Let the Right One In

by John Ajvide Lindqvist

  ‘Are there many of us?’

  The woman shook her head and had said with theatrical sadness, ‘No. We are so few. So few.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why? Because most of us kill ourselves, that’s why. You must understand that. Such a heavy burden, oh my.’ Her hands fluttered, said in a shrill voice: ‘Ooooh, I cannot bear to have dead people on my conscience.’

  ‘Can we die?’

  ‘Of course we can. All you have to do is set fire to yourself. Or let other people do it; they are only too happy to oblige, have done so through the ages. Or…’ She held out her index finger and pressed it hard into Eli’s chest, above the heart. ‘There. That’s where it is, isn’t it? But now my friend, I have a wonderful idea…’

  And Eli had fled from that wonderful idea. As before. As later.

  Eli put his hand on his heart, felt the slow beats. Maybe it was because he was a child. Maybe that was why he hadn’t put an end to it. The pangs of conscience were weaker than his will to live.

  Eli got up out of the armchair. Håkan would not turn up tonight. But before Eli went to rest he had to check on Tommy. That he had recovered. He had not become infected, but for Oskar’s sake Eli wanted to make sure that Tommy was fine.

  He turned off all the lights and left the apartment.

  Down in Tommy’s stairwell all he had to do was pull the cellar door open; a long time ago when he was down here with Oskar, he had tucked some paper into the lock so it would stay unlatched when the door closed. He stepped into the cellar corridor and let the door fall shut behind him with a muted thud.

  He stopped, listened. Nothing.

  No sound of a sleeping person’s breathing; only the cloying smell of paint thinners, glue. He walked quickly along the corridor to the storage area, pulled open the door.

  Empty.

  Twenty minutes until sunrise.

  During the night Tommy had glided in and out of a daze of sleep, half-wakefulness, nightmares. He didn’t know how much time had gone by when he started to wake up properly. The naked bulb in the cellar was always the same. Maybe it was dawn, morning, day. Maybe school had already started. He didn’t care.

  His mouth tasted of glue. He looked around bleary-eyed. There were two banknotes on his chest. Thousand kronor notes. He bent his arm to pick them up, felt a tugging on his skin. A large band-aid was pasted over the inside of his elbow, a small bloodstain in the middle of the patch.

  But there was…something more.

  He turned in the couch, searching along the inside of the cushions and found the roll he had dropped during the night. Three thousand more. He unfolded the bills, put them together with the bills from his chest, felt the whole lot, made them crinkle. Five thousand. Anything he wanted to do.

  He looked at the band-aid, chuckled. Not bad for just lying back and closing your eyes.

  Not bad for just lying back and closing your eyes.

  What was that? Someone had said it, someone…

  That was it. Tobbe’s sister, what was her name…Ingela? Turning tricks, Tobbe had told him. And she got five hundred for it, and Tobbe’s comment was ‘Not bad for…’

  Just lying back and closing your eyes.

  Tommy squeezed the bills in his hand, scrunched them up into a ball. She had paid for and drunk his blood. An illness, she had said. But what kind of fucking illness was that? He had never heard of anything like it. And if you had something like that, you went to the hospital, then they gave you…You didn’t fucking go down into some basement with five thousand and…

  Swish.

  No?

  Tommy sat up in the couch, pulled off the blanket.

  They didn’t exist. No. Not vampires. That girl, the one in the yellow dress, she must somehow believe that she is…but wait, wait. It was that Ritual Killer that…the one they were searching for…

  Tommy leaned his head in his hands; the bills crinkled against his ear. He couldn’t figure it out. But in any case he was damn scared of that girl now.

  Just as he was thinking about going back up to the apartment even if it was still night, come what may, he heard the door to his stairwell open. His heart fluttered like a frightened bird and he looked around.

  Weapon.

  The only thing he could see was the broom. Tommy’s mouth was pulled up into a smile that lasted for a second.

  The broom—a good weapon against vampires.

  Then he remembered, got up and walked to the safety room while he stuffed the money into his pocket. Cleared the corridor in one step and slid into the safety room as the cellar door opened. Didn’t dare lock the door since he was afraid she would hear it.

  He sank into a crouch in the dark, tried to breathe as silently as possible.

  The razor blade glimmered on the floor. One corner was stained with brown, like rust. Eli tore off a corner of the cover of a motorcycle magazine, wrapped the paper around the razor blade, put it into his pocket.

  Tommy was gone, that meant he was alive. He had left on his own, gone home to sleep, and even if he put two and two together he didn’t know where Eli lived, so…

  Everything is as it should be. Everything is…great.

  There was a wooden broom with a long handle leaning against the wall.

  Eli took it, broke it over his knee, almost as far down as the head of the broom. The surface of the break was rough, sharp. A thin stake, about an arm’s length. He put the point against his chest, between two ribs. Exactly where the woman had put her finger.

  He took a deep breath, squeezed the shaft and tried on the thought.

  In! In!

  Breathed out, loosened his grip. Squeezed again. Pressed.

  For two minutes he stood with the point one centimetre from his heart, the shaft held firmly in his hand, when the handle of the cellar door was slammed down and the door glided open.

  He removed the wooden stake from his chest, listened. Heard slow, tentative steps in the corridor like from a child who had just learned to walk. A very large child who had just learned to walk.

  Tommy heard the steps and thought: Who?

  Not Staffan, not Lasse, not Robban. Someone who was sick in some way, who was carrying something very heavy…Santa Claus! His hand went up to his mouth to smother a giggle as he imagined Santa Claus, the Disney version—

  Hohoho! Say ‘Mama!’

  —come staggering through the corridor with his enormous bag on his back.

  His lips trembled under his hand and he clenched his teeth to stop them from chattering. Still in a crouch, he shuffled back from the door, one step at a time. Felt the corner of the room at his back at the same time as the spear of light from the door was darkened.

  Santa Claus had stopped between the light and the shelter. Tommy put his other hand over the first to stop himself from screaming, waited for the door to open.

  Nowhere to run to.

  Through cracks in the door he could see a fragmented outline of Håkan’s body. Eli stretched the stake out as far as it went, nudged the door. It swung out about ten centimetres, then the body outside stopped it.

  One hand grabbed the edge of the door, threw it open so it banged into the wall, tearing off one of the hinges. The door sagged, swung back leaning on its remaining hinge, hitting against the shoulder of the body that now filled the door opening.

  What do you want from me?

  There were still patches of blue on the shirt that covered the body to the knees. The rest was a dirty map of earth, mud, stains of something Eli’s nose identified as animal blood, human blood. The shirt was torn in several places revealing white skin, etched with scratches that would never heal.

  His face had not changed. It was still a clumsily fashioned mass of naked flesh with one single red eye thrown in as if for fun, a ripe cherry to top a rotten cake. But his mouth was open now.

  A black hole in the lower half of the face. No lips to cover the teeth that were revealed; an uneven semicircle of white that made the oral cavity seem even darker. The
hole increased and decreased in size with a chewing motion and out of it came: ‘Eeeiiiij.’

  You couldn’t hear if the sound was supposed to mean ‘Hi’, ‘Hey’ or ‘Eli’ since the ‘L’ had to be formed without the help of lips or tongue. Eli pointed the stake at Håkan’s heart, said ‘Hi’.

  What do you want?

  The undead. Eli knew nothing about them. Didn’t know if the creature in front of her was limited by the same restrictions as she was. If it even helped to destroy the heart. That Håkan was standing still in the doorway seemed to imply one thing: that he needed an invitation.

  Håkan’s gaze ran up and then down over Eli’s body which felt unprotected in the thin, yellow dress. He wished there was more to the fabric, more protection between his body and Håkan. Tentatively Eli held the stake closer to Håkan’s chest.

  Can he feel anything? Can he even feel…fear now?

  Eli experienced a feeling that he had almost forgotten: fear of pain. Everything healed of course, but there was such an overpowering sense of threat emanating from Håkan that…

  ‘What do you want?’

  A hollow, rasping sound as the creature pressed out air and a drop of yellowish, viscous liquid ran out of the double hole where the nose had been. A sigh? Then a damaged whisper, ‘Aaaaaaijjjj…’ and one arm flinched quickly, cramplike, baby movements, clumsily grabbed the shirt down at the hem, pulled it up.

  Håkan’s penis stood out from his body to one side, craving attention, and Eli looked at its stiff swollenness crisscrossed with veins and—

  How can he…he must have had it the whole time.

  ‘Aaeejjlll…’

  Håkan’s hand pulled the foreskin aggressively up and back, up and back and the head of his penis appeared and disappeared, appeared and disappeared like a jack in the box while he uttered a sound of pleasure or suffering.

  ‘Aaaee…’

  And Eli laughed with relief.

  All this. To be able to jack off.

  He could stand there, rooted to the spot until…until…

  Can he even get it off? He’s going to have to stand there… forever.

  Eli imagined one of those obscene dolls that you wound up with a key; a monk whose cape went up and he started masturbating as long as the mechanism allowed.

  clickety-click, clickety-click…

  Eli laughed, was so occupied with the crazy image that he didn’t notice when Håkan stepped into the room, uninvited. Didn’t notice anything until the fist that had just been sealed around an impossible pleasure was raised above his head.

  With a flashing spasm the arm came down and the fist landed over Eli’s ear with a force that could have killed a horse. The blow came sideways and Eli’s ear was folded in with such force that the skin split and half the ear was separated from his head, which met the cement floor with a muffled crack.

  When Tommy realised that the thing that was out in the corridor was not on its way to the shelter, he dared to take his hand from his mouth. He sat pressed into the corner and listened, trying to understand.

  The girl’s voice.

  Hi. What do you want.

  Then her laugh. And then that other voice. Didn’t even sound like it came from a human being. Then muffled thuds, the sounds of bodies moving.

  Now there was some kind of…rearranging going on out there. Something was dragged across the floor and Tommy was not planning to find out what it was. But the sounds disguised those he could make as he stood up and felt his way along the wall to the stacked boxes.

  His heart was smattering like a toy drum and his hands shook. He didn’t dare flick his lighter, so to concentrate better he shut his eyes and searched with his hand over the top of the boxes.

  His fingers clenched around what they found. Staffan’s shooting trophy. He carefully lifted it from its place, tested it in his hand. If he held the figure’s chest the stone base made a kind of club. He opened his eyes, found that he could vaguely make out the outline of the little silver pistol shooter.

  Friend. My little friend.

  With the trophy pressed against his chest he sank down into the corner again, and waited for all this to be over.

  Eli was being handled, like an object.

  While he was swimming to the surface of the darkness he had sunk into, he felt how his body, at a distance, in another part of the sea…was being handled.

  Intense pressure against his back, legs that were forced up, back and iron rings pulled tight around his ankles. Now the ankles with their iron rings were on either side of his head and his spine was tight, so stretched it felt like it was about to snap.

  I’m going to break.

  His head felt like a container of gleaming pain, as his body was doubled over by force, folded up like a bale of fabric and Eli thought he was still having an hallucination because when his eyes started to see again, they only saw yellow. And behind the yellow a massive, billowing shadow.

  Then came the cold. Something was rubbing a ball of ice across the thin skin between his buttocks. Something tried, first poking, then thrusting to force its way into him. Eli gasped; the fabric of the dress that had been spread over his face was blown aside, and he saw.

  Håkan was lying over him. His only eye was staring fixedly at Eli’s spread buttocks. His hands were locked around Eli’s ankles, whose legs had been brutally bent back so that his knees were pressed to the ground on either side of his shoulders. When Håkan pressed harder, Eli heard how the tendons in the back of his own thighs broke like tightly pulled strings.

  ‘Noooo!’

  Eli screamed into Håkan’s shapeless face where no feelings at all could be discerned. A strand of drool came out of Håkan’s mouth, stretched and broke, falling onto Eli’s lips and the taste of corpse filled his mouth. Eli’s arms fell out from his body as limp as a rag doll’s.

  Something under his fingers. Round, hard.

  He tried to think, forced himself to create a sphere of light inside the black, whirling insanity. And envisioned himself in the pool of light, holding the stick in his hand.

  Yes.

  Eli squeezed the handle of the broom, locking his fingers around the delicate saviour while Håkan kept pushing, poking, trying to enter.

  The point. The point has to be on the right side.

  He turned his head to the stick and saw it was lying the right way.

  A chance.

  Everything went quiet inside Eli’s head as he visualised what he had to do. Then he did it. In one movement he raised the stick from its prone position and thrust it up towards Håkan’s face with all his might.

  His underarm brushed against the side of his thigh and the stick formed a straight line that…stopped a few centimetres from Håkan’s face when Eli, because of his position, could not manage to move his arm any further.

  He had failed.

  For one second Eli had time to think that maybe he possessed the ability to will his body to die. If he turned off all…

  Then Håkan thrust himself forward and at the same time dropped his head down. With the soft sound of a wooden spoon pushed down into thick porridge, the sharp end of the stick went into his eye.

  Håkan did not scream. Perhaps he did not even feel it. Maybe it was simply surprise at not being able to see that made him loosen his grip around Eli’s ankles. Without feeling anything from his damaged legs, Eli wriggled his feet free and kicked straight out at Håkan’s chest.

  The soles of his feet met skin with a moist smacking sound and Håkan fell back. Eli pulled his legs under him and with a wave of cold pain from his back he got to his knees. Håkan had not fallen, only been folded up and like an electric doll in a ghost house he now straightened up again.

  They faced each other, on their knees.

  The stick in Håkan’s eye was pulled downward in stages, inching down with the regularity of a second hand and then fell out, drummed out a few beats on the floor and then it lay still. A translucent fluid started to seep out of the hole where it had been,
a teary flood.

  Neither of them moved.

  The fluid from Håkan’s eye trickled down onto his naked thighs.

  Eli concentrated all of his strength into his right arm, made a fist. When Håkan’s shoulder jerked to life and his body made an effort to stretch out to Eli, to pick up where it had left off, Eli hit his right hand straight into the left side of Håkan’s chest.

  The ribs cracked and the skin was stretched to its limit for a moment, then gave way, broke.

  Håkan’s head bent down to see what it couldn’t see as Eli fumbled inside his chest cavity and found his heart. A cold, soft lump. Unmoving.

  It’s not alive. But it has to…

  Eli squeezed the heart until it went to pieces. It gave way too easily, allowed itself to be broken like a dead jellyfish.

  Håkan only reacted as if a particularly persistent fly had settled on his skin. He moved his arm up to remove the irritating element and before he had time to grip Eli’s wrist, Eli pulled his hand out with remnants of the heart quivering in the clenched fist.

  Have to get away from here.

  Eli wanted to get up but his legs would not obey him. Håkan was groping blindly, arms out in front, trying to find him. Eli rolled over on his stomach and started to crawl out of the room, his knees whispering on the concrete. Håkan turned his head towards the noise, put his arms out and got a hold of the dress, managed to tear off one sleeve before Eli reached the door, got up on his knees again.

  Håkan stood up.

  Eli had a few seconds of reprieve before Håkan found the door. He tried to order his broken joints to heal enough to enable him to stand, but by the time Håkan reached the door Eli’s legs were only strong enough to allow him to stand braced against the wall.

  Splinters from the rough planks punctured the tops of his fingers as his hand scratched along them in order not to fall. And he knew now. That without a heart, blind, Håkan would pursue him until…until…

  Must…destroy…must…destroy him.

  A black line.

  A vertical, black line in front of his eyes. It had not been there before. Eli knew what to do.