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

Sorry I broke your music machine. Take the money if you want. I have a lot. Don't be afraid of me. There's no reason for you to be. Maybe you know that. I hope you know that. I like you so very much.

Yours, Eli

P.S. Feel free to stay. But if you leave make sure the door locks behind you.

Oskar read the note several times. Then he picked up the pen next to it. He looked around the empty room, Eli's life. The bills she had tried to give him were still lying on the table, scrunched up. He took one thousand kronor bill, put it in his pocket.

He looked for a long time at the space on the page under Eli's name. Then he lowered the pen and wrote in letters as tall as the space

YES.

He put the pen down, got up, and slipped the Walkman into his bag. He turned around one last time and looked at the by-now upside-down letters.

YES.

Then he shook his head, dug the thousand kronor bill out of his pocket, and put it back on the table. When he was out in the stairwell he checked that the door had locked securely behind him. He pulled on it several times.

From the Daily Update, 16:

The official search for the man who early Sunday morning escaped from Danderyd Hospital after having killed one person, has not yet yielded any results.

The police have searched all of Judarn forest in western Stockholm in the attempt to track down the man, who is assumed to be the so-called Ritual Killer. At the time of his escape the man was critically wounded and the police now suspect he had an accomplice.

Arnold Lehrman, of the Stockholm Police:

"Yes, that's the only logical explanation. There is no physical possibility that he would have been able to keep himself hidden this long in his… condition. We have had thirty officers out here, dogs, a helicopter. It's just not feasible, that's all."

"Will you keep searching Judarn forest?"

"Yes. The possibility that he remains in the area cannot be ruled out. But we will divert some of our forces from here in order to concentrate on… in order to investigate how he has been able to proceed."

The man is severely disfigured and was at the time of his escape dressed in a light blue hospital gown. The police ask that anyone with information regarding the disappearance contact them at the following number…

8 November [Evening]

Public interest in the police search of Judarn forest was at an all-time high. The evening news realized they would not be able to print the composite picture of the murderer one more time. They had been hoping for images of an apprehended suspect but in the absence of this both evening papers ran the sheep picture.

The Expressen even put it on the front page.

Say what you will, there was undeniable drama in that photograph. The police officer's face twisted by exertion, the splayed limbs and open mouth of the sheep. You could almost hear the panting, the bleating.

One of the papers had even tried to reach the royal court for comment, since it was the King's sheep that the officer was manhandling in this way. The King and Queen had only two days earlier informed the public that they were expecting their third child, and decided that that would have to do. The court offered no comment.

Of course several pages were devoted to maps of Judarn and the western suburbs. Where the man had been sighted, how the police search had been organized. But all this had been seen before, in other contexts. The sheep picture was something new and it was this that people remembered.

Expressen had even dared to try a little joke. The caption said, "Wolf in sheep's clothing?"

You had to laugh a little, and people needed this. They were scared. This same man had killed two people, almost three, and now he was once more on the loose and kids again were subject to a curfew. A school field trip to Judarn on Monday was canceled.

And running right through this there was an underlying anger at the fact that one person, one single person, could have the power to dominate so many people's lives simply through his evil and his… ability to stave off death.

Yes. Experts and professors who were called upon to comment in newspapers and TV all said the same thing: it was impossible that the man was still alive. In answer to a direct question they then went on to say in the next breath that the man's escape was just as impossible.

A professor of medicine at Danderyd made an unfavorable impression on the evening news when he said, in an aggressive tone of voice: "Until very recently the man was hooked up to a respirator. Do you know what that means? That means that you are not able to breathe on your own. Add to this a fall of about thirty meters…" The professor's tone implied that the reporter was an idiot and that the whole thing was an invention by the media.

So everything was a soup of guesses, impossibilities, rumors and-of course-fear. Not so strange then that one used the sheep picture in spite of everything. That at least was concrete. The photograph was disseminated throughout the land and found its way to people's eyes.

Lacke saw it when he bought a packet of Red Prince cigarettes in the Lover's newsstand, with his last few kronor, on his way over to Gosta's. He had been sleeping all afternoon and felt like Raskolnikov; the world was hazily uncertain. He glanced at the sheep photograph and nodded to himself. In his present state it did not seem strange to him that the police were apprehending sheep.

Only when he was halfway to Gosta's place did the image come back

to him and he thought, "What the hell was that?" but didn't have the energy to pursue it. He lit a cigarette and kept going.

Oskar saw it when he came home after having spent the afternoon walking around Vallingby. When he got off the subway Tommy was getting on. Tommy looked jumpy and wound up and said he had done something "fucking hilarious" but didn't have time to say anything more before the doors closed. At home there was a note on the kitchen table; his mom was going to dinner with the choir tonight. There was food in the refrigerator, the advertising flyers had been delivered, hugs and kisses.

The evening paper was on the kitchen sofa. Oskar looked at the sheep on the front page and read everything about the search. Then he did something he had been lagging behind on: cut out and saved the articles about the Ritual Killer from the paper over the last few days. He took the pile of newspapers out from the cleaning closet, his scrapbook, scissors, paste, and got to work.

Staffan saw it about two hundred meters from where it had been taken. He had not been able to catch Tommy, and after a few brief words with a distraught Yvonne he had left for Akeshov. Someone there had referred to a colleague he didn't know by the name of "the sheep man" but he hadn't gotten the joke until a few hours later when he had a chance to see the evening paper.

Police management was ticked off at the newspapers' indiscretion, but most officers in the field thought it was funny. With the exception of "the sheep man" himself, of course. For several weeks he had to endure the occasional "baaaaaa" and "nice sweater, is that sheep's wool?"

Jonny saw it when his four-year-old little brother- half little brother- Kalle came up to him with a present. A wooden block that he had

wrapped in the first page of the evening paper. Jonny shooed him out of his room, said he wasn't in the mood, locked the door. Took up the photo album again, looking at pictures of his dad, his real dad, who was not Kalle's dad.

A little later he heard his stepfather yelling at Kalle because he had destroyed the paper. Jonny then unwrapped the present, turning the block in his fingers as he studied the close-up of the sheep. He chuckled, the skin pulled taut around his ear. He stowed the photo album in his gym bag-it would be safest to keep it at school-and from there his thoughts turned to what the hell he should do with Oskar.