Let the Right One In

by John Ajvide Lindqvist

And people moved into what had been built for them. Earth-colored concrete buildings scattered about in the green fields. When this story begins, Blackeberg the suburb had been in existence for thirty years.

Only one thing was missing. A past. At school, the children didn’t get to do any special projects about Blackeberg’s history because there wasn’t one.

You were beyond the grasp of the mysteries of the past; there wasn’t even a church. Nine thousand inhabitants and no church.

That tells you something about the modernity of the place, its rationality. It tells you something of how free they were from the ghosts of history and of terror. It explains in part how unprepared they were. No one saw them move in.

18 October. Norrköping-Blackeberg (Stockholm). He was the one who had moved them in. The man and his daughter. He wasn’t going to tell anyone about it, not for as long as he lived.

Love trouble will burst your bubble boys! —Siw Malmkvist, “Love Trouble” trans. Laurie Thompson

I never wanted to kill. I am not naturally evil Such things I do just to make myself more attractive to you Have I failed? —Morrissey, “The Last of The Famous International Playboys”

He had put his hand up in class, a declaration of existence, a claim that he knew something. And that was forbidden to him. They could give a number of reasons for why they had to torment him; he was too fat, too ugly, too disgusting. But the real problem was simply that he existed, and every reminder of his existence was a crime.

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

Real love is to offer your life at the feet of another, and that’s what people today are incapable of.

While he locked the front door to the apartment and walked out of the building with his hand resting on the knife handle he repeated these words like a mantra. “The earth shall drink his blood. The earth shall drink his blood.”

The forest that, starting a few years back, had felt threatening, the haunt of enemies, now felt like a home and a refuge. The trees drew back respectfully as he passed. He didn’t feel an ounce of fear though it was starting to get really dark.

“Aren’t you cold?” “No.” “Why not?” The girl frowned, wrinkling up her face, and for a moment she looked much much older than she was. Like an old woman about to cry. “I guess I’ve forgotten how to.”

This Friday night is going to be the last one they will ever have all together. Tomorrow one of them will be gone forever. One more picture will be nothing more than a memory. And nothing will ever be the same.

Oskar sat down on the sandbox ledge and waited. Like he was waiting for an animal to come out of its hole.

Naturally. She talked funny too, like a grown-up. Maybe she was older than him, even though she was so puny. Her thin white throat jutted out of her turtleneck top, merged with a sharp jaw bone. Like a mannequin.

Or else he pretended that each building was a hungry animal, a dragon with six mouths whose only source of nourishment was the virgin flesh—made to look like advertisements—that he fed it with. The packet screamed in his hands when he pressed it into the jaws of the beast.

He went through the cabinets and drawers as if he were looking for something without knowing exactly what it was. A secret. Something that would change things. To suddenly find a piece of rotting meat in the back of a cabinet. Or an inflated balloon. Anything. Something unfamiliar.

That was why he didn’t see her eyes change, how they narrowed, took on another expression. He didn’t see how her upper lip drew back and revealed a pair of small, dirty white fangs. He only saw her cheek and while her mouth was nearing his throat he drew up his hand and stroked her face.

The risk of infection. You could not allow it to reach the nervous system. The body had to be turned off. That was all he had been told. He had not understood it then, but he did now.

Got to his feet, staggered a little, regained his balance. Just as he had expected, the head fell back at an unnatural angle and the jaws shut with an audible click.

. . . and they steered their course toward parts where Martin had never been, far past Tyska Botten and Blackeberg—and there ran the border for the known world. —Hjalmar Söderberg, Martin Bircks Ungdom

But he, whose heart a skogsrå* steals it never will recover His soul will long for moonlight dreams and no mere mortal lover . . . —Viktor Rydberg, “Skogsrået”

Everyone who had ever taken that path, or been anywhere near it, had something to tell. How creepy that part of the forest was. Or how beautiful and calm it was around there, and how you could never have guessed.

The underground smell. He liked it. A reassuring blend of wood, old things, and locked-in-ness.

Oskar stood in front of the massive iron door and a thought appeared. That someone . . . someone was locked in here. That that’s what the chains and lock were for. To restrain a monster. He listened. There were distant sounds from the street, from people’s movements in the apartments above. He really liked the basement. It was like being in another world, while knowing that the other world was still there outside, above you, if you needed it. But down here it was quiet, and no one came and said anything, did anything to you. Nothing you had to do.

Oskar. That guy in the mirror. Who is he? A lot of things happened to him. Bad things. Good things. Strange things. But who is he?

Eli was new to him and therefore he had the opportunity to be someone else, say something different from what he said to other people.

Eli’s face was almost completely blacked out against the lighted windows behind her. Of course it was just his imagination but he thought her eyes were glowing. At any rate, they were the only thing he could see clearly in her face.

Jealousy was a fat, chalk-white snake in his chest. It writhed slowly, as pure as innocence and childishly plain.

He had thought his beloved was like him. He had looked into Eli’s eyes and seen an ancient person’s knowledge and indifference. At first it had frightened him:

Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops. I must be gone and live, or stay and die. —William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, III:5