Free Let the Old Dreams Die by John Ajvide Lindqvist Page B

family home. The album of black and white photographs, the house built by hergreat-grandfather, the whole line stretching back through time was erased. It didn’t belong to her. Tall, sinewy people in fields, standing next to houses, swimming. An unusual farming family. To which she did not belong, of course.
    ‘Steps…’ she heard herself say.
    ‘Yes,’ said her father. ‘I don’t know how much of this you want to hear, but it was a serious case of…neglect, if I can put it that way. You were crawling around without a stitch on even though it was October, and they didn’t really have any food. No electricity, no water, and you couldn’t talk. Nothing. They weren’t even living in a house, it was more a kind of shelter. Just walls. They built a fire on the ground. So you were…taken into care. And eventually you came to us.’
    Tears welled up in her eyes. She dashed them away, covered her mouth with her hand and stared out of the window.
    ‘Darling girl,’ said her father, his voice expressionless. ‘I can’t reach out and touch you. As I should do right now.’
    Tina didn’t move.
    ‘And my parents? What happened to them?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    She caught his eye. Refused to look away. Her father sighed deeply. ‘They ended up in a mental institution. Died. Both of them. Quite soon.’
    ‘They were killed.’
    Her father flinched at the harshness in her voice. His face aged a few more years. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I suppose you could look at it that way. That’s what I think, looking back.’ His eyes sought hers, pleading. ‘We did what we thought was best. It wasn’t us who decided you should be taken into care. We just welcomed you…as our child. When it had already happened.’
    Tina nodded and stood up. ‘I understand,’ she said.
    ‘Do you?’
    ‘No. But perhaps I will.’ She looked down at him, sitting there in his wheelchair. ‘What was my name?’ she asked. ‘Had they given me a name?’
    Her father’s voice was so weak she thought he said ‘Eva’. She leaned closer to his mouth. ‘What did you say?’
    ‘Reva. They said Reva. I don’t know if it was a name or just… just something they said.’
    ‘Reva.’
    ‘Yes.’
    Reva. Vore.
    On the bus home from Norrtälje she peered out of the windows as they drove along. Beyond the fences, into the forest. The significance of the nondescript mass of fir trees had deepened. She had always felt that she belonged to the forest. Now she knew it was true.
    Reva.
    Had they called out her name, locked inside white rooms?
    She imagined padded cells, heavy iron doors with peep holes. Saw her mother and father hurling themselves at the walls, screaming to be let out, to be released back into the forest, to be given back their child. But there were only rigid, closed institutionalised faces around them. Not a trace of green, of greenery.
    Not a stitch on even though it was October. Didn’t really have any food.
    She had never really needed a great deal of food, and she didn’t like the food that was served in cafés, in the cafeteria at work. She liked snails, sushi. Raw fish. She was almost never cold, however low the temperature fell.
    They had doubtless known how to look after their own child. But the early sixties, the art of social engineering—smiling mothers in floral aprons, record years, the building project known as the Million Program. Lighting a fire on the ground and no food in thelarder, if they even had a larder. Such things couldn’t be permitted.
    Tina had heard that people were sterilised well into the 1970s. Was that what happened to her parents?
    A mental institution.
    She couldn’t get away from the image of those white cubes, her mother and father each locked in their own space, screaming themselves hoarse until they died of grief. She tried to think that perhaps it was for the best. That otherwise they would have neglected her until she died. But she had survived at least one winter, hadn’t she? The most