Let the Right One In Read online

  Theirs was the intoxication of the hunter, his the terror of the prey. Once they had actually captured him the fun was over and the punishment more of a duty that had to be carried out. If he gave up too early there was a chance they would put more energy into the punishment instead of the hunt. That would be worse.

  Jonny Forsberg stuck his head in.

  ‘You’ll have to open the lid if you’re going to shit, you know. Go on, squeal like a pig.’

  And Oskar squealed like a pig. That was part of it. If he squealed, sometimes they would leave it at that. He put extra effort into it this time, afraid that, in the process of punishing him, they would uncover his disgusting secret.

  He wrinkled up his nose like a pig’s and squealed, grunted and squealed. Jonny and Micke laughed.

  ‘Fucking pig, go on, squeal some more.’

  Oskar carried on. Shut his eyes tight and kept going. Balled his hands up into fists so hard that his nails went into his palms, and kept going. Grunted and squealed until he felt a funny taste in his mouth. Then he stopped and opened his eyes.

  They were gone.

  He stayed put, curled up on the toilet seat, and stared down at the floor. There was a red spot on the tile below. While he was watching, another drop fell from his nose. He tore off a piece of toilet paper and held it against his nostril.

  This sometimes happened when he was scared. His nose started to bleed, just like that. It had helped him a few times when they were thinking about hitting him, then decided against it since he was already bleeding.

  Oskar Eriksson perched there with a wad of paper in his hand and his pissball in the other. Got nosebleeds, wet his pants, talked too much. Leaked from every orifice. Soon he would probably start to shit his pants as well. Piggy.

  He got up and left the bathroom. Didn’t wipe up the drop of blood. Let someone see it, let them wonder. Let them think someone had been killed here, because someone had been killed here. And for the hundredth time.

  Håkan Bengtsson, a forty-five-year-old man with an incipient beer belly, a receding hairline and an address unknown to the authorities, was sitting on the subway, staring out of the window at the place that was to be his new home.

  It was a little ugly actually. Norrköping would have been nicer. But having said that, these western suburbs didn’t look anything like the Stockholm ghetto-suburbs he had seen on TV; Kista and Rinkeby and Hallonbergen. This was different.

  ‘Next station: Råcksta.’

  It was a little softer and rounder than those places. Although, here was a real skyscraper.

  He arched his neck to see the top floors of the Waterworks’ administrative building. He couldn’t recall there being any buildings this tall in Norrköping. But of course he had never been to the downtown area.

  He was supposed to get off at the next station, wasn’t he? He looked at the subway map over the doors. Yes, the next stop.

  ‘Please stand back from the doors. The doors are closing.’

  Was anyone looking at him?

  No, there were only a few people in this car, all of them absorbed in their evening newspapers. Tomorrow there would be something about him in there.

  His gaze stopped at an ad for women’s underwear. A woman was posing seductively in black lace panties and a bra. It was crazy. Naked skin wherever you looked. Why was it tolerated? What effect did it have on people’s heads, on love?

  His hands were shaking and he rested them on his knees. He was terribly nervous.

  ‘Is there really no other way?’

  ‘Do you think I would expose you to this if there was another way?’

  ‘No, but…’

  ‘There is no other way.’

  No other way. He had to do it. And not mess up. He had studied the map in the phone book and chosen a forested area that looked appropriate, then packed his bag and left.

  He had cut away the Adidas logo with the knife that was in the bag between his feet. That was one of the things that had gone wrong in Norrköping. Someone had remembered the brand name on the bag, and then the police had found it in the rubbish skip where he had tossed it, not far from their apartment.

  Today he would take the bag home with him. Maybe cut it into small pieces and flush it down the toilet. Is that what you did?

  How is this supposed to work anyway?

  ‘This is the final station. All passengers must disembark.’

  The subway car disgorged its contents and Håkan followed the stream of people, the bag in his hand. It felt heavy, although the only thing in it that weighed anything was the gas canister. He had to exercise a great deal of self-restraint to walk normally, rather than as a man on the way to his own execution. He couldn’t afford to give people any reason to notice him.

  But his legs were leaden, they wanted to weld themselves to the platform. What would happen if he simply stayed here? If he stood absolutely still, without moving a muscle, and simply didn’t leave. Waited for nightfall, for someone to notice him, call for…someone to come and get him. To take him somewhere.

  He continued to walk at a normal pace. Right leg, left leg. He couldn’t falter now. Terrible things would happen if he failed. The worst imaginable.

  Once he was through the gates he looked around. His sense of direction wasn’t very good. Which way was the forested area? Naturally he couldn’t ask anyone. He had to take a chance. Keep going, get this over with. Right leg, left leg.

  There has to be another way.

  But he couldn’t think of any other way. There were certain conditions, certain criteria. This was the only way to satisfy them.

  He had done it twice before, and had messed up both times. Hadn’t bungled it quite as much that time in Växjö but enough that they had been forced to move. Today he would do a good job, receive praise.

  Perhaps a caress.

  Two times. He was already lost. What difference did a third time make? None whatsoever. Society’s judgment would probably be the same. Lifetime imprisonment.

  And morally? How many lashes of the tail, King Minos?

  The park path he was on turned a corner further up, where the forest started. It had to be the forest he had seen on the map. The gas container and the knife rattled in the bag. He tried to carry it without jostling the contents.

  A child turned onto the path in front of him. A girl, maybe eight years old, walking home from school with her schoolbag bouncing against her hip.

  No, never!

  That was the limit. Not a child so young. Better him, then, until he fell to the ground dead. The girl was singing something. He increased his pace to get closer to her, to hear.

  ‘Little ray of sunshine peeking in

  Through the window of my cottage…’

  Did kids still sing that one? Maybe the girl’s teacher was older. How nice that the song was still around. He wanted to get even closer to hear better, so close in fact that he would be able to smell the scent of her hair.

  He slowed down. Don’t create a scene. The girl turned off from the park path, taking a small trail that led into the forest. Probably lived in a house on the other side. To think her parents let her walk here all alone. And so young.

  He stopped, let the girl increase the distance between them, disappear into the forest.

  Keep going, little one. Don’t stop to play in the forest.

  He waited for maybe a minute, listened to a chaffinch singing in a nearby tree. Then he went in after her.

  Oskar was on his way home from school, his head heavy. He always felt worse when he managed to avoid punishment in that way—by playing the pig, or something else. Worse than if he had been punished. He knew this, but couldn’t handle the thought of the physical punishment when it loomed. He would rather sink to any level. No pride.

  Robin Hood and Spider-man had pride. If Sir John or Doctor Octopus cornered them they simply spat danger in the face, come what may.

  But what did Spider-man know? He always managed to get away, even if it was impossible. He w
as a comic-book action figure and had to survive for the next issue. He had his spider powers, Oskar his pig squeal. Whatever it took to survive.

  Oskar needed to comfort himself. He had had a shitty day and now he needed some compensation. Despite the risk of running into Jonny and Micke he walked towards downtown Blackeberg, to Sabis the local grocery store. He shuffled up along the zigzagging ramp instead of taking the stairs, using the time to gather himself. He needed to be calm for this, not sweaty.

  He had been caught shoplifting once at a Konsum, another grocery chain, about a year ago now. The guard had wanted to call his mother but she had been at work and Oskar didn’t know her number, no, really he didn’t. For a week Oskar had agonised every time the phone rang but then a letter arrived, addressed to his mother.

  Idiotic. It was even labelled ‘Police Authorities, District of Stockholm’, and of course Oskar had ripped it open, read about his crime, faked his mother’s signature and returned the letter to confirm that she had read it. He was a coward, maybe, but he wasn’t stupid.

  What was cowardly, anyway? Was this, what he was about to do, cowardly? He stuffed his down coat full of Dajm, Japp, Coco and Bounty chocolate bars. Finally he slipped a bag of chewy Swedish Cars between his stomach and pants; went to the checkout and paid for a lollipop.

  On the way home he walked with his head high and a bounce to his step. He wasn’t just Piggy, whom everyone could kick around, he was the Master Thief who took on dangers and survived. He could outwit them all.

  Once he walked through the front gate to the courtyard of his apartment complex he was safe. None of his enemies lived in this complex, an irregular circle of buildings positioned inside the larger circle formed by his street, Ibsengatan. A double ring of protection. Here he was safe. In this courtyard nothing shitty had ever happened to him. Basically.

  He had grown up here and it was here he had had friends before he started school. It was only in fifth grade that he started being picked on seriously. At the end of that year he had become a full-fledged target and even friends outside his class had sensed it. Now they seldom asked him to play.

  It was during that time he started his scrapbook. He was on his way home to enjoy that scrapbook right now.

  Wheeee!

  He heard a whirring sound and something bumped into his feet. A dark red radio-controlled car was backing away from him. It turned and drove up the hill at high speed towards the front doors of his building. Behind the prickly bushes to the right of the front door was Tommy, a long antenna sticking out from his stomach. He was laughing softly.

  ‘Surprised you, didn’t I?’

  ‘Goes pretty fast, that thing.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. Do you want to buy it?’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Three hundred.’

  ‘Naw, I don’t have that much.’

  Tommy waved Oskar closer, turned the car on the slope and drove it down at breakneck speed, stopping it with a huge skid in front of his feet, picked it up, patted it and said in a low voice, ‘Costs nine hundred in the store.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Tommy looked at the car, then scrutinised Oskar from top to bottom.

  ‘Let’s say two hundred. It’s brand new.’

  ‘Yes, it’s great, but…’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Tommy nodded, put the car down and steered it in between the bushes so the large bumpy wheels shook, let it come around the large drying rack and drive out on the path, going further down the slope.

  ‘Can I try?’

  Tommy looked at Oskar as if to evaluate his worthiness, then handed over the remote, pointing at his upper lip.

  ‘You been hit? You’ve got blood. There.’

  Oskar wiped his lip. A few brown crusts came off on his index finger.

  ‘No, I just…’

  Don’t tell. There was no point. Tommy was three years older, a tough guy. He would only say something about fighting back and Oskar would say ‘sure’ and the end result would be that he lost even more respect in Tommy’s eyes.

  Oskar played with the car for a while, then watched Tommy steer it. He wished he had the money so they could have made a deal. Have that between them. He pushed his hands into his pockets and felt the candy.

  ‘Do you want a Dajm?’

  ‘No, I don’t like those.’

  ‘A Japp?’

  Tommy looked up from the remote. Smiled.

  ‘You have both kinds?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Swiped ’em?’

  ‘…yeah.’

  ‘OK.’

  Tommy put his hand out and Oskar gave him a Japp, which Tommy slipped into the back pocket of his jeans.

  ‘Thanks. See you.’

  ‘Bye.’

  Once Oskar made it into the apartment he laid out all the candy on his bed. He was going to start with the Dajm, then work his way through the double bits and end with the Bounty, his favourite. Then the fruit-flavoured gummy cars that kind of rinsed out his mouth.

  He arranged the food in a long line next to the bed in the order it would be eaten. In the refrigerator he found an opened bottle of Coca-Cola that his mum had put a piece of aluminium foil over. Perfect. He liked Coke even more when it was a little flat, especially with sweets.

  He removed the foil and put the bottle next to the sweets, flopped belly down on his bed and studied the contents of his bookcase. An almost complete collection of the series Goosebumps, here and there augmented by a Goosebumps anthology.

  The bulk of his collection was made up of the two bags of books he had bought for two hundred kronor through an ad in the paper. He had taken the subway out to Midsommarkransen and followed the directions until he found the apartment. The man who opened the door was fat, pale and spoke in a low, hoarse voice. Luckily he had not invited Oskar to come in, just carried out the two bags, taken the two hundred, nodded, said ‘Enjoy’ and closed the door.

  That was when Oskar had become nervous. He had spent months searching for older publications in the series in the used comics stores along Götgatan in south Stockholm. On the phone the man had said he had those older volumes. It had all been too easy.

  As soon as Oskar was out of sight he put the bags down and went through them. But he had not been cheated. There were forty-one books between number 2 to number 46.

  You could no longer get these books anywhere. And all for a paltry two hundred!

  No wonder he had been afraid of that man. What he had done was no less than rob him of a treasure.

  Even so, they were nothing compared to his scrapbook.

  He pulled it out from its hiding place under a stack of comics. The scrapbook itself was simply a large sketchbook he had swiped from the discount department store Åhléns in Vällingby; simply walked out with it under his arm—who said he was a coward?—but the contents…

  He unwrapped the Dajm bar, took a large bite, savouring the familiar crunch between his teeth, and opened the cover. The first clipping was from the Home Journal: a story about a murderess in the US in the forties. She had managed to poison fourteen old people with arsenic before she was caught, tried and sentenced to death by electric chair. Understandably she had requested to be executed by lethal injection instead, but the state she was in used the chair, and the chair it was.

  That was one of Oskar’s dreams: to see someone executed in the electric chair. He had read that the blood started to boil, the body contorted itself in impossible angles. He also imagined that the person’s hair caught on fire but he had no official source for this belief.

  Still, pretty amazing.

  He turned the page. The next entry was from the newspaper Aftonbladet and concerned a Swedish murderer who had mutilated his victims’ bodies. Lame passport photo. Looked like any old person. But he had murdered two male prostitutes in his home sauna, butchered them with an electric chainsaw and buried them out back, behind the sauna. Oskar ate the last piece of Dajm and studied the man’s fac
e closely. Could have been anybody.

  Could be me in twenty years.

  Håkan had found a good place to stand watch, a place with a clear view of the path in both directions. Further in among the trees he had found a protected hollow with a tree in the middle where he had left his bag. He had slipped the little halothane gas canister into a holster under his coat.

  Now all he had to do was wait.

  ‘Once I also wanted to grow up

  To know as much as Father and Mother’

  He hadn’t heard anyone sing that song since he was in school. Was it Alice Tegnér? Think of all the wonderful songs that had disappeared, that no one sang any more. Think of all the wonderful things that had disappeared, for that matter.

  No respect for beauty—that was characteristic of today’s society. The works of the great masters were at most employed as ironic references, or used in advertising. Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, where you see a pair of jeans in place of the spark. The whole point of the picture, at least as he saw it, was that these two monumental bodies each came to an end in two index fingers that almost, but not quite, touched. There was a space between them a millimetre or so wide. And in this space—life. The sculptural size and richness of detail of this picture was simply a frame, a backdrop, to emphasise the crucial void in its centre. The point of emptiness that contained everything.

  And in its place a person had superimposed a pair of jeans.

  Someone was coming up the path. He crouched down with the sound of his heart beating in his ears. No. An older man with a dog. Two wrongs from the outset. First a dog he would have to silence, then poor quality.

  A lot of screams for so little wool, said the man who sheared the pig.

  He looked at his watch. In two hours it would be dark. If no one suitable came along in the next hour he would have to settle for whatever was available. Had to be back home before it got dark.

  The man said something. Had he seen him? No, he was talking to the dog.

  ‘Does that feel better, sweetpea? You really had to go, didn’t you. When we get home Daddy will give you some liverwurst. A nice thick slice of liverwurst for Daddy’s good little girl.’