Lars Kepler - The Nightmare

“God, what you’ve been through!” Robert says, shaking his head. “I’ve been on the phone to Joona Linna and he was telling me this crazy story-”

“You know how tough your big brother is,” Axel says, smiling.

They hug and for a moment hold each other tightly. Then they walk together to the house.

“We’ve set the table for lunch in the garden,” Robert says.

“How’s your heart? It hasn’t given you further trouble, has it?” Axel asks as he follows his brother.

“Actually, I was scheduled for surgery next week,” Robert answers gravely.

“I didn’t know that,” Axel whispers.

“I’m getting a pacemaker instead. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it to you-”

“So, an operation.”

“Well, anyway, it was canceled.”

Axel looks at his brother and he feels a dark twist in his soul. He understands who had booked Robert’s operation and that it was meant never to succeed. The details of the patient in a coma had come from Robert’s medical data. He would have gone into an induced coma on the operating table. Axel would have been given the donation from his own brother.

Axel has to sit abruptly on a hall chair. He feels the flush of guilt. Tears come to his eyes.

“Aren’t you coming?” Robert says easily.

“Yes, of course.”

Axel takes a deep breath, stands up, and follows his younger brother through the house and into the garden. Underneath the shade of the big tree in the center of the garden, a table set with their finest tableware is waiting on the marble paving.

Axel starts toward Robert’s wife, Anette, to greet her, but Robert takes his arm to steer him away.

“Remember when we were kids? We had fun together,” he says quietly, looking serious. “Why did we grow apart and stop talking? What happened?”

Axel looks at his brother in surprise. He notices the wrinkles in Robert’s face and the stubbly hair around a large bald spot.

“Life happens-”

“No, there’s something else,” Robert says. “We must talk about something I could not discuss over the phone.”

“What could that be?”

“Beverly told me that you blame yourself for Greta’s death,” Robert says.

“I refuse to discuss that.”

“But you must listen,” Robert insists. “I was backstage at the competition. I heard everything. I heard Greta with her father. She was crying the whole time. She’d played a passage incorrectly and her father was furious she’d lost the competition.”

Axel breaks free of Robert’s hold.

“I already know-”

“Let me tell you what I have to tell you,” he says.

“Go ahead, then.”

“Axel… if only you’d just said something. If only I’d known you blamed yourself for Greta’s suicide. I was the one who overheard her father. It was his fault, his fault and only his fault. They had a horrible fight, and he said horrible things to her. He told her he was completely humiliated. He said that she’d shamed him and that he didn’t want her as his daughter any longer. She was to leave his house. He would no longer finance her at the music academy. She was to drop her whole world here and go back to her drug-addicted mother in Mora.”

“How could he ever have said such a thing!”

“I’ll never forget Greta’s voice,” Robert continues bitterly. “How frightened she sounded. She pleaded that she’d done her best. She said that everyone makes mistakes and there’d be other competitions… That this was the only life she knew, the only one she loved.”

“I always told her there would be other competitions,” Axel says slowly.

He looks around, dazed, and doesn’t know what to do. He slowly sits down on the marble patio and holds his face in his hands.

“She was crying and said she’d kill herself if he didn’t let her keep her life in music, let her stay at the academy and continue to play.”

“I don’t know what to say,” Axel whispers.

“You should thank Beverly,” Robert replies.

Beverly Andersson

It’s drizzling as Beverly stands on the train platform inside Central Station. Her journey south will be in a summer landscape wrapped in gray fog. It’s not until she reaches Hassleholm that the sky will clear again. She changes trains in Lund. Then from Landskrona, she takes the bus to Svalov.

It’s been a long time since she was last home.

She remembers that Dr. Saxeus assured her that things would go well.

I’ve had a long talk with your father, the doctor had said. He really wants you to come home.

Beverly is now walking across a dusty square. She pictures herself as she was two years ago: vomiting on the square because some boys had forced her to drink illegal booze. They’d taken shameful pictures of her and then dropped her off on the square. Her pappa did not want her at home after that incident.

She keeps walking. Her stomach ties in knots when she sees the country road open before her. The road leads to her farm three kilometers away. Cars used to pick her up on this road. Now she doesn’t remember why she would agree to go with them. She’d imagined she had seen something in their eyes: a special shine.

Beverly shifts her heavy suitcase to her other hand.

Down the road, dust flies up from an approaching car.

She thinks, I know that car.

She smiles and waves.

Pappa is coming! Pappa is coming!

Lars Kepler

The Nightmare penelope fernandez

Roslags-Kulla is a small church made of reddish wood. But it has a tall, beautiful clock tower. The church is in the quiet countryside near the Vira factory, just a bit farther away than the heavily trafficked roads in the Osteraker district. The sky is clear and blue and the air is clean. The wind blows the scent of wildflowers over the peaceful cemetery by the church.

Yesterday Bjorn Almskog was buried at Norra Cemetery, and today four men in black suits are carrying Viola Maria Liselott Fernandez’s coffin to her final resting place. Following the pallbearers, two uncles and two cousins from El Salvador, Penelope Fernandez and her mother, Claudia, walk with the priest.

They gather around the open grave. One of the cousin’s children, a girl of about nine, looks at her father questioningly. When he nods to her, she lifts up her recorder and begins to play Hymn 97 while the coffin is lowered into the ground.

Penelope Fernandez holds her mother’s hand while the priest reads a passage from the book of Revelation.

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death.

Claudia looks at Penelope and straightens her collar. She pats her cheek as if Penelope were still a small child.

As they return to their cars, Penelope’s phone buzzes. It’s Joona Linna. Penelope disengages her hand from her mother’s and walks to the shade underneath the large trees to talk in private.

“Hello, Penelope,” Joona says in his characteristic voice, singsong but serious.

“Hello, Joona,” Penelope replies.

“I thought you would want to know that Raphael Guidi is dead.”

“And the ammunition to Darfur?”

“We’ve stopped the shipment.”

“That’s good.”

Penelope looks around at her relatives and friends; her mother, who stands where she left her. Her mother, who won’t let her out of her sight.

“Thanks,” she says.

She goes back to her mother who watches her anxiously. She takes her mother’s hand again, smiles, and they walk together to the cars. She stops and turns around. For a second she’d thought she heard her sister’s voice right beside her. She shivers and a shadow passes over the neatly mown grass. Her young cousin with the recorder is standing between the gravestones looking at her. Her headband has slipped free and her hair is loosened in the summer breeze.