For one second she really believed it was the sorrow-demon who had taken a physical form and thrown itself on top of her. Then she felt the searing pain in her throat as sharp teeth penetrated the skin. She managed to get back on her feet, spinning around and trying to get rid of the thing that was on top of her.
There was something chewing on her neck, her throat, a stream of blood ran down between her breasts. She screamed at the top of her lungs and tried to shake off the creature on her back, kept screaming as she fell again onto the snow.
Until something hard was laid over her mouth. A hand.
Against her cheek there were claws digging into the soft flesh… all the way in until they reached the cheekbone.
The teeth stopped chewing and she heard a sound like the one you make with a straw as you suck up the dregs in the glass. Liquid flowed over one eye and she didn’t know if it was tears or blood.
When Lacke came out of the apartment building Virginia was nothing more than a dark shape moving down the path towards Arvid Mörnes. His chest was hurting from sprinting down the stairs and his elbow sent waves of pain towards the shoulder. In spite of all this, he ran. He ran as fast as he could. His head was starting to clear in the cool air, and fear of losing her drove him on.
When he reached the bend in the path where ‘Jocke’s path’ — as he had started to call it—met ‘Virginia’s path’ he stopped, drew as much air into his lungs as he could to shout out her name. She was up ahead, only fifty metres away.
Just as he was about to call out her name he saw a shadow fall from a tree above Virginia, land on her and knock her to the ground. His scream turned into a hiss, and he sped up. He wanted to shout something but there was not enough air to both run and shout.
He ran.
In front of him Virginia got to her feet with a large lump on her back, spun around like a crazed hunchback and fell down again.
He had no plan, no thoughts. Nothing except this: to get to Virginia and get rid of whatever that was on her back. She lay in the snow next to the path with that black mass crawling on her.
When he reached her he directed all of his force into a kick at the black thing. His foot made contact with something hard and he heard a sharp crack, as when ice breaks up. The black thing was thrown from Virginia’s back and landed in the snow next to her.
Virginia lay completely still, there were dark stains on the white ground. The black thing sat up.
A child.
Lacke stood there staring into the prettiest little child’s face imaginable, framed by a veil of black hair. A pair of enormous dark eyes met his.
The child got up on all fours, cat-like, preparing to lunge. The face changed as the child drew back its lips and Lacke could see the rows of sharp teeth glow in the dark.
They remained like this for a few panting breaths. The child on all fours, and Lacke could now see that its fingers were claws, sharply defined against the snow.
Then a grimace of pain contorted the child’s face, she got up on two legs and ran off in the direction of the school with long rapid steps. A few seconds later she reached the shadows and was gone.
Lacke stood where he was and blinked away the sweat running into his eyes. Then he threw himself down next to Virginia. He saw the wound. Her whole throat was ripped up, dark strands of blood ran all the way up into her hair, down her back. He stripped off his jacket, pulled off the sweater he was wearing underneath, bunched it up into a ball and pressed it against the wound.
‘Virginia! Virginia! My darling, beloved…’
At last he was able to get the words out.
Saturday
7 November
On his way to Dad’s house. Every bend in the road familiar; he had taken this route…how many times? Alone, maybe only ten or twelve, with his mum maybe another thirty, at least. His mum and dad had divorced when he was four, but Oskar and his mum had kept coming out on weekends and holidays.
The last three years he had been allowed to take the bus by himself. This time his mum hadn’t even come with him in to the Tekniska Högskolan stop where the buses left. He was a big boy now, had his own book of prepaid tickets to the subway in his wallet.
Actually, the main reason he had the wallet was to have a place to keep the prepaid tickets but now there was also twenty kronor to buy sweets and such, as well as the notes from Eli.
Oskar fiddled with the band aid on his palm. He didn’t want to see her any more. She was scary. What happened in the basement was—
She showed her true face.
—there was something in her, something that was…Pure Horror. Everything you were supposed to watch out for. Heights, fire, shards of glass, snakes. Everything that his mum tried so hard to keep him safe from.
Maybe that was why he hadn’t wanted Eli and his mum to meet. His mum would have recognised it, forbidden him to get near it. Near Eli.
The bus exited the freeway and turned down towards Spillersboda. This was the only bus that went to Rådmansö Island— that was why it had to wind its way up and down all the roads in order to drive through as many settlements as possible. The bus drove past the mountainous landscape of piled timber at the Spillersboda sawmill, made a sharp turn and almost slid on its back down towards the pier.
He had not waited for Eli on Friday evening.
Instead he had taken the snow racer and gone by himself to Ghost Hill. His mum had protested since he had stayed home from school that day with a cold, but he said he felt better.
He walked through China Park with the Snow racer on his back. The sledding hill started a hundred metres past the last park lights, a hundred metres of dark forest. The snow crunched under his feet. There was a soft soughing from the forest, like breathing. The moonlight filtered through the trees and the ground between them turned into a woven tapestry of shadows where figures without faces waited, swaying to and fro.
He reached the place where the path started to bear down strongly towards Kvarnviken Bay, and climbed onto his Snow racer. The ghost house was a black wall next to the hill, a reprimand: You are not allowed to be here in the dark. This is our place now. If you want to play here, you’ll have to play with us.
At the bottom of the hill you could see the occasional light shining from the Kvarnviken boat club. Oskar inched himself forward, the incline took over and the Snow racer started to glide. He squeezed the steering wheel, wanted to close his eyes but didn’t dare to because then he might veer off the road and down the steep slope towards the ghost house.
He shot down the hill, a projectile of nerves and tensed muscles. Faster, faster. Formless, snow-covered arms stretched out from the ghost house, grabbing for his hat, brushing against his cheek.
Maybe it was only a sudden gust of wind, but at the very bottom of the hill he drove into a viscous, transparent filmy barrier stretched out over the path that tried to stop him. But his speed was too great.
The Snow racer drove into the filmy barrier and it was glued onto his face and body, was stretched until it burst and then he was through.
The lights were glittering over Kvarnviken Bay. He sat and stared out over the spot where he had knocked down Jonny yesterday morning. Turned around. The ghost house was an ugly shack of sheet-metal.
He pulled the Snow racer up the hill again. Slid down. Up again. Down again. Couldn’t stop. And he went on. Went on until his face was a mask of ice.
Then he walked home.
He had only slept four or five hours, afraid that Eli was going to come. Of what he would be forced to say, to do if she did that. Push her away. And so he fell asleep on the bus to Norrtälje and didn’t wake up until they were there. On the Rådmansö bus he had kept himself awake, made a game out of trying to remember as much as possible along the way.
Soon there will be a yellow house with a windmill on the lawn.
A yellow house with a snowy windmill on the lawn passed by outside the window. And so on. In Spillersboda a girl got on the bus. Oskar gripped the back of the se
at in front of him. She looked a little like Eli. Of course it wasn’t her. The girl sat down a few seats in front of him. He looked at her neck.
What’s wrong with her?
The thought had come to him even as he was in the cellar gathering the bottles together and wiping the blood away with a piece of cloth from the garbage: Eli was a vampire. That explained a lot of things.
That she was never out in the daytime.
That she could see in the dark, which he had come to understand she could.
Plus a lot of other things: the way she talked, the cube, her flexibility, things that of course could have a natural explanation…but then there was also the way that she had licked his blood from the floor and what really made him shiver was when he thought about the ‘Can I come in? Say that I can come in.’
That she had needed an invitation to come into his room, to his bed. And he had invited her in. A vampire. A being that lived off other people’s blood. Eli. There was not one person who he could tell. No one would believe him. And if someone did believe him, what would happen?
Oskar imagined a caravan of men walking through Blackeberg, in through the covered entrance where he and Eli had hugged, with sharpened stakes in their hands. He was afraid of Eli now, didn’t want to see her any more, but he didn’t want that.
Three quarters of an hour after he had boarded the bus in Norrtälje he arrived in Södersvik. He pulled on the string and the bell rang up front by the driver. The bus pulled over right in front of the store and he had to wait for an old lady whom he recognised but didn’t know the name of to get off.
His dad was standing below the stairs, nodded and said ‘hum’ to the old lady. Oskar climbed off the bus, stood still for a second in front of his dad. This last week things had happened that had made Oskar feel bigger. Not adult. But bigger, at any rate. All that fell away as he stood in front of his father.
His mum claimed his dad was childlike, in a bad way. Immature, couldn’t handle responsibility. Oh, she said some nice things about him too, but that was what she always came back to. The immaturity.
For Oskar his dad was the very image of an adult as he now stretched out his broad arms and Oskar fell into them.
His dad smelled different from all the people in the city. In his torn Helly Hansen vest fixed with velcro there was always the same mixture of wood, paint, metal and, above all, oil. These were the smells, but Oskar didn’t think of them in that way. It was all simply ‘Dad’s smell’. He loved it and drew a deep breath through his nose as he pressed his face against his dad’s chest.
‘Well hey there.’
‘Hi Dad.’
‘Your trip go OK?’
‘No, we ran into an elk.’
‘Oh no. That must have been something.’
‘Just joking.’
‘I see. I see. But you know, I remember a time…’
As they walked towards the store Dad started telling a story about how once a truck he was driving had collided with an elk. Oskar had heard the story before and looked around, humming from time to time.
The Södervik store looked as trashy as ever. Signs and streamers that had been allowed to stay up in anticipation of next summer made the whole store look like an oversized ice-cream stand. The large tent behind the store where they sold garden tools, soil, outdoor furniture and such was tied up for the season.
In summer the population of Södervik increased four-fold. The whole area down towards Norrtäljeviken Bay, Lågarö, was an unruly conglomeration of summer houses and even though the mailboxes down towards Lågarö were hung in double rows of thirty, the postman almost never had to go there at this time of year. No people, no mail.
Just as they reached the moped his dad finished the story with the elk.
‘…and then I had to hit him with a crowbar that I had for opening drawers and that kind of thing. Right between the eyes. He twitched like this and…yes. No, it wasn’t so nice.’
‘No, of course not.’
Oskar jumped up on the trailer, pulling his legs in under him. His dad dug around in a pocket on the vest and pulled out a cap.
‘Here. It’ll get cold around your ears.’
‘No, I have one.’
Oskar took out his own cap and put it on. Dad put the other one away.
‘What about you? It’ll get cold around your ears.’
Dad laughed.
‘No, I’m used to it.’
Of course Oskar knew that, he was just teasing. He couldn’t remember ever seeing his dad in a wool cap. If it got really cold and windy he put on a kind of bearskin hat with earflaps that he called his ‘inheritance’ but that was the limit.
His dad kick-started the moped and it roared like an electric chainsaw. He shouted something about the idling and put it in first. The moped jumped forward, almost causing Oskar to fall backwards. His dad yelled something about the gears and then they were off.
Second, third gear. The moped flew through the town. Oskar sat with his legs crossed in the clattering trailer. He felt like the king of the world and would have been able to keep going like this forever.
A physician had explained it to him. The fumes he had inhaled had burned away his vocal cords and he would probably never be able to speak normally again. A new operation would give him a rudimentary ability to produce vowels, but since even his tongue and lips were badly injured there would have to be additional operations to enable the possibility of uttering consonants.
As a former Swedish teacher Håkan could not help but be fascinated at the thought: to create speech by surgical means.
He knew quite a bit about phonemes, the smallest components of language, common across many cultures. He had never reflected much over the actual tools of production—the roof of the mouth, lips, tongue, vocal cords—in this way. To coax speech from this shapeless raw material with a scalpel.
But it was meaningless anyway. He did not intend to speak. In addition he suspected that the doctor was talking that way for a special reason. He was considered suicide-prone. Therefore it was important to imprint him with a linear sense of time. To recreate the feeling of life as a project, a dream of future conquests.
He didn’t buy it.
If Eli needed him he could consider living. Otherwise he could not. Nothing indicated that Eli needed him.
But how would Eli be able to contact him in this place?
From the treetops outside his window he sensed that he was high up. And furthermore, he was well guarded. In addition to the doctors and nurses there was always at least one policeman nearby. Eli could not reach him and he could not reach Eli. The thought of escaping, of getting in touch with Eli one last time had gone through his head. But how?
The throat operation had made him capable of breathing on his own again, he no longer had to be attached to a respirator. But he could not get food down in the normal way (even this would be repaired, the doctor had assured him). The feeding tube dangled constantly at the edge of his vision. If he pulled it out an alarm would go off somewhere, and anyway he saw very badly. To escape was basically unthinkable.
A plastic surgeon had taken the opportunity to transplant a piece of skin from his back to his eyelid so he could shut his eye.
He shut his eye.
The door to his room opened. It was time again. He recognised the voice. The same man as before.
‘Well, well,’ said the man. ‘They tell me there won’t be any talking in the near future. That’s too bad. But I have this stubborn thought that we could still manage to communicate with each other, you and me, if you’re up for it.’
Håkan tried to remember what Plato said in The Republic about murderers and violent offenders, what you were supposed to do with them.
‘I see you can shut your eye now. That’s good. You know what? I’ll try to make this a little more concrete for you. Because it struck me that maybe you don’t believe we’re going to identify you. But we will. I’m sure you remember you had a wristwatch. Luckily it was an old
er watch with the manufacturer’s initials, serial number and everything. We’re going to trace it within a couple of days, in one way or another. A week maybe. And there are other things.
‘We’ll find you, that’s a certainty.
‘So…Max. I don’t know why I want to call you Max, it is entirely provisional. Max? Maybe you want to help us out a little here. Otherwise we’ll have to take a picture of you and send it to the papers and…well, you see. It will be…complicated. Much easier if you talk…or something…with me now.
‘You had a piece of paper with the Morse code in your pocket. Do you know the Morse code? Because in that case we can talk by tapping.’
Håkan opened his eye, looked in the direction of the two dark spots in the white, blurry oval that was the man’s face. The man clearly chose to interpret this as an invitation. He continued.
‘This man in the water. It wasn’t you who killed him, was it? The pathologists say that the bite-marks on his neck were probably made by a child. And now we’ve had a report that I unfortunately can’t give any details of, but…I think you are protecting someone. Is this correct? Lift your hand if this is correct.’
Håkan shut his eye. The policeman sighed.
‘OK, then we’ll let the machine keep working. Is there anything else you would like to tell me before I go?’
The man was about to get up when Håkan lifted his hand. The policeman sat down again. Håkan lifted the hand higher. And waved.
Goodbye.
The policeman let out a snorting sound, got up and left.
Virginia’s injuries had not been life-threatening. On Friday afternoon she was discharged from the hospital with fourteen stitches and a large bandage on her neck, a smaller one on her cheek.
She had refused Lacke’s offer to stay with her, live with her until she felt better.
She had gone to bed Friday evening convinced that she would get up and go to work Saturday morning. Couldn’t afford to stay home.
It had been hard to fall asleep. Memories of the attack kept returning, and she couldn’t get settled. Thought she saw black lumps emerge out of the shadows of her room and fall down on her as she lay in bed with her eyes wide open. The wound on her throat itched under the bandage. Around two o’clock in the morning she got hungry, went out into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator.