Lars Kepler - The Nightmare

“Only once the general director of the ISP has decided to turn the matter over to the government.”

“I understand,” says Axel.

For eleven years, Axel Riessen served as a war materiel inspector in the old system for the Foreign Office before being assigned to the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs. At fifty-one, he still looks youthful. His hair, flecked with gray, is still thick. His features are regular and friendly, and the tan he picked up recently on vacation in Cape Town gives him a healthy glow. It had been an exceptional vacation: he’d sailed solo along the breathtaking, rugged coast.

Axel walks to his library and settles into his reading chair. He closes his eyes and starts to reflect on the fact that Carl Palmcrona is dead. He’d read the obituary in the morning edition of Dagens Nyheter. It was not clear what had happened, but he’d gotten the impression the death was unexpected. Palmcrona had not been ill, that much was clear. He thinks back to some of the times they’d met through the years and recalls when they’d worked together on how to combine the Military Equipment Inspection Committee with the Governmental Strategic Export Control Committee. In the end, a new agency would emerge: the National Inspectorate of Strategic Products.

And now Palmcrona is dead. Axel remembers the tall, pale man with his military air and a sense of loneliness about him.

Axel starts to worry. The rooms are too quiet. He stands up and looks around the apartment, listening for sounds.

“Beverly?” he calls in a low voice. “Beverly?”

She doesn’t answer and fear rises in his mind. He walks quickly through the rooms and heads for the hallway to put on his coat when he hears her humming to herself. She is walking barefoot over the rugs in the kitchen. When she sees his worried face, her eyes widen.

“Axel,” she says. “What’s wrong?”

“I was just worried that you’d left,” he mutters.

“Out into the dangerous world.” She smiles.

“I’m just saying there are people you can’t trust out there.”

“I don’t trust them,” she says. “I just look at them. I look at their light. If it shines around them, I know that they’re nice.”

Axel never knows what to say when she says things like that, so he just tells her he’s bought some chips and a big bottle of Fanta.

It seems as if she’s stopped listening. He tries to read her face, to see if she is restless or depressed or closed off.

“So are we still going to get married?” she asks.

“Yes,” he lies.

“It’s just that flowers make me think of Mamma’s funeral and Pappa’s face when-”

“We don’t need to have flowers,” he says. “Though I like lilies of the valley.”

“Me, too,” he says weakly.

She reddens contentedly and he hears her pretend to yawn for his sake.

“I’m so sleepy,” she says as she leaves the room. “Do you want to go to sleep?”

“No,” Axel says, but only to himself.

Parts of his body want to stop dead, but he gets up and follows her, clumsily and strangely slow, over the marble floor that leads along the hallway, up the stairs, through two large rooms, and finally into the suite where he retires in the evening. The girl is skinny and short and doesn’t even come up to his chest. Her hair is frizzy. She shaved it last week, but it’s begun to grow out again. She gives him a quick hug and he can smell the odor of caramel from her mouth.

It’s been ten months since Axel Riessen met Beverly Andersson, and that only came about because of his acute insomnia. Ever since he experienced a traumatic event thirty years ago, he’s had difficulty sleeping. As long as he took sleeping pills, he was able to manage, but he slept a chemical sleep without dreams and without real rest. At least he slept.

Eventually he had to keep increasing the dosage. The pills caused a hypnotic noise that drowned out his thoughts, but he loved his medication and he usually mixed it with expensive, well-aged whiskey. One day, after twenty years of high consumption, Axel’s brother found him unconscious in the hallway, blood flowing from both nostrils.

At Karolinska Hospital, he was diagnosed with severe cirrhosis of the liver. The chronic cell damage was so serious that, after the usual medical tests, he was placed on the waiting list for a liver transplant. He was in blood group O and his tissue type was unusual, so the number of possible donors was fairly slim.

His younger brother could have donated a partial liver if he hadn’t suffered from such severe arrhythmia that his heart could not have endured an operation.

The hope of finding a liver donor was nearly nonexistent, but if Axel refrained from drinking and using sleeping pills, he would not die. As long as he took regular doses of Konakion, Inderal, and Spironolakton, his liver functioned and he lived a normal life.

Except that he never slept more than an hour or two at night. He was admitted to a sleep clinic in Gothenburg and underwent a polysomnography and had his insomnia officially diagnosed. Since medication was out of the question, he was given advice about meditation, hypnosis, self-suggestion, and sleep techniques. None of this helped.

Four months after his liver collapsed, he was awake for nine days straight and had a psychotic episode.

He had himself voluntarily admitted to the private psychiatric hospital Saint Maria Hjarta.

There he met Beverly. She was just fourteen years old.

As usual, Axel had been lying awake and it was about three in the morning. It was totally dark outside. She just opened his door. She was like an unhappy spirit who walked all night through the hallways of the psychiatric hospital. Perhaps all she was looking for was a person she could be with.

He was in bed, sleepless and disconsolate, when the girl came into his room and stood in front of him without a word. Her long nightgown brushed against the floor.

“I saw there was light in this room,” she whispered. “You’re giving off light.”

Then she crawled into his bed. He was still sick from lack of sleep and he didn’t know what he was doing. He grabbed her tiny body hard, too hard, and pressed her to him.

She said nothing. She just lay there.

He buried his face in the back of her neck. Then he fell asleep.

It was as though he had plunged deep into the waters of sleep and found dreams. He slept only a few minutes that first time. Every night after that, she came to his room. He would hold her tightly and then, covered with sweat, he’d fall asleep.

His psychological instability slowly dissipated like condensation from a mirror. Beverly stopped wandering through the hospital hallways all night.

Axel Riessen and Beverly Andersson left Saint Maria Hjarta Hospital with a silent and desperate agreement. Both of them understood that this close-knit arrangement had to be a secret. As far as the outside world could see, Beverly Andersson was temporarily housed in one of the apartments in Axel Riessen’s mansion until a student apartment opened up.

Beverly Andersson is now fifteen and had been diagnosed with a borderline personality disorder. She has no sense of boundaries between herself and other people. She also has no self-defense mechanism.

In past eras, girls like Beverly might be locked up in mental institutions permanently or they might be forced to undergo sterilization or a lobotomy to control their lack of morals and unrestrained sexuality.

Girls like Beverly often still follow the wrong people home and trust people who are not worth their trust.

Beverly is lucky she found me, Axel Riessen would reassure himself. I am not a pedophile, do not want to harm her or make money off her. I just need her next to me so I can sleep. Without sleep, I’ll be destroyed.