Caroline Åberg - Stockholm Noir

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 closest 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.”