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

Lacke's eyes teared up.

People always had so many damned friends, tossed the word around so lightly. He had had one, only one, and he happened to be the one who was taken from him by a cold-blooded mugger. Why the hell did that kid have to kill Jocke?

Somehow he knew that Gosta wasn't lying or making it up, and Jocke was gone, but it seemed so damned meaningless. The only reasonable explanation was that drugs were involved. Jocke must have been involved in some drug shit and double-crossed the wrong person. But why hadn't he said anything?

Before he left the apartment he emptied the ashtray, stowed the empty wine bottle on the floor of the pantry. Had to put it in upside down so it would fit with all the other bottles.

Yes, damn it. Two cottages. A potato patch. Earth on your knees and lark song in springtime. And so on. Some day.

He put on his coat and went out. When he walked past the ICA store he threw a kiss to Virginia, who was sitting at a register. She smiled and pouted at him.

On his way back to Ibsengatan he saw a young boy laden with two large paper bags. Someone who lived in his complex, but Lacke didn't know his name. Lacke nodded at him.

"Looks heavy, what you've got there."

"It's OK."

Lacke gazed after the boy struggling on with his bags in the direction of some nearby apartment buildings. Looked so damned happy. That's how you should be. Accept your burden and carry it, with joy.

That's how you should be.

Inside the courtyard he hung around hoping to bump into the guy

who had bought him the whisky drinks. The man was sometimes up and walking around at this time. Walked in circles around the courtyard. But he hadn't seen him the last couple of days. Lacke peeked up at the covered windows to the apartment where he thought the man lived.

Probably in there drinking, of course. Could go ring the doorbell.

Maybe another day.

When it was starting to get dark Tommy and his mother went down to the graveyard. His dad's grave was just inside the dike that bordered Racksta Lake. His mom was quiet until they reached Kanaanvagen, and Tommy had thought it was because she was grieving but when they walked onto the little road that ran parallel to the lake his mom coughed and said, "So you know, Tommy."

"What."

"Staffan says that something has gone missing from his apartment. Since we were there last." I see.

"Do you know anything about it?"

Tommy scooped up some snow with his hand, shaped it into a ball, and threw it at a tree. Bull's eye.

"Yeah. It's lying under his balcony."

"It's quite important to him because…"

"It's in the bushes under his balcony, I said."

"How did it end up there?"

A section of the snow-covered wall around the graveyard came into view. A soft red light illuminated the pine trees from below. The grave lantern that Tommy's mom was carrying made a clinking sound. Tommy asked: "Do you have a light?"

"Light? Oh yes. I have a lighter. How did it-"

"I dropped it."

Once he was inside the gate to the graveyard Tommy stopped and looked at the map; the different sections were marked with different letters. His dad was in section D.

If you thought about it, it was actually pretty sick. To do this. Burn

people up, save the ashes, bury them in the ground, and then call the spot "Grave 104, section D."

Almost three years ago. Tommy had fuzzy memories of the funeral, or whatever it should be called. That thing with the coffin and a lot of people who alternated between crying and singing.

He remembered he had been wearing shoes that were too big for him, Daddy's shoes, that his feet had slipped around in them on the way home. That he had been afraid of the coffin, sat staring at it the whole time, sure his dad was going to get up out of it and come alive again, but…changed.

Two weeks after the funeral he had gone around with a total fear of zombies. Especially when it was dark, he looked in the shadows and thought he could make out the shrivelled being in the hospital bed, who was no longer his dad, coming at him with arms held out stiffly, like in those movies.

The terror had stopped after they interred the urn. It had only been him, Mom, a gravedigger, and a minister. The gravedigger had carried the urn and walked with a dignified stride while the minister comforted his mom. The whole thing was so fucking ridiculous. The little wooden box with a lid that a guy in carpenter overalls carried in front of him as he walked; that this had anything whatsoever to do with his dad. It was one big joke.

But the terror had lifted and Tommy's relationship to the grave had changed over time. Now he sometimes came here alone, sat a while by the gravestone, and ran his fingers across the carved letters that formed his father's name. That was what he came for. Not the box in the ground, but the name.

The distorted person in the hospital bed, the ashes in the box, none of that was Dad, but the name referred to the person he could remember and therefore he sometimes sat there and rubbed his finger over the depressions in the stone that formed the name martin samuelsson.

"How beautiful it is," his mom said.

Tommy looked out over the graveyard.

Small candles were lit all over. A city viewed from an airplane. Here and there dark figures moved among the gravestones. Mom walked in the direction of Dad's grave, the lantern dangling from her hand. Tommy

looked at her thin back and was suddenly sad. Not for his sake, or his mom's sake, no: for everyone. For all the people walking here with their flickering lights in the snow. Themselves only shadows that sat next to the headstones, looked at the inscription, touching it. It was just so… stupid.

Dead is dead. Gone.

Even so, Tommy walked over to his mom and crouched down next to his dad's grave while she lit the lantern. Didn't want to touch the letters in his name when she was there.

They sat like that for a while and watched the weak flicker make the shading in the marble block crawl and move. Tommy didn't feel anything except a certain embarrassment. To think he went along with this pretend play. After a minute he got up and started to head home.

His mom followed. A little too soon, in his opinion. As far as he was concerned, she could cry her eyes out, sit there all night. She caught up with him and carefully put her arm through his. He let her. They walked side by side and looked out over Racksta Lake, where ice had started to form. If this cold snap kept up you'd be able to skate on it in a few days.

One thought kept going through his head like a stubborn guitar riff.

Dead is dead. Dead is dead. Dead is dead.

His mom shivered, pressed up against him.

"It's awful."

"You think?"

"Yes, Staffan told me such an awful thing."

Staffan. Couldn't she keep herself from mentioning him, here of all… I see.

"Did you hear about that house that burned down in Angby? The woman who…"

"Yes."

"Staffan told me that they did the autopsy on her. I think that kind of stuff is so awful. That they do those things."

"Yes. Sure."

A duck was walking on the thin ice toward the open water that had formed near a drain that let out into the lake. The small fishes you could catch in the summer smelled like sewage.

"Where does that drain lead from?" Tommy asked. "Does it come from the crematorium?"

"Don't know. Don't you want to hear about it? Do you think it's too awful?"

"No, no."

And then she told him while they were walking home through the woods. After a while Tommy got interested, started asking questions his mom couldn't answer; she just knew what Staffan had told her. In fact Tommy asked so much, became so interested, that his mom regretted having brought it up in the first place.