Little Star by John Ajvide Lindqvist Read Free Book Online Page B

him. There had to be a purpose.
    Another source of relief was that Laila seemed happier than she had been for some considerable time. Occasionally he even heard her humming to herself as she moved around the house. Mostly old pop songs, of course, but he actually like hearing her voice as he sat at his keyboard sweating over yet another three-chord tune he was trying to smarten up by inserting a surprising minor chord, even though it did feel like putting an evening jacket on a pig.
    However, every rose has a thorn.
    One evening when Lennart had been in the boiler room stoking up the fire for the last time and was on his way to the girl’s room to get her ready for the night, he heard a sound. He stopped by the half-open door to the girl’s room and listened. Very, very faintly he could hear the girl’s voice as she lay in her cot…humming. When Lennart had been standing there for a while he began to pick out a melody he recognised, but was unable to place. Odd words that fitted the melody flickered through his mind.
    Glances…something…eyes
    Lennart refused to believe his ears. But it was impossible to deny it. The girl was lying there humming ‘Strangers in the Night’. Lennart opened the door and walked in. The humming stopped abruptly.
    He picked up the girl and looked into her unfathomable eyes,which never seemed to be looking into his, but at a point far beyond him. He realised what was going on. It wasn’t actually ‘Strangers in the Night’ he had heard, but ‘Tusen och en natt’, Lasse Lönndahl’s saccharine Swedish version of the same song. One of Laila’s favourites.
    This is how it happens.
    The fact that it was totally unreasonable for a baby to be able to remember and reproduce a tune was something that didn’t even cross Lennart’s mind. The girl had already crossed so many boundaries when it came to music that he had grown used to it, but…
    This is how it happens.
    Crap has an astonishing ability to find its mark. It doesn’t matter how carefully you try to enclose and protect. The crap seeps in through the gaps, through the cracks you have forgotten to fill. And then it takes over.
    Lennart put the girl down on the straw mat, where she began clumsily hitting out at the colourful blocks Laila had put there. Lennart cleared his throat and began to sing quietly, ‘O Värmland, thou art beautiful…’ The girl took no notice of him; she simply carried on hitting the blocks until they were all out of reach.

It was a mild winter, and Laila was able to continue her outdoor excursions with the child well into December. At the beginning of January there was a cold snap with snow, and it was the snow rather than the cold that prevented her from going out when Lennart was away. She didn’t want to leave any tracks.
    Lennart had strictly forbidden her from having any contact whatsoever with the child, beyond what was absolutely necessary. She was not allowed to talk, or sing, or make any noise at all. The child was to live in a bubble of silence, apart from the singing practice which Lennart conducted with her. Laila had understood the aim of his project and thought it was completely insane, but since she was able to offer the child small oases of normality, she left him to it.
    One afternoon she was sitting watching as the child played, or whatever it was she did. The girl had learned to grip things, and would sit there for ages with the same coloured block, picking it up and dropping it, picking it up and dropping it.
    Laila tried to give her one of the soft toys she had brought out of storage. A little fox came bobbing along, ‘Here comes Freddy Fox, sniff sniff sniff…but what’s this he can smell?’
    The girl was completely uninterested, and took no notice whatsoever of Freddy, even when he nudged her thigh with his nose. Instead she grabbed hold of her block once again, lifted it up to eye level and looked at it, dropped it, and watched carefully as it fell and rolled away. When it