She opened it and screamed, then slammed the door shut. I hoped no neighbors had heard her. I pushed the mail slot open and said in as friendly a way as I could, “Open the door, Mama, it’s me, Alma!” No answer. I slumped against the door, ready to cry. I decided I would wait it out until she opened it again. Instead, the mail slot opened and she pushed a piece of paper out. She’d written a message: Whoever you are, go away! I’m calling the police.
Whoever I am? Had she gone completely psycho or had I?
I thought I heard a noise from one of the neighboring apartments and my first reaction was to hide in the elevator, which was, of course, waiting right by our—or should I now say her—door.
The next shock of the night—I was looking straight into a mirror and there was no reflection of me. Only the inside of the elevator. I put my hand on the glass. No matter what I did, I was not there. I can’t begin to describe how terrifying that was. You’re used to checking yourself in the mirror, right, to see how you look? I thought I’d found myself in the middle of a nightmare, but I could not wake up.
I tried to press the down button and heard a crackling sound, but the elevator refused to work. I went down the stairs and into the basement where I found a moldy blanket. I hid under it, shaking like an animal, but not from cold, because I could no longer feel the cold.
Terror short-circuited my thought process and saved me from realizing, at that moment, what my existence would be like from here on out.
* * *
Yes, and what is my existence, you wonder? Think of rats. I live on rats, pigeons, rabbits. A blood hunger is now a part of my being, and I soon discovered that small animals are drawn to me. I can hypnotize them the way snakes hypnotize their prey. I realized fairly soon that I couldn’t remain long in the light of day, not because it kills me immediately, but it makes me weak and ill. As long as it was winter and the days were short, I found it easy to sleep. But my first summer was unbearable . . . so many nights in subway tunnels and the hidden rooms by the abandoned train line below South Hospital, in culverts and caves and other places where I encountered darkness and rats. I spent my time searching for the man who had been my transformer, but he was gone without a trace. He’d told me nothing about what was going to happen to me, nothing at all about my new existence. But there was one thing I had decided on my own: I was not going to kill human beings. I would not become that depraved.
Are you laughing now? No, I see you’re not laughing. That’s good.
* * *
The loneliness! Of course, I’d believed I had been lonely and abandoned and bullied when I was a human being, but now I was so completely cut off from everything and everyone. In addition, something electromagnetic about my new being short-circuited cell phones and computers, so that I couldn’t use the Net. I was something completely other, something with another kind of electric charge, something of another dimension but still requiring nourishment from the normal dimension of the living. I’d become something that could not die and yet was no longer alive.
Obviously I frightened most people, but those who were not afraid of death were not terrified of me, and at times they found me tempting. Those were the ones who wanted to die, who wanted me to kill them! I’d run away before I could fulfill their desire, even though it was against my new nature. Perhaps it was my dignity that mattered.
I spied on Mama, and it hurt when I saw her, but I didn’t dare show myself. I had seen my image—a bullied girl’s school photo—beneath the newspaper headlines: MISSING! MURDERED? I have to admit I was happy to see Mama sad and depressed; it was my only comfort.
* * *
I hung around my old neighborhood until something happened. I’ve just returned—I’ve been away for a long time and there’s a good reason for that. Here’s what happened: Then . . . then it was fall again and I was crouching beneath a thicket near my apartment building. A girl crawled in. She looked tired and worn out, and she didn’t see me at first. She shot up. People do that in my neighborhood. She took out a makeup kit and tiny mirror to paint a new face onto the tired one. I hadn’t thought to make my presence known, but something forced me to.
“Sorry,” she said. “I don’t have any more.”
She was not afraid of me at all. It seemed she mistook me for a friend. She called herself a “crack whore” and seemed to believe I was one too. She told me I was too young to shoot up; she said that a few times. She also told me my eyes were strange. I said I was almost completely blind.
This girl seemed to like me. She was acting like a big sister. She offered to make up my face. She said I felt cold and she took pity on me. She shouldn’t have done that. We stood too close, much too close, and I lost my dignity. Something came over me and all went black until I returned to myself to find I was next to a body drained of blood. I was overwhelmed by what was happening to me. Probably it was not just the blood, but the drugs. I felt in shock but also filled with dancing fire, a pure and delicate but grim blessedness. Grim, yes, powerful and shameless. At least as long as the effect lasted. I sat there beside her body and waited for her to transform like I had. Then I would have a friend, someone like me! Now that I’d done what I’d done.
I sat there for hours. Nothing happened. Dawn started to break, so I needed to find shelter somewhere else. When darkness fell again, I returned, but the police were there and the thicket was taped off; they were bringing a body bag. I realized she’d died a real death. I fell into an abyss of shame and torment. I had killed another human being!
* * *
All I wanted was to hide and get away from everything. Oh, I was good at not being seen, of course, at pulling the hood of my sweatshirt over my head, hiding my face beneath my hair, sneaking past security guards and everyone else.
One night I took the last subway all the way out to Hässelby strand, where I’d lived when I was younger, before my mother inherited the apartment in Tanto. I knew that there was a grotto in Grimsta Forest, near Maltesholm Baths. I wanted to go into hibernation and disappear.
I felt sad when I got to the beach where I’d swum and eaten ice cream as a little girl. The food stand, with its ugly graffiti, now shuttered. The fire pits for grilling hot dogs. The playground with its green wooden cars. Nobody was swimming now. There were a few dog walkers and I stayed away from them. Like a hunted animal, I took refuge in the hidden grotto. I covered the entrance with branches. I stayed there for some time, crying, feeding myself with squirrels and small birds, staring at a glassy, swollen moon which seemed to me like a large breast filled with heavenly shining milk, unreachable but still so beautiful it broke my heart.
What could give me any comfort, any grace? Only my dreams. I dreamed I lived in the country of the moon, a pearl princess in a mother-of-pearl castle on the white plains of the moon, free from shame, from feelings, from hunger, from guilt. There in my lair, I dreamed many beautiful dreams. It was painful to awaken—drawn out from them by my blood hunger.
* * *
Winter arrived—the cold was harsh and few people came to the beach. The nights were almost completely empty. A raw beauty animated nature. Frost covered everything. I walked along the beach beneath the moon and peered out over the frozen waves: when I looked at my own hand, I saw that frost covered my skin and made me glitter and shine like a blessed, beautiful being. Loneliness, ice-cold, exiled, but also a kind of freedom, a place to breathe, as far from human beings as possible.
By chance, I discovered that the human blood I’d drunk had given me new skills. One night, as I sat on the stairs of the food shack enjoying the moonshine, a couple of loud guys came walking along the beach. I pressed back tightly against the shack and wished I could hide inside it when I found myself going through the wall. It gave way and let my body in bit by bit until I was entirely inside, with the outdoor furniture and umbrellas. I found I could now go through other walls too, force myself through solid materials. My amazement caused me to laugh out loud, but the gang outside just continued on to the closes
t fire pit where they made a huge bonfire with all the trash they wanted to get rid of.
Were there other things I could do that I was not yet aware of? Yes, I found I could hover in the air, like in a dream where you find it easy to fly once you decide to try. I could move very swiftly, almost teleport myself short distances, if I concentrated hard enough. I tried to tell myself I’d had those skills from the beginning, but I knew that these gifts arrived only after I’d drunk the blood of the dead girl.
* * *
I remained in exile, mostly in the forest. One night, in the season between winter and spring, the moon was shining so very brightly that for some reason I wanted to celebrate it, or honor it, as if it could help me. The full moon is a cold and harsh parent, but still somehow I felt I could communicate with it, even if it was only pretend. And now I wanted to show it my respect. During my walks on the beach, I had found things left behind by others; the nicest was a necklace of rock crystals. A child had forgotten a plastic handbag with a pattern of stars. And once I found a long strand of Christmas garland on a bush; I draped it in my hair. And I had my white dress that I’d found in a bag behind a thrift store in the city.
Dressed in these pretty things, I walked down the path to the edge of the water until I reached the swimming beach. The warmth of the day had melted most of the snow that had been on the sand and the ice was gone too, but the night was still cold. I’m mentioning the cold because it has to do with what comes next. When I’d left the edge of the forest, I saw a young man in just jeans and a T-shirt, standing barefoot on the beach. The rising moon gave him a long, indistinct shadow. As I came closer, I saw his teeth were chattering. He didn’t see me at first; he was staring at the water. He took a step into the surf.
“Where are you going?” I yelled. He turned toward me with no fear at all.
A second later, I was by his side. “Don’t do this,” I said. “You have no idea what death is like.”
He stared at me, shivering, and tried to say something, but he was freezing so much he was no longer able to speak. His lips had a blue tinge. His eyes were large and beautiful, he was beautiful.
“Wait here,” I said, and in a second I was back at the food shack where I’d seen some blankets were stored. I brought back two. In the meantime, he’d taken a few more steps into the water.
“No, you must not!” I exclaimed. I wrapped him in one of the blankets and took the Christmas garland from my head and set it on his. This earned me a timid smile, more like a grimace, really. His eyelashes were long, like a child’s.
“Put your shoes on,” I ordered. “Go back home.” For a fraction of a second, I thought we might be able to be friends, the young man and me, though who knows how I could even think this as my eyes were drawn to his throbbing jugular vein where his blood pulsed, and the hunger welled up in me like a shock to my body, and I could barely hold myself back. I stepped away from him, shaking as much as he was.
“Forget me,” I managed to say. “Tomorrow you will find someone else, someone who will listen to you and understand what you’re going through. I promise.”
He reached out a thin, shaking hand.
I ran to the edge of the forest, up among the trees, I had to reach my cave, my lair. My entire body was in revolt. Luckily, I came across a hare, which I sucked dry, but it took a long time for me to calm down.
Later, I retraced my steps to the place where I’d seen him. Both his clothes and the blankets were gone. The Christmas garland was arranged in a circle on the sand, with the words THANKS. DAVID scratched inside.
I had saved him. I had prevented him from drowning himself. I wept with happiness, sorrow, and other human feelings, as if I was still human, over that which was still possible and that which was not.
David! His name alone, and the memory of his eyes—it was enough to make me happy. I snuck up among the human houses until I saw him again. I followed him until I knew where he lived. In the yard by his house, I formed a heart with the last bit of snow, and I hoped he would see it before it began to melt.
I did not dare stay near where he lived. Not even in the neighborhood, by the beach, or even in the forest. I went back to the city, to human beings. My life there was much easier now that I knew how to use my new skills. I could always find somewhere to sleep. And at first I thought it was exciting to go wherever I wanted, observe secrets, research people’s lives. It was like reading books or watching movies, but in real time. Unfortunately, I could not influence them very much. Mostly I watched as I swayed in the darkness outside people’s windows. Much of what I saw shocked me. Many people find themselves in difficult situations that are not their fault, but there are so many others who make life difficult for themselves and others even though they aren’t poor, sick, oppressed, or even damned, the way I was damned. If only you knew! I wanted to scream. You need to value your lives! But I realized that most of the time they would only hear my voice as some frightening sound. It became ever more clear that only those who are not afraid of death will experience me as something other than a monster.
I observed happy people too, the ones who could value themselves and other people. I did not understand where they’d received that gift. They were not always beautiful and rich. They were often fairly lonely people, but still able to enjoy their lives, as if they were honeybees with an inexhaustible supply of internal nectar. When I saw these happy people—and I mean really happy people, not those who pretend they’re happy—when I saw them with my depthless eyes, I saw that they had a golden shimmer around them that seemed to come from within. It might sound sentimental, but they were like little lamps. Seeing them made me both happy and endlessly sad, a pain that was simultaneously as beautiful as it was unbearable. I don’t think I’ll tell you any more about it. It hurts me even to talk about it.
Thinking of David was just like that—a bright blessing and a stinging pain simultaneously. Something alive to protect and value, but with no fulfillment for me. Yet, better to be nourished by the thought, the dream, than to be destroyed by reality. Or so I thought.
* * *
Eventually I started searching for others like me. I wanted to know more about who and what I was, but when I finally did find one, I regretted it immediately.
I’d started hanging around in Tanto again so I could spy on Mama. And winter finally returned—my third winter as one of the undead—so I walked over the ice to Årsta Island to sleep in one of the abandoned boats there. I was getting tired of human habitats.
When I woke up and crept out on deck, he was sitting there, hunched like a monkey on the railing, smiling like the Cheshire cat.
Mr. Humbert Fishy. Or that’s how he introduced himself. Thin. Conceited. Wearing a long leather coat, black-red like old blood. I didn’t ask what the coat was made from. Long oily hair. High white forehead. Pointed teeth. With his X-ray vision, he drew me from the inside out and knew my entire history. I couldn’t hide anything from him. That was his power. A devil’s.
“Little saint,” he called me, laughing all the while.
In the pauses between his gales of laughter, he answered my questions. I didn’t even need to ask them—he read my thoughts as easily as a fly eating shit.
Where do we come from, we the damned? Answer: from the same place as everything else, from God the Black Hole. Are we evil? No, why would we be? Living human beings kill more than we do. Can we escape our fate and die the true death? The stake, little saint, the stake or the daylight. Or perhaps starve to death from the wrong kind of food ha ha ha, little saint.
How can I transform them, then? That is, not kill them, but give them the Gift, as I’d gotten it? Not a chance, he said, only the very old and experienced ones can do that. Only those who had fed themselves the right food for hundreds of years.
He told me what I’d been suspecting all along. Only if I regularly drank human blood would I be able to develop into the “remarkable being” I was meant to be. The Crown of Creation, as he put it. He could not only read t
houghts, he could fly and he could see entire cities at once, and he could zero in on prey with especially good blood; it was as if they glowed on a map. Yes, he said prey instead of humans. He was a gourmet, he said. Five hundred years had made him one.
Since not a shred of my soul or memory was hidden from him, he sniffed out my love for David right away. Oh, how he laughed!
“Now, my little mosquito,” he said, “how do you think you could be close to him—a living boy? Don’t you think he’d be scared out of his mind? And even more important, how could you resist biting him? You remember how you felt on the beach, right? His pulsing vein, your burning hunger? And you ran away! From such a wonderful piece of meat, from one who wanted to die anyway! You would have done him a favor!” Mr. Fishy laughed until he choked. And while he laughed, the whole boat shook, and a thousand pieces of broken ice applauded.
“I can be your friend,” he said. “Absolutely! But only once you’ve become what you really are. Right now, you’re nothing at all!”
He let the width and breadth of his damnation travel so deep into me I could feel my own nothingness and that nothing else existed. I felt crushed and laid on the boat like a whipped dog. Then I felt anger start to rise in me, at first just a spark. He noticed it, of course.
“Why are you mad at me, little flea? You’re the one making it more difficult for yourself by trying to be something you’re not. Focus on me all you want, but soon enough you’ll realize the one you’re fighting is yourself. Bye for now!” And he lifted up from the deck and fluttered like a stupid scarecrow before he shot into the air and flew away so fast I didn’t see him disappear.
The strange thing was I felt more abandoned than ever. However horrible he was, I still wanted him to come back. But he didn’t return. Still, I had many hundreds of years ahead of me to run into him again, right?
I was still mad. That small speck of anger grew and in my mind I heard his raw laughter—at my love and longing! I was going to prove him wrong. I would show him I could make it work—or be brave enough to try.
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