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

The sheep picture would start a minor debate about the ethics of photojournalism, but was nonetheless featured in both papers' end-of-year collage of the year's most unforgettable images. In the spring the tackled ram himself was let out into the Drottningholm summer pastures, forever oblivious to his fifteen minutes of fame.

Virginia rests rolled up in duvets and blankets. Her eyes are closed, the body completely still. In a moment she will wake up. She has been lying here for eleven hours. Her body temperature is down to twenty-seven degrees, which corresponds to the temperature inside the closet. Her heart rate is four faint beats a minute.

During these past eleven hours her body has changed irrevocably. Her Stomach and lungs have adapted to a new kind of existence. The most interesting detail, from a medical point of view, is a still-developing cyst in the sinoatrial node of the heart, the clump of cells that controls the heart's contractions. The cyst has now grown to twice its former size. A cancer-like growth of foreign cells continues unhindered.

If one could take a sample of these cells, put the sample under a mi-croscope, one would see something that all heart specialists would reject with the assumption that the sample had become contaminated, mixed. A tasteless joke.

Namely, the tumor in the sinoatrial node consists of brain cells.

Yes. Inside Virginia's heart a separate little brain is forming. This new brain has, during its initial stage of development, been dependent on the large brain. Now it is self-sufficient, and what Virginia during a terrible moment sensed is completely correct: it would live on even if her body died.

Virginia opened her eyes and knew she was awake. Knew it even though opening her eyelids made no difference. It was as dark as before. But her consciousness was turned on. Yes. Her consciousness came to life, and at the same time it was as if something else quickly withdrew.

Like…

Like coming to a summer cottage that has been empty all winter. You open the door, fumble for the light switch, and at that same moment you hear the rapid scuttling, the clicking of small claws against the floorboards, you catch a brief glimpse of the rat squeezing in under the kitchen counter.

An uncanny feeling. You know it's been living there in your absence. That it thinks of the house as its own. That it will come sneaking out again as soon as you turn out the light.

I am not alone.

Her mouth felt like paper. She had no feeling in her tongue. She continued to lie there, thinking of the cottage that she and Per, Lena's father, had rented a couple of summers when Lena was little. The rat's nest they found all the way in under the kitchen counter. The rats had chewed off small pieces of a milk carton and a packet of cornflakes, built what almost looked like a little house, a fantastic construction of multicolored cardboard.

Virginia had felt a certain kind of guilt as she vacuumed up the little house. No, more than that. A superstitious feeling of transgression. As she inserted the cold mechanical trunk of the vacuum cleaner into the delicate, fine construction the rat had spent the winter building it felt like she was casting out a good spirit.

And sure enough. When the rat was not caught in any of the traps but continued to eat their dry goods even though it was summer, Per had put out rat poison. They had argued about it. They had argued about other things. About everything. In July sometime the rat had died, somewhere inside the wall.

As the stench of the rat's dead, decomposing body spread through the

house, their marriage slowly broke down that summer. They had gone home a week earlier than planned since they could no longer tolerate the stench or each other. The good spirit had left them.

What happened to that house? Does anyone else live there now?

She heard a squeaking sound, a hiss.

There IS a rat! Inside these blankets!

She was gripped by panic.

Still wrapped up, she threw herself to the side, hitting the closet doors so they flew open, and she tumbled out onto the floor. She kicked with her legs, waving her arms until she managed to free herself. Disgusted, she crawled up onto the bed, into a corner, pulling her knees under her chin, staring at the pile of blankets and duvets, waiting for a movement. She would scream when it came. Scream so the whole house came rushing with hammers and axes and beat the pile of blankets until the rat was dead.

The blanket on top was green with blue dots. Wasn't there a movement there? She drew a breath in order to scream, and she heard the squeaking, hissing again.

I'm… breathing.

Yes. That was the last thing she had determined before she fell asleep: that she wasn't breathing. Now she was breathing again. She drew the air in tentatively, and heard the squeaking, hissing. It was coming from her air passages. They had dried out as she was resting, were making these sounds. She cleared her throat and felt a rotten taste in her mouth.

She remembered everything. Everything.

She looked at her arms. Strands of dried blood covered them, but no cuts or scars were visible. She picked out the spot on the inside of her elbow where she knew she had cut herself at least twice. Maybe a faint streak of pink skin. Yes. Possibly. Except for that everything was healed.

She rubbed her eyes and checked the time. A quarter past six. It was evening. Dark. She looked down again at the green blanket, the blue dots.

Where is the light coming from?

The overhead light was off, it was evening outside, all the blinds were drawn. How could she possibly be seeing all the contours and colors so clearly? In the closet it had been pitch black. She hadn't seen anything there. But now… it was clear as day.

A little light always gets in.

Was she breathing?

She couldn't figure it out. As soon as she started to think about her breathing she also controlled it. Maybe she only breathed when she thought of it.

But that first breath, the one she had mistaken for the sound of a rat… she hadn't thought that one. But perhaps it had only been like a… like a…

She shut her eyes.

Ted.

She had been there when he was born. Lena had never met Ted's father again after the night when Ted was conceived. Some Finnish businessman in Stockholm for a conference and so on. So Virginia had been there for the birth, had nagged and pleaded her way there.

And now it came back to her. Ted's first breath.

How he had come out. The little body, sticky, purple, hardly human. The explosion of joy in her chest that changed to a cloud of anxiety when he didn't breathe. The midwife who had calmly picked up the little creature in her hands. Virginia had expected her to hold the little body upside down, slap him on the behind, but just as the midwife picked him up a bubble of saliva formed at his mouth. A bubble that grew, grew and… burst. And then came his cry, the first cry. And he breathed.

So?

Was that what Virginia's squeaky breath had been? A birth cry?

She straightened up, lying down on her back on the bed. Continued to replay the images of the birth. How she had washed Ted, since Lena had been too weak, had lost a lot of blood. Yes. After Ted had come out it had run over the edge of the birthing bed and the nurses had been there with paper, masses of paper. Finally it had stopped of its own accord.

The heap of blood-drenched paper, the midwife's dark red hands. Her calm, her efficiency in spite of all… the blood. All that blood.

Thirsty.

Her mouth was sticky and she replayed the sequence a number of times, zooming in on everything that had been covered in blood; the midwife's hands to let my tongue glide over those hands, the blood-drenched paper on the floor, put them in my mouth, suck on them, between Lena's legs where the blood ran out in a thin rivulet, to…