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

He looked at the by-now pale splotch on the floor. Then he gingerly licked a little of the blood on his palm, spit it out.

Night lights.

Tomorrow they would operate on his mouth and throat, probably in the hopes that something would come out. His tongue was still there. He could move it around in the sealed cavity of his mouth, tickle his upper jaw with it. Maybe he would be able to talk again even though his lips were gone. But he did not intend to talk again.

A woman, he didn't know if she was from the police or a nurse, sat in the corner a few meters away, reading a book and keeping an eye on him.

They allot so much of their resources when a nobody decides his life is over?

He realized that he was valuable, that he meant a lot to them. Probably they were digging around in old records right now, cases they hoped to be able to solve with him as the perpetrator. A policeman had been in yesterday to take his fingerprints. He had not made any resistance. It didn't matter.

It was possible that the fingerprints would link him to the murders in both Vaxjo and Norrkoping. He tried to remember how he had proceeded there, if he had left fingerprints or other traces. Probably.

The only thing that worried him was that by way of these events people could track down Eli.

People…

They had put notes in his mailbox, threatened him.

Someone who worked at the post office and who lived in the area had tipped off the other neighbors about what kind of mail, what kind of videos he received.

It took about a month before he was fired from his job at the school. You couldn't have someone like that working with children. He had walked away willingly, even though he could probably have brought it up with the union.

He hadn't actually done anything at the school; he wasn't that stupid.

The campaign against him had increased in strength and finally one night someone had thrown a firebomb through his living room window. He had fled out onto the lawn in only his underpants, stood there and watched his life burn to the ground.

The crime investigation dragged on in time and therefore he didn't get the insurance money. With his meager savings he had taken the train, rented a room in Vaxjo. That's where he started working on trying to die.

He drank himself down to the level where he used whatever was at hand. Aco acne-solution, T-Rod denatured alcohol. He stole wine-making kits and Turbo yeast from hardware stores and drank everything before it was ready.

He was outside as much as possible. In some way he wanted "the people" to see him die, day for day.

In his drunken stupor he became careless, fondled young boys, got beaten up, ended up at the police station. Once he sat in jail for three days and puked his guts out. Was released. Kept drinking.

One evening when Hakan was sitting on a bench next to a playground with a bottle of half-yeasted wine in a plastic bag, Eli came and sat down beside him. In his drunkenness Hakan had almost immediately put a hand on Eli's thigh. Eli had let it stay there, taken Hakan's head between her hands, turned it toward her, and said: "You are going to be with me."

Hakan had mumbled something about how he couldn't afford such a beauty right now but when his finances allowed…

Eli had moved his hand from her thigh, leaned down, and taken his wine bottle, poured it out and said: "You don't understand. You're going to stop drinking now. You are going to be with me. You are going to help me. I need you. And I'm going to help you." Then Eli had held out her hand, Hakan had taken it, and they had walked away together.

He had stopped drinking and entered into Eli's service.

Eli had given him money to buy some clothes and to rent another apartment. He had done everything without wondering whether Eli was

"evil" or "good" or anything else. Eli was beautiful and Eli had given him back his dignity. And in rare moments… tenderness.

The pages rustled when the night guard turned them in the book she was reading. Probably a dime store novel. In Plato's republic the "Guards" were supposed to be the most highly educated among the people. But this was Sweden, 1981, and they were probably reading Jan Guillou.

The man in the water, the man whose corpse he had sunk. That had been clumsy of him, of course. He should have done as Eli said and buried him. But nothing about the man would be traced back to Eli. The bite mark in his neck would be regarded as unusual, but they would think the blood had been washed away by the water. The man's clothes were…

Her top!

Eli's top, the one Hakan had found on the man's body when he first came to take care of it. He should have taken it home with him, burned it, anything.

Instead he had tucked it inside the man's coat. How would they interpret that? A child's top, spotted with blood. Was there a risk that someone had seen this shirt on Eli? Someone who would recognize it? If it were displayed in the paper, for example? Someone Eli had met before, someone who…

Oskar. The boy next door.

Hakan's body twisted restlessly in the bed. The guard put her book down and looked at him.

"Don't do anything stupid."

Eli crossed Bjornsonsgatan, continued into the courtyard between the nine-story buildings, two monolithic lighthouses towering over the crouching three-story buildings scattered around. No one was outside, but there was light coming from the gymnasium and Eli slithered up the fire escape ladder, looked in.

Music was blaring out of a small tape player. Middle-aged women

were jumping around in time to the music so the wooden floor shook. Eli curled up in the metal grating of the stairs, leaned her chin on her knees, and took in the scene.

Several of the women were overweight and their massive breasts were bouncing like cheery bowling balls under their T-shirts. The women jumped and skipped, lifting their knees so the flesh trembled in their too-tight workout pants. They moved in a circle, clapped their hands, jumped again. All the while the music kept going. Warm, oxygenated blood streaming through thirsty muscles.

But there were too many of them.

Eli jumped down from the fire escape, landed softly on the frozen ground underneath, continued around the back of the gym, and stopped outside the swimming pool.

The large frosted windows projected rectangles of light onto the snow cover. Over each large window there was a smaller, narrow window made of regular glass. Eli jumped up and hung from the edge of the roof with her hands, looked in. No one was inside. The surface of the pool glittered in the glow of the halogen lights. A few balls were floating in the middle.

Swim. Splash. Play.

Eli swayed back and forth, a dark pendulum. Looked at the balls, saw them flying through the air, thrown up again, laughter and screams and splashing water. Eli relaxed her hold on the edge of the roof, fell down, and consciously let herself land so hard that it hurt, then kept going over the school yard to the path through the park, stopping under a high tree hanging over the path. It was dark. No one around. Eli looked up into the top of the tree, along five six meters of smooth tree trunk. Kicked off her shoes. Thought herself new hands, new feet.

It hardly hurt at all anymore, just felt like a tingling, an electric current through her fingers and toes as they thinned out, took on a new shape. The bones crackled in her hands as they stretched out, shot out through the melting skin of the fingertips and made long, curved claws. Same thing with her toes.

Eli jumped a couple of meters up onto the trunk of the tree, dug in her claws, and climbed up to a thick branch that hung out over the path. Curled the claws on her feet around the branch and sat without moving.