I Always Find You Read online

  About the Book

  SOMETHING HAPPENED ON 26 DECEMBER which at the time seemed unimportant, but came to have a crucial ignificance. It will probably lead to my being contacted by the police once this book is published, provided they believe what is written here.

  In 1985, nineteen-year-old John Lindqvist moved into a dilapidated flat in Stockholm, planning to make his living as a magician. Something strange was going on in the building’s locked shower room—and the price of entry was just a little blood.

  I Always Find You is a horror story, as bizarre and macabre as any of Lindqvist’s earlier novels. It’s also about being young and lonely, about the intensity of human connection—and controlling the monster within.

  Praise for John Ajvide Lindqvist

  ‘A dangerously imaginative man.’ Herald Sun

  ‘Brilliant and unexpected.’ Weekend Australian

  ‘A delicate balance between macabre and moving.’ Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Lindqvist is Sweden’s answer to Stephen King.’ Daily Mirror

  ‘Fabulously creepy.’ Sunday Age

  To Magnus Bodin

  and Carl-Einar Häckner

  In reality you existed

  In imagination

  Listen to the movement.

  Tage Erlander’s advice to his

  successor, Olof Palme, in 1969

  CONTENTS

  Cover Page

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  1. Outside

  2. Inside

  3. Beyond

  Epilogue

  Also by the Author

  About the Author

  About the Translator

  Praise for John Ajvide Lindqvist

  Copyright page

  There is a house in a courtyard at Luntmakargatan 14 in Stockholm. I was nineteen years old when I moved there in September 1985. After growing up with my mother on Ibsengatan in Blackeberg, this was the first time I’d had a place of my own. I had resigned from my job at the after-school centre where I had worked since leaving high school, and I had also ended my first and so far only relationship, with a girl I had met a few months earlier.

  I moved into the city in order to take my first real steps into the adult world. The plan was to make my living as a magician. Over the summer I had amassed start-up capital of twelve thousand kronor by performing on the street in the Old Town and Kungsträdgården, which covered four months’ rent.

  Three thousand kronor a month for a centrally located house might sound like a bargain, but we’re not talking about a charming little place that might appear in an Astrid Lindgren story, but rather a pile of bricks measuring twelve square metres, where hardly any daylight found its way in. It wasn’t even meant for residential use, and there was something very shady about the arrangements. I didn’t even sign a lease.

  When I went to check it out for the first time, an enormous desk made of dark wood with a grubby telephone on top of it occupied a fifth of the floor space. Papers and betting slips lay scattered across a dirty grey fitted carpet. I never found out what the previous tenants had actually done, but there was an atmosphere of petty criminality about the cramped room, impregnated with cigarette smoke. Men in shabby suits, overflowing ashtrays, brief, muttered conversations down the sticky telephone receiver.

  It had a sink and two electric hotplates, but no shower. A cubicle measuring some two square metres housed a toilet with no seat, plus a brown-stained washbasin. There was a shower in the laundry block, I was informed. A shower and a bath. In spite of the gloomy look of the place, something clicked and I moved in as soon as I could.

  Thirty years later I really do wonder how I survived that autumn and winter, but things are different when we’re young. Our gaze is fixed on a vague but glowing future, and the dirt and darkness of the present are no more than a temporary inconvenience. After all, plenty of people are worse off.

  I was going to be a magician. I had achieved some impressive placements in Swedish and Nordic championship competitions; I had business cards and a flyer advertising my skills; I had the necessary equipment. What I didn’t have was enough bookings to live on. The move to the city centre was part of a determined effort to change that situation.

  What happened during the six months—or just over—while I was living at Luntmakargatan 14 hurled my life in a different direction, and in the long term led to my starting to write horror stories. We’ll come to that in due course.

  *

  The all-encompassing memory of that period is darkness. Spending my waking hours in darkness. This was partly due to the location of the house, and partly due to my sleeping habits.

  The building was in the middle of a narrow courtyard, which was virtually never reached by direct sunlight. Because the four-storey buildings all around were built on the slope of the Brunkeberg Ridge, there was a difference in the level of the main doors, and two of them were reached by a staircase running along the side of the house. Anyone using those stairs could see straight into my poky hovel. These days I would put up some thin curtains to have some privacy, while still making the most of the small amount of daylight, but at the age of nineteen I opted to keep the blinds closed.

  On top of this, I was and am a night owl. It would often be three or four in the morning before I laid out my mattress on the floor and made up my bed. I would sleep until midday, and after having coffee and breakfast at my desk, it might be two o’clock before I ventured out. During the winter months, it had already begun to get dark by that time.

  The light in my life came from street lamps and shop windows, and—when I was at home—from a fluorescent tube on the ceiling that suffused the twelve square metres with a cold, white glare. I usually made do with my desk lamp, and spent my days in semi-darkness.

  I also recall the local area as a place in permanent shadow. When I left the house I went through a door into a stairwell with brown walls and dark grey marble, which I crossed to reach the main door and Luntmakargatan. To the left lay Sveavägen with its bright lights and traffic, to the right the entrance to the Brunkeberg Tunnel.

  There will be more to say about the Brunkeberg Tunnel during the course of this narrative, but for now I will simply state that the tunnel, which had been excavated through the esker, ran alongside the building of which my house was a part. That’s enough for the moment.

  My usual route took me in the opposite direction, down the narrow passageway of Tunnelgatan between windowless facades. It was always damp, with the water trickling along the cracks between the paving stones. After around fifty paces I reached Dekorima’s brightly lit shop window.

  It would be six months before photographs of this spot were sent all around the world and I myself became a wanted man, but I already felt there was something special about this place, where a bronze plaque now commemorates the murder of Sweden’s prime minister Olof Palme.

  I often stopped there, partly because I had finally reached the lights of the city after a walk through dark passageways, and partly because that unprepossessing crossroads seemed like the quintessence of Stockholm.

  If a tourist, after ticking off the city sights and photographing the reflection of the City Hall in Lake Mälaren, the view from the Western Bridge and a Djurgården ferry with the hills of Söder rising up in the background, had come up to me and asked, ‘Where should I go to find the real Stockholm, beyond the Vasa Museum and the Old Town?’, I might well have answered, ‘Go and stand at the junction of Tunnelgatan and Sveavägen. Stop. Look around you. Listen. Stay a while. Then you can go home and say that you’ve been in Stockholm.’

  Everything is close at hand there, even though the place itself is nothing. The steps leading down to the Hötorget subway station are a short distance away; you can see the blue facade of the Concert Hall, and the glass obelisk in Sergels torg. Behind you is the Brunkeberg Tunnel, linking Norrmalm and Östermalm, and right beside you is the meeting point of Stockholm’s two main arteries, Kungsgatan and Sveavägen. Nothing happens at the exact point where you are standing, but you only need to take a few steps in any direction for that to change. You are at the hub.

  *

  I moved into the house a week before the election, and the city was plastered with images of people who had something to say. I had received my first polling card before I left Blackeberg, and I intended to use it to vote for the Social Democrats. I had probably inherited a vague commitment to the left from home, and the alternative seemed repellent. There was something sly about those right-wing faces, while Palme was always Palme.

  That business about the darkness didn’t apply to the early days. It was September and we were enjoying an Indian summer, a honeymoon period when I always emerged into a bright, airy city. I spent my days wandering around and feeling at home. I belonged to Stockholm.

  I sat in the Konditori Kungstornet drinking café au lait, reading Stig Dagerman and trying to look interesting. I might spend an hour or so in front of the TV screens in Åhlén’s record department, watching videos of Madonna, Wham! and A-ha. I stole records from that same department by tucking them under my arm and walking out. My evenings and nights were devoted to magic.

  The Nordic Championships were due to be held in Copenhagen at the end of September, and my ambition was to win in the close-up magic category. It would look good on my CV when I was trying to get work as an entertainer in restaurants. Close-up magic requires a high level of technica
l skill, because the audience is only a metre or so away. The sleight of hand must be invisible.

  When I was thirteen I spent a week walking around with a five-kronor coin in my right hand, training my fingers to act naturally and to give no indication that anything was concealed in my palm. When I was fifteen I scraped at the skin on the same palm until it bled, with the aim of creating a callus that would make it possible to perform a coin trick known as Han Ping Chien. Magic was my passion, my direction in life.

  I had come second in the junior Nordic Championships twice. In Copenhagen I would be competing as a senior for the first time, and to be honest I didn’t think much of my chances. I was determined to try, though. My double lifts and side steals were second to none, and street magic had taught me the importance of arousing the interest of the public and maintaining that contact.

  On the third or fourth night when I was sitting at my desk in front of a mirror studying my hand movements—passing the coin and not passing the coin must look exactly the same—the phone rang. It was just after one o’clock in the morning, and I couldn’t imagine who would be calling me at that hour, but I put down the coin and picked up the receiver.

  ‘Hello?’

  There was a brief silence, then a subdued male voice asked, ‘Is Sigge there?’

  ‘I think you’ve got the wrong number,’ I said. ‘There’s no Sigge here.’

  Another pause. Then: ‘Has he been there?’

  ‘No. And he’s not going to turn up either.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Because I don’t know anyone called Sigge.’

  ‘Of course you do. Everyone knows Sigge.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  The person on the other end sighed, as if my refusal to accept an obvious fact made him weary. I was about to hang up when he asked, ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘What are you doing? Right now?’

  My eyes took in the objects in front of me. The close-up mat, the coins, the decks of cards. At this point I must remind you that I was nineteen years old. These days I would probably say something dismissive and put down the phone. I have a family, a home, a well-defined life. At nineteen my boundaries were different, so I replied, ‘I’m practising.’

  ‘Practising what?’

  ‘Magic,’ I said, not without a certain amount of pride.

  The man on the other end summed up the situation: ‘You’re sitting there in the middle of the night practising magic.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘And what are you hoping to achieve by that?’

  I could detect nothing unpleasant in the way the question was asked, merely a tone of genuine interest. There was a simple answer: ‘It’s the Nordic Championships in a couple of weeks and—’

  The man interrupted me. ‘No, no. What are you hoping to achieve?’

  ‘I don’t understand what you mean.’

  ‘No. Well, maybe you should think about it.’

  The call ended, and I remained sitting there with the receiver in my hand. I was using the same phone that had been in the house the first time I came to see it. I had cleaned it up and changed the number. Now I was struck by the tricky thought that the old number was somehow still within the phone itself.

  What are you hoping to achieve?

  It could have been a prank call. An existential joker, ringing random strangers and questioning their motivation in life. I went back to the coins, because there was still a certain jerkiness in my technique.

  I had practised the false throwing movement a dozen times before I realised that I wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing, that my mind was elsewhere.

  What are you hoping to achieve?

  I was trying to make it look as though I was throwing the coin from my right hand, when in fact I was holding on to it, dropping a coin from my left hand at the same moment so that it appeared to be the coin from my right hand when it landed. I wanted to do it so that not even someone who knew the technique would suspect it was being used. It was virtually impossible, but that was what I was hoping to achieve. It had taken me fifty or sixty hours of repeating the movement to master it as well as I had at that time, and it still wasn’t perfect. I hadn’t yet reached the final level, the one at which it became second nature.

  Development in magic occurs in leaps and bounds. You practise a movement until you’re sick and tired of it, and then one day, all of a sudden, a distinct change takes place. Every single muscle in the hands, fingers and arms works together, and the movement is as natural as holding a fork.

  That was where I wanted to be before the championships, but now I was distracted. My hands were moving mechanically, without grace. I decided that was enough for the night; I would go and take a shower before I went to bed. I grabbed some clean underwear and a towel, and headed for the laundry block.

  *

  The laundry block was a place full of contradictions. On the one hand it was set into the rock face next to the Brunkeberg Tunnel, and I sometimes felt the weight of that mass of stone as a pressure inside my head, my body. On the other hand it was light and clean, with a fresh smell. There were two washing machines, two tumble dryers and an airing cupboard, plus a table on which to fold the laundry, and a surprisingly comfortable chair where you could sit and wait for the machines to finish. Right at the back was a door leading to a combined toilet and shower room.

  This area hadn’t been afforded the same care and attention as the rest of the block. The bathtub was an old-fashioned model; the enamel surface was worn, with dirt ingrained in the scratches. The shower-head was rusty, and half the holes in it were blocked. The floor tiles were worn too, and a deep crack ran along the plaster in the ceiling above the bath. As if to conceal the miserable state of the place, the room was illuminated by a single dim bulb.

  The appearance and location of the shower room could create a feeling of claustrophobia as I stood in the bath with water trickling over my body. I think it was because of the rock. Even though I couldn’t see it, I could perceive it all around me—its age, its weight.

  I usually showered quickly so that I could get back into the brighter environment of the laundry room, and that was what I did on this particular night. I left the dingy room with my towel over my shoulder and sat down in the chair, because the same old feeling was beginning to grow within me.

  At this time of the night the laundry room could be regarded as an extension of my house, because nobody used it after ten. I placed my arms on the rests, closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I hesitate to call my nightmares ‘angst’ out of respect for those who really are caught in the vice-like grip of that condition, but they were certainly a kind of milder version. A growing sense of unease, a dark sea crashing against a distant shore in my breast.

  The laundry room helped. The light caressing me through my eyelids, the fresh smell of clean clothes. Though I had it to myself just now, at the same time it was a collective space that eased my loneliness. I breathed through my nose as calmly as I could, inhaling microscopic particles of my neighbours’ lives.

  As so often during my sleepless nights, the memory of the child in the forest came back to me. There was a locked door inside me, something that prevented me from really connecting with other people and condemned me to isolation. The key to that lock lay in the events surrounding the child in the forest, but I couldn’t find it.

  I had been sitting there clutching the arms of the chair for perhaps fifteen minutes when I made up my mind. If I was going to succeed in becoming an adult, I had to tackle the demons of my childhood—or at least name them.

  I left the laundry room and went back to my house and my desk. I pushed my magic paraphernalia aside and set out a notepad and pen. I had never tried to write anything in this way, so to get going I began to tell the story of the child in the forest as if it were a fairytale.

  *

  Once upon a time many years ago, in a place called Blackeberg, there was a boy who was happiest in the forest. The other children used to tease him and call him Piggy, saying that he was ugly and disgusting. Eventually the boy started to believe they were right, and withdrew to the forest.

  Which was really only a wooded area between Ibsengatan and Råcksta Lake. The boy had built a cabin out of planks and branches, way up high in a tree. Every afternoon when school was over the boy sat in his tree house fantasising about worlds that were similar to ours, yet completely different. Worlds where he was popular and had an important role. He dreamed of superpowers and vampire friends, played out scenes where he fought back and tore the heads off those who tormented him, or sent fire to consume them.