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

Like a lizard. No. Cats. Cats.

Eli blinked. Her pupils were normal again.

"What is it?"

"Nothing. Come on…"

Oskar walked over to the bulk item trash room and opened the door. The bag was almost full, hadn't been emptied for a while. Eli squeezed in beside him and they rummaged through the trash. Oskar found a bag with empty bottles that you could get a deposit back on. Eli found a plastic sword, waved it around, said:

"Should we check the one next door?"

"No, Tommy and those guys might be there."

"Who are they?"

"Oh, some older guys who use a basement storage unit… they hang out there in the evening."

"Are there a lot of them?"

"No, three. Most of the time it's just Tommy."

"And they're dangerous?"

Oskar shrugged. "Let's check it out, then."

They walked out through Oskar's building into the next basement corridor, all the way into Tommy's building. As Oskar stood there with a key in his hand, about to unlock the last door, he hesitated. If they were in there? If they caught sight of Eli? If they… it could turn into something he wasn't able to handle. Eli held the plastic sword in front of her. "What is it?"

"Nothing."

He unlocked the door. As soon as they walked into the corridor he heard music coming from the storage unit. As he turned to her he whispered: "They're here! Come on."

Eli stopped, sniffed.

"What's that smell?"

Oskar checked to make sure that nothing was moving around at the other end of the corridor, then sniffed the air. Couldn't smell anything except the usual basement air. Eli said, "Paint, glue." Oscar sniffed again. He couldn't smell it but he knew what it had to be. When he turned back to Eli to get her to follow him he saw that she was doing something with the lock.

"Come on. What are you doing?" I m just…

As Oskar was unlocking the door to the next basement corridor, their path of retreat, the door fell shut behind them. It didn't make the normal

sound. No click, just a metallic clunk. On the way back to their basement he told Eli about glue-sniffing; how crazy those guys could get when they did that.

He felt safe again in his own basement. He knelt down and started to count the bottles in the bag. Fourteen beer bottles and a liquor bottle with no deposit value.

When he looked up to report this to Eli she was standing in front of him with the plastic sword held up as if about to attack. Used to sudden blows as he was, he flinched a little. But Eli mumbled something and lowered the sword against his shoulder and said, with as deep a voice as she could muster:

"I herewith dub you, Jonny's conqueror, knight of Blackeberg and all surrounding areas like Vallingby… um…"

"Racksta."

"Racksta."

"Maybe Angby?"

"Angby maybe."

Eli tapped him lightly on the shoulder for each new area. Oskar took his knife out of the bag, held it out, and proclaimed that he was the Knight of Angby Maybe. Wanted Eli to be the Beautiful Maiden he would rescue from the Dragon.

But Eli was a terrible monster who ate beautiful maidens for lunch and she was the one he would have to fight. Oskar left the knife in his sheath as they fought, shouted, and ran around in the corridors. In the middle of their game they heard a scrape in the lock to the basement doors.

They quickly piled into a food cellar where they hardly had room to sit hip against hip, and breathed quickly and quietly. They heard a man's voice.

"What are you doing down here?"

Oskar and Eli held their breath as the man waited, listening. Then he said: "Damn kids" and left. They stayed in the food cellar until they were sure the man had gone, then they crawled out, leaned against the wooden wall, giggling. After a while Eli stretched out on the concrete floor and stared up at the ceiling.

Oskar touched her foot.

"Are you tired?"

"Yes. Tired."

Oskar pulled his knife out of the sheath, looked at it. It was heavy, beautiful. He carefully pressed his pointed finger against the tip, then removed it. A small red dot. He pressed again, harder. When he took his finger away a pearl-shaped drop of blood came out. But this wasn't the way to do it.

"Eli? Do you want to do something?"

She was still staring up at the ceiling.

"What?"

"Do you want to… enter into a pact with me?"

"Yes."

If she had asked him "how?" he would maybe have told her what he was thinking before he did it. But she simply said "yes." She wanted to do it, whatever it was. Oskar swallowed hard, gripped the knife so the edge was resting against the palm of his hand, shut his eyes, and pulled the blade out of his hand. A stinging, smarting pain. He caught his breath.

Did I do this?

He opened his eyes, opened his hand. Yes. A thin trickle of blood was revealed in his palm. The blood pushed out slowly, not as he had thought in a thin line but as a string of pearls that he stared at with fascination as they merged into a thicker, uneven mass.

Eli lifted her head.

"What are you doing?"

Oskar was still holding his hand in front of his face, staring at it, and said:

"It's easy, Eli, it wasn't even…"

He held his bleeding hand toward her. Her eyes widened. She shook her head violently while she crawled backward, away from his hand.

"No, Oskar…"

"What is it?"

"Oskar, no."

"It almost doesn't hurt at all."

Eli stopped backing up, staring at his hand while she kept shaking her head. Oskar was holding the knife by the blade in his other hand, held it out to her handle first.

"You only have to prick yourself in a finger or something. Then we'll mix our blood. And then we have our pact."

Eli did not take the knife. Oskar put it down on the floor so he could catch a drop of blood that fell from his wound.

"Come on. Don't you want to?"

"Oskar… we can't. You would be infected, you-"

"It doesn't feel like that, it…"

A ghost flew into Eli's face, distorting it into something so different from the girl he knew that he completely forgot about catching the blood that dropped from his hand. She now looked like the monster they had recently pretended that she was and Oskar jumped back while the pain in his hand intensified.

"Eli, what…"

She sat up, pulled her legs under her, crouched on all fours, and stared straight at his bleeding hand, took a step closer toward it. Stopped, clenched her teeth, and got out a gruff: "Leave!"

Tears of fear welled up in Oskar's eyes. "Eli, stop it. Stop playing. Stop it."

Eli crawled a bit closer, stopped again. She forced her body to contort itself so her head was lowered to the ground and screamed:

"Go! Or you'll die!"

Oskar got up, took a few steps back. His feet hit against the bag of bottles so it fell over, with a clinking sound. He flattened himself against the wall while Eli crawled over to the little smear of blood that had fallen from his hand.

Another bottle fell over and broke against the concrete floor while Oskar stood pressed against the wall and stared at Eli, who stretched out her tongue and licked the dirty concrete, whisked her tongue around on the place where blood had fallen.

A bottle clinked softly and stopped moving. Eli licked and licked the floor. When she lifted her face to him there was a gray smear of dirt on the tip of her nose. "Go… please… leave."

Then the ghost flew into her face again, but before it had time to take over she got up and ran down the corridor, opened the door to her stairwell, and disappeared.

Oskar stood there with the damaged hand tightly wrapped. Blood was starting to well out around the edges. He opened it, looked at the cut. It had gone deeper than he had intended, but it wasn't dangerous, he thought. Some blood was already starting to congeal.