Good.
He folded a newspaper around the knife as a standin holster, taped it up, and pushed the packet down between his pants and left hip. Only the handle stuck up. He tried to walk. The blade was in the way of his left leg and so he angled it down along his groin. Uncomfortable, but it worked.
He put his jacket on in the hall. Then he remembered all the candy wrappers that lay strewn around his room. He gathered them all up and stuffed them into his pocket, in case mom came home before he did. He could hide the wrappers under a rock in the forest.
Checked one more time to make sure he hadn’t left any evidence behind.
The game had already begun. He was a dreaded mass murderer. He had already slain fourteen people with his sharp knife without leaving a single clue behind. No hair, no candy wrapper. The police feared him.
Now he was going out into the forest to select his next victim.
Strangely enough he already knew the name of his victim, and what he looked like. Jonny Forsberg with his long hair and large, mean eyes. He would make him plead and beg for his life, squeal like a pig, but in vain. The knife would have the last word and the earth would drink his blood.
Oskar had read those words in a book and liked them.
The Earth Shall Drink His Blood.
While he locked the front door to the apartment and walked out of the building with his hand resting on the knife handle he repeated these words like a mantra.
“The earth shall drink his blood. The earth shall drink his blood.”
The entrance he had used on his way into the yard lay at the right end of his building, but he walked to the left, past two other buildings, and out through the entrance where the cars could drive in. Left the inner fortification. Crossed Ibsengatan and continued down the hill. Left the outer fortification. Continued on toward the forest.
The earth shall drink his blood.
For the second time this day Oskar felt almost happy.
***
There were only ten minutes left of Hakan’s self-imposed time limit when a lone boy came walking down the path. Thirteen or fourteen, as far as he could judge. Perfect. He had been planning to sneak down to the other end of the path and then come walking toward his intended victim.
But now his legs had really gotten stuck. The boy was walking nonchalantly along the path and Hakan was going to have to hurry. Every second that went by reduced the chance of success. Even so his legs simply refused to budge. He stood paralyzed and stared at the chosen one, the perfect one, who was moving forward, who was about to pull up next to where he was standing, right in front of him. Soon it would be too late.
Have to. Have to. Have to.
If he didn’t do it, he would have to kill himself. Couldn’t go home empty-handed. That’s how it was. It was him or the boy. Go ahead and choose.
He finally got going, too late. Now he made his approach by stumbling
through the forest, straight at the boy, instead of simply meeting him calmly on the path. Idiot. Clumsy oaf. Now the boy would be on his guard, suspicious.
“Hello there!” he called out to the boy. “Excuse me!”
The boy stopped. He didn’t run away, he could be grateful for that. He had to say something, ask something. He walked up to the boy who was standing on the path, alert, uncertain.
“Excuse me⦠Could you tell me what the time is?”
The boy’s gaze went to Hakan’s watch.
“Yes, well, mine has stopped, you see.”
The boy’s body was tense as he checked his watch. He couldn’t do anything about that. Hakan put his hand inside his coat and rested his index finger on the trigger while he waited for the boy’s answer.
***
Oskar walked down the hill past the printing company, then turned onto the path into the forest. The weight in his belly was gone, replaced with an intoxicating sense of anticipation. On his way to the forest the fantasy had gripped him and now it felt like reality.
He saw the world through the eyes of a murderer, or so much of a murderer’s eyes as his thirteen-year-old’s imagination could muster. A beautiful world. A world he controlled, a world that trembled in the face of his actions.
He walked along the forest path looking for Jonny Forsberg.
The earth shall drink his blood.
It was starting to get dark and the trees closed around him like a silent crowd, following his smallest movements with trepidation, fearful that one of them was the intended target. But the killer moved through them, past them; he had already caught sight of his prey.
Jonny Forsberg was standing at the top of a hill some fifty meters from the trail, hands on his hips, a grin pasted on his face. Thought it was going to be business as usual. That he would force Oskar to the ground, hold his nose, and force pine needles and moss into his mouth, or some such thing.
But this time he was mistaken. It wasn’t Oskar who was walking toward him, it was the Murderer, and the Murderer’s hand closed hard around the handle of the knife, preparing himself.
The Murderer walked with slow dignified steps over to Jonny Forsberg, looked him in the eyes, and said “Hi Jonny.”
“Hello Piggy. Are you allowed out this late?”
The Murderer pulled out his knife. And lunged.
***
Uh, it’s⦠a quarter past five.”
“OK, thanks.”
The boy didn’t leave. Just stood there staring at Hakan, who took the opportunity to step closer. The boy stood still, following him with his gaze. This was going to hell. Of course the boy sensed something was wrong. First a man came storming out of the woods to ask him what the time was and now he had struck a Napoleon pose with his hand inside his coat.
“What do you have there?”
The boy gestured at Hakan’s heart region. Hakan’s head was empty; he didn’t know what he was going to do. He took out the gas container and showed it to the boy.
“What the hell is that?”
“Halothane gas.”
“What are you carrying it around for?”
“Because⦔ He felt the foam covered mouthpiece and tried to think of something to say. He couldn’t lie. That was his curse. “Because⦠it’s part of my job.”
“What kind of job?”
The boy had relaxed somewhat. He was holding a sport bag similar to the one Hakan had stowed in the hollow up in the woods. Hakan gestured to the bag with the hand that was holding the gas canister.
“Are you on your way to work out or something?”
When the boy glanced down at his bag he had his chance.
Both arms shot out, the free hand grabbing the boy by the back of the head, the other pressing the mouthpiece of the canister against his mouth. Hakan released the trigger. It let out a hissing sound like a large snake and the boy tried to pull bis bead away but it was locked between Hakan’s hands in a desperate vice.
The boy threw himself back and Hakan followed. The hissing of the snake drowned out all other sounds as they fell onto the wood shavings on the trail. Hakan’s hands were still clenched around the boy’s head and he held the mouthpiece in place as they rolled around on the ground.
After a couple of deep breaths the boy started to relax in his grip. Hakan still made sure the mouthpiece was in place, then looked around.
No witnesses.
The hissing sound of the canister filled his head like a bad migraine. He locked the trigger in place and teased his free hand out from underneath the boy, loosened the rubber band and then drew it back over the boy’s head. The mouthpiece was secured.
He got up with aching arms and regarded his prey.
The boy lay there with his arms thrown out from his body, the mouthpiece over nose and mouth, and the halothane canister on his chest. Hakan looked around once more, retrieved the boy’s bag, and placed it on his stomach. Then he picked him up and carried him to the hollow.
The boy was heavier than he had expected: a lot of muscle. Unconscious weight.
<
br /> He was panting from the exertion of carrying the boy over the soggy ground while the hissing of the gas cut through his head like a chain saw. He deliberately panted more loudly so as not to hear the sound.
With numb arms and sweat pouring down his back he finally reached his destination. There, he laid the boy down in the deepest part of the hollow and then stretched out beside him. It grew quiet. The boy’s chest rose and fell. He would wake up in approximately eight minutes, at most. But he wouldn’t.
Hakan lay beside the boy, studied his face, caressed it with a finger. Then he pulled himself closer to the boy, took the floppy body in his arms, and pressed it to him. He kissed the boy tenderly on the cheek, whispered “forgive me,” and got up.
Tears threatened to well up into his eyes as he looked at the defenseless body on the ground. He could still refrain.
Parallel worlds. A comforting thought.
There was a parallel world where he didn’t do what he was about to do. A world where he walked away, leaving the boy to wake up and wonder what had happened.
But not in this world. In this world he now walked over to his bag and opened it. He was in a hurry. He quickly pulled on his raincoat and got out his tools. A knife, a rope, a large funnel, and a five liter plastic jug.
He put everything on the ground next to the boy, looking at the young body one last time. Then he picked up the rope and got to work.
***
He thrust and thrust and thrust. After the first blow Jonny had realized this wasn’t going to be like those other times. With blood gushing from a deep cut on his cheek, he tried to escape, but the Murderer was faster. With a couple of quick moves he sliced away the tendons at the back of the knees and Jonny fell down, lay writhing in the moss, begging for mercy.
But the Murderer wasn’t going to relent. Jonny was screaming⦠like a pig⦠when the Murderer threw himself over him and let the earth drink his blood.
One stab for what you did to me in the bathroom today. One for when you tricked me into playing knuckle poker. And I’m cutting your lips out for everything nasty you’ve ever said to me.
Jonny was bleeding from every orifice and could no longer say or do anything mean. He was long since dead. Oskar finished by puncturing his glassy eyeballs, whack whack, then got up and regarded his work.
Large pieces of the rotting, fallen trees that had represented Jonny’s body had been hacked away and the tree trunk was full of perforations. A number of wood chips were scattered under the healthy tree that had been Jonny when he was still standing.
His right hand, the knife hand, was bleeding. There was a small cut right next to his wrist; the blade must have slipped while he was stabbing. Not the ideal knife for this purpose. He licked his hand, cleaning the wound with his tongue. It was Jonny’s blood he was tasting.
He wiped the last of the blood on the newspaper holster, put the knife back, and started walking home.
The forest that, starting a few years back, had felt threatening, the
haunt of enemies, now felt like a home and a refuge. The trees drew back respectfully as he passed. He didn’t feel an ounce of fear though it was starting to get really dark. No anxiety for the next day, whatever it would bring. He would sleep well tonight.
When he was back in the yard, he sat down on the edge of the sandbox for a while to calm himself before he went back home. Tomorrow he would get himself a better knife, a knife with a parry guard, or whatever it was called⦠so he didn’t cut himself. Because this was something he was going to do again.
It was a good game.
THURSDAY
22 October
H is mom reached over the kitchen table and squeezed Oskar’s hand. There were tears in her eyes.
“You are absolutely not allowed to go into the woods by yourself, do you hear me?”
A boy about Oskar’s age had been murdered in Vallingby yesterday. It had appeared in the afternoon papers and his mother was completely beside herself when she came home.
“It could have been⦠I don’t even want to think about it.”
“But it was Vallingby.”
“And you mean to say that someone who is capable of doing this to a child wouldn’t be able to go two subway stations? Or walk? Walk all the way here to Blackeberg and do the same thing again? Do you spend a lot of time in the woods?”
“No.”
“You are not allowed to go past the yard now, as long as this⦠Until they’ve caught him.”
“You mean I can’t go to school?”
“Of course you can go to school. But after school you come straight here and you don’t leave this complex until I get home.”
“Big deal.”
The pain in his mother’s eyes mixed with anger.
“Do you want to be murdered? Do you? You want to go into the woods and be killed and I have to sit here and worry while you’re lying out there in the forest and⦠you’re being butchered by some bestial⦔
The tears welled up in her eyes. Oskar put his hand on hers.
“I won’t go into the woods, Mom. I promise.”
His mother stroked his cheek.
“Little sweetheart, you’re all I have. Nothing is allowed to happen to you. I would die too.”
“Mmmm. How exactly did he do it?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know. The murder.”
“How should I know? The boy was killed by some kind of maniac with a knife. He’s dead. His parents’ lives have been ruined.”
“Aren’t the details in the paper?”
“I can’t bear to read it.”
Oskar took the copy of Expressen and flipped through the pages. The crime filled four pages.
“You shouldn’t read things like that.”
“I’m only checking something. Can I take it?”
“Don’t read about it, I’m serious. All that violent stuff you read isn’t good for you.”
“I’m just seeing what’s on TV tonight.”
Oskar got up intending to take the paper to his room. His mother hugged him clumsily and pressed her wet cheek against him.
“Sweetheart, can’t you understand that I’m worried about you? What if something were to happen to you-”
“I know, Mom, I know. I’m careful.”
Oskar hugged her a little back and then carefully extracted himself, went to his room wiping his mother’s tears from his cheek.
This was amazing.
From what he could understand the boy had been killed while he was out playing in the woods. Unfortunately the victim had not been Jonny Forsberg, only some unknown boy from Vallingby.
The atmosphere in Vallingby that afternoon had been funereal. He had seen the headlines before he came home and perhaps he was only imagining things but it seemed to him that people in the main square had been talking more, walking more slowly than normal.
In the hardware store he had swiped an incredibly alluring hunting knife that cost three hundred. He had made up an excuse in advance in case he was caught.
“Excuse me, Sir, but I am just so afraid of the killer.”
He would probably also have been able to squeeze out a few tears, if it came to that. They would have let him go, no doubt about it. But he had not been caught, and now the knife was tucked into the hiding place next to his scrapbook.
He needed to think.
Could it be that his game had in some way caused the murder to happen? He didn’t think so, but he couldn’t completely rule out the idea. The books he read were full of things like this. A person’s thoughts in one place causing an action somewhere else.
Telekenesis. Voodoo.
But exactly where, when, and above all how had the murder been committed? If it had involved a large number of stab wounds on a prone body he had to seriously consider the possibility that his hands possessed a terrifying power. A power he would have to learn to control.
Or is it⦠the TREE⦠that is the link.
&
nbsp; The rotten log that he had cut. Maybe there was something special about it, something that meant that whatever you did to the tree⦠spread further.
Details.
Oskar read all of the articles on the murder. A photograph of the policeman who had been to their school and talked about drugs appeared on one page. He was not able to comment further at this stage. Technical experts from the National Laboratory of Forensic Science had been called in to secure evidence from the crime scene. One had to wait and see. There was a picture of the murdered boy, taken from the school yearbook. Oskar had never seen him before. He looked like a Jonny or Micke. Maybe there was now an Oskar in the Vallingby school who had been set free.
The boy had been on his way to handball practice at the Vallingby gym and never come home. The practice had started at five-thirty. The boy had probably left home at around five o’clock. So at some point in between-Oskar’s head started to spin. The time matched up exactly. And the boy had been murdered in the forest.
7s it true? Am I the one?â¦
A sixteen-year-old girl had found the body around eight o’clock in the evening and contacted the police. She was described as being treated for “extreme shock.” Nothing about the state of the body, but if this girl was in a state of extreme shock it indicated the body had been mutilated in some way. Usually they only wrote “shocked.”
What was the girl doing in the woods after dark? Probably nothing interesting. Been picking pine cones or something. But why wasn’t there anything about how the boy had been murdered? The only thing they offered was a photograph of the crime scene. Police tape demarcated an ordinary wooded area, a hollow with a large tree in the middle. Tomorrow or the next day there would be a photo in this place, lots of candles and signs about “why?” and “we miss you.” Oskar knew how it went; he had several similar cases in his scrapbook.
The whole thing was probably a coincidence. But what if.
Oskar listened at the door. His mom was doing the dishes. He lay down on the bed and dug out the knife. The handle was shaped to fit the hand and the whole thing weighed about three times as much as the kitchen knife he had used yesterday.
He got up and stood in the middle of the room with the knife in his hand. It was beautiful, transmitted power to the hand holding it.
Let The Right One In aka Let Me In Page 3
