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

When he was back in the yard, he sat down on the edge of the sandbox for a while to calm himself before he went back home. Tomorrow he would get himself a better knife, a knife with a parry guard, or whatever it was called… so he didn't cut himself. Because this was something he was going to do again.

It was a good game.

22 October

H is mom reached over the kitchen table and squeezed Oskar's hand. There were tears in her eyes.

"You are absolutely not allowed to go into the woods by yourself, do you hear me?"

A boy about Oskar's age had been murdered in Vallingby yesterday. It had appeared in the afternoon papers and his mother was completely beside herself when she came home.

"It could have been… I don't even want to think about it."

"But it was Vallingby."

"And you mean to say that someone who is capable of doing this to a child wouldn't be able to go two subway stations? Or walk? Walk all the way here to Blackeberg and do the same thing again? Do you spend a lot of time in the woods?"

"No."

"You are not allowed to go past the yard now, as long as this… Until they've caught him."

"You mean I can't go to school?"

"Of course you can go to school. But after school you come straight here and you don't leave this complex until I get home."

"Big deal."

The pain in his mother's eyes mixed with anger.

"Do you want to be murdered? Do you? You want to go into the woods and be killed and I have to sit here and worry while you're lying out there in the forest and… you're being butchered by some bestial…"

The tears welled up in her eyes. Oskar put his hand on hers.

"I won't go into the woods, Mom. I promise."

His mother stroked his cheek.

"Little sweetheart, you're all I have. Nothing is allowed to happen to you. I would die too."

"Mmmm. How exactly did he do it?"

"What do you mean?"

"You know. The murder."

"How should I know? The boy was killed by some kind of maniac with a knife. He's dead. His parents' lives have been ruined."

"Aren't the details in the paper?"

"I can't bear to read it."

Oskar took the copy of Expressen and flipped through the pages. The crime filled four pages.

"You shouldn't read things like that."

"I'm only checking something. Can I take it?"

"Don't read about it, I'm serious. All that violent stuff you read isn't good for you."

"I'm just seeing what's on TV tonight."

Oskar got up intending to take the paper to his room. His mother hugged him clumsily and pressed her wet cheek against him.

"Sweetheart, can't you understand that I'm worried about you? What if something were to happen to you-"

"I know, Mom, I know. I'm careful."

Oskar hugged her a little back and then carefully extracted himself, went to his room wiping his mother's tears from his cheek.

This was amazing.

From what he could understand the boy had been killed while he was out playing in the woods. Unfortunately the victim had not been Jonny Forsberg, only some unknown boy from Vallingby.

The atmosphere in Vallingby that afternoon had been funereal. He had seen the headlines before he came home and perhaps he was only imagining things but it seemed to him that people in the main square had been talking more, walking more slowly than normal.

In the hardware store he had swiped an incredibly alluring hunting knife that cost three hundred. He had made up an excuse in advance in case he was caught.

"Excuse me, Sir, but I am just so afraid of the killer."

He would probably also have been able to squeeze out a few tears, if it came to that. They would have let him go, no doubt about it. But he had not been caught, and now the knife was tucked into the hiding place next to his scrapbook.

He needed to think.

Could it be that his game had in some way caused the murder to happen? He didn't think so, but he couldn't completely rule out the idea. The books he read were full of things like this. A person's thoughts in one place causing an action somewhere else.

Telekenesis. Voodoo.

But exactly where, when, and above all how had the murder been committed? If it had involved a large number of stab wounds on a prone body he had to seriously consider the possibility that his hands possessed a terrifying power. A power he would have to learn to control.

Or is it… the TREE… that is the link.

The rotten log that he had cut. Maybe there was something special about it, something that meant that whatever you did to the tree… spread further.

Details.

Oskar read all of the articles on the murder. A photograph of the policeman who had been to their school and talked about drugs appeared on one page. He was not able to comment further at this stage. Technical experts from the National Laboratory of Forensic Science had been called in to secure evidence from the crime scene. One had to wait and see. There was a picture of the murdered boy, taken from the school yearbook. Oskar had never seen him before. He looked like a Jonny or Micke. Maybe there was now an Oskar in the Vallingby school who had been set free.

The boy had been on his way to handball practice at the Vallingby gym and never come home. The practice had started at five-thirty. The boy had probably left home at around five o'clock. So at some point in between-Oskar's head started to spin. The time matched up exactly. And the boy had been murdered in the forest.

7s it true? Am I the one?…

A sixteen-year-old girl had found the body around eight o'clock in the evening and contacted the police. She was described as being treated for "extreme shock." Nothing about the state of the body, but if this girl was in a state of extreme shock it indicated the body had been mutilated in some way. Usually they only wrote "shocked."

What was the girl doing in the woods after dark? Probably nothing interesting. Been picking pine cones or something. But why wasn't there anything about how the boy had been murdered? The only thing they offered was a photograph of the crime scene. Police tape demarcated an ordinary wooded area, a hollow with a large tree in the middle. Tomorrow or the next day there would be a photo in this place, lots of candles and signs about "why?" and "we miss you." Oskar knew how it went; he had several similar cases in his scrapbook.

The whole thing was probably a coincidence. But what if.

Oskar listened at the door. His mom was doing the dishes. He lay down on the bed and dug out the knife. The handle was shaped to fit the hand and the whole thing weighed about three times as much as the kitchen knife he had used yesterday.

He got up and stood in the middle of the room with the knife in his hand. It was beautiful, transmitted power to the hand holding it.

The sound of clinking dishes came from the kitchen. He thrust a few times into the air. The Murderer. When he had learned to control the power Jonny, Micke, and Tomas would never bother him again. He was about to lunge again, but stopped himself. Someone could see him from outside. It was dark now and the light was on in his room. He looked out but only saw his own reflection in the glass.

The Murderer.

He put the knife back in its hiding place. This was only a game. These kinds of things didn't happen in reality. But he needed to know the details. Needed to know them now.

Tommy was sitting in an armchair with a motorcycle magazine, nodding his head and humming. From time to time he held the magazine aloft so Lasse and Robban, who were sitting in the couch, could see a particularly interesting picture, with a caption about cylinder volume and maximum speed. The naked light bulb in the ceiling was reflected in the shiny pages, throwing pale cat's eyes over the cement and timber walls.