Lars Kepler - The Hypnotist

“Sorry,” I said, “I just wanted to let in a bit of light.”

In the sudden brightness, Eva Blau was sitting up and looking at me with heavily drugged eyes, the corners of her mouth curving downwards bitterly. My heart was pounding. The tip of Eva’s nose had been cut off. She was hunched over, with a bloodstained bandage around her hand, just staring at me.

“Eva, I came as soon as I heard,” I said.

She banged her clenched fist slowly against her stomach. The circular wound from the severed tip of her nose glowed red in her tortured face.

“I tried to help you all,” I said. “But I’m beginning to understand that I was wrong about almost everything. I thought I was on to something important, that I understood how hypnosis worked. But I didn’t, I didn’t understand anything. I’m sorry I couldn’t help you, not one of you.”

She rubbed her nose with the back of her hand, and blood began to trickle from the wound above her mouth.

“Eva? Why have you done this to yourself?” I asked her.

“It was you, you, it’s your fault!” she yelled. “It’s all your fault. You’ve destroyed my life, you’ve taken everything I have!”

“I understand that you’re angry with me because- ”

“Shut the fuck up, You don’t understand anything. My life has been destroyed, and I will destroy yours. I can wait, I can wait as long as it takes, but I will have my revenge.”

Then she started to scream, her mouth wide open, the sound hoarse and insane. The door flew open and a doctor came in.

“You were supposed to wait outside,” he said. He sounded shaken, but he was angry.

“The nurse gave me the key, so I thought- ”

He pulled me into the corridor, closed the door, and locked Eva in.

“Haven’t you done enough harm? This patient is suffering from persecutory delusions- ”

I interrupted him with a smile. “I don’t think so.”

“That is my assessment of this patient,” he said.

“Of course. I’m sorry.”

“Hundreds of times every day she demands that we lock her door and lock the key inside the key cupboard.”

“Yes, but- ”

“And she keeps saying she won’t testify against anyone, that we can subject her to electric shocks and rape, but she won’t tell us anything. What the hell did you actually do to your patients? She’s terribly frightened. I can’t believe you went ahead and- ”

“She’s angry with me, but she isn’t afraid of me.”

“I heard her screaming,” he said.

After my visit to the hospital and my encounter with Eva Blau, I drove to Television Centre and asked to speak to Stefanie von Sydow, the TV news reporter who had tried to get a comment out of me earlier. The receptionist dialled an editorial assistant and then handed me the phone. I said I was ready to do an interview if they were interested. After a little while the assistant came downstairs. She was a young woman with short hair and an intelligent expression.

“Stefanie can see you in ten minutes,” she said.

“Good.”

“I’ll take you to make-up.”

The interview was brief. When I went home, the entire house was in darkness. I called out but there was no reply. I was surprised to find Simone upstairs sitting in front of the television, but it wasn’t switched on.

“Has something happened?” I asked. “Where’s Benjamin?”

“He’s at David’s,” she answered tonelessly.

“Isn’t it time he was home? What did you tell him?”

“Nothing.”

“But what’s the matter? Talk to me, Simone.”

“Why should I? I don’t even know you.”

Anxiety rose sharply within me like mercury in a thermometer; I moved closer and tried to brush a strand of hair from her face.

“Don’t touch me,” she snapped, snatching her head away. “What is it? Talk to me, Simone.”

She nodded, and in a voice full of pain, she said, “Erik, please tell me the truth. Have you been unfaithful?”

My heart raced, but my voice stayed gruesomely steady. “What are you talking about?”

“Who is Maja?”

“Maja? I don’t know… should I know who that is?”

“Have you been cheating on me?” Simone’s lips quivered.

“Simone? What is this about?”

My thoughts swirled. How could she know? “I would never… I get it… You’re talking about Maja Swartling. Yes? She hates me for some reason, she’s already influenced the board, and- ”

“Erik,” Simone interrupted. “You get one more chance. Have you slept with another woman?”

“No.”

“You have not been unfaithful. You give me your word?” Her eyes filled with tears.

“I promise,” I whispered.

She opened a pale blue envelope and tipped out several photographs: I saw myself posing in Maja Swartling’s apartment, then a series of pictures of her dressed only in those pale green panties. Tresses of her dark hair curled over her broad white breasts. She looked happy, blushing high on her cheeks. A number of photographs were close-ups of one breast in varying degrees of fuzziness. In one of the pictures she was lying with her thighs wide apart.

“Sixan, let me try to- ”

“I can’t cope with your lies,” she said, and hurled the photos at me, one by one.

The evening news was on. Suddenly there was a report on a scandal brewing at Karolinska University Hospital, involving a hypnotist. Annika Lorentzon did not wish to comment on the case during the ongoing investigation, but when the reporter brought up the significant funding recently allocated by the board to the hypnotist in question, Annika Lorentzon found herself on the defensive.

“That was a mistake,” she said.

“What was a mistake?”

“Erik Maria Bark has been suspended until further notice.”

“Only until further notice?”

“He will not be practising hypnosis at Karolinska Hospital in the future,” she said.

Then I saw my own face on the screen; I was sitting in the television studio looking frightened.

“Will you be continuing to practise hypnosis at other hospitals?” the interviewer asked me.

For a moment I looked confused, as if I didn’t understand the question, and then I shook my head almost imperceptibly.

“Erik Maria Bark, do you still believe that hypnosis is a good form of treatment?” she persisted.

“I don’t know,” I answered feebly. “Will you continue to practise?”

“No.”

“Never?”

“I will never hypnotize anyone again,” I replied. “Is that a promise?”

“Yes.”

Erik gives a start, and the hand holding the coffee cup jerks and spills the liquid all over his jacket and shirt cuffs.

Joona turns to him in surprise and without a word pulls a tissue from a box of Kleenex on the dashboard.

Erik looks out at the big yellow wooden house, the garden, the lawn, and the enormous Winnie-the-Pooh with the fangs drawn on it.

“Is she violent?” asks Joona. “Who?”

“Eva Blau.”

“Maybe. I mean, she’s certainly capable of it.”

Joona switches off the engine and they get out of the car. “Just don’t expect too much,” he says in a melancholy tone. “Liselott Blau might have nothing to do with Eva.”

“No,” Erik replies absently.

They walk up a path made of flat, dark-gray slate. A heavy white veil of little snowflakes whirls in the air.

“We have to be careful,” says Joona. “Because this could actually be the haunted house.” His face lights up in a faint smile.

Erik stops in the middle of the path. The wet fabric around his wrist has grown cold. He smells of stale coffee. “I should explain. The haunted house is a house in the former Yugoslavia,” he says. “It’s also an apartment in Jakobsberg, a gym in Stocksund, a pale green house up in Dorotea, and so on.”