I Am Behind You

by John Ajvide Lindqvist

  Both of them know that they are just talking for the sake of it. They know next to nothing about guns, but Olof takes the irregular piece of metal, turning it over and over. The only result is an unwelcome reminder of the bullets filed down to sharp points that he found outside the grazing pasture on the day that Holger Backlund shot their cows—bullets that were never fired, fortunately.

  ‘No idea,’ he says, handing back the bullet as if it was burning his fingers. Both Lennart and Olof pick up a cloth and start wiping down worktops and cupboard doors.

  Molly is bent over her puzzle, the rose-pink tip of her tongue sticking out as she concentrates on joining up the dots. Without looking up, she says: ‘Why did the cows die?’

  Lennart and Olof stop cleaning.

  ‘What cows?’ Lennart asks.

  ‘Your cows, of course,’ Molly says, drawing several short, jagged lines.

  ‘Our cows aren’t dead.’

  ‘Some of them are,’ Molly says, leaning back to study her work. ‘Why did it happen?’

  Lennart goes over and leans on the table, lowering his head to try and catch Molly’s eye. ‘How do you know about that?’

  Molly looks dissatisfied, and adds a couple more lines. ‘You told me.’

  ‘No, we didn’t.’

  ‘I must have dreamt about it then.’

  Using the table for support, Lennart crouches down so that his face is level with Molly’s. She draws two more lines, and seems happy with the result.

  ‘Molly,’ Lennart says. ‘What are you up to?’

  Molly looks at him with such a big smile that her entire face seems to be made up of a smile. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. What are you up to?’

  ‘I’m not up to anything,’ Lennart says, his tone less pleasant this time. ‘But we haven’t mentioned those cows, so…’

  Olof places a hand on his shoulder. ‘Lennart. Leave it.’

  ‘Yes,’ Molly says. ‘Leave it. If you know what’s good for you.’

  Lennart raises his eyebrows and turns to Olof with an expression that says did you hear that?, but Olof shakes his head and says: ‘Let’s go and see how our plants are getting on.’

  ‘Oh, you’ve got plants!’ Molly says, getting up from the table so quickly that she bumps into Lennart, who loses his balance and has to support himself with one hand on the floor to stop himself from falling over. Olof glances at Lennart to check that he’s okay; Lennart waves a dismissive hand, and Molly and Olof go outside.

  If you know what’s good for you.

  Lennart was nine years old when his mother was kicked in the head by a horse. After that she was bedridden for long periods, although no one could say what the problem actually was. After years of fruitless visits to doctors she started to pin her hopes on ‘wise women’ as she called them. Lennart’s father had another name for them: ‘charlatans’.

  Most of them were probably harmless, with their salves and concoctions and amulets, but Lennart remembers the woman who came on the scene when he was thirteen: Lillemor. She was a different kettle of fish.

  Unlike many of the others, she made no attempt to convert Lennart and his father to her approach; in fact she didn’t even bother to explain it. She did, however, demand full access to the patient with no interruptions. For two hours three times a week the door to his mother’s room would remain closed; Lillemor also asked Lennart and his father to leave the house, if possible.

  The only reason his father didn’t throw Lillemor out, bushy red hair first, was that her treatment was the first that seemed to have any effect. Lennart’s mother was able to stay up for longer periods, and there was a clarity in her eyes that had been absent for many years. His father was so pleased that she appeared to be on the road to recovery that Lennart didn’t want to rock the boat by saying there was something in that clarity that scared him.

  During the fifth or sixth week something changed. His mother started mentioning long-dead relatives as if she had spoken to them recently, and in spite of her isolation she had an astonishing grasp of what was going on in the village. She also began referring to herself in the third person: ‘Kerstin needs to rest for a while’, ‘Kerstin thought that was delicious’.

  One day Lennart came home on a Lillemor-free day and went into his mother’s bedroom to find Lillemor sitting there anyway. The curtains were closed, and a large candle was burning on the bedside table. As soon as Lennart opened the door he recoiled, because there was something…distorted about the image that confronted him.

  Lennart had just been learning about perspective in his art lessons in school, but that wouldn’t have helped him if he had tried to draw his mother’s room at that moment. The angles were strange, and things that should have been far away seemed close, and vice versa. He could count the legs on a fly sitting on the bedstead, while the door handle seemed far out of reach.

  Lennart closed his eyes and rubbed his eyelids. When he opened them again the room looked just as it always did. Lillemor had got up and opened the curtains.

  ‘Mum?’ Lennart said.

  His mother turned her head towards the sound of his voice, but her eyes were unseeing, fixed on a point far beyond him.

  ‘We are not to be disturbed,’ Lillemor said, taking a step towards him.

  Lennart swallowed and moved forward. ‘I didn’t think this was one of your days.’

  Lillemor tilted her head on one side and gave him a smile that revealed unusually white teeth. ‘I had a space in my diary.’

  ‘Right. But I need some help with my homework.’

  Lillemor studied him for a moment as Lennart’s eyes darted around the room. That was a straight lie; he had no homework, and when he had, he was perfectly capable of doing it on his own.

  ‘No,’ Lillemor said. ‘You need help explaining where the key to the school storage shed has gone.’

  Lennart stood there, feeling as if it had just started snowing in his belly, cold and fluttery. A week ago he had come across a key that the caretaker had dropped, and with this key he and his friends had been able to unlock the shed outside school hours and help themselves to hockey sticks and footballs which they replaced when they had finished playing. It wasn’t exactly the crime of the century, but the possession of the key was far more serious.

  Lillemor nodded at his confusion and said calmly: ‘So off you go, and close the door behind you. If you know what’s good for you.’

  If you know what’s good for you.

  That same evening Lennart plucked up more courage than ever before and told his father everything, except the bit about the distorted appearance of the room. The business of the key had been on his conscience anyway, and the blow his father delivered felt like a kind of penance. When he got up from the floor with his ears ringing and the imprint of his father’s hand on his cheek, his father asked as if nothing had happened: ‘Did she really say that? If you know what’s good for you? She threatened you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lennart said, trying to stand up straight. ‘And there’s no… Dad, she couldn’t possibly have known about the key. It’s just like when Mum said that Östlund’s Karin had…’

  His father interrupted him. ‘Be quiet.’ He sat there for a while with his head in his hands, then he looked up. ‘Well. That’s a shame.’

  The next time Lillemor turned up, Lennart’s father sent her away and told her not to come back. As she left she gave Lennart a long look, a look that said, you’d better hope that our paths never cross again, if you know what’s good for you, then she got into her silver Volkswagen Beetle and disappeared out of their lives.

  Lennart has had a feeling about Molly, a feeling he couldn’t put his finger on until she spoke those words. She reminds him of Lillemor. The look in her eyes, the smile, the air of calm, and something else, something hard to define, a kind of distortion. Everything around her is slightly skewed, as if the eye has been unable to focus for a moment.

  Lennart gets up and hurries out of the caravan; he is suddenly afr
aid to leave Olof alone with Molly. He shakes his head at his own stupidity. Those things happened over forty years ago, but

  If you know what’s good for you

  he still feels as if it has started snowing in his belly. He shivers as he steps outside and to his relief finds Molly and Olof standing side by side.

  ‘Look at this, Lennart,’ Olof says. ‘You won’t believe your eyes.’

  Molly kneels down, hands resting on her thighs, beaming at their little garden.

  ‘What a pretty flower!’ she exclaims, stroking the pelargonium’s dark green leaves with her fingertips.

  No, Lennart doesn’t believe his eyes. It looks as if the pelargonium has grown, which is ridiculous; it’s only a little while since they planted it. Anyway, the flower is glowing with rude health, so they must have been wrong about the soil being toxic. Then Lennart glances at the rest of their plantation. If there had been a chair nearby, he would have slumped down on it, but instead he links his hands behind his head and simply stares.

  The first pale green buds of the potato leaves have begun to peep out of the ground, and right next to them he can see a couple of slender dill shoots. A process that would normally take something in the region of ten days has taken just over an hour.

  ‘What the hell…’ he whispers.

  Molly wags her finger at him. ‘No swearing. It’s naughty.’

  The whole thing is so bizarre that Lennart can’t help clutching at the only straw he can find. Narrowing his eyes, he looks at Olof: ‘Have you done this? Is it some kind of joke?’

  ‘When would I have had time? It’s crazy, isn’t it?’

  Lennart shakes his head, utterly bewildered. The only time he has seen something grow like this is when they use those time lapse films on TV; he finds them slightly unpleasant, but this is a hundred times worse, because this is for real.

  Lennart looks out at the empty field, spreads his arms wide and says, with an anger directed at everything and nothing: ‘But this doesn’t make any sense! There ought to be a jungle here if…’ he waves at their rapidly growing plants, ‘… if this is what’s happening!’

  ‘It’s very strange,’ Olof agrees.

  ‘It’s more than strange,’ Lennart says, so loudly that Molly tenses and jumps to her feet. ‘It’s completely… unnatural!’

  Olof goes over and places his hand on Lennart’s shoulder. ‘Calm down, Lennart. Calm down. You’re frightening the girl.’

  It is obvious that Lennart and Olof have widely different perceptions of Molly’s character, but Lennart takes a deep breath, allows his arms to drop and nods to Olof to indicate that he is calm, in spite of the cold front in his belly now spreading and covering large parts of his body.

  He looks at Molly, convinced that it wasn’t the fact that he raised his voice that made her leap up. Quite right. The girl’s eyes are screwed up in concentration as she peers out at the field behind Lennart, and her nostrils are twitching as if she is sniffing the air.

  ‘Molly,’ Olof says, but the child merely shakes her head and quickly walks away from them, out into the field. Olof hurries after her, telling her to stop, but Lennart stays where he is long enough to see Stefan hurry down from the roof of his caravan, rush inside and come straight out again clutching his son’s hand. He drags the boy to their car, pushes him into the passenger seat, then runs around to the driver’s side.

  ‘Stefan?’ Lennart shouts. ‘What’s going on?’

  Either Stefan doesn’t hear or he decides to ignore him, because five seconds later he has started the car and set off in the opposite direction from Molly and Olof.

  The girl has broken into a run now; Olof is lumbering after her as best he can, but he is falling further and further behind, still shouting to her to stop. Lennart looks down at the glorious pelargonium, swears to himself, then sets off after them.

  *

  Isabelle’s tongue is a lump of meat in her mouth, so swollen that it seems to fill the entire cavity. She would like to stuff her face with snow, ice, ice cream to cool down the burning, throbbing pain that is bringing tears to her eyes. Now that Carina is no longer the avenger, destroying all before her, Isabelle feels nothing but hatred towards her.

  Isabelle’s lips are numb, and as they approach the white figure she feels something trickling from the corner of her mouth. She wipes it away and discovers that it is not blood, but saliva. Her mouth is watering.

  She is intimately acquainted with the meaninglessness of life, more so than most. Just as some people have genes that make them good at maths, while others have a high pain threshold or can draw a perfect circle freehand, Isabelle is gifted with two defining qualities: her beauty and her constant terror over the emptiness of her existence.

  Just as someone who is capable of multiplying two-digit numbers in their head cannot be called a mathematical genius, so someone who says that ‘life seems a bit empty sometimes’ cannot be compared with Isabelle when it comes to her capacity for experiencing the futility of life, every second and with every fibre of her being.

  She doesn’t know when the realisation struck her; it has been there for as long as she can remember. Everything is an illusion, a pretence, an as if, and its only purpose is for life to continue until it is over. When the bookmark angels she had made were passed around her father’s guests to cries of delight, when some boy told her she was the most beautiful girl in the world, she knew exactly what to say and how to behave, but nothing touched her, because these people were just as empty and unreal as her.

  Only extreme horror films evoke a response and create an illusion of being in the moment, with the lower bar set around the level of Hostel. The sight of people being hunted down, tortured and slashed to pieces with close-ups of plenty of gore can give her peace of mind, temporarily at least. The French wave is her favourite—Frontiers, Inside, Martyrs. She has spent many sleepless nights watching those films over and over again. As dawn approaches, the madness is lurking.

  Paradoxically, it is her illness that has kept her comparatively healthy. The hyperthyroidism has given a direction, a partial goal to her days. She has to eat to avoid intense physical discomfort. Without this discomfort she might just have sat down in an armchair and faded away. There is nothing for her in the world anyway.

  Hence the saliva. The white figure does not belong to the same conceptual world as everything that Isabelle perhaps renounced even before she could talk; it is the first indication that her feeling is justified. There is another world, a world that is purer and more real. Isabelle has understood what the white figure wants, and she intends to oblige.

  They have now caught up with the figure, which keeps on moving, its dark eyes fixed on the horizon. Isabelle’s eyes caress its perfect white skin, its body unmarked by human degeneration.

  ‘What shall we do?’ Carina asks; for some incomprehensible reason her voice is trembling.

  Isabelle makes a two-part gesture which means: Drive a bit further. Then stop.

  Carina turns to her and nods, fear shining in her eyes. ‘Yes. We have to stop it. Before it reaches the camp. And the children.’

  ‘Mm-hm,’ Isabelle says.

  Carina speeds up and drives a couple of hundred metres beyond the figure, then stops, leaving the engine ticking over. Isabelle indicates that she should turn it off, which she does. She seems to have lost any capacity for taking the initiative, which suits Isabelle perfectly.

  They get out of the car and go round to the boot. Isabelle takes out the heaviest rounders bat. When Carina reaches out for it, Isabelle points to the other one. The flat one. The girl’s bat.

  Carina leans over and Isabelle considers whacking her right away, but decides the angle isn’t right. She needs a clean blow to the back of the head to avoid any difficulties. Then there’s the bleeding. Even if Isabelle manages to crack Carina’s skull, there is no guarantee that there will be much blood. She will need to open a vein, and she lacks the tools for such an operation.

  Hang on a minute.r />
  Her emergency make-up bag in the glove compartment also contains a pair of nail scissors. For her toenails. She takes care of, or fails to take care of, her fingernails with her teeth. The scissors should do the job of opening up the jugular vein.

  ‘Should we wait here, or what?’ Carina says, glancing nervously towards the figure, which is approaching across the grass.

  ‘Mm-hm,’ Isabelle says, studying her head. It’s probably best to hit her really hard if she’s going to bring her down with a single blow. But…She mustn’t kill her, because then her heart will stop beating and the blood won’t be pumped out. Then again, surely there will be some blood? When she strikes the blow? Isabelle blinks a couple of times.

  Jugular vein. Nail scissors.

  Absolutely. That’s the way. But it is as if she has forgotten one detail: that she is the one who is going to do it. Isabelle Sundberg, who was so well placed for the Rodebjer contract. She was going to call them, that’s what she was going to do.

  She no longer wants to call them, the contract is no longer important, it never was. So is the alternative to smash Carina’s skull, to open the vein, get the blood out?

  Yes? That’s right, isn’t it?

  They are standing next to the car clutching their bats, waiting for the white figure, which is getting closer and closer. Isabelle is slightly behind Carina, at exactly the right angle and the right distance for a direct hit that would send the ball flying into the forest, if there was a ball and if there was a forest.

  ‘Shit,’ Carina says when the figure is perhaps twenty metres away from them. ‘I’m so fucking scared.’

  Isabelle lowers the tip of the bat to the ground so that she can get a decent swing. She fixes her gaze on the back of Carina’s head and waits for a sign, a word of exhortation.

  ‘Mummy!’

  Molly is racing across the field, with the two farmers lumbering along behind her, and when Isabelle narrows her eyes she can see the outline of the camp. She didn’t know they were so close. She lifts up the bat and holds it in her arms, squeezing it tightly.