She sighed. “No, I wouldn’t say that.”
“So what’s going on, then?”
“I’m a . . . traveler.”
“So am I, but there’s a purpose to my traveling.”
“Mine, too.”
“Do you mind if I ask what that purpose is?”
“I do mind, yes.”
I turned to look at her, and her eyes met mine. There was something in them, a kind of inner light. As if she could see in the dark.
Over the years I have never met anyone else who is . . . it goes against the grain to use the word, but . . . a vampire. It carries a number of associations: on the one hand, gloomy, forbidding castles, and on the other, extremely good-looking young people with superpowers, when in fact it is nothing more than an infection, a disease.
But that was what I had to accept that day in the parking lot outside the Docksta Bar. I had been infected with the need to drink blood, and now that I had tasted it, there was no going back. I sat there with my eyes closed, my head resting on the steering wheel as that word went around and around in my head: Vampire. Vampire. Vampire.
“Hey there, Tompa—are you sleeping on the job?”
I vaguely recognized the voice outside, and when I looked up, I saw Gunnar Gravel standing in front of the cab with his hands by his sides. He once tipped a whole load of gravel in the wrong yard. That wouldn’t have been enough to give him his nickname, but the family’s dachshund ended up underneath the pile. Since then, he was always known as either Gunnar Gravel or Splat. He was a wiry little man of about sixty who smoked and took snuff, often both at the same time.
I lowered the window and stuck my head out. Gunnar came around the side and stared at me. “Jesus, Tompa, you don’t look too good. Long trip?”
“No, it’s just—”
Gunnar interrupted me. “I get it. MoDo, and you already look fucking worn out. Come and have a beer.”
“That’s a great idea—drinking and driving.”
Gunnar waved a hand in the direction of the building where you could rent a basic room; I’d spent the night there myself once or twice. “Ah, just a low-alcohol beer. I’ve driven up from Travemünde and I thought I’d crash here overnight.”
I looked at Gunnar. At the deserted parking lot. At the motel, which was in total darkness. Then I opened the door, jumped down, and followed him as he babbled on cheerfully about some strap that had come loose and slapped a German customs official right in the face. I found it difficult to comment because my mouth had gone so dry that I could hardly move my tongue.
When we reached his little room, he opened the refrigerator in the tiny kitchen area and took out a six-pack of Falcon Bayerskt. “Help yourself. I just need to pee. Gotta make some room.”
He left the bathroom door open, and I could hear the urine splashing against the porcelain as he carried on talking. I opened the top drawer and saw a serrated bread knife with a plastic handle among the few simple utensils. I tucked it along my right forearm, grabbed a beer, then sat down on the only chair in the room as Gunnar continued his monologue.
“. . . and when I was ready to clear customs, the bastard had gone on his lunch break, so I had to run around like a scalded cat because the refrigeration unit had switched itself off. It’s always the same when you’re transporting fresh goods . . .”
Gunnar emerged from the bathroom zipping up his pants; he picked up a beer and sat down on the bed. The room was so small that our knees were almost touching. Gunnar took a long drink, then wiped his mouth. “And smoking’s bad for you too. I’ve started on those goddamn e-cigarettes. Bought them in Poland, have you tried them?”
My jaws were clamped together; my body was so rigid that I could only just manage to shake my head.
Can I do this? Can I?
Fortunately Gunnar was the kind of man who thought there was a conversation going on just as long as he was allowed to continue his monologue; he didn’t appear to notice the strain I was under, but he reached down to pick up a box from the floor next to the bed. The back of his neck glowed white just inches away from me.
At the time I didn’t really know what was happening. Since then, I’ve come to understand it a little better. I stared at the back of Gunnar’s neck, still weighing up the pros and cons, but before I had time to make a decision, it was as if someone or something seized my right arm, sweeping it forward and upward so that the blade of the knife slashed Gunnar’s flesh as he began to straighten up.
He sat up. In one hand, he was holding something that looked like a cigarette with a glowing red tip that went out as soon as he dropped it. He was staring at me with his mouth wide open. Then came the blood. Oh my God, so much blood.
The serrated knife had opened up a deep gash in his neck, and great gouts of blood came spurting out. Gunnar twisted around and my face was splashed with it. I licked my lips, the taste filled my mouth, and I was consumed by madness.
One flap of Gunnar’s overalls fell down over his shoulder as he curled up, then flung his arms wide in despair. To me it was an open invitation. I got up from my chair and fell on him, pressing my mouth to the wound and drinking, drinking while Gunnar’s sinewy hands struck impotently at my head.
Afterward, I slid down onto the floor. I felt totally satisfied, full up and alive. Crazy, too. And remorseful, pointlessly remorseful. I picked up the e-cigarette, pressed the button that turned on the red light, and took a drag, exhaled steam. It tasted of nothing. Gunnar’s body lay sprawled on the bed like a bundle of rags. There was blood all over the walls, the bed, the floor.
I did this.
I, Tomas Larsson, forty-four-year-old trucker, husband of Angelica and father of a seventeen-year-old daughter, once a pretty good table tennis player, had killed another human being and drunk his blood. Something like that changes things. Something like that changes a great deal. For example, at that very moment I realized that I could never see my daughter, Moa, again. The movement of the knife had been involuntary. Other things could happen the same way.
There was a rush within my body. A gushing, vibrating, wonderful rush that temporarily washed away my regrets. I fetched a dishcloth from the kitchen area and wiped the e-cigarette, the knife, the beer can, and everything else I thought I might have touched. As I left the room, I wiped the door handle. Not that the police already had my fingerprints on record.
But I might do this again.
“Do you have family?”
The woman’s question followed a silence that had gone on for miles and miles of the uneventful E4, where my thoughts had returned to my victims, as they so often did. After Gunnar, I had taken more care. A long period of time and a considerable distance between incidents. Four so far. One in Uppland, one in Skåne, one in the Netherlands, and one in Germany. All buried, by me, none found, as far as I knew.
Family.
“A daughter,” I said. If the woman had asked a follow-up question, I probably wouldn’t have wanted to answer, but she said nothing. In the silence, I could see Moa standing in front of me, and after a while she forced me to add: “Moa. She’s twenty-one. Training to be a teacher.”
“Are you close?”
“No, I can’t say we are. I haven’t seen her for three years.”
The woman straightened up in her seat, clearly interested. Before she had time to ask anything else, come tiptoeing even farther into my pain zone, I returned the question: “How about you?”
Her shoulders dropped a fraction as she nodded and said, “Two sons. Both working in health care. As far as I know.”
Now it was my turn to be interested. The woman’s final words suggested that her situation was similar to mine. The faint suspicion or hope I was harboring grew a little stronger. The hooker in Barcelona had been infected by someone, and they in turn had been infected by someone else, and so on and so on. There had to be more of us out there.
It was a long shot and it was highly unlikely, but I still wanted to probe a little farther, so I asked: “Why don’
t you know?”
“Because I walked out on my family. About a year ago.”
“Because it was . . . necessary?”
“Yes. It was necessary.”
“But it’s painful?”
“Yes. Extremely painful.”
I took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly. My heart, which these days beat only a few times per minute, sped up to almost the normal rate.
It has no doubt become clear by now that there is nothing romantic about my infection, but in fact it’s worse than that. It is more or less a constant torment. First of all, the hunger, which grows and grows until I can no longer bear it and am compelled to do what I have to do. Then the feelings of guilt over what I have done, which as the weeks and months go by gradually turn into hunger once more, and the cycle begins again. It is terrible. And on top of all that, the hunger returns after a shorter interval each time.
And the positives? You don’t usually ask about the positive aspects of a disease. So you have lung cancer and you’ve lost your hair due to radiotherapy? Oh well, at least you don’t have to go to the hairdresser.
The advantages I have are slightly greater, I must admit. I can see in the dark. I have grown stronger. And recently I have also begun to develop a certain ability to . . . change. If I think hard enough about altering a certain part of my body, a metamorphosis takes place. My nails grow longer, my teeth acquire sharp points. In conjunction with this my thirst for blood has increased, as I said, and I have become more and more sensitive to light. I realize what is happening to me. The disease is spreading.
Then there’s the fact that I have stopped aging, but I don’t regard that as an advantage. To be perfectly honest, I detest my very existence, and the thought that the way out via old age and death appears to be closed fills me with despair.
Is there any alternative? No, there is no alternative. I am meant to travel these roads like an Ahasuerus with four hundred horsepower until I am no longer meant to do so. That was something else I realized that day, between Örnsköldsvik and Helsingborg.
It was somewhere around Gävle that what I had done really caught up with me. The image of little Gunnar Gravel, lying there limp and lifeless on that shabby bed. Never again would he go home to his wife, Birgit, and their cats; four grandchildren had lost their grandfather so that I could slake my thirst.
And the knife. The knife. It haunted me. As soon as I closed my eyes, it was there, seared on my retinas like a brightly lit exhibit in a museum. The faded, rough handle and the pliant blade. There was something so undignified about killing someone with a knife like that, and I just didn’t understand how I could have been capable of such an act.
Anything would have been better. A cutthroat razor, a hunting knife, a hammer, a chain saw. I hardly knew myself what I actually meant, but the fact that I had done the deed with that cheap bread knife seemed to me to be the worst thing of all, and it haunted me the entire night.
I don’t want to make out that I’m any better than I really am, paint a picture of a deeply repentant murderer. Behind these images and this remorse lay the strength the blood had given me. The life. Physically I felt much better than I had for a long time, and if it hadn’t been for my guilty conscience weighing me down, I would have cheered, laughed, and sung along to the upbeat song playing on the radio. Instead I switched it off and sank deeper into brooding blackness as the miles went by.
I passed Stockholm, Södertälje, and Norrköping as a new form of madness grew within me. Under normal circumstances I would have needed a break at that stage, but instead I was wide awake and more alert than ever. I was in top form and the depths of despair at the same time, and I felt as if the tension between the two would make my brain explode at any moment.
I was driving way too fast, particularly in view of the load I was carrying. Part of me wanted to be stopped by the police, even arrested. Another part just wanted the speed and the rushing, singing, vibrant life. But no one pulled me over, and my insane journey continued past Linköping and down toward Lake Vättern. I was doing almost ninety, and sometimes the rig listed slightly with a warning sucking, lapping sound from the tanker behind me.
Something snapped as I reached Brahehus. I was approaching the long, steep hill known as Huskvarnabacken, and I could see the lights of Jönköping glittering in the darkness down below on the southern shore of Lake Vättern. As I reached the summit and began the descent, I instinctively lowered my speed.
No. No. NO!
I was halfway down the hill, and on the right-hand side there was only the barrier between me and the drop to the lake. Me and my load. Ten thousand gallons of ethanol. If I careered off the road the whole thing would probably explode with such ferocity that it would take a DPF to find anything that was left of me. It was an appealing thought, to say the least. It was the right thing. Obliterated from the surface of the earth, without a trace.
I put my foot down and began to turn the wheel to the right; in the wing mirror, I could see the tanker swerving behind me. I held my breath and . . . that’s when it happened.
In the same way as the bread knife was drawn across Gunnar’s neck by some external force, it was as if two hands were laid on top of mine and . . . no, that’s wrong. It was as if two hands slipped inside mine like a pair of gloves, and without taking any notice of the gloves’ feeble protests, they turned the wheel to the left and corrected the movement of the tanker until I was once again safely positioned in the middle of the highway. My speed had dropped too.
With hands that still didn’t feel as if they belonged to me, I maneuvered my way down the hill and pulled into the Eurostop outside Jönköping, where I sat motionless in the cab for a long time, studying my palms as if I might find an answer in the lines etched upon them.
How should I interpret what had just happened? One option was that I had gone completely crazy and was no longer in control of myself; I might even start hearing voices telling me to do things, terrible things, more terrible things.
The other option . . . I didn’t know if it was better or worse, but it was more difficult to grasp because it carried the message that I was meant to carry on, that I had no chance of ending this of my own volition. And who or what was behind this intention? Something within the very structure of existence. A balance, a purpose. I didn’t know.
But regardless of which option was correct, one thing was clear to me. With a right hand that once again belonged to me, I got out my cell phone and called home. When Angelica answered, I told her I wanted a divorce. She thought I was joking, but when she realized I was serious, the tears came, the questions. Was it anything to do with the fact that I had been so strange recently? Had I met someone else, had I . . . and so on.
I talked. I answered. I lied. Once more it was as if a different voice was speaking behind my own, but unlike the experience coming down Huskvarnabacken, this felt like a normal psychological mechanism. I couldn’t process the fact that I was saying the things I said, and therefore it seemed as if someone else was saying them. Presumably. Presumably.
I ended the call, then went into the café and bought a cup of coffee. I drank it standing outside in the windy parking lot. It tasted of nothing.
“Sometimes I feel as if I’m completely alone. As if I’m the only one of my kind. Do you feel that way?”
“Yes,” the woman said. “I know what you mean.”
During the hundred and twenty miles or so we had covered, she hadn’t once taken out her cell phone to check or send a message, make a call, or just generally mess around with it the way most people do these days. I assumed she didn’t have one, but it no longer mattered. I was on a different track now, but I had to proceed with caution.
“Did you start to feel this way at . . . any particular time?” I asked in a further attempt to sound out the terrain.
We were just passing Gnarp, and as on so many occasions in the past, it felt like a knife thrusting into my warped, infected heart when I saw the lights shining in the windows of
the houses, the flickering glow of TV screens, and the silhouettes of people living their ordinary, cozy lives together. I usually sleep in the cab these days. Sleep during the day. Drive during the night.
“Something happened to me,” the woman said. “At first I didn’t understand what it was. I had no one to ask.”
I had to make a real effort to prevent my voice from trembling when I asked: “Did it feel as if you had been given . . . a task to fulfill?”
“Yes,” she replied. “You could put it like that.”
That’s what I can’t understand. Since I accepted what has happened to me, what I have become, I have been unable to escape the sense of a kind of purpose running through all the repulsiveness, as if this is what I have to do.
My first one after Gunnar was just under a year later. A hooker at a rest stop outside Aachen. A transaction that was concluded in a mixture of English and German, after which she led me into the forest, where I slit her throat with a Japanese chef’s knife specially acquired for the occasion; it was as sharp as a razor blade. As she was dying, as I drank her, as I dragged her farther into the forest and buried her, it all felt just as natural as loading up my truck, driving, and unloading at exactly the agreed time. Doing the right thing.
The remorse and anguish came later, the fear of being found out, but every time while it was actually happening it felt as if I was simply fulfilling the task I had been given. As if the slaking of my thirst was part of a bigger picture, and I was doing my bit.
That feeling has not grown weaker—quite the reverse. My latest victim was a young guy, a hitchhiker I picked up outside Ljungby. After a few miles, I said the suspension was making a funny noise and asked him to help me check it out. As we squatted down and peered under the trailer, I did that for the first time. Used my mind to make my teeth sharper, turn my nails into claws. Then I grabbed hold of him, pierced the skin over the carotid artery.
It was euphoric, a sensation of being in total contact with the universe as my hands grasped his head, covering his mouth while I sank my teeth deeper and deeper into his flesh so that the blood poured into my own mouth. I was a wolf hunting down its prey, a squirrel leaping through the air, I was a creature doing exactly what it should be doing. Then I dragged him away and buried him, all with the same deep feeling of meaningfulness.
Seize the Night Page 48