Free Let the Old Dreams Die by John Ajvide Lindqvist

Vore sitting there with the box on his knee. He made no move to stop her. She gathered up her clothes, which were strewn across the floor, and bundled them up in her arms.
    ‘What…why have you got it?’
    Vore looked at her. Where she had seen warmth and love just minutes before there was now only the loneliness of a tarn in the depths of the forest where no one ever goes. In a thin voice he said, ‘Don’t you know?’
    She shook her head and took a single step to the door, opened it. Vore was still sitting on the bed. She walked out onto the porch and the wind showered her naked body with light rain. The candle flames flickered wildly inside the cottage, cascading patterns over the big man on the bed with the little box on his knee.
    I was the one who gave birth to it…
    The white eyes opening, the finger pushed into the chest.
    She slammed the door and ran over to the house. When she got inside she locked the front door. She dropped her clothes on the hall floor and went straight into the kitchen where she knocked back thelast of the wine straight out of the bottle. Then she opened another and went into the bedroom, put on a CD of Chopin’s piano sonatas, turned the volume up high and crawled into bed.
    She didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to know anything. When she had drunk half the bottle she ran her fingers over her sex. She could feel a sticky wetness, and brought her fingers up to her nose. They smelled of germinating sprouts and salt water. She caressed herself. Nothing happened. She had another drink.
    When the bottle was empty and the pattern on the curtains was beginning to move, wriggling around before her eyes, there was a knock on the door.
    ‘Go away,’ she whispered. ‘Go away.’
    She staggered over to the stereo and turned up the volume until the piano was reverberating off the walls. There might have been another knock at the door, there might not. She crawled back into bed and pulled the covers over her head.
    I don’t want to. Don’t want to don’t want to…
    The pictures in her head became confused. Big hands grabbing at her. A forest of enormous tree trunks that disappeared into shadow, then everything was white, white. White hands, white clothes, white walls. Hands that seized her, lifted her. She travelled along a sloping chute down into the darkness, and fell asleep.
    She opened her eyes and knew nothing. Grey light was pouring into the room, and her mouth was stuck together. She had a splitting headache, and her belly was hurting because she was desperate for a pee. She managed to get out of bed and into the bathroom.
    When she was sitting on the toilet letting it all go, she remembered. She looked down to where the urine was pouring out of her in a jagged stream, tried to imagine what things looked like inside her. It was impossible. An illustration from her school biology lessons flashed through her mind.
    It’s not true. I’m a freak.
    She leaned against the washbasin, turned on the tap, half pulled herself up and drank. The sharpness of the water was real. She clung onto it and drank until her stomach was cold. When she straightened up and walked into the kitchen, the water began to reach the same temperature as the rest of her body. The contours blurred once more. She sat down on a chair, thought:
there’s the coffee machine, there’s the magazine rack, there’s the clock. It’s a quarter past eleven. There’s a box of matches. All of these things exist. I exist too.
    She took two painkillers out of the medicine drawer, swallowed them with another swig of cold water from a glass that was hard and round in her hand.
    Quarter past eleven!
    For a moment she panicked, thinking she was late for work. Then she remembered she was off sick. She went back to the bedroom, looked out of the window. The white car had gone. She lay down on the bed, gazed up at the ceiling for an hour.
    She thought she understood everything. But she had to know.
    At a quarter past one she was