Let the right one in (33 page)

"He ... I just know that the police have him here. Where is he?"

"Probably on the top floor, but you can't go up there if you haven't... made an appointment with them ahead of time."

"I just wanted to know which window was his so I could ... I don't know."

The girl started to cry again. Maud's throat got so tight it hurt. The girl wanted to know this so she could stand outside the hospital in the snow .

.. and look up toward her father's window. Maud swallowed.

"I can call them if you like. I'm sure that you can—"

"No, it's fine. Now I know. Now I can ... Thanks, thanks a lot." The girl turned away and walked back to the revolving door.

My Lord, all these broken families.

The girl walked out the doors and Maud kept staring at the place where the girl had disappeared.

Something was wrong.

In her mind Maud went over what the girl had looked like, how she had moved. There was something that didn't match up, something you... It took Maud half a minute to remember what it was. The girl had not been wearing any shoes.

Maud jumped up and ran to the doors. She was only allowed to leave the reception desk unattended under very special circumstances. She decided that this counted as one of them. She trotted through the revolving doors impatiently
hurry hurry hurry
and then out into the parking lot. The girl was nowhere in sight. What should she do? The social welfare people would have to be brought in; no one had checked to make sure there was someone to look after the girl. That was the only explanation. Who was her father?

Maud looked around the parking lot without finding the girl. She ran down one side of the hospital, in the direction of the subway. No girl. On her way back to the reception she tried to figure out who she should call, what she should do.

+

Oskar lay in bed, waiting for the Werewolf. He felt the inside of his chest churning with rage, despair. From the living room he heard his dad's and Janne's loud voices, mixed with music from the tape recorder. The Deep Brothers. Oskar could not actually make out the words but he knew the song by heart.

"We live in the country, and soon we realized

we're country fellas and then it hit us

We needed something for the barn

We sold the china, all nice and fine

and bought ourselves a great big swine ..."

At this point the whole band started to imitate different farm animals. Normally he thought the Deep Brothers were funny. Now he hated them. Because they were part of this. Singing their idiotic songs for Dad and Janne while they got packed.

He knew exactly how it was going to go.

In an hour or so the bottle would be empty and Janne would go home. Then Dad would pace up and down in the kitchen for a while, and finally decide he needed to talk to Oskar.

He would come into Oskar's room and he would no longer be Dad. Just an alcohol-stinking, clumsy mess, all sentimental and needy. Would want Oskar to get out of bed. Needed to talk for a while. About how he still loved Mom, how he loved Oskar, did Oskar love him back? Slurring about all the wrongs he had ever experienced, and in the worst case scenario get himself worked up, become angry. He never got violent or anything. But what Oskar saw in his eyes at those times was the absolutely scariest thing he had ever seen. Then there was no trace of Dad left. Just a monster who had somehow crawled into his dad's body and taken control of it.

The person his dad became when he drank had no connection to the person he was when he was sober. And so it was comforting to think about Dad being a werewolf. That he in fact contained a whole other person in his body. Just as the moon brought out the wolf in a werewolf, so alcohol brought this creature out of his dad.

Oskar picked up a Bamse comic, tried to read but couldn't concentrate. He felt... forlorn. In an hour or so he would find himself alone with the Monster. And the only thing he could do was wait.

He threw the Bamse comic at the wall and got out of bed, went to get his wallet. One pack of prepaid subway tickets and two notes from Eli. He put Eli's notes side by side on the bed.

THEN WINDOW, LET DAY IN, AND LET LIFE OUT.

A heart.

SEE YOU TONIGHT. ELI.

And then the second.

I MUST BE GONE AND LIVE, OR STAY AND DIE. YOURS, ELI.

There are no vampires.

The night was a black cover over the window. Oskar shut his eyes and thought about the route to Stockholm, raced past the houses, the farms, the fields. Flew into the courtyard in Blackeberg, in through her window, and there she was.

He opened his eyes, stared at the black rectangle of the window. Out there.

The Deep Brothers had started a song about a bicycle that got a flat tire. Dad and Janne laughed much too loudly at something. Something fell over.

Which monster do you choose?

Oskar put Eli's notes back in his wallet and put his clothes on. Sneaked out into the hall and put on his shoes, his coat, and hat. He stood still in the hall a few seconds, listening to the sounds from the living room. He turned to go, saw something, stopped.

On the shoe rack in the hall were his old rubber boots, the ones he had worn when he was four or five. They had been there as long as he could remember, even though there was no one who could use them. Next to them were his dad's enormous Tretorn boots, one of them with a patch on the heel like the kind you use to fix bicycle tires.

Why had he kept them?

Oskar knew why. Two people grew up out of the boots with their backs to him. His dad's broad back, and next to it Oskar's thin one. Os-kar's arm upstretched, his hand in Dad's. They walked in their boots up over a boulder, maybe on their way to pick raspberries.

He suppressed a sob, tears rising in his throat. He stretched out his hand to touch the small boots. A salvo of laughter came from the living room. Janne's voice, distorted. Probably imitating someone, he was good at that.

Oskar's fingers closed over the top of the boots. Yes. He didn't know why but it felt right. He carefully opened the front door, closed it behind him. The night was icy cold, the snow a sea of tiny diamonds in the moonlight.

He started to walk up to the main road, with the boots tightly clasped in his hands.

+

The guard was sleeping, a young policeman who had been brought in after the hospital staff had protested against having one of them constantly assigned to guard Hakan. The door was, however, secured with a coded lock. That was probably why he had dared to snooze.

Only a night lamp was on and Hakan was studying the blurry shadows on the ceiling the way a healthy man might lie in the grass looking at clouds. He was looking for shapes, figures in the shadows. Didn't know if he would be able to read, but longed to do so.

Eli was gone and everything that had dominated his old life was coming back. He would get a long prison sentence and he would devote that time to read everything he had not yet read and also to reread everything he had promised himself to reread.

He was going over all the books by Selma Lagerlof when a scraping sound interrupted him. He listened. More scraping. It was coming from the window.

He turned his head as far as he could, looked in that direction. Against the dark sky there was a lighter oval, lit by the night lamp. A pale little blob appeared beside the oval, moving back and forth. A hand. Waving. The hand pulled along the window and that scraping, screeching sound came again.

Eli.

Hakan was grateful for the fact that he was not connected to an EKG

machine as his heart began to race, fluttering like a bird in a net. He imagined his heart bursting out of his chest, crawling over the floor to the window.

Come in, my beloved, come in.

But the window was locked and even if it had been open his lips could not form the words that would allow Eli to enter the room. He could perhaps make a gesture that meant the same thing, but he had never really understood all that.

Can I?

Tentatively he pulled one leg down off the bed, then the other. Put both feet on the floor, tried to stand. His legs did not want to carry his weight after lying in bed for ten days. He steadied himself against the railing, was about to fall to one side.

The IV tube was stretched taut, tugging on the skin where it entered his body. Some kind of alarm was connected to the IV, a thin electric wire ran along the length of it. If he pulled the tube out at either end the alarm would go off. He moved his arm in the direction of the IV stand creating more slack, then turned to the window.

Have to.

The IV stand had wheels, the batteries to the alarm were screwed in a little ways under the bag. He reached for the stand, grabbed hold of it. With the stand as support he stood up, slowly, slowly. The room swam around in front of his one eye as he took a tentative step, stopped, listened. The guard's breathing was still calm and regular. He shuffled through the room at a snail's pace. As soon as one of the wheels squeaked he stopped and listened. Something told him this was the last time he would see Eli and he didn't intend to ...

...
blow it.

His body was as exhausted as after a marathon when he finally reached the window and pressed his eye against it so the gelatinous membrane on his face was plastered onto the glass and his skin started to burn again.

Only a few centimeters of double-paned glass separated his eye from his beloved. Eli moved her hand across the window as if to caress his deformed face. Hakan held his eye as close to Eli's as he could and still his sight was distorted: Eli's black eyes dissolved, became fuzzy. He had assumed his tear canal had burned away like everything else, but this wasn't the case. Tears welled up in his eye and blinded him. The provisional eyelid could not blink them away and so he carefully wiped his eye with his uninjured hand while his body shook with silent sobs. His hand fumbled for the window lock. Turned it. Snot ran out of the hole that had been his nose, dripping down onto the window sill as he opened the window.

Cold air rushed into the room. Only a matter of time before the guard woke up. Hakan reached his arm, his healthy hand, through the window toward Eli. Eli pulled herself up onto the window ledge, took his hand between hers and kissed it. Whispered: "Hello, my friend." Hakan nodded slowly to let her know he could hear her. Took his hand out of Eli's and stroked her over the cheek. Her skin like frozen silk. Everything came back.

He wasn't going to rot in some jail cell surrounded by meaningless letters. Harassed by other prisoners for having committed the—in their eyes—worst of all crimes. He would be with Eli. He would ...

Eli leaned close to him, curled up on the windowsill.

"What do you want me to do?"

Hakan moved his hand from her cheek and pointed to his throat. Eli shook her head.

"That would mean I'd have to kill you . . . after." Hakan took his hand from his throat, brought it back to Eli's face. Rested a finger for a moment on her lips. Then pulled it back. Pointed once more at his throat.

+

His breath came out in white clouds but he wasn't cold. After ten minutes Oskar had reached the store. The moon had followed him from his dad's house, played hide-and-seek behind the spruce tops. Oskar checked the time. Half past ten. He had seen on the bus schedule in the hall that the last bus from Norrtalje left around half past twelve. He crossed the open space in front of the store, lit up by the lights of the gas pumps, walked out toward Kapellskarsvagen. He had never hitched a ride before and his mom would go crazy if she knew. Climbing into a complete stranger's car . ..

He walked faster, past a few lit-up houses. People were sitting in there having a good time. Kids sleeping in their beds without having to worry about their parents coming and waking them up to talk a lot of nonsense.
This is Dad's fault, not mine.

He looked down at the boots he was still carrying in his hands, threw them into the ditch, stopped. The boots came to rest there, two dark splotches against the snow in the moonlight.

Mom will never let me come out here again.

Dad would realize he was gone in maybe ... one hour. Then he would go outside and look for him, shout out his name. Then he would call Mom. Would he? Probably. To see if Oskar had called her. Mom would realize Dad was drunk when he told her about Oskar being gone and then it would be . . .

Wait. Like this.

When he got to Norrtalje he would call his dad from a pay phone and tell him he had gone back to Stockholm, that he was going to spend the night at a friend's house and then go back to Mom's tomorrow morning and not say anything about it.

Then Dad would get his lesson without turning it into a catastrophe.
Great. And then . . .

Oskar walked down into the ditch and picked up the rubber boots, crumpled them up into his pockets, and kept walking along the road. Now everything was good. Now Oskar was the one who decided where he was going and the moon shone kindly down on him, lighting up his way. He lifted his hand in greeting and started to sing.

"Here comes Fritjof Andersson, it's snowing on his hat..." Then he didn't know any more of the lyrics so he hummed instead. After a couple hundred meters, a car came. He heard it from far away and slowed down, holding out a raised thumb. The car drove past him, stopped, and backed up. The door to the passenger side opened; there was a woman in the car, a little younger than Mom. Nothing to be afraid of.

"Hello. Where are you headed?"

"Stockholm. Well, Norrtalje."

"I'm also on my way to Norrtalje, so ..."

Oskar leaned into the car.

"Oh my, do your mom and dad know you're here?"

"Yes, but Dad's car has broken down and . . . well. . ." The woman looked at him, seemed to be thinking something over.

"OK, why don't you get in."

"Thanks."

Oskar slid into the seat, closed the door behind him. They drove off.

"Do you want to be dropped off at the bus stop?"

"Yes, please."