John Lindqvist - Handling The Undead

The skin was orange-brown, drawn taut so the cheekbones were sharply outlined. The eyes were just a couple of slits and the whole face looked vaguely… Egyptian. The nose and lips were black, shrunken. There wasn't much that resembled Elias except for the brown curly hair tumbling down over the wide forehead.

And yet, it was a stroke of luck.

Elias had started to mummify. If it had been damp in that earth he would most likely have rotted away.

'You were lucky, my boy. That it's been such a warm summer. Yes, you wouldn't know, but it has been…lovely and warm every day. Like the time we went fishing for perch… do you remember? When you felt so sorry for the worm and we fished with gummy worms instead…'

Mahler kept on talking the whole way until he was back at the gates again. They were still locked. He had forgotten about that.

Exhausted, unable to take another step, he sank into a heap next to the wall by the gates with Elias in his arms. He couldn't smell him anymore. The world smelled like this.

He held Elias pressed against his chest, looked up at the moon.

It looked back down at him, kind and yellow, approving. Mahler nodded, allowed his eyes to shut, stroked Elias' hair.

His soft hair.

Danderyd Hospital 00.34

'How are you feeling now?'

A microphone was stretched in toward his chin and David almost

grabbed hold of it out of habit.

'How I… feel?'

'Yes. How do you feel right now?'

He did not understand how the Channel-s reporter had tracked him down. After having been turned out of Eva's room he had gone and sat down in the waiting room and fifteen minutes later this reporter had turned up, wondering if he could ask some questions. The man, who was close to his own age, had a shiny look about his eyes that was either due to sleep-deprivation or makeup. Or excitement.

David pulled up the corners of his mouth into a grin that looked horrible on camera, answered, 'It feels good. I'm already looking forward to the semis.'

'Pardon?'

'The semi-finals. Against Brazil.'

The reporter glanced at the cameraman and they exchanged a silent code: re-take. The reporter changed his tone, as if he was saying his line for the first time.

'David, you are the only person who was actually present at an awakening. Can you describe what happened?'

'Yes,' David said. 'After we nailed that first penalty I just felt the game swung our way…'

The reporter frowned and put the microphone down, waved the cameraman over and leaned close to David.

'Forgive me, I know this must be hard for you, but you have been through something that the public…I mean, you must understand. Lots of people are interested in hearing this.'

'Go away.'

The reporter threw his arms out wide. 'I get it. Sure. Here I am attaching myself to your pain like a kind of parasite, in order to make entertainment out of it, I know it feels that way to you, but… '

David looked the reporter straight in the eye and babbled mechanically, 'I think a lot of it's due to the fact that we've shaken loose a bunch of people who don't ordinarily come home to Sweden for these events I'm not saying we don't normally have a strong team but it's true that when you've got Mjallby covering you from behind and Zlatan in the kind of form he showed today… '

He grabbed his head in his hands, fell and curled up on the couch, closing his eyes as he went on, '… well you know it's almost impossible to win no sorry I mean not to win of course I felt it from the moment we ran onto the pitch… '

The reporter stood up, signalling to the cameraman to film David as the latter continued his recitation in the empty room, curled up in a ball.

'… and I said to Kimpa Now let's take them and he just nodded like this and I thought about that how he'd nodded when he passed me that long ball and I sent it on to Henke… '

They drew back, zooming out. It was a good shot.

David stopped at the moment he heard the door glide shut, but remained in the same position. He was never going to be human again. This is what the darkness looked like from the inside. The famines, torture victims, massacres. The other half of the world, the one the comfortable people sighed over, racked their conscience over and had no way into. The darkness that he flirted with in his routines sometimes. Hypothetically, with no knowledge.

The reporter was living in the sunlit world, and speech with him was meaningless. There were no words. David pressed his palms against his eyes until red flowers bloomed. The worst thing was that Magnus was still there. He was sleeping at his grandmother's and knew nothing. In a couple of hours David would have to go there and let in the darkness.

Eva, what should I do?

If he could only ask her advice about this one thing: how he should tell Magnus.

But there were other people asking her questions right now. About other things.

After the initial burst of chaos waned, the doctors had become extremely interested in the fact that Eva could talk. Apparently she was one of the few who could. Perhaps it was due to the fact that she had died so close to the awakening, perhaps it was something else. No one knew.

David had not been particularly surprised to hear about what was happening in the morgue. It seemed to him as abhorrent, implausible-and as logical-as everything else. The world had been thrown into darkness tonight: why shouldn't the dead come back to life as well?

He got up after an immeasurable length of time, walked out into

the corridor and turned the corner on his way to Eva's room. He stopped. A throng of people had gathered outside the closed door, he spotted a couple of television cameras, microphones.

My only love…

Each time he saw a shooting star, every time he played a game where he got a silent wish, he had wished this:

Let me always love Eva, let my love for her never fade.

For him, she was the one who dominated the heavens and made the world a place it was possible to live in. For the people in the corridor she was an object, a novelty, a source of information. But they were the ones who owned her now. If he approached them, they would throw themselves upon him.

He found a waiting room further down the corridor where he sat down and stared at a Mira poster until the figures in the artwork started to crawl, move along the edges of the frame. At that point he approached a doctor who knew nothing, could give no news but the word itself: no. No visitors allowed.

He walked back to Mira. The longer he stared at the figures, the more evil they looked. He stared at the wall instead.

Taby Municipality 00.52

When Flora got off the telephone she looked, for the second time this night, as if she had seen a ghost. She walked over to the bedroom door, listening for something from inside.

'How did it go?' Elvy asked. 'Did they believe you?'

'Yes,' Flora said. 'They did.'.1

'Are they sending an ambulance?'

'Yes, but… ' Flora sat down next to Elvy on the couch, knocking her teaspoon against her cup, 'it may take a while. They have a lot to do… right now.'

Elvy gently took hold of her hand to make her stop clinking.

'Why is that? What did they say?'

Flora shook her head, turning the spoon in her fingers.

'It's happening all over. There's several hundred that have woken up. Maybe thousands.'

'No.'

'Yes. She said that every ambulance is out at the moment… picking them up. And that we shouldn't try to do anything, that we shouldn't… touch him or anything.'

'Why not?'

'Because there could be a danger of contagion or something. They don't know.'

'What kind of contagion?'

'I haven't the faintest. That's just what she said.'