They quickly piled into a cellar where they hardly had room to sit hip against hip, and breathed quickly and quietly. They heard a man’s voice.
‘What are you doing down here?’
Oskar and Eli held their breath as the man waited, listening. Then he said ‘Damn kids’ and left. They stayed in the cellar until they were sure the man had gone, then they crawled out, leaned against the wooden wall, giggling. After a while Eli stretched out on the concrete floor and stared up at the ceiling.
Oskar touched her foot.
‘Are you tired?’
‘Yes. Tired.’
Oskar pulled his knife out of the sheath, looked at it. It was heavy, beautiful. He carefully pressed his pointed finger against the tip, then removed it. A small red dot. He pressed again, harder. When he took his finger away a pearl-shaped drop of blood came out. But this wasn’t the way to do it.
‘Eli? Do you want to do something?’
She was still staring up at the ceiling.
‘What?’
‘Do you want to…enter into a pact with me?’
‘Yes.’
If she had asked him how, maybe he would have told her what he was thinking before he did it. But she simply said yes. She wanted to do it, whatever it was. Oskar swallowed hard, gripped the knife so the edge was resting against the palm of his hand, shut his eyes and pulled the blade out of his hand. A stinging, smarting pain. He caught his breath.
Did I do this?
He opened his eyes, opened his hand. Yes. A thin trickle of blood was revealed in his palm, the blood appeared slowly, not as he had thought in a thin line but as a string of pearls that he stared at with fascination as they merged into a thicker, uneven mass.
Eli lifted her head.
‘What are you doing?’
Oskar was still holding his hand in front of his face, staring at it. ‘It’s easy, Eli, it wasn’t even…’
He held his bleeding hand towards her. Her eyes widened. She shook her head violently while she crawled backwards, away from his hand.
‘No, Oskar…’
‘What is it?’
‘Oskar, no.’
‘It almost doesn’t hurt at all.’
Eli stopped backing up, staring at his hand while she kept shaking her head. Oskar was holding the knife by the blade in his other hand, held it out to her handle first.
‘You only have to prick yourself in a finger or something. Then we’ll mix our blood. And then we have our pact.’
Eli did not take the knife. Oskar put it down on the floor so he could catch a drop of blood that fell from his wound.
‘Come on. Don’t you want to?’
‘Oskar…we can’t. You would be infected, you—’
‘It doesn’t feel like that, it…’
A ghost flew into Eli’s face, distorting it into something so different from the girl he knew that he completely forgot about catching the blood that dropped from his hand. She now looked like the monster they had recently pretended that she was, and Oskar jumped back while the pain in his hand intensified.
‘Eli, what…’
She sat up, pulled her legs under her, crouched on all fours and stared straight at his bleeding hand, took a step closer. Stopped, clenched her teeth and got out a gruff, ‘Leave!’
Tears of fear welled up in Oskar’s eyes. ‘Eli, stop it. Stop playing. Stop it.’
Eli crawled a bit closer, stopped again. She forced her body to contort itself so her head was lowered to the ground and screamed.
‘Go! Or you’ll die!’
Oskar got up, took a few steps back. His feet hit against the bag of bottles, it fell over with a clinking sound. He flattened himself against the wall while Eli crawled over to the little smear of blood that had fallen from his hand.
Another bottle fell over and broke against the concrete floor while Oskar stood pressed against the wall and stared at Eli who stretched out her tongue and licked the dirty concrete, whisked her tongue around on the place where blood had fallen.
A bottle clinked softly and stopped moving. Eli licked and licked the floor. When she lifted her face to him there was a grey smear of dirt on the tip of her nose. ‘Go…please…leave.’
Then the ghost flew into her face again, but before it had time to take over she got up and ran down the corridor, opened the door to her stairwell and disappeared.
Oskar stood there with the damaged hand tightly wrapped. Blood was starting to well out around the edges. He opened it, looked at the cut. It had gone deeper than he had intended, but it wasn’t dangerous, he thought. Some blood was already starting to congeal.
He looked at the now pale splotch on the floor. Then he gingerly licked a little of the blood on his palm, spat it out.
Night lights.
Tomorrow they would operate on his mouth and throat, probably in the hopes that something would come out. His tongue was still there, he could move it around in the sealed cavity of his mouth, tickle his upper jaw with it. Maybe he would be able to talk again even though his lips were gone. But he did not intend to talk again.
A woman, he didn’t know if she was from the police or a nurse, sat in the corner a few metres away, reading a book and keeping an eye on him.
They allot so much of their resources when a nobody decides his life is over?
He realised that he was valuable, that he meant a lot to them. Probably they were digging around in old records right now, cases they hoped to be able to solve with him as the perpetrator. A policeman had been in yesterday to take his fingerprints. He had not resisted. It didn’t matter.
It was possible that the fingerprints would link him to the murders in both Växjö and Norrköping. He tried to remember how he had proceeded there, if he had left fingerprints or other traces. Probably.
The only thing that worried him was that by way of these events people could track down Eli.
People…
They had put notes in his letterbox, threatened him.
Someone who worked at the post office and who lived in the area had tipped off the other neighbours about what kind of mail, what kind of videos he received.
It took about a month before he was fired from his job at the school. You couldn’t have someone like that working with children. He had walked away willingly, even though he could probably have brought it up with the union.
He hadn’t actually done anything at the school, he wasn’t that stupid.
The campaign against him had increased in strength and finally one night someone had thrown a fire bomb through his living room window. He had escaped out onto the lawn in only his underpants, stood there and watched his life burn to the ground.
The crime investigation dragged on in time and therefore he didn’t get the insurance money. With his meagre savings he had taken the train, rented a room in Växjö. That’s where he started working on trying to die.
He drank himself down to the level where he used whatever was at hand. Aco acne-solution, T-red. He stole wine mix and yeast in paint stores and drank everything before it was ready.
He was outside as much as possible, in some way he wanted ‘the people’ to see him die, day by day.
In his drunken stupor he became careless, fondled young boys, got beaten up, ended up at the police station. Once he sat in jail for three days and puked his guts out. Was released. Kept drinking.
One evening when Håkan was sitting on a bench next to a playground with a bottle of half-yeasted wine in a plastic bag, Eli came and sat down beside him. In his drunkenness Håkan had almost immediately put a hand on Eli’s thigh. Eli had let it stay there, taken Håkan’s head between her hands, turned it towards her and said: ‘You are going to be with me.’
Håkan had mumbled something about how he couldn’t afford such a beauty right now but when his finances allowed…
Eli had moved his hand from her thigh, leaned down and taken his wine bottle, poured it out and said: ‘You don’t understand. You’re going to stop drinking now. You are goin
g to be with me. You are going to help me. I need you. And I’m going to help you.’ Then Eli had held out her hand, Håkan had taken it and they had walked away together.
He had stopped drinking and entered into Eli’s service.
Eli had given him money to buy some clothes and to rent another apartment. He had done everything without wondering whether Eli was ‘evil’ or ‘good’ or anything else. Eli was beautiful and Eli had given him back his dignity. And in rare moments…tenderness.
The pages rustled when the night guard turned them in the book she was reading. Probably a dime-store novel. In Plato’s Republic the ‘Guards’ were supposed to be the most highly educated among the people. But this was Sweden, 1981, and they were probably reading Jan Guillou.
The man in the water, the man whose corpse he had sunk. That had been clumsy of him, of course. He should have done as Eli said and buried him. But nothing about the man would be traced back to Eli. The bite-mark in his neck would be regarded as unusual, but they would think the blood had been washed away by the water. The man’s clothes were…
Her top!
Eli’s top, the one Håkan had found on the man’s body when he first came to take care of it. He should have taken it home with him, burned it, anything.
Instead he had tucked it inside the man’s coat. How would they interpret that? A child’s top, spotted with blood. Was there a risk that someone had seen this shirt on Eli? Someone who would recognise it? If it was in the paper, for example? Someone Eli had met before, someone who…
Oskar. The boy next door.
Håkan’s body twisted restlessly in the bed. The guard put her book down and looked at him.
‘Don’t do anything stupid.’
Eli crossed Björnsonsgatan, continued into the courtyard between the nine-storeyed buildings, two monolithic lighthouses towering over the crouching three-storey buildings scattered around. No one was outside, but there was light coming from the gymnasium and Eli slithered up the fire escape ladder, looked in.
Music was blaring out of a small tape player. Middle-aged women were jumping around in time to the music so the wooden floor shook. Eli curled up in the metal grating of the stairs, leaned her chin on her knees and took in the scene.
Several of the women were overweight and their massive breasts were bouncing like cheery bowling balls under their T-shirts. The women jumped and skipped, lifting their knees so the flesh trembled in their too-tight workout pants. They moved in a circle, clapped their hands, jumped again. All the while the music kept going. Warm, oxygenated blood streaming through thirsty muscles.
But there were too many of them.
Eli jumped down from the fire escape, landed softly on the frozen ground underneath, continued around the back of the gym and stopped outside the swimming pool.
The large frosted windows projected rectangles of light onto the snow cover. Over each large window there was a smaller, narrow window made of regular glass. Eli jumped up and hung from the edge of the roof with her hands, looked in. No one was inside. The surface of the pool glittered in the glow of the halogen lights. A few balls were floating in the middle.
Swim. Splash. Play.
Eli swayed back and forth, a dark pendulum. Looked at the balls, saw them flying through the air, thrown up again, laughter and screams and splashing water. Eli relaxed her hold on the edge of the roof, fell down and consciously let herself land so hard that it hurt, then kept going across the schoolyard to the path through the park, stopping under a high tree hanging over the path. It was dark. No one around. Eli looked up to the top of the tree, along five metres of smooth tree trunk. Kicked off her shoes. Thought herself new hands, new feet.
It hardly hurt at all any more, just felt like a tingling, an electric current through her fingers and toes as they thinned out, took on a new shape. The bones crackled in her hands as they stretched out, shot out through the melting skin of the fingertips and made long, curved claws. Same thing with her toes.
Eli jumped a couple of metres up onto the trunk of the tree, dug in her claws and climbed up to a thick branch that hung out over the path. Curled the claws on her feet around the branch and sat without moving.
A shooting sensation in her teeth as Eli thought them sharp. The enamel bulged out, was sharpened by an invisible file, became sharp. Eli carefully bit her lower lip, a crescent shaped row of needles that almost punctured the skin.
Now only the wait.
It was close to ten and the temperature in the room was approaching the unbearable. Two bottles of vodka had already been consumed, a new one had been taken out and everyone agreed that Gösta was one hell of a guy and his kindness wouldn’t count for nothing.
Only Virginia had been taking it easy since she had to get up and work the next day. She also seemed to be the only one who was affected by the air in the room. The damp smell of cat piss and stale air was now mixed with smoke, alcohol fumes and the perspiration of six bodies.
Lacke and Gösta were still sitting on either side of her on the couch, now only half conscious. Gösta was petting a cat on his lap, a cat who was wall-eyed, something which had caused Morgan to have such fits of laughter that he had hit his head on the table and then had a shot of pure alcohol in order to dull the pain.
Lacke wasn’t saying much. He mostly sat staring straight ahead, his eyes glazed over with haziness, then mist and fog. His lips moved soundlessly from time to time as if he was conversing with a ghost.
Virginia got up and walked over to the window. ‘Is it OK if I open this?’
Gösta shook his head.
‘The cats…can…jump out.’
‘But I’ll stand here and keep watch.’
Gösta kept shaking his head mechanically and Virginia opened the window. Air! She greedily took a couple of lungfuls of fresh air and immediately felt better. Lacke, who had been starting to slip sideways on the couch since Virginia’s support was no longer available, straightened up and said out loud: ‘A friend! A real…friend!’
A mumble of agreement from around the room. Everyone knew he was talking about Jocke. Lacke stared into the empty glass in his hand and continued.
‘You have one friend…who never lets you down. And that is worth everything. Do you hear that? Everything. And you have to get that me and Jocke were…like this!’
He made his hand into a tight fist, shook it in front of his face.
‘And nothing can replace that. Nothing! You’re all sitting here yammering about “what a damn good guy” and all that but you, you’re all empty. Hollow. I have nothing now that Jocke…is gone. Nothing. So don’t talk about loss with me, don’t talk about…’
Virginia stood next to the window, listening. She walked up to Lacke in order to remind him of her existence. Crouched down next to his knee and tried to catch his eye and said, ‘Lacke.’
‘No! Don’t come here and…“Lacke, Lacke”…this is just the way it is. You don’t get it. You’re…cold. You go downtown and pick up some damn truck driver or whatever, take him home and let him screw you when you get down. That’s what you do. Damn…trucking caravan is what you have going on. But a friend… a friend…’
Virginia stood up with tears in her eyes, slapped Lacke and ran out of the apartment. Lacke lost his balance in the couch and hit Gösta in the shoulder. Gösta mumbled, ‘The window…the window.’
Morgan closed it and said, ‘Well done, Lacke. That was a good one. You probably won’t see any more of her.’
Lacke stood up and walked with unsteady legs over to Morgan who cast an eye out the window. ‘What the hell, I didn’t mean to…’
‘No, of course not. Go tell her instead.’
Morgan nodded down at the ground where Virginia had just come out of the front door of the building. She was walking rapidly towards the park, her gaze lowered. Lacke heard what he had said. His last words to her stuck inside his head like an echo. Did I say that? He turned on his heel and hurried to the door.
‘I just have to…’
/> Morgan nodded. ‘Hurry up. And give her my regards.’
Lacke threw himself down the stairs as fast as his trembling legs could carry him. The speckled-patterned stairs were nothing but a shimmer before his eyes and the banister slid so quickly through his hand it started to sting from the friction. He tripped on a landing, fell and hit his elbow hard. The arm filled with heat and became sort of paralysed. He got up and stumbled on down the stairs. He was rushing to help save a life. His own.
Virginia walked away from the building, down to the park, and did not turn around.
Her body was wracked with sobs, half-running as if to outrun the tears. But they followed her, forced themselves into her eyes and fell in big drops down her cheeks. Her heels cut through the snow, clicking against the asphalt of the path, and she wound her arms around herself, hugging herself.
There was no one to be seen so she gave in freely to her sobs as she made her way home, pressed her arms against her stomach; the pain lodged in there like an ill-tempered foetus.
Let a person in and he hurts you.
There was a reason why she kept her relationships brief. Don’t let them in. Once they’re inside they have more potential to hurt you. Comfort yourself. You can live with the anguish as long as it only involves yourself. As long as there is no hope.
But with Lacke she had held out hope. That something would slowly grow up between them. And in the end. One day. What? He accepted her food and her warmth, but in reality she meant nothing to him.
She walked huddled-up along the path, doubled over with sorrow. Her back stooped and it was as if a demon sat there whispering terrible things in her ear.
Never again. Nothing.
Just as she was starting to imagine what this demon looked like, it landed on top of her.
A heavy weight struck her in the back and she fell helplessly to the side. Her cheek met snow and the film of tears was transformed into ice. The weight remained.