Caroline Åberg - Stockholm Noir

This time it was also winter, and she threw me out without warning. Just because. I was locked out in the falling snow and wind, late at night, no coat, just a long sweater, no phone, no keys. You whore, stealing Lasse from me.

You see, we lived in this neighborhood, in one of those huge tower blocks on Flintbacken, the ones shaped in a half-circle. In the same building, next to our entrance, were a school and a preschool for English-speaking children and I often wished I could live there instead. A sign said: Welcome to the Suns. If you took the stairs on the left side of the building, through the groves, you went down to the beach. The path along the beach always had joggers on it in all kinds of weather, but halfway up there was a bench not far from the stairs and I sat down on it in spite of the cold and the snow. I hoped I would get pneumonia or a urinary tract infection or something. Maybe even die. And it would be all her fault.

I sat there for a while, the falling snow muffling all sounds, although I could still hear the frenetic pace of the runners training for some marathon and a dog barking in the distance. I could hear the sound of a train crossing the Årsta Bridge — a train going away , I’ve always loved that sound.

Die, die, die! I kept thinking, and I don’t know who I wanted to die, me or her. Perhaps I wanted everything to die, sucked into a black hole and gone, like in Donnie Darko .

I hadn’t heard any footsteps, but a guy suddenly appeared in the snow in front of me. My first thought was he must have come from a costume party. He wore a tall black hat, sunglasses, and a tuxedo. A little like the Sandman. I remember thinking that he was trying for the creepy look and he’d succeeded, but in my state of mind, I was not afraid. I felt he was very attractive, extremely attractive, even sexy. Unfortunately.

“May I sit down?” he asked, and I said, “Sure.”

He sat down and we were silent for a while. Then he said, “Look, you’re freezing. You don’t need to freeze.” He was all over me in an instant and I remember his sickly black eyes as he whipped off the sunglasses and then everything faded.

I woke up with snow on me everywhere, in my mouth and eyes and nose; I was lying stretched out on the bench, completely covered in snow; he must have left me in this odd position. I sat up. Everything felt strange, shifted, changed, as if I’d had some kind of memory loss or had fainted. But the strangest thing of all was I wasn’t freezing. I had no idea what time it was. I didn’t have my cell phone. The air was so still, however, that I thought it must be very late at night. No sounds of running from the walkway, no day sounds at all. Had anyone seen me as they walked by? Do people bother to look around at all?

Then I heard a dog barking shrilly from the top of the stairs. It sounded like a tiny, terrified dog, and the voice of the owner trying to calm it was female.

I got up, reassured that someone was out and about, and a woman too, and I walked up the stairs to ask her what time it was.

I will never forget the expression on her face. She was as terrified as the dog. She told me the time — one thirty in the morning — and then she pulled the Chihuahua, still barking at the top of its tiny lungs, as far away from me as she could, while striding down the path in a different direction. Her reaction terrified me too. I knew nothing but had the urge to go home. Mama would ask me for forgiveness, I thought, and she’d make me a cup of hot chocolate. She is nice to me as soon as she regrets what she’s done, which usually happens after a few hours.

I couldn’t get the door code to work. I pressed the call button for our apartment, again and again, until she answered over the intercom. The connection was bad. She said hello a number of times and couldn’t seem to hear what I was saying, but she must have realized it was me, because she let me in. Once inside, I pressed the elevator button, but it didn’t work that night either, so I ended up taking the stairs three flights up. The elevator was waiting right by our door, so why hadn’t it come down? I rang the bell at the door to my home.

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.