Part 41 (2/2)

I am not alone.

Her mouth felt like paper. She had no feeling in her tongue. She continued to lie there, thinking of the cottage that she and Per, Lena's father, had rented a couple of summers when Lena was little. The rat's nest they found all the way in under the kitchen counter. The rats had chewed off small pieces of a milk carton and a packet of cornflakes, built what almost looked like a little house, a fantastic construction of multicolored cardboard.

Virginia had felt a certain kind of guilt as she vacuumed up the little house. No, more than that. A superst.i.tious feeling of transgression. transgression. As she inserted the cold mechanical trunk of the vacuum cleaner into the delicate, fine construction the rat had spent the winter building it felt like she was casting out a good spirit. As she inserted the cold mechanical trunk of the vacuum cleaner into the delicate, fine construction the rat had spent the winter building it felt like she was casting out a good spirit.

And sure enough. When the rat was not caught in any of the traps but continued to eat their dry goods even though it was summer, Per had put out rat poison. They had argued about it. They had argued about other things. About everything. In July sometime the rat had died, somewhere inside the wall.

As the stench of the rat's dead, decomposing body spread through the house, their marriage slowly broke down that summer. They had gone home a week earlier than planned since they could no longer tolerate the stench or each other. The good spirit had left them.

What happened to that house? Does anyone else live there now?

She heard a squeaking sound, a hiss.

There IS a rat! Inside these blankets!

She was gripped by panic.

Still wrapped up, she threw herself to the side, hitting the closet doors so they flew open, and she tumbled out onto the floor. She kicked with her legs, waving her arms until she managed to free herself. Disgusted, she crawled up onto the bed, into a corner, pulling her knees under her chin, staring at the pile of blankets and duvets, waiting for a movement. She would scream when it came. Scream so the whole house came rus.h.i.+ng with hammers and axes and beat the pile of blankets until the rat was dead.

The blanket on top was green with blue dots. Wasn't there a movement there? She drew a breath in order to scream, and she heard the squeaking, hissing again.

I'm ... breathing.

Yes. That was the last thing she had determined before she fell asleep: that she wasn't breathing. Now she was breathing again. She drew the air in tentatively, and heard the squeaking, hissing. It was coming from her air pa.s.sages. They had dried out as she was resting, were making these sounds. She cleared her throat and felt a rotten taste in her mouth. She remembered everything. Everything.

She looked at her arms. Strands of dried blood covered them, but no cuts or scars were visible. She picked out the spot on the inside of her elbow where she knew she had cut herself at least twice. Maybe a faint streak of pink skin. Yes. Possibly. Except for that everything was healed. She rubbed her eyes and checked the time. A quarter past six. It was evening. Dark. She looked down again at the green blanket, the blue dots.

Where is the light coming from?

The overhead light was off, it was evening outside, all the blinds were drawn. How could she possibly be seeing all the contours and colors so clearly? In the closet it had been pitch black. She hadn't seen anything there. But now... it was clear as day.

A little light always gets in.

Was she breathing?

She couldn't figure it out. As soon as she started to think think about her breathing she also controlled it. Maybe she only breathed when she thought of it. about her breathing she also controlled it. Maybe she only breathed when she thought of it.

But that first breath, the one she had mistaken for the sound of a rat... she hadn't thought that one. But perhaps it had only been like a ... like a ...

She shut her eyes.

Ted.

She had been there when he was born. Lena had never met Ted's father again after the night when Ted was conceived. Some Finnish businessman in Stockholm for a conference and so on. So Virginia had been there for the birth, had nagged and pleaded her way there.

And now it came back to her. Ted's first breath.

How he had come out. The little body, sticky, purple, hardly human. The explosion of joy in her chest that changed to a cloud of anxiety when he didn't breathe. The midwife who had calmly picked up the little creature in her hands. Virginia had expected her to hold the little body upside down, slap him on the behind, but just as the midwife picked him up a bubble of saliva formed at his mouth. A bubble that grew, grew and . . . burst. And then came his cry, the first cry. And he breathed. So?

Was that what Virginia's squeaky breath had been? A birth cry?

She straightened up, lying down on her back on the bed. Continued to replay the images of the birth. How she had washed Ted, since Lena had been too weak, had lost a lot of blood. Yes. After Ted had come out it had run over the edge of the birthing bed and the nurses had been there with paper, ma.s.ses of paper. Finally it had stopped of its own accord. The heap of blood-drenched paper, the midwife's dark red hands. Her calm, her efficiency in spite of all... the blood. All that blood. Thirsty. Thirsty.

Her mouth was sticky and she replayed the sequence a number of times, zooming in on everything that had been covered in blood; the midwife's hands to let my tongue glide over those hands, the blood-drenched paper to let my tongue glide over those hands, the blood-drenched paper on the floor, put them in my mouth, suck on them, between Lena's legs on the floor, put them in my mouth, suck on them, between Lena's legs where the blood ran out in a thin rivulet, to . . . where the blood ran out in a thin rivulet, to . . .

She sat up abruptly, ran doubled-over to the bathroom and threw open the lid to the toilet, leaned her head over the bowl. Nothing came. Just dry, convulsive heaves. She leaned her forehead against the edge of the bowl. The images of the birth started to well up again.

Don'twantdon'twantdon'twantdon'twa- She banged her forehead hard against the porcelain and a geyser of icy clear pain spurted up in her head. Everything in front of her eyes turned bright blue. She smiled, and fell sideways to the floor, down onto the bathroom rug that...

Cost 14:90, but I got it for ten because a large piece of fuzz came off when the cas.h.i.+er pulled off the price tag, and when I came out onto the square from Ahlen's department store there was a pigeon pecking from a cardboard container where there were a couple of french fries and the pigeon was gray ... and ... blue ... there was... a strong backlight... She didn't know how long she had been gone. One minute, an hour?

Maybe only a few seconds. But something had changed. She was calm. The fuzz of the bathroom mat felt good against her cheek as she lay there and looked at the rusted pipe that ran down from the sink into the floor. She thought the pipe had a beautiful shape.

A strong smell of urine. She hadn't wet her pants, no, because it was ... Lacke's urine she smelled. She bent her body, moved her head closer to the floor under the toilet, sniffed. Lacke ... and Morgan. She couldn't understand how she knew that but she knew: Morgan had peed on the side.

But Morgan hasn't even been here.

No, actually. That evening when they had helped her home. The evening when she was attacked. Bitten. Yes, of course. Everything fell into place. Morgan had been here, Morgan had used the bathroom, and she had been lying out there on the couch after having been bitten and now she could see in the dark, was sensitive to light, and needed blood and- A vampire.

That's how it was. She had not contracted some rare and unpleasant disease that was treatable at the hospital or in a psychiatric ward or with ...

Photo-therapy!

She started to laugh, then coughed, turned over on her back, stared up at the ceiling, and went over everything. The cuts that healed so quickly, the effect of the sun on her skin, blood. She said it aloud: ”I am a vampire.”

It couldn't be. They didn't exist. But even so something felt lighter. As if a pressure in her head eased. A weight lifted from her. It wasn't her fault. The revolting fantasies, the terrible things she had done to herself all night. It wasn't something she was responsible for.

It was simply . . . very natural.

She got up halfway, and started to run a bath, sat on the toilet and watched the running water, the bath as it slowly filled. The phone rang. She only registered it as an indifferent noise, a mechanical signal. It didn't mean anything. She couldn't talk to anyone anyway. No one could talk to her.

Oskar had not read Sat.u.r.day's paper. Now it was spread out in front of him on the kitchen table. He had had it turned to the same page for a while and read the caption to the picture over and over again. The picture he couldn't let go of.

The text was about the man who had been found frozen into the ice down by the Blackeberg hospital. How he had been found, how the recovery work had been undertaken. There was a small picture of Mr. Avila as he stood pointing out over the water, toward the hole in the ice. In the quote from Mr. Avila, the reporter had smoothed out his linguistic eccentricities.

All this was interesting enough and worth cutting out to save, but that wasn't what he was staring at, couldn't tear himself from.

It was the picture of the s.h.i.+rt.

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