Let the right one in Read Online Free PDF Page B

like that."
    "I'm only checking something. Can I take it?"
    "Don't read about it, I'm serious. All that violent stuff you read isn't good for you."
    "I'm just seeing what's on TV tonight."
    Oskar got up intending to take the paper to his room. His mother hugged him clumsily and pressed her wet cheek against him.
    "Sweetheart, can't you understand that I'm worried about you? What if something were to happen to you—"
    "I know, Mom, I know. I'm careful."
    Oskar hugged her a little back and then carefully extracted himself, went to his room wiping his mother's tears from his cheek.
    This was amazing.
    From what he could understand the boy had been killed while he was out playing in the woods. Unfortunately the victim had not been Jonny Forsberg, only some unknown boy from Vallingby.
    The atmosphere in Vallingby that afternoon had been funereal. He had seen the headlines before he came home and perhaps he was only imagining things but it seemed to him that people in the main square had been talking more, walking more slowly than normal.
    In the hardware store he had swiped an incredibly alluring hunting knife that cost three hundred. He had made up an excuse in advance in case he was caught.
    "Excuse me, Sir, but I am just so afraid of the killer." He would probably also have been able to squeeze out a few tears, if it came to that. They would have let him go, no doubt about it. But he had not been caught, and now the knife was tucked into the hiding place next to his scrapbook.
    He needed to think.
    Could it be that his game had in some way caused the murder to happen?
    He didn't think so, but he couldn't completely rule out the idea. The books he read were full of things like this. A person's thoughts in one place causing an action somewhere else.
    Telekenesis. Voodoo.
    But exactly where, when, and above all how had the murder been committed? If it had involved a large number of stab wounds on a prone body he had to seriously consider the possibility that his hands possessed a terrifying power. A power he would have to learn to control. Or is it... the TREE... that is the link.
    The rotten log that he had cut. Maybe there was something special about it, something that meant that whatever you did to the tree .. . spread further.
    Details.
    Oskar read all of the articles on the murder. A photograph of the policeman who had been to their school and talked about drugs appeared on one page. He was not able to comment further at this stage. Technical experts from the National Laboratory of Forensic Science had been called in to secure evidence from the crime scene. One had to wait and see. There was a picture of the murdered boy, taken from the school yearbook. Oskar had never seen him before. He looked like a Jonny or Micke. Maybe there was now an Oskar in the Vallingby school who had been set free.
    The boy had been on his way to handball practice at the Vallingby gym and never come home. The practice had started at five-thirty. The boy had probably left home at around five o'clock. So at some point in between—Oskar's head started to spin. The time matched up exactly. And the boy had been murdered in the forest.
    7s it true? Am I the one?. . .
    A sixteen-year-old girl had found the body around eight o'clock in the evening and contacted the police. She was described as being treated for
    "extreme shock." Nothing about the state of the body, but if this girl was in a state of extreme shock it indicated the body had been mutilated in some way. Usually they only wrote "shocked."
    What was the girl doing in the woods after dark? Probably nothing interesting. Been picking pine cones or something. But why wasn't there anything about how the boy had been murdered? The only thing they offered was a photograph of the crime scene. Police tape demarcated an ordinary wooded area, a hollow with a large tree in the middle. Tomorrow or the next day there would be a photo in this place, lots of candles and signs about "WHY?" and "WE MISS YOU."