Gosta mumbled something from the couch. Virginia leaned her head in toward him.
"What did you say?"
Gosta spoke in a very small voice as he stared into his drink.
"Please forgive me. But I"m too scared. I can"t."
Morgan turned back from the window, held his arm out.
"That"s how it is, then. Nothing more to talk about." He gave Karlsson a sharp look. "We"ll have to think of an alternative. Do it some other way. Maybe make a sketch, call, whatever. We"ll think of something." He walked over to Gosta and nudged his foot with his own.
"Hey you, now. Pull yourself together. We"ll take care of this thing anyway. Take it easy. Gosta? Can you hear me? We"ll take care of this. Cheers!"
He stretched out his gla.s.s, clinked it against Gosta"s and took a sip.
"We"ll fix this thing. Won"t we?"
He had left the others outside the gymnasium and started to head home when he heard her voice coming from the school.
"Psst. Oskar!"
Footsteps on stairs and she emerged from the shadows. She had been sitting there, waiting. Then she heard him say good-bye to the others and how they answered as if he was a completely normal person.
The workout session had been good. He wasn"t as weak as he had thought, was able to do more than a couple of the guys who had been there several times before. And his concern that Mr. Avila would interrogate him about what had happened out there on the ice today turned out to be unfounded. Mr. Avila had simply asked: "Do you want to talk about it?" and when Oskar shook his head they left it at that. The gym was another world, separate from school. Mr. Avila was less severe and the other guys left him alone. Micke hadn"t been there, of course. Was Micke scared of him now? The thought was enough to make his head spin.
He walked over to meet Eli.
"Hi."
"Hey."
Without saying anything about it they had switched their words of greeting. Eli was wearing a checkered shirt that was much too big for her and she looked ... shriveled again. Her skin was dry and her face thinner. Even yesterday Oskar had seen the first white hairs and tonight there were many more.
When she was healthy Oskar thought she was the cutest girl he had seen. But the way she looked right now she was ... you couldn"t compare her to anyone. No one looked like that. Dwarves, maybe. But dwarves weren"t thin like that... nothing was. He was grateful she hadn"t appeared in front of the others.
"How"s it going?" he asked. "So so."
"Want to do something?"
"Of course."
They walked home side by side. Oskar had a plan. They were going to enter into a pact together. If they entered into a pact together, Eli would become healthy. A magical thought, inspired by the books he had read. But magic ... surely there was a little magic in the world. The people who denied the existence of magic, they were the ones that it went badly for.
They walked into the yard. He touched Eli"s shoulder.
"Should we check the garbage room?"
"OK.".
They walked in through Eli"s front door and Oskar unlocked the door to the bas.e.m.e.nt.
"Don"t you have a bas.e.m.e.nt key?" he asked.
"I don"t think so."
It was pitch black in the bas.e.m.e.nt entrance. The door slammed shut behind them with a heavy sound. They stood still, side by side, breathing. Oskar whispered: "Eli, you know what? Today . .. Jonny and Micke tried to throw me into the water. Into a hole in the ice."
"No! You-"
"Wait. Do you know what I did? I had a stick, a big stick. I hit Jonny in the head with it so he started to bleed. He got a concussion, went to the hospital. I never ended up in the water. I. . . beat him." Quiet for a few moments. Then Eli said: "Oskar."
"Yes."
"Yippee."
Oskar stretched his hand to the light switch; he wanted to see her face. Turned it on. She was staring straight into his eyes and he saw her pupils. For a few moments before they got used to the light they looked like those crystals they talked about in physics cla.s.s, what were they called ... elliptical.
Like a lizard. No. Cats. Cats.
Eli blinked. Her pupils were normal again.
"What is it?"
"Nothing. Come on ..."
Oskar walked over to the bulk item trash room and opened the door. The bag was almost full, hadn"t been emptied for a while. Eli squeezed in beside him and they rummaged through the trash. Oskar found a bag with empty bottles that you could get a deposit back on. Eli found a plastic sword, waved it around, said: "Should we check the one next door?"
"No, Tommy and those guys might be there."
"Who are they?"
"Oh, some older guys who use a bas.e.m.e.nt storage unit.. . they hang out there in the evening."
"Are there a lot of them?"
"No, three. Most of the time it"s just Tommy."
"And they"re dangerous?"
Oskar shrugged. "Let"s check it out, then."
They walked out through Oskar"s building into the next bas.e.m.e.nt corridor, all the way into Tommy"s building. As Oskar stood there with a key in his hand, about to unlock the last door, he hesitated. If they were in there? If they caught sight of Eli? If they... it could turn into something he wasn"t able to handle. Eli held the plastic sword in front of her. "What is it?"
"Nothing."
He unlocked the door. As soon as they walked into the corridor he heard music coming from the storage unit. As he turned to her he whispered: "They"re here! Come on."
Eli stopped, sniffed.
"What"s that smell?"
Oskar checked to make sure that nothing was moving around at the other end of the corridor, then sniffed the air. Couldn"t smell anything except the usual bas.e.m.e.nt air. Eli said, "Paint, glue." Oscar sniffed again. He couldn"t smell it but he knew what it had to be. When he turned back to Eli to get her to follow him he saw that she was doing something with the lock.
"Come on. What are you doing?" I m just. . .
As Oskar was unlocking the door to the next bas.e.m.e.nt corridor, their path of retreat, the door fell shut behind them. It didn"t make the normal sound. No click, just a metallic clunk. On the way back to their bas.e.m.e.nt he told Eli about glue-sniffing; how crazy those guys could get when they did that.
He felt safe again in his own bas.e.m.e.nt. He knelt down and started to count the bottles in the bag. Fourteen beer bottles and a liquor bottle with no deposit value.
When he looked up to report this to Eli she was standing in front of him with the plastic sword held up as if about to attack. Used to sudden blows as he was, he flinched a little. But Eli mumbled something and lowered the sword against his shoulder and said, with as deep a voice as she could muster: "I herewith dub you, Jonny"s conqueror, knight of Blackeberg and all surrounding areas like Vallingby... um ..."
"Racksta."
"Racksta."
"Maybe Angby?"
"Angby maybe."
Eli tapped him lightly on the shoulder for each new area. Oskar took his knife out of the bag, held it out, and proclaimed that he was the Knight of Angby Maybe. Wanted Eli to be the Beautiful Maiden he would rescue from the Dragon.
But Eli was a terrible monster who ate beautiful maidens for lunch and she was the one he would have to fight. Oskar left the knife in his sheath as they fought, shouted, and ran around in the corridors. In the middle of their game they heard a sc.r.a.pe in the lock to the bas.e.m.e.nt doors. They quickly piled into a food cellar where they hardly had room to sit hip against hip, and breathed quickly and quietly. They heard a man"s voice.
"What are you doing down here?"
Oskar and Eli held their breath as the man waited, listening. Then he said: "d.a.m.n kids" and left. They stayed in the food cellar until they were sure the man had gone, then they crawled out, leaned against the wooden wall, giggling. After a while Eli stretched out on the concrete floor and stared up at the ceiling.
Oskar touched her foot.
"Are you tired?"
"Yes. Tired."
Oskar pulled his knife out of the sheath, looked at it. It was heavy, beautiful. He carefully pressed his pointed finger against the tip, then removed it. A small red dot. He pressed again, harder. When he took his finger away a pearl-shaped drop of blood came out. But this wasn"t the way to do it.
"Eli? Do you want to do something?"
She was still staring up at the ceiling.
"What?"
"Do you want to ... enter into a pact with me?"
"Yes."
If she had asked him "how?" he would maybe have told her what he was thinking before he did it. But she simply said "yes." She wanted to do it, whatever it was. Oskar swallowed hard, gripped the knife so the edge was resting against the palm of his hand, shut his eyes, and pulled the blade out of his hand. A stinging, smarting pain. He caught his breath. Did I do this? Did I do this?
He opened his eyes, opened his hand. Yes. A thin trickle of blood was revealed in his palm. The blood pushed out slowly, not as he had thought in a thin line but as a string of pearls that he stared at with fascination as they merged into a thicker, uneven ma.s.s.
Eli lifted her head.
"What are you doing?"
Oskar was still holding his hand in front of his face, staring at it, and said: "It"s easy, Eli, it wasn"t even . . ."
He held his bleeding hand toward her. Her eyes widened. She shook her head violently while she crawled backward, away from his hand.
"No, Oskar ..."
"What is it?"
"Oskar, no."
"It almost doesn"t hurt at all."
Eli stopped backing up, staring at his hand while she kept shaking her head. Oskar was holding the knife by the blade in his other hand, held it out to her handle first.
"You only have to p.r.i.c.k yourself in a finger or something. Then we"ll mix our blood. And then we have our pact."
Eli did not take the knife. Oskar put it down on the floor so he could catch a drop of blood that fell from his wound.
"Come on. Don"t you want to?"
"Oskar ... we can"t. You would be infected, you-"
"It doesn"t feel like that, it..."
A ghost flew into Eli"s face, distorting it into something so different from the girl he knew that he completely forgot about catching the blood that dropped from his hand. She now looked like the monster they had recently pretended that she was and Oskar jumped back while the pain in his hand intensified.
"Eli, what..."
She sat up, pulled her legs under her, crouched on all fours, and stared straight at his bleeding hand, took a step closer toward it. Stopped, clenched her teeth, and got out a gruff: "Leave!"
Tears of fear welled up in Oskar"s eyes. "Eli, stop it. Stop playing. Stop it."
Eli crawled a bit closer, stopped again. She forced her body to contort itself so her head was lowered to the ground and screamed: "Go! Or you"ll die!"
Oskar got up, took a few steps back. His feet hit against the bag of bottles so it fell over, with a clinking sound. He flattened himself against the wall while Eli crawled over to the little smear of blood that had fallen from his hand.
Another bottle fell over and broke against the concrete floor while Oskar stood pressed against the wall and stared at Eli, who stretched out her tongue and licked the dirty concrete, whisked her tongue around on the place where blood had fallen.
A bottle clinked softly and stopped moving. Eli licked and licked the floor. When she lifted her face to him there was a gray smear of dirt on the tip of her nose. "Go ... please ... leave."
Then the ghost flew into her face again, but before it had time to take over she got up and ran down the corridor, opened the door to her stairwell, and disappeared. Oskar stood there with the damaged hand tightly wrapped. Blood was starting to well out around the edges. He opened it, looked at the cut. It had gone deeper than he had intended, but it wasn"t dangerous, he thought. Some blood was already starting to congeal.
He looked at the by-now pale splotch on the floor. Then he gingerly licked a little of the blood on his palm, spit it out.