Chapter 11 - A Nocturnal Visit

Chapter 11

Disclaimer:
The following is adapted from the novel Let the Right One In by John A. Linqvist and the film bearing the same name. The characters in this work are those of Mr. Linqvist and no copyright protection is asserted to this work.

Oskar stuck his hands a little deeper into the pockets of his parka, hoping to slow the penetration of cold through his gloves and into his fingers. It didn’t help much, but it made him feel better. He hustled along the final curve of Horsensgatan before it connected with 63.

He wished it hadn’t snowed so early and so heavily so he could have kept riding his bike. Naturally, everything had to be difficult; even the weather was piling on to make his life miserable.

He sniffed and started looking for the big, crooked pine tree where he would get off the road and cut through the back of the cemetery. About a week after he had left Eli in the mausoleum, he had discovered this new way to enter the place. It was a much shorter trip through the cemetery to reach the tomb, and there was less chance of meeting anyone.

He spotted his tree, and when he reached it he turned off the shoulder of the road and headed into the trees. The snow was heavier here, making for slower going. The trees were very dense where he was in the back of the cemetery. It was 10 p.m., and it had been dark for about seven hours. There wasn’t a soul around.

He climbed over a stone wall, then went down a short hill. Once it leveled out, he was able to see the back of the crypt. Well, he couldn’t really see the back itself, because of all the trees around it, but he knew where it was. He approached the mausoleum as quietly as he could, looking around for anyone who might be out here. But the place was deserted.

He was upset tonight because he’d finally broken down and tried to telephone his mother. He knew he was weak and he had felt pathetic doing it, but he just couldn’t help himself. The loneliness had become too much to bear.

He hadn’t realized how much Eli had anchored his life over the last . . . what? almost two years? until she was gone. When she was around, there was always someone to do something with: work, talk, play, or just run around—but now, he had only himself, and it wasn’t nearly enough. He missed her terribly, but he had discovered that he missed the routine he had with her, too. Everything had become disjointed.

He had planned to at least tell Yvonne that he was alive and okay, and maybe . . . well, maybe more, depending on what she had said; how she reacted. But when Yvonne had answered the phone and he’d heard her voice, his plans had changed. At the last second, what had been a sneaking suspicion about what might happen became a sharp certainty: that to say anything at all would inevitably lead to the abandonment of Eli. So he had said nothing—just listened to her say hello a few times, and then hang up.

Hearing her voice had nearly killed him. He had put his head in his hands and cried for a long time, all alone at the kitchen table. It was while he was pulling himself together that he’d developed the notion to actually see Eli tonight, one way or the other. He just had to.

He paused for a moment at the bronze door. This was the first night he had actually built up the resolve to go inside. He had understood how concerned she was about seeing him when she woke up. She was so afraid that something terrible would happen if he was the first person she saw when that happened. He still didn’t really understand what she had been saying—that she would be “small” or “weak”; that she might forget things. Like what? Surely she would not forget him, would she? Not as if that was any safeguard, but still.

Maybe she was just worried that she’d be really hungry and unable to control herself. That he could understand, and that had been enough—at least until tonight—to keep him from going in. Instead, he’d tapped some Morse Code messages through the wall, roughly where she ought to be, based on his memory of the mausoleum’s interior and the vault she had chosen. Sitting in the snow and weeds, he had tapped her name and things like, “Hi, it’s Oskar”; “I love you”; and “I miss you”; but she had not tapped back. It had always been dead silence, leaving him bitterly disappointed.

He slowly pushed the door open. It was very heavy, and he tried to push it carefully so that the squeaking it made would be minimal. It didn’t squeak too bad, and after opening it just wide enough to get past it, he stopped pushing and slipped inside. Then he pushed it closed behind him.

He sniffed. There was a faint odor of mold and burned cloth; nothing more. No smell of burnt hair and charred flesh.

He shined his light around. Through clouds of his own, frosty breath, he saw with relief that things were exactly like he’d left them that awful dawn three weeks ago when she had almost burnt to death. The cinderblocks were still stacked just inside the door where she had left them, intending to block the door from the inside. The funeral urn was still lying near the back wall, where it had come to rest after she’d hit it and it had rolled away. And—

Yes. The marble slab was still leaning on the wall where he’d left it. As soon as it was captured by the beam of his flashlight, he felt a chill.

That’s where she is.

Would she look different? Would she be scary?

He advanced toward the slab with leaden feet. He wondered if she would have approved of what he was doing, if she could have known. Probably not, given how certain she was that she did not want to wake up with him around. But she couldn’t understand how hard it had been, waiting for her to come back. Waiting for her, all by himself, with no one to talk to or spend time with. Completely alone, for days on end. Even a grownup, he thought, would have had a hard time. He just needed to see her. Needed to re-establish some contact with her; to restore some meaning, some . . . humanity, back into his hollow, empty life.

He squatted down directly in front of the slab. Because he had lacked the strength to lift it back up and into place, there was a narrow gap of about six centimeters above the top of the panel that would allow him to look directly into her vault. Cautiously, he brought the flashlight up and shined it into the crack.

Eli. His heart fluttered and his breath caught in his throat.

She was lying on her side, but she was not where he had imagined she would be. He had thought she would be lying more or less where he’d last seen her—in the middle of the vault with her feet closest to the opening. But instead, she was turned around. Her head was nearest to him, and she was curled up against the long wall to his left. She was completely silent and he could detect no movement at all.

Her head was tucked down and her hands were clasped together over her chin, as if she had fallen asleep praying. Her legs were drawn up tightly, and so he was really not able to see much of her body except her arms, knees, and lower legs. She still had on her winter coat and hat, his pants, and her seared shoes.

Her skin had healed, like she had said it would. There were no traces of the horrible, reddish-black burns that had covered her face when he had last seen her. And her eyebrows and eyelashes were back. But she looked—wizened. Old and emaciated. Her cheeks had shrunken, and her cheekbones jutted out beneath the thin skin on her face. Her forehead wasn’t smooth like he remembered; instead, it was crossed by the kind of wrinkles his 89-year-old great aunt in Stockholm had. Even her fingers looked bony, as if she were an old woman, or . . . a witch. And on the side of her that was up there was a layer of—

. . . dust.

His stomach turned. He couldn’t look at her. He snapped off his light and just sat there in silence.

He experienced a sudden moment of self-objectivization. What am I doing here?, he thought. I’m 13 years old, kneeling two feet away from something I know is a vampire, in a cold, deserted tomb in the middle of the winter, in a city that’s not my home, far away from my mom and dad, not going to school, not doing anything normal. I should run screaming from this place, hop on the nearest train, and high-tail it back to Blackeberg. To some semblance of normalcy. To people I know are—alive. Not like this.

Slowly he stood up. He wondered, what if . . . what if she keeps sleeping for another three weeks? Will it progress? Will she look even worse?

He thought back to the last night they’d spent together. The price of that night had been her almost killing him without even knowing it, and Eli being nearly roasted alive by the sun. Had it been worth it?

Yes.

He would give anything to have her back right now. Away from this cold, awful place, surrounded by dead bodies and snow. Under the covers, warmed by the heat of their bodies—or at least his, anyway. Touching each other, and telling each other how much they loved one another; and not by words, for speech was unnecessary with Eli: thought alone was sufficient. Long, lingering kisses in which his mind experienced directly the depth of her emotion for him. And deep it was—he had never felt so loved, so cherished, so adored, as he had that night.

And he had let go, too; had projected the strength of his feelings for her, full-blown, into her consciousness. He had known at some level that his feelings were not as well-refined as hers. Hers were like . . . a river of warm gold that flowed into his mind. His was more like a lightning bolt, blasting into her without direction or control. And he had known when it was happening that Eli had never experienced anything like it before; that he had left her reeling, had filled her with everything she had lacked for two centuries and so desperately wanted: love; commitment; fulfillment; happiness.

In the exquisite mixing of their minds, they had exchanged memories of their experiences since they had first met. She had showed him what she had seen and felt upon seeing him in those first, tentative encounters, and then he had shown her what he had thought upon meeting her. She understood the compassion he had felt for her when she’d said she couldn’t remember her birthday; he realized what it had meant to her when he’d worried that she didn’t get any birthday presents. Then they had touched one another. Her soft, flawless skin, her beautiful, thick hair, had been his; her hands—always so inquisitive, so restless—had roamed freely over him. And so their loving exchange had continued for what seemed like hours. They shared their thoughts and feelings when they had been away from each other; her hopeful anticipation when she had solved his Rubik’s Cube for him; his joy upon finding it. The excitement he’d experienced when copying the Morse Code for the two of them to use, and the happiness each of them had experienced while using it to say good night to each other. Times of thoughtlessness and misunderstanding were exposed and resolved through silent thoughts of apology and foregiveness. Then they would touch again, each caress causing other memories, thoughts and emotions to come to the fore and be shared. In this way, they came to understand how their love had blossomed and sprung forth, like a tiny mustard seed into something alive and beautiful, in a new and more perfect way.

They had made love that night, but not in any conventional sense. It had been something that no pornographer peddling the magazines Oskar had seen in the basement of his old apartment could ever have imagined. Oskar suspected that they were the only two people on earth who had ever experienced one another that way. It had been one of the most exciting, yet blissful, experiences Oskar had ever had. Just before he had finally fallen asleep with her cupped against him, he realized he had never felt so utterly tranquil and fulfilled. And he knew that she, too, felt the same.

He had wondered—not at the time, because intellectual reflection was not something that had occurred as they’d lain together—but later, how it was that they had been able to do what they did when she had not been capable of the same thing at the waterfall. The most likely answer was that she had been hungry at the waterfall, but not the night before she’d left. He did not know whether this was true or not, but he hoped not, since it would have made the whole experience dirty and sinful. That she’d only been able to love him like that because she was full and riding high from another person’s blood—it made him queasy just to think it.

Another possibility was that she’d developed more control over herself in the couple of months after the waterfall. Like a new muscle she’d flexed and made strong within herself, enabling her to shut down her impulse to attack and consume.

Or . . . was there a third possibility? That his response

(my lightning)

had done it? Forced that part of her to retreat, locked it up in some little room inside of her, at least for awhile?

(You saved my life. Not just today—but yesterday, too.)

What had she meant by that?

Now he felt strongly, in his heart, that what they had shared had been too pure, too beautiful, too—he was at a loss to further describe it—to have been anything other than good. If God Himself had been in on their kisses, he would not have been ashamed.

(But God sees everything; knows everything. So he was in on them, wasn’t he?)

He paused to think about this new thought. What if it really had been him—his feelings for Eli—that had allowed it to happen? Would that have made it . . . miraculous?

Impelled by the memory he reached down, grabbed the edge of the marble panel, and began to push it aside. Eli I need you now. I’ll drag you out and take you home. Or I'll just crawl in there and we’ll be together.

It moved a few centimeters with a loud, low, grinding sound, much louder than he’d expected. As if it were a warning. He froze and stopped pushing.

Oskar! Don’t be stupid—she’s different now. She warned you herself: this is exactly what she doesn’t want to happen.

But . . . but what if I could . . . .

The thought died. Oskar let go of the panel and looked once more into the vault. She hadn’t moved. She still looked . . . shrunken, dusty and dead. He breathed a sigh of relief, feeling that some horrible tragedy had just been narrowly averted, and stood up. Slowly he backed away from the wall, then turned and walked quickly to the front. He realized as he switched off his light to open the door that he was shaking like a leaf. But whether it was from fear, or from frustrated desire to be with her, he didn’t know.

Good night, Eli. See you soon? –I hope.