Let the Old Dreams Die by John Ajvide Lindqvist

Author:John Ajvide Lindqvist
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2012-08-30T06:00:00+00:00

What else is there to tell?

Anna survived. After a few days in hospital her physical recovery was complete. She didn’t even need a D and C. Death had done its job meticulously. She would never be able to have children.

The case featured in the papers for a week or so, and Josef got four years for contributing to the death of another person. A psychiatrist who had been working with Kaxe was able to confirm that he had strong suicidal tendencies, and that Josef’s version of events was not at all unlikely.

There was no mention of Death, which lives in the sea.

Anna visited Josef in prison a few times, but their relationship was untenable after what had happened. She said he shouldn’t blame himself, that it had been her own choice, but it didn’t help much. Josef was lost to the world.

After a couple of years Anna started painting again, taking up the thread she had begun in the days before the thing that had happened, but without the comic element. Things went well for her. She was never happy again, but she kept going.

When Josef came out of prison he went back to the house. Spent a few months sorting it out.

In prison he had had plenty of time to consider his impressions from the hours spent in the company of Death. In spite of the fact that he had striven for eternal life, it came as a relief when he realised that the immortality given to him through the pact applied only to death by water.

He would age, like other people. He could take his own life if he wanted to. But he would never drown.

The years passed. Josef was unable to return to any kind of work. At the age of thirty-eight he was an old man, sitting in his cottage and living on benefits, drinking as much as he could.

The locals avoided him. They knew who he was, what he’d done. Perhaps their attitude might have mellowed over the years if he hadn’t also stopped washing, stopped eating more than was absolutely necessary to stay alive.

One evening as he sat there, mercifully drunk, staring out at the lighthouse sending its flashes of light across the water as it had always done, he realised with a bitter laugh that he was becoming exactly like Kaxe.

Life lost more and more of its meaning. He was incapable of enjoying anything any longer. Even the booze didn’t help. In this desert the importance of his only oasis grew and grew, the reason why things had turned out like this, the only gift he had been given. The fact that he couldn’t drown.

One October day he fetched an anchor with a chain from the boathouse, heaved it into the boat and set off. He sailed to the same spot where he had sunk Kaxe. There he fastened the chain tightly around his waist with a lockable split pin so that he would be able to open it again once he was convinced.

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