During the month the group spend in the underground chamber, they have no contact whatsoever with the outside world, and no one can see them. In addition, there is also a kind of inbuilt reward system. If they can complete certain tasks, they receive alcohol or food or entertainment. A living TV game show. When they return to the surface, the hard drive is brought out and used to edit together a program.
Still not keen? No, me neither. Could easily degenerate into satire. But here’s the thing:
Are you familiar with Schrödinger’s cat?
Briefly, it’s a way of describing quantum mechanics, what is known as wave-particle duality. I won’t go into the science behind the whole thing, because not even the scientists are completely clear about it. But the idea is that a poison gas is released or not released into the box containing the cat. And in the world of quantum mechanics it isn’t just that we don’t know if the cat is alive or dead until we open the box. It’s also that the cat isn’t alive or dead, or rather it’s both at the same time, until we open the box.
It’s the observation itself that evokes the choice, determining the fate of the cat. Or, to put it another way: ‘Curiosity killed the cat’.
Back to the story.
The people in the underground chamber have been in a situation not unlike the cat’s. But now they begin to look at the tapes, at the material filmed by the cameras. And at that point reality is changed. They see things on the tapes that don’t correspond with what the participants said when they came out. When the tapes are rewound, they have been altered to match the new reality.
Since I write in this particular genre, it was naturally a terrible course of events that began to unfold. Those who are watching the tapes realise they must watch them in order to be able to stop this course of events, while at the same time they know that the very act of watching will cause the events to happen. Curiosity killed the participants.
Good idea, isn’t it?
I thought so, anyway. Until I tried to write it.
Oh well. At least I’ve found some use for it here. As a little bonus story for the three of you who are still hanging in there.
That’s all I wanted to say this time. It’ll probably be a while before we hear from each other again. Just one last thing.
I had intended to use a particular quotation as a motto for this collection, but I’m going to use it as the final word instead.
Sometimes I’m asked why I choose to write horror. A journalist pushed the issue so far that in the end I got really tired of it.
‘Why did you choose horror in particular?’
I told him.
‘Why did you locate a vampire in Blackeberg?’
I told him the truth: my idea was very simple. Something terrible arrives in Blackeberg, I wanted to see what would happen. Then came the follow-up question: ‘Why does something terrible arrive in Blackeberg?’
Somewhere around that point I gave up. I had no more variations when it came to answering what was basically the same question.
The following day I listened to Morrissey Live at Earl’s Court for the first time. And there, in the break between two songs, he suddenly comes out with something that I think can serve as both the answer to the questions, and the motto for my entire production:
‘I really can’t help it. It’s either this or prison.’
I also have some people to thank. Lots of people to thank.
Thomas Oredsson and Eva Harms Oredsson did the proofreading, and Thomas gave a lovely speech. Eva’s laughter echoed across the neighbourhood in the summer’s evening.
All my stepsons have read the stories. Their names are Nils, Jonatan and Kristoffer Sjögren and they’re the best in the world, each in his own way. Kristoffer’s Emma is called Berntson, and she can wa
lk any distance you care to mention. She read them too.
Aron Haglund stuck with it. Gave me faith in Majken and sent great lyrics by return.
Jan-Olof Wesström and Bob Hansson haven’t read the stories, but they’re such great guys and good friends that I wanted to say thank you, thank you anyway.
Then there are people who’ve given me factual information:
Frank Watson corrected some photographic errors in ‘Can’t see it! It doesn’t exist!’ in spite of the fact that he happened to share the same name as the main character.
Martin Skånberg and Maria Halla told me a bit about the load-bearing properties of buildings for ‘Village on the hill’.
Kurt Ahrén sat with me in the boathouse working out Latin terms for ‘The final processing’.
The staff at the customs post in Kapellskär told me about their work for ‘Border’.
(If any errors remain it is not their fault, but must be blamed on my lively imagination.)
I wouldn’t want to be without my editor, Elisabeth Watson Straarup, nor Malin Morell at Ordfront. Without them it wouldn’t be so much fun.
And then there’s Mia, of course. Everything is written for her, to be read aloud to her. It burns, flickers, and will never die.
Thanks, all of you.
John Ajvide Lindqvist
PS: Plus you, the very last one, who stuck it out right to the end. Thanks to you too.
John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Old Dreams Die
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