And after he had lain his hand on mine
Let the Right One In“And after he had lain his hand on mine” opens an epigraph from Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, Canto III, translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Its image of touch marks the passage from comfort toward an encounter with what has been concealed, setting an intimate, shadowed threshold for Part Three.
Source and Placement
The epigraph continues by describing a guide whose joyful expression comforts the speaker as he leads him “in among the secret things.” It appears beneath the part heading “SNOW, MELTING AGAINST SKIN.” The phrase thus introduces the section through a gesture of contact and guidance, while the heading and the epigraph’s movement toward hidden things give that opening a wintry, mysterious frame.
Syntax and Perspective
The opening words form a temporal continuation rather than a self-contained beginning: the touch has already occurred, and the passage turns to what follows it. Its first-person speaker registers comfort before the unnamed guide leads onward, so the movement into the hidden is filtered through a change in feeling, not presented as a bare destination. The excerpt leaves both speaker and guide unidentified; their relationship is conveyed instead through the handclasp, the guide’s expression, and the speaker’s response.
The Adjacent Song Lyric
The passage is followed by a lyric attributed to Nationalteatern’s “Kaldolmar och kalsipper,” in which a speaker insists on being a real ghost and asks whether the listener is supposed to be frightened; the reply is unafraid. Beside the Dante epigraph’s approach to hidden things, this exchange makes the opening’s supernatural register more explicit, while its refusal of fear complicates the solemnity of entering the unknown.
The Epigraph as a Threshold
The excerpt begins in the aftermath of a touch, then moves toward a place described only as secret. That shift—from contact to entry—lets the epigraph work as a threshold rather than an explanation: it offers a direction into the unknown without naming what will be found there.
