Once he was in the courtyard he stopped, caught his breath. Almost all the windows were dark, but wasn’t there a faint light coming from behind the blinds of Eli’s apartment?
What will she look like?
He walked up the sloping yard glancing at his own dark window. The normal Oskar was lying in there, sleeping. Oskar…pre-Eli. The one with the pissball in his underpants. That was something he had done away with, didn’t need it any longer.
Oskar unlocked the door to his building and walked through the basement corridor over to hers, did not stop to see if the stain was still on the floor. Just walked past it. It didn’t exist any longer. He had no mum, no dad, no earlier life, he was simply…here. He walked through the door, up the stairs.
Stood there on the landing, looking at the worn wooden door, the empty nameplate. Behind that door.
He had imagined he was going to dash up the stairs, make a dive for the bell. Instead he sat down on the next to last step, next to the door.
What if she didn’t want him to come?
After all, she was the one who had run away from him. She would maybe tell him to go away, that she wanted to be left alone, that she…
The basement storage room. Tommy’s gang.
He could sleep there, on the couch. They weren’t there at night, were they? Then he could see Eli tomorrow evening, like normal.
But it won’t be like normal.
He stared at the doorbell. Things would not simply return to normal. Something big had to be done. Like running away, hitchhiking, making your way home in the middle of the night to show that it was…important. What he was scared of was not that maybe she was a creature who survived by drinking other people’s blood. No—it was that she might push him away.
He rang the bell.
A shrill sound rang out inside the apartment, stopped abruptly when he let go of the button. He stood there, waiting. Rang it again, longer this time. Nothing. Not even a sound.
She wasn’t home.
Oskar sat still on the step while disappointment sank like a stone to his stomach. And he suddenly felt so tired, so very tired. He got up slowly, walked down the stairs. Halfway down he had an idea. Stupid, but why not. Walked up to her door again and with short and long tones of the doorbell he spelled out her name in Morse code.
Short. Pause. Short, long, short, short. Pause. Short, short. E…L…I…
Waited. No sound from the other side. He turned to leave when he heard her voice.
‘Oskar? Is that you?’
And so it was, after all; joy exploded inside his chest like a rocket blasting off through his mouth with an altogether too-loud ‘Yes!’
In order to have something to do, Maud Carlberg got herself a cup of coffee from the room behind the reception desk, sat down at the darkened counter. She should have finished her shift an hour ago but the police had asked her to wait.
A couple of men—not dressed like police officers—were painstakingly brushing a kind of powder onto the floor where the little girl had walked in her bare feet.
The policeman who had questioned her about what the girl had said, done, what she looked like, had not been friendly. Maud got the impression from his tone that she had done the wrong thing. But how could she have known?
Henrik, one of the security guards whose shift often overlapped with hers, came over to the reception desk and pointed at her cup of coffee.
‘For me?’
‘If you like.’
Henrik picked up the cup, took a sip and looked out into the hall. Apart from the men who were brushing the floor for prints there was also a uniformed policeman who was talking to a taxi driver.
‘A lot of people tonight.’
‘I don’t understand any of it. How did she get up there?’
‘No idea. They’re working on it. Looks like she climbed the walls.’
‘But surely that’s not possible?’
‘No.’
Henrik took a bag of licorice boats out of his pocket and held them out to her. Maud shook her head and Henrik took three boats, put them in his mouth and shrugged apologetically.
‘I stopped smoking. Put on four kilos in two weeks.’ He made a face. ‘Christ. You should have seen him.’
‘Him…the murderer?’
‘Yes. It had splattered…over the whole wall. And his face… shit. If I ever have to kill myself it’ll be pills. Just think about the guys who do the autopsy. To have to—’
‘Henrik.’
‘Yes?’
‘Stop.’
Eli was standing in the doorway. Oskar was sitting on the step. In one hand he was squeezing the handle of his bag, like he was prepared to leave at any moment. Eli pushed a tendril of hair behind her ear. She looked completely healthy. A little girl, unsure of herself. She looked down at her hands, said in a low voice, ‘Are you coming?’
‘Yes.’
Eli nodded almost imperceptibly, fidgeting with her fingers. Oskar was still sitting on the step.
‘Can I…come in?’
‘Yes.’
The devil flew into him. ‘Say that I can come in.’
Eli lifted her head, made an attempt to say something, but didn’t. She started to close the door a little, stopped. Shifted her weight between her bare feet, then said, ‘You can come in.’
She turned and walked into the apartment, Oskar followed, closing the door behind him. He put the bag down in the hall, took off his jacket and hung it on the hat shelf with little hooks underneath where, he noted, nothing else was hanging.
Eli was standing in the door to the living room with her arms limp at her side. She was wearing panties and a red T-shirt with the words Iron Maiden on it, over a picture of the skeleton monster they had on their albums. Oskar thought he recognised it. Had seen it in the trash room at some point. Was it the same one?
Eli was studying her dirty feet.
‘Why did you say that?’
‘You said it.’
‘Yes. Oskar…’
She hesitated. Oskar stayed in the same position, with his hand on the jacket he had just hung up. He looked at the jacket as he asked:
‘Are you a vampire?’
She wrapped her arms around her body, slowly shook her head.
‘I…live on blood. But I am not…that.’
‘What’s the difference?’
She looked him in the eyes and said somewhat more forcefully, ‘There’s a very big difference.’
Oskar saw her toes tense, relax, tense. Her naked legs were very thin, where the T-shirt stopped he could see the edge of a pair of white panties. He gestured to her. ‘Are you kind of…dead?’
She smiled for the first time since he had arrived.
‘No. Can’t you tell?’
‘No, but…I mean…did you die once, a long time ago?’
‘No, but I’ve lived for a long time.’
‘Are you old?’
‘No. I’m only twelve. But I’ve been that for a long time.’
‘So you are old, inside. In your head.’
‘No, I’m not. That’s the only thing I still think is strange. I don’t understand it. Why I never…in a way…get any older than twelve.’
Oskar thought about it, stroking the arm of his jacket.
‘Maybe that’s just it, though.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean…you can’t understand why you’re only twelve years old, because you are twelve years old.’
Eli frowned. ‘Are you saying I’m stupid?’
‘No, just a bit slow. Like kids are.’
‘I see. How are you doing with the cube?’
Oskar snorted, met her gaze and remembered that thing about her pupils. Now they looked normal but they had looked really strange before, hadn’t they? But still…it was too much. Couldn’t believe it.
‘Eli. You’re just making all this up, aren’t you?’
Eli stroked the skeleton monster on her belly, let her hand stop right over the monster’s ga
ping mouth.
‘Do you still want to be blood brothers?’
Oskar took half a step back.
‘No.’
She looked up at him. Sad, almost accusing.
‘Not like that. Don’t you understand…that…’
She stopped. Oskar finished her sentence for her.
‘That if you had wanted to kill me you would have done it a long time ago.’
Eli nodded. Oskar took another half step back. How quickly could he get out the door? Should he leave the bag behind? Eli didn’t seem to notice his anxiety, his impulse to flee. Oskar stayed put, his muscles tensed.
‘Will I get…infected?’
Still looking down at the monster on her T-shirt, Eli shook her head. ‘I don’t want to infect anyone. Least of all you.’
‘What is it then? This alliance.’
She lifted her head to the point where she thought his face would be, saw that he was no longer there. Hesitated. Then walked up to him, took his head between her hands. Oskar let her do it. Eli looked…blank. Distant. But no hint of that face he had seen in the cellar. Her fingertips brushed against his ears. A sense of calm welled up quietly inside of his body.
Let it happen.
No matter what.
Eli’s face was twenty centimetres from his own. Her breath smelled funny, like the shed where his dad kept metal scraps and parts. Yes. She smelled…rusty. The tip of her finger stroked his ear.
‘I’m all alone,’ she whispered. ‘No one knows. Do you want to?’
‘Yes.’
She quickly brought her face up to his, sealed her lips over his upper lip, held it firm with a light, steady pressure. Her lips were warm and dry. Saliva started in his mouth and when he closed his own lips around her lower one it moistened it, softened. They carefully tasted each other’s lips, let them glide over each other and Oskar disappeared into a warm darkness that gradually lightened…
became a large room, a large room in a castle with a table in the middle laden with food, and Oskar…runs up to the delicacies, starts to eat from the platters with his hands. Around him there are other children, big and small. Everyone eats from the table. At the far end of the table there is a…man?…woman…person wearing what has to be a wig. An enormous mane of hair covers the person’s head. The person is holding a glass filled with a dark red liquid, comfortably reclining in the chair, sipping from the glass and nodding encouragingly to Oskar.
They eat and eat. Farther away, against a wall, Oskar can see people in poor clothes anxiously following the events at the table. He sees a woman with a brown shawl over her head and her hands clamped tight over her stomach and Oskar thinks ‘Mama’.
Then there is the ding of a glass and all attention is directed towards the man at the far end of the table. He stands up. Oskar is afraid of him. His mouth is small, thin, unnaturally red. His face is chalk-white. Oskar feels saliva run out the corner of his mouth, a little flap of flesh has loosened from the inside of his cheek towards the front, he runs his tongue over it.
The man is holding up a suede bag. With an elegant motion he opens the hand holding the bag shut and out roll two large white dice. It echoes in the large room when the two dice roll, come to a stop. The man takes up the dice in his hand, holds them out to Oskar and the other children.
The man opens his mouth to say something but at that moment the little flap of flesh falls out of Oskar’s mouth and…
Eli’s lips left his, she let go of his head, took a step back. Even though it scared him, Oskar tried to hold onto the image of the castle room again, but it was gone. Eli scrutinised him. Oskar rubbed his eyes, nodded.
‘It really happened, didn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
They stood there for a while, not saying anything. Then Eli said, ‘Do you want to come in?’
Oskar didn’t reply. Eli lifted her hands, let them fall.
‘I’m never going to hurt you.’
‘I know that.’
‘What are you thinking about?’
‘That T-shirt. Is it from the rubbish room?’
‘…yes.’
‘Have you washed it?’
Eli didn’t answer.
‘You’re a little gross, you know that?’
‘I can change, if you like.’
‘Good. Do that.’
He had read about the man on the gurney, under the sheet. The Ritual Killer.
Benke Edwards had wheeled all sorts through these corridors, to cold storage. Men and women of all ages and sizes. Children. There was no particular gurney for children and few things made Benke feel as uncomfortable as seeing the empty space on the trolley when he was transporting the body of a child; the little figure under the white cover, pushed up against the headboard. The whole lower half empty, the sheet smooth. That flat sheet was death itself.
But now he was dealing with a grown man, and not only that, a celebrity.
He guided the gurney through the silent corridors. The only sound was the squeak of the rubber wheels against the linoleum floor. There were no coloured markings on this floor. On the few occasions they ever had a visitor here they were always accompanied by a member of the staff.
Benke had waited outside the hospital while the police took photographs of the body. A few members of the press had been standing around with their cameras, outside the restricted area, taking pictures of the hospital with their powerful flashes. Tomorrow the pictures would be in the papers, complete with a dotted line showing how the man had fallen.
A celebrity.
The lump under the sheet gave no indication of any such thing. A lump of flesh like any other. He knew the man looked like a monster, that his body had exploded like a water balloon when he hit the ground, and he was thankful for the cover. Under the cover we are all alike.
Even so, many people were probably grateful that this particular lump of no longer living flesh was now being wheeled into cold storage, awaiting later transport to the crematorium when the police pathologists were done with it. The man had a wound in his throat that the police photographer had been particularly interested in getting on film.
But did it matter?
Benke saw himself as a philosopher of sorts. Probably came with the job. He had seen so much of what people really were when you got down to it, and he had developed a theory which was relatively uncomplicated.
‘Everything is in the brain.’
His voice echoed in the empty corridors as he stopped the gurney in front of the doors to the morgue, entered in the code and opened the door.
Yes. Everything is in the brain. From the beginning. The body is simply a kind of service unit that the brain is forced to be burdened with in order to keep itself alive. But everything is there from the beginning, in the brain. And the only way to change someone like this man under the sheet would be to operate on the brain.
Or turn it off.
The lock that was programmed to keep the door open for ten seconds after the code had been entered had still not been repaired and Benke was forced to hold the door open with one hand as he grabbed the gurney with the other and guided it into the room. The trolley bumped against the doorjamb and Benke swore.
If this had been the OR, it would have been fixed at once.
Then he noticed something unusual.
On the sheet, to the left of and slightly underneath the raised area that was the man’s face, there was a brownish stain. The door locked behind them as Benke bent down to take a closer look. The stain was slowly growing.
He’s bleeding.
Benke was not one to be easily shaken. This kind of thing had been known to happen before. Probably an accumulation of blood in the skull that had been jolted and started to drain when the trolley hit the doorframe.
The stain on the sheet grew larger.
Benke went over to a first aid cabinet and took out surgical tape and gauze. He had always thought it was funny that there was one in a place like this, but of course the supplies were her
e in case a living person injured themselves; got their finger caught on a gurney or some such thing.
With his hand on the sheet slightly above the stain he steeled himself. He was not afraid of dead bodies but this one had looked pretty bad. And now Benke had to bandage him up. He was the one who would get in trouble if blood spilled and messed up the floor in here.
So he swallowed, and folded the sheet down.
The man’s face defied all description. Impossible to imagine how he had lived for a week with this face. Nothing there that looked even remotely human, with the exception of an ear and an…eye.
Couldn’t they have…taped it shut?
The eye was open. Of course. There was hardly any eyelid to close it. And the eye itself was so badly damaged it looked as if scar tissue had formed in the eyeball.
Benke tore himself away from the dead man’s gaze and concentrated on the task at hand. The source of the stain appeared to be that wound on his throat.
He heard a soft dripping sound and quickly looked around. Damn. He must be a little on edge after all. Another drip. That came from his feet. He looked down. A drop of water had fallen from the gurney and landed on his shoe. Plop.
Water?
He examined the wound on the man’s throat. The liquid had formed a small pool underneath it and was spilling out over the metal rim of the stretcher.
Plop.
He moved his foot. Another drop fell onto the tile floor.
Plip.
He stirred the pool of liquid with his index finger, then rubbed his finger and thumb together. It wasn’t water. It was some slippery, transparent fluid. He smelled his hand. Nothing he recognised.
When he looked down at the white floor he saw a veritable puddle had formed there. The liquid was not transparent after all, it had a pink tinge. It reminded him of when blood separates in transfusion bags. The stuff that is left over when the red blood cells sink to the bottom.
Plasma.
The man was bleeding plasma.
How that was possible was a question the experts would have to deal with tomorrow, or rather, later today. His job was simply to patch it so it didn’t make a mess. Wanted to go home now. To crawl into bed beside his sleeping wife, read a few pages of The Abominable Man from Säffle, and then sleep.
Let the Right One In Page 28
