John Lindqvist - Let The Right One In aka Let Me In

Eli. The pool. The boy. Acid.

His memory stopped at the part where he unscrewed the lid. He must have poured it over himself, all according to the plan. The only miscalculation was that he was still alive. He had seen pictures. Women who had gotten acid thrown into their faces by jealous boyfriends. He didn't want to feel his face, even less see it.

His hold on the tube tightened. It didn't give way. Screwed in. He tried to turn the metal end and, as he had suspected, it turned. He kept unscrewing it. He searched for his left hand, but only sensed a prickling ball of pain where that hand should have been. With the tops of the fingers on his living hand he now felt a light, fluttering pressure. Air was starting to escape from around the seal. The hissing sound had changed slightly, become thinner.

The gray light around him was infiltrated by something blinking red. He tried to close his one eye. Thought about Socrates and the jar of poison. Because he had seduced the youth of Athens. Don't forget to offer a rooster to… what was he called? Archimandros? No…

A sucking sound as a door was pushed open and a white figure moved toward him. He felt fingers prying open his fingers, prying them from the metal end. A woman's voice.

"What are you doing?"

Asclepius. Offer a cock to Asclepius.

"Let go!"

A cock. To Asclepius. The god of healing.

A hissing sound when his fingers gave way and the tube was screwed back in place.

"We'll have to guard you from now on." Offer it to him, do not forget.

Eli was gone when Oskar woke up. He lay with his face toward the wall. His back got cold. He drew himself up on one elbow and looked around the room. The window was open a crack. She must have let herself out that way.

Naked.

He rolled over in his bed, pressed his face against the place where she had slept, sniffed. Nothing. He moved his nose back and forth across the sheet trying to discern the tiniest glimmer of her presence, but nothing. Not even that smell of gasoline.

Had it really happened? He lay down on his stomach, thought about it.

Yes.

It was real. Her fingers on his back. The memory of her fingers on his back. Bulleribock. His mom had played it with him when he was little. But this was now. Not long ago. The hairs on his arms and on his neck stood up.

He got out of bed and started to pull his clothes on. When he had his pants on he walked up to the window. No snowfall. Four degrees below zero. Good. If the snow had started to melt it would be too slushy to set the bags of advertising down outside. He thought about crawling naked out of a window when it was four degrees below zero outside, down into snow-covered bushes, down into…

No.

He leaned forward, blinked.

The snow on the bushes was completely undisturbed.

Last night when he had stood there he had looked out onto a clean sweep of snow that ran down to the path. It looked exactly the same now. He opened the window a little more, stuck his head out. The bushes reached all the way up to the wall below his window, the snow cover as well. And it was undisturbed.

Oskar looked to the left, along the rough surface of the outside wall. Her window was three meters away.

Cold air swept over Oskar's naked chest. It must have snowed last night after she went back to her room. That was the only explanation. But anyway… now that he thought about it: how had she made it up to the window? Had she climbed up the bushes?

But then the snow couldn't look like this. And it hadn't been snowing when he went to bed. Neither her body nor her hair had been damp, so it couldn't have been snowing then. When did she go?

Some time between the time that she left and when she was here it must have snowed enough to cover the tracks of…

Oskar shut the window, continued to dress. It was unbelievable. He started thinking it was all a dream again. Then he saw the note. Folded and left under the clock on his desk. He took it out and unfolded it.

THEN WINDOW, LET DAY IN AND LET LIFE OUT.

A heart, and then:

SEE YOU TONIGHT, ELI.

He read the note five times. Then he thought about her, standing here by the desk as she wrote it. Gene Simmons' face on the wall, half a meter behind her, his tongue sticking out.

He leaned over the desk and took the poster down from the wall, crinkled it into a ball, and threw it into the trash.

Then he read the short note three more times, folded it, and put it in his pocket. Put on the last of his clothes. Today there could be five papers in each advertising packet as far as he was concerned. It would still be as easy as pie.

The room smelled of smoke and the dust particles danced in the rays of sunlight that filtered in through the blinds. Lacke had just woken up, was lying on his back in bed, coughing. Dust particles were doing a funny dance in front of his eyes. A smoker's cough. He turned, managed to get a hold of the lighter and cigarette packet that was on the nightstand next to an overflowing ashtray.

He helped himself to a cigarette-Camel lights, Virginia was starting

to get health conscious in her old age-lit it, rolled over onto his back again with one arm behind his head, and reflected on the situation.

Virginia had left for work a few hours earlier, probably fairly tired. They had stayed awake for a long time after making love, talked and smoked. It was close to two in the morning when Virginia put out the last cigarette and said it was time to sleep. Lacke had slipped out of bed after a while, had drained the dregs of the bottle of wine, and smoked a few more cigarettes before he went back to bed. Maybe mostly because he liked this: crawling into bed next to a warm sleeping body.

Too bad he hadn't managed to arrange his life so he always had someone next to him. If there could have been someone, it would have been Virginia. Anyway… damn it, he had heard from others how things were for her. Rollercoaster times. Times when she drank too much in city pubs, dragged home any old guy. She didn't want to talk about that, but she had aged more than she needed to these past few years.

If he and Virginia could have… yes, what? Sell everything, buy a house in the country, grow their own potatoes. Sure, but it wouldn't last. After a month they would be getting on each others' nerves, and she had her mom here, her job, and he had… well, his stamps.

No one knew about that, not even his sister, and he had kind of a guilty conscience about that.

His dad's stamp collection, which had not been drawn up in the estate, was worth a small fortune as it turned out. He had raided it, a few stamps at a time, when he needed the cash.

Right now the market was at a low, and he didn't have many stamps left. But soon he would have to sell them anyway. Maybe sell those special ones, Norway number one, and buy a round of beer in return for all the beers he had gotten people to buy him the last while. That's what he should do.

Two houses in the country. Cottages. Close to each other. Cottages cost almost nothing. Then there was Virginia's mother. Three cottages. And then her daughter, Lena. Four. Sure. Buy a whole village while you're at it.

Virginia was only happy when she was with Lacke; she had said so herself. Lacke wasn't sure he had the capacity to be happy, but Virginia was the only person he liked being with. Why shouldn't they be able to make things work out somehow?

Lacke set the ashtray on his stomach, flicked the ash from the tip, put the cigarette in his mouth, and inhaled deeply.

The only person he liked being with these days. Since Jocke had… disappeared. Jocke had been good. The only one among all his acquaintances he counted as a friend. This thing about his body being missing was fucked up. It wasn't natural. There should be a funeral at least. A corpse that you can look at, that prompts you to say: yes, there you are, my friend. And you are dead.