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

Virginia closed the door on Lacke's pleading face, locked it, and put the chain on. Didn't want him to see her. Didn't want to see anyone. It had cost her a great effort to say those few words, to act according to some basic form of normality.

Her condition had deteriorated rapidly after she got home from the ICA store. Lotten had helped her home and in her dazed state she had simply put up with the pain of daylight on her face. Once she was home she had looked in the mirror and seen the hundreds of tiny blisters on her face and hands. Burn marks.

She had slept for a few hours, woken up when it got dark. Her hunger had then changed in nature, been transformed into anxiety. A school of hysterically wriggling little fish now filled her circulatory system. She could neither lie down, nor sit, nor stand. She walked around and around the apartment, scratched her body, took a cold shower to dampen the jumpy, tingling feeling. Nothing helped.

It defied description. It reminded her of when she was twenty-two and had been informed that her father had fallen from the roof of their summer cottage and broken his neck. That time she had also walked around and around as if there was not a single place on earth where her body could rest, where it didn't hurt.

Same thing now, except worse. The anxiety did not let up for a moment. It forced her around the apartment until she couldn't stand it any longer, until she sat down on a chair and banged her head into the kitchen table. In desperation she took two sleeping pills and washed them down with a couple of mouthfuls of wine that tasted like dishwater.

Normally one was all she needed to fall asleep as if she had been hit in the head. The only effect on her now was that she became intensely nauseated and after five minutes vomited green slime and both of the half-dissolved tablets.

She kept walking around, ripped a newspaper into tiny pieces, crawled on the floor and whimpered. She crawled into the kitchen, pushed the bottle of wine from the table so it fell to the ground and broke in front of her eyes.

She picked up one of the broken shards.

Didn't think. Just pressed it into the palm of her hand and the pain felt good, felt right. The school of fish in her body rushed toward the point of the pain and blood welled out. She pressed the palm to her mouth and licked it, and the anxiety gave way. She cried with relief while she punctured her hand in a new place and kept sucking. The taste of blood mingled with the taste of tears.

Curled up on the kitchen floor, with her hand pressed against her mouth, greedily sucking like a newborn child that finds its mother's breast for the first time, she felt-for the second time on this terrible day-calm.

About half an hour after she had stood up from the floor, swept the shards up from the floor, and put on a Band-Aid, the anxiety had started to return. That was when Lacke had rung the bell.

When she had sent him away and locked the door she walked out into the kitchen and put the box of chocolates in the pantry. She sat down on a kitchen chair and tried to understand. The anxiety would not let her. Soon it would force her to her feet again. The only thing she knew was that no one could be with her here. Particularly not Lacke. She would hurt him. The anxiety would drive her to it.

She had contracted some kind of disease. There were medicines for diseases.

Tomorrow she would consult a doctor, someone who could examine her and say that: Well, this was simply an attack of X. We'll have to put you on Y and Z for a couple of weeks. That'll clear it right up.

She walked to and fro in the apartment. It was starting to get unbearable again.

She hit her arms, her legs, but the small fish had come back to life and nothing helped. She knew what she had to do. She sobbed from fear of the pain but the actual sensation was so brief and the relief so great.

She walked out into the kitchen and got a sharp little fruit knife, went back out and sat down in the couch in the living room, rested the blade against the underside of her arm.

Only to get her through the night. Tomorrow she would seek help. It

was self-evident she couldn't keep going like this. Drink her own blood. Of course not. There would have to be a change. But for now…

The saliva rose up in her mouth, wet anticipation. She cut into herself. Deeply…

7 November [Evening]

Oskar cleared the table and his dad did the dishes. The eider duck had been delicious, of course. No shot. There was not much to wash off the plates. After they had eaten most of the bird and almost all of the potato they had sopped up the remains on their plates with white bread. That was the best part. Pour out gravy on the plate and sop it up with porous bits of white bread that half-dissolved in the gravy and then melted in your mouth.

His dad wasn't a great cook or anything, but three dishes- pytt-i-panna, fried herring, and roasted seabird-he made so often that he had mastered them. Tomorrow they would have pytt-i-panna made from the leftovers.

Oskar had spent the hours before dinner in his room. He had his own room at his dad's house that was bare compared to his room in town, but he liked it. In town he had posters and pictures, a lot of things; it was always changing.

This room never changed and that was exactly what he liked about it.

It looked the same now as when he was seven years old.

When he walked into the room, with its familiar damp smell that lingered in the air after a rapid heating job in anticipation of his visit, it was as if nothing had happened for… a long time.

Here were still the Donald Duck and Bamse comic books bought during the many summers of years past. He no longer read them when he was in town, but here he did. He knew the stories by heart but he read them again.

While the smells filtered in from the kitchen he lay on his bed and read an old issue of Donald Duck. Donald, his nephews, and Uncle Scrooge were traveling to a distant country where there was no money and the cap tops of the bottles containing Uncle Scrooge's calming tonic became the currency.

When he had finished reading he busied himself with the assortment of lures and sinkers that he kept in an old sewing kit his dad had given him. Tied a new line with loose hooks, five of them, and attached the lures for summertime herring fishing.

Then they ate, and when his dad was done with the dishes they played tic-tac-toe.

Oskar liked sitting like that with his dad; the graph paper on the thin table, their heads leaning over the page, close to each other. The fire crackled in the fireplace.

Oskar was crosses and his dad circles, as usual. His dad never let Oskar win purposely and so until a few years ago his dad had always won easily, even if Oskar got lucky now and again. But now it was more even. Maybe it had to do with him practicing so much with the Rubik's Cube.

The matches could go on over half the page, which was to Oskar's advantage. He was good at keeping in mind places with holes that could be filled if Dad did this or that, mask an offensive as a defense.

Tonight it was Oskar who won.

Three matches in a row had now been encircled and marked with an "O" in the middle. Only a little one, where Oskar had been thinking of something else, had a "P" on it. Oskar filled in a cross and got two open fours where his dad could only block one. His dad sighed and shook his head.

"Well, Oskar. Looks like I've met my match."

"Seems like it."

For the sake of the game, his dad blocked the one four and Oskar filled in the other. His dad closed one side of the four and Oskar put a fifth cross on the other side, drew a circle around the whole thing, and

wrote a neat "O." His dad scratched his beard and pulled out a new sheet of paper. Held his pen up.