I Am Behind You

by John Ajvide Lindqvist

  ‘Not as far as I know.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Pretty sure.’

  ‘But there could be?’

  Carina runs her fingers over the knobbly top of the walls and asks: ‘This…attack. Is the fortress going to be attacked by those who live on blood?’

  ‘Yes,’ Emil says, slotting in the piece in his hand. ‘But not the dangerous ones.’

  Even though Carina assumes that this is something Molly has told Emil, the quiet simplicity in his voice has created an idea that makes her scream out loud when she hears a crash from the roof.

  *

  At first Benny thinks it must be thunder, which makes him nervous. He doesn’t like thunderstorms. He pricks up his ears, scampers to the opening and peeps out. The sky doesn’t look the way it usually does when there is going to be a storm. Something else must have made the noise.

  Cat is lying in the window of her caravan, and her owners are busy with something on the ground. The door is ajar. Benny stretches and yawns without taking his eyes off Cat. He sniffs and is confused. The smell of Grandchildren that he picked up from the field is here now. It’s very, very faint. Grandchildren coming closer. It’s strange, but not too alarming. Grandchildren are not dangerous, just hard on the ears.

  Benny takes a few tentative steps outside. Cat is watching him now. A couple more steps. Cat gets to her feet. Benny is approaching the area that is no one’s territory. When he is a nose-length away, Cat jumps down from the window. There is a clattering sound from inside her caravan, and a second later she is out on the grass, racing towards Benny, who stops exactly on the borderline of his territory.

  Cat stops on her own borderline, sits down. Benny stays where he is. Cat starts washing herself. Benny scratches behind his ear. He can’t decide. Should he go for it, or bide his time?

  He settles on a compromise, and embarks on a circuitous manoeuvre, edging towards Cat in a semicircle. Cat watches him, then gets up and begins to move away from him in a semicircle of her own. After a while Benny is in the spot where Cat started off, and vice versa.

  He scratches behind his ear again, debating whether to cut across the circle, step across the borderline. Instead he sets off again in Cat’s footsteps, moving a little faster this time. Cat does the same, keeping her distance. When Benny gets back to his own starting point, he breaks into a run. Cat does the same.

  It is no longer possible to tell who is chasing and who is being chased. Round and round they go; Benny lets out a couple of barks. Cat doesn’t bark, but sometimes she fits in an extra little leap.

  They carry on running until Benny starts to feel dizzy and can’t go on any longer. He flops down outside his own caravan, panting heavily with his tongue hanging out. Cat lies down on the grass, her expression inscrutable as she stares uninterruptedly at Benny.

  He fires off one last bark, then lumbers back to his basket. Before he goes and lies down he tries whimpering outside the door; something to eat would be nice. But no one comes.

  *

  Majvor is lying on the bed reading an old magazine by torchlight, since Donald will not allow her to open the blinds. Donald is sitting on the sofa, his hands constantly gripping, then releasing, the fabric of his sweatpants. His fists clench, then relax, clench, then relax. His mouth is filled with the taste of chocolate. The Bloodman is wandering through his mind. This is not a good dream.

  Donald was the eldest child, born in 1943. Two sisters arrived shortly after him, and then his mother and father decided to stop, because they couldn’t afford any more children. In spite of this, another sister saw the light of day in the spring of 1953. A little accident, his father said; Donald didn’t understand what that meant.

  The youngest member of the family was christened Margareta, and she was a real crybaby. There was no escape in a three-room cottage, so in the summer of 1953 Donald made sure he accompanied his father to his job at Räfsnäs Sawmill as often as possible. They even managed to find him an unofficial summer post as a kind of general dogsbody.

  For twenty öre an hour, Donald sorted screws and nails, carried planks of wood to the storeroom and gathered up the waste timber which would eventually be shredded. He really enjoyed going on deliveries with his father, when they loaded timber for a building site onto the truck, then helped to unload it at the other end.

  Donald and his father got on very well, and he would have happily worked for nothing just to spend time with his dad, exchanging banter about his mother and his little sisters. There was nothing wrong with them, nothing at all—they just weren’t proper blokes.

  It was no secret that Donald was his father’s favourite, or at least the child he paid most attention to. It was only natural. Donald was the one who would learn the ropes, so that one day he could work in the timber industry. However, his father made sure that Donald worked hard in school, and liked to say: ‘The boy has a good head on his shoulders.’ If you were going to run your own business, it was important to be able to keep an eye on the figures.

  One of their favourite games when they were driving the truck to some distant customer was to fantasise about the future, and what the sawmill or lumberyard Donald would own when he grew up might look like. Would he take care of the sawing himself, or contract it out? Would he perhaps have his own forest? What additional products should he sell?

  June and the first half of July passed, and even if the work was sometimes physically taxing (a ton of battens to be distributed between five different storage areas) or boring (ten thousand nails to be sorted), Donald couldn’t recall a better summer.

  One very hot day in the middle of July, Donald and his father set off for the sawmill in Riddersholm. A small shipment of logs had arrived, and needed to be sawn into planks for a customer. Since the trunks were relatively slender, Donald’s father decided they could do the job themselves.

  When they had climbed up into the driver’s cab, he nodded towards their lunch box and said he had a little surprise for Donald. The usual fare consisted of fried egg sandwiches which Donald’s mother made in the morning, along with a small bottle of milk to share. There was rarely anything else. Donald couldn’t guess what the surprise might be, so the lunchbreak hovered before him like a tempting mirage.

  The circular saw used to split the logs was housed in a rectangular building with a corrugated iron roof. If it was hot outside, then it was boiling inside. Both Donald and his father worked with their shirts off, and the whirling sawdust combined with the sweat and the whining of the blade made for a less than pleasant experience. As Donald hauled away the cut planks and helped to load the logs onto the belt, he was really looking forward to that lunch.

  After a while they just couldn’t carry on. Only a few ugly logs remained, covered in gnarled, lumpy knots. Donald and his father stopped for a breather, wiping the sweat from their brows. Then they started again. Carrying the logs and dropping them onto the belt, sawing and lifting, carrying and dropping. Donald’s head was spinning with heat and exhaustion, and even his father was blinking and shaking his head from time to time.

  The penultimate log proved particularly difficult, and the blade of the saw got stuck twice in a root nodule near the end. Donald’s father wrenched it free and told Donald to fetch the cant hook so that he could get a grip on the other end. If one of them pushed and the other one tugged at the same time, they ought to be able to force the bastard past the blade.

  Donald used the metal hook to grab the narrow end of the log. His father was standing by the blade at the other end of the belt, ready to push. They nodded to one another and mimed: ‘One…two…three!’ Donald pulled, feeling triumphant as the log shifted a metre towards him with unexpected ease; it had gone through.

  He glanced over at his father, ready to give him the thumbs up—only one more log to go—but before he could raise his hand he gasped and dropped the hook. The sudden jerk had made his father fall forward over the belt.

  All his life Donald would keep going over what h
ad happened, examining every second in minute detail. It had been so hot; the sweat had been trickling into their eyes, clouding his father’s vision among the swirling sawdust; they had been tired; his father had misjudged the situation; or perhaps the log had an unusual structure which meant that the blade suddenly slipped through it like a hot knife through butter.

  It couldn’t be that Donald had tugged too hard, that his violent movement had caused his father to lose his balance, falling onto the blade which sliced off both his hands.

  At first Donald couldn’t process what he was seeing. His father slid down until he was on his knees. Blood was spurting from his wrists; it struck the spinning blade and was flung into the air. A few drops hit Donald’s face; he looked down at the backs of his hands and saw the blood that had splashed onto them too, was still splashing onto them, and only then did his heart plummet in his chest like a lump of ice.

  On legs that didn’t want to obey him he ran over to his father, who managed to get to his feet, then fell back against the wall as the blood carried on pumping out of the stumps that were his arms, over his chest and stomach, over his face.

  ‘Dad! Dad!’

  ‘Donald,’ his father wheezed above the whine of the saw. ‘Pressure…tie…’

  In a panic Donald looked around for their shirts, a piece of rope, anything that he could use to tie around his father’s arms to try to stop the blood from gushing out of his body. He spun around and almost threw up when he saw one of his father’s hands lying on the belt, the other on the floor in a clump of dark-coloured sawdust. No rope.

  Our shirts, our shirts…

  They had hung them on a tree. Donald raced outside and grabbed them, letting out a sob when his shirt got caught on a branch. He pulled at it until the sleeve tore off, then dashed back towards the building.

  His father came staggering out into the light, and Donald stopped dead as the image that would haunt him as long as he lived was seared onto his retinas.

  His father paused as if the blazing sunlight had taken him by surprise. His body was smeared with blood, shining like a fresh piece of meat in the harsh light. His hair was plastered to his head, and his eyes gleamed white through the blood that ran down his face when he raised his mutilated arms to the sky and dropped to his knees. There was no longer anything about him that resembled Dad; this was a horrific figure, a man covered in blood.

  And yet Donald ran over to him, his hands shaking as he tried to knot the fabric around the Bloodman’s forearms, where the blood was no longer spurting but merely trickling.

  ‘Dad, please Dad, please!’

  His father took no notice of his efforts. He was looking up at the sky, his body swaying from side to side. Donald had managed to apply a tourniquet of sorts around one arm; he tied the knot as tightly as he could and the flow of blood stopped.

  Maybe, maybe, maybe…

  Everything around him had disappeared. The birds were no longer singing, there was no sun in the sky, the trees had gone. There was only Donald and his father and the blood; he had to get the blood to stay in his father’s body.

  As he straightened out a shirtsleeve before winding it around the other arm, his father’s chin fell onto his chest. He looked at Donald and whispered: ‘My…boy,’ then collapsed sideways.

  Donald screamed and pleaded, he applied a tourniquet to the other arm, he shook his father and begged him to open his eyes, to say something, not to leave him alone. To no avail. His hands were red with blood by the time he got to his feet, his expression blank as he stared at the saw, which was still spinning, still emitting that monotonous whine.

  He went inside and switched it off, stood and watched as it slowed down, stopped, fell silent. He considered picking up his father’s hands and placing them next to his body, but he couldn’t do it. Instead he went and sat in the truck.

  He sat there for a long time. Now and again he glanced over at the driver’s seat as if to check whether his father had come back, telling him that the whole thing was just a stupid joke, let’s go home now. He felt nothing. He couldn’t move.

  The sun was no longer shining in his face when he noticed the lunch box on the floor. He picked it up and opened the lid. He saw the usual sandwiches, wrapped in greaseproof paper. And a bar of chocolate. A great big bar of chocolate. Hazelnut, his favourite, which they could hardly ever afford to buy.

  He and Dad would have sat side by side sharing the chocolate, satisfied with a job well done. Sat side by side on a flat rock in the shade. Savoured every bite. Donald started to cry, and he was still crying as he walked to the main road, the chocolate bar in his hand. A car stopped and he explained what had happened.

  Somewhere during the tears and screams of that afternoon and evening, with friends and neighbours coming and going and the realisation that his father wasn’t coming back, Donald decided that he would keep the bar of chocolate, that he would never eat it.

  All evening he sat on a chair with the chocolate bar on his knee beneath the oak tree where his father used to rock him when he was little, and gradually a dreadful realisation took root inside him.

  He had somehow managed to accept that he would never see his father again. That his father as a living person could no longer mean anything to him. But what was even worse was that Donald no longer meant anything to his father. His father’s eyes could no longer see him, because the light in them had died. On some essential level, Donald had ceased to exist. He sat on the chair beneath the oak tree and grew lighter and more transparent as his very being disintegrated and dissolved.

  That night he lay in his bed staring up at the ceiling, listening to his mother sobbing in the room next door. He got up and fetched the bar of chocolate.

  Carefully he removed the wrapper, then stood for a long time contemplating the rectangular block divided into squares as it began to melt in his hands. He broke off big pieces and stuffed them into his mouth, chewing and swallowing as fast as he could.

  He remained standing in the middle of the room for a minute or so as the heavy lump grew in his belly, then he went to the outside toilet and threw up.

  *

  Carina, Emil, Peter, Lennart and Olof have gathered around the caravan as Stefan slowly gets to his feet on the roof. He seems shaken rather than hurt as he looks down at the assembled company; he raises his mobile phone like a trophy and says: ‘I got through! I spoke to my mother.’

  A grimace of pain passes across his face, and only Carina knows him well enough to suspect the reason. ‘So what did she say? How’s Bengt?’

  The look Stefan gives her is answer enough. She is about to ask for more details, but Peter pre-empts her; he strides forward, and in a second he is on top of the roof standing next to Stefan. He fishes out his iPhone and looks at the screen, shakes his head. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You have to be higher up,’ Stefan explains. ‘I stood on a chair. It gives you just enough of a signal.’ He holds out his phone. ‘And of course I’ve got this.’

  Peter glances from his own brand-new iPhone to Stefan’s Nokia. A Bugatti versus a Volvo 240. But old phones often have better reception, so Peter reaches out. ‘May I…?’

  Stefan shakes his head. ‘The battery runs down in no time. If we’re going to make calls, we have to be sure we can get through.’

  ‘And how do we do that?’

  Stefan looks at the sky. ‘We need to be higher up.’

  Both men stare at the sky as if they are waiting for a rope ladder to drop down. Lennart clears his throat and steps forward, raising a hand as if asking for permission to speak.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he says to Stefan. ‘You said you spoke to your mother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And she could hear you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Lennart says. ‘That’s all.’ Olof looks at him enquiringly, and Lennart shrugs. There is a brief pause as everyone considers the implications of this new state of affairs. Emil presses his body close to Carina and whispers: ‘Can we g
o home soon, Mummy?’

  *

  One of the secrets to a good cinnamon bun is the rolling. How thin you can make the dough before you spread it with the mixture of butter and spices before rolling it up. Normally it is rolled four or five times, in a patisserie sometimes six. Majvor’s cinnamon buns are rolled seven times.

  The children never needed to feel embarrassed in school when they were asked to bring in homemade cakes to sell at some event. Majvor’s buns always disappeared in no time. People with no skill in baking have no idea why these particular buns are so light and delicious, but those in the know raise their eyebrows and say: ‘Seven, Majvor? How do you manage that?’

  Skill with the rolling pin, that’s all there is to it. The perfect balance between applying and releasing pressure. Plus of course lots of butter in the dough so that it doesn’t stick to the worktop in spite of its thinness.

  This is a concern at the moment. The kitchen worktops are a decent size for a caravan, but if Majvor is going to make a large batch of buns, she is going to have to divide the dough into seven or eight pieces and roll out each one separately, which to be honest would be a hell of a lot of trouble.

  She has gone through the cupboards and laid out her ingredients. Flour, milk, sugar, yeast, butter, cinnamon and cardamom. Bowl, rolling pin, wooden spoon, dough scraper. The oven is also reasonably large, and she will probably be able to bake the buns in two batches. Only the work surface is lacking.

  How many times have Majvor’s good intentions been derailed by irritating deficiencies in her surroundings? If she had ten kronor for each one, she would be rich by now!

  Come on, kids, let’s build a snowman. The wrong kind of snow. Donald, look at this lovely sweater I’ve bought you. Too tight around the neck. I’ve made muffins—I thought we could all have a lovely cosy evening together. Everyone has other plans. Wasn’t that delicious? No idea, I’ve got a cold.

  And so on and so on.

  Majvor stands in the middle of the caravan clenching her fists. Donald is still hunched on the sofa, his lips moving. Ridiculous man. Majvor remembers a letter he wrote her in the long-distant past. His final words were: ‘You are my dream.’ Who would have thought they would end up like this?