Free Handling the Undead by John Ajvide Lindqvist

after'. Tore in tails, she in a white dress with a colourful bouquet of flowers at her breast. Both staring into the future with spookily blue eyes. (Tore had not even had blue eyes; the retoucher had made a mistake, but they'd never got around to having it corrected.)

    Elvy sighed, stroking the photograph with her finger.

    'That's how things can end up,' she said, not thinking of anything in particular.

    She turned on the bedside lamp, wondering if she should try another session with Grimberg before she fell asleep, but before she had made up her mind there was something at the front door. She listened. The sound came again. A ... scratching.

    What in the name of heaven ... ?
     
    The clock on her bedside table said it was twenty past twelve. The scratching came again. Probably some animal, perhaps a dog, but what would it be doing at her house? She waited a while, but the scratching continued. Stray dogs were unusual round here. In the winter you might get a deer, wandering into the suburbs, but they never came to the door to pay a visit.

    She pulled on her robe and walked to the front door, listening. Not a cat, she thought. Partly because the scraping was too strong, and partly because it appeared to be coming from chest height. Elvy leaned against the door post and whispered loudly, 'Who is it?'

    The scraping stopped. Now there was a low whimpering instead.

    It must be someone who's been injured in some way .

    She stopped thinking about it and opened the door.

    He was dressed in his best suit, but it did not hang well on him. During his final years of illness he had lost about twenty kilos and the gabardine now drooped from his shoulders where he stood on the front steps, his arms dangling. Elvy backed up a couple of steps until her feet bumped the doorstop and she almost lost her balance, but grabbed the coat rack and straightened again.

    Tore was standing still, staring at his feet. Elvy looked down. His feet were bare and white, his toenails untrimmed.

    She stared at his feet and thought:

    They cheated. They haven't trimmed his toenails.
     
    For it was not terror or horror that she felt when she looked at her husband, dead three years after their fiftieth anniversary, now returned. No. Only surprise and ... a kind of exhaustion. Then she took a step towards him and said, 'What are you doing here?'

    Tore did not answer. But he lifted his head. There were eyes, but no gaze. Elvy was used to this, she'd had the non-gaze turned on her for three years. It was just that now it was even more frozen, lifeless.

    This is not Tore. This is a doll.
     
    The doll took a couple of steps forward and entered the house.
    Elvy could not bring herself to do anything to stop it. She wasn't afraid, but she had no idea what she should do.

    It was Tore, there was no sense in pretending anything else. But how was this possible? She had felt for his absent pulse; had held the little hand mirror to his mouth and seen that he was no longer breathing. She had heard the ambulance driver say it, she'd been given certificates confirming the fact that Tore was dead, deceased, gone.

    The resurrection of the flesh ...

    He brushed past her and went on into the house. A cloud of chilled hospital smell reached her nostrils; disinfectant, starch ... and something sweeter, more fruity underneath. She quickly pulled herself together, grabbed hold of his shoulder and whispered, 'What are you doing?'

    He paid her no attention, and continued his steps-jerkily, as if each one was an effort-in the direction of the other bedroom. His room.

    It struck her suddenly that for the first time in seven years she was seeing him walk. Stiffly, as if unused to his new-found body, but walking nonetheless. Straight to the room where Flora was sleeping.

    Elvy turned around, grabbed hold of both his shoulders from behind and whisper-shouted, 'Flora is sleeping in there! Let her be!’

    Tore stopped, the cold from his body seeping through the cloth into her