The Sandman

by Lars Kepler

“Just shut up,” she cuts him off.

  He nods, looking wounded, then walks straight over to the palm leaf, turns it over, and points at the microphone with a grin.

  “Now you’re my slave,” he says, laughing.

  Saga jabs him hard, making him stumble back and sit on the floor.

  “I want to escape as well,” he hisses. “I want to drive a taxi and—”

  “Shut up,” Saga says, checking over her shoulder to see if the guards are on their way in through the security door.

  But no one seems to be watching them on the monitor in the surveillance room.

  “You’re going to take me with you when you escape, do you hear—”

  “Shut up,” Jurek interrupts behind them.

  “Sorry,” Bernie whispers at the floor.

  Saga didn’t hear Jurek come into the dayroom. A shiver runs down her spine when she realizes that he may have seen the microphone under the palm leaf.

  Maybe her cover is already blown?

  Maybe it’s going to happen now, she thinks. The crisis she’s been dreading is happening now. She feels adrenaline rushing through her and tries to visualize the plan of the secure unit. In her thoughts, she moves quickly through the marked doors, the different zones, the best places to take temporary shelter.

  If Bernie blows her cover, she’ll have to barricade herself in her room to start with. Ideally, she would get hold of the microphone and shout for immediate backup.

  Jurek stops in front of Bernie, who’s lying on the floor, whispering his apologies.

  “Pull the power cord off the treadmill, go to your room, and hang yourself from the top of your door,” Jurek tells him.

  Bernie looks up at Jurek with fear in his eyes.

  “What? What the fuck?”

  “Tie the cord to the handle on the outside, throw it over the door, and pull your plastic chair over,” Jurek instructs.

  “I don’t want to. I don’t want to,” Bernie says, his lips trembling.

  “We can’t have you alive any longer,” Jurek says.

  “But—what the fuck, I was only joking. I know that I can’t come with you. I know it’s just your thing…just your thing…”

  133

  Pollock and Corinne both stand up from the table when the situation in the dayroom becomes critical. They realize that Jurek has decided to execute Bernie, and are hoping that Saga won’t forget that she has no police responsibilities.

  “There’s nothing we can do,” Corinne whispers.

  Slow, thunderous rumbling sounds emerge from the speakers. Johan adjusts the sound levels and scratches his head anxiously.

  “Give me a punishment instead,” Bernie whimpers. “I deserve a punishment.”

  “I can break both his legs,” Saga says.

  Corinne wraps her arms around herself and is trying to control her breathing.

  “Don’t do anything,” Pollock whispers to the speaker. “You have to trust the guards. You’re only a patient.”

  “Why hasn’t anyone come in?” Johan says. “The guards must have noticed what’s going on, for God’s sake?”

  “If she acts, Jurek will kill her,” Corinne whispers.

  “Don’t do anything,” Pollock pleads. “Don’t do anything.”

  134

  Saga’s heart pounds in her chest. She can’t make any sense of her thoughts as she gets off the treadmill. It’s not her job to protect other patients. She knows she must not step out of her role.

  “I can break his kneecaps,” she tries. “I can break his arms and fingers and—”

  “It would be better if he just died,” Jurek concludes.

  “Come on,” she says quickly to Bernie. “The camera’s hidden here—”

  “Snow White, what the fuck?” Bernie snivels, moving closer to her.

  She grabs hold of his wrist, pulls him closer, and breaks his little finger. He screams and sinks to his knees, clutching his hand to his stomach.

  “Next finger,” she says.

  “You’re both mad,” Bernie says through his sobbing. “I’ll call for help. My skeleton slaves will come.”

  “Be quiet,” Jurek says.

  He walks over to the treadmill and removes the power cord, yanking it out from the baseboard and sending a shower of concrete dust over the floor.

  “Next finger,” Saga tries.

  “Just stand back,” Jurek says, looking her in the eye.

  Saga remains where she is, with one hand against the wall, as Bernie follows Jurek.

  The situation feels absurd to her. She watches Jurek tie the cord around the handle on the side of Bernie’s door facing the dayroom and throw it over the top of the door.

  She feels like shouting out.

  Bernie looks at her beseechingly as he climbs onto the plastic chair and puts the noose around his neck.

  He tries to talk to Jurek, smiling and repeating something.

  She stands there, immobile, thinking that the staff must surely see them now. But no guards come. Jurek has been in the unit for so long that he’s learned their routines by heart. Maybe he knows that this is when they have a coffee break or change shifts.

  Saga backs away slowly toward her own room. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do and can’t understand why no one’s coming.

  Jurek says something to Bernie, waits, and repeats the words, but Bernie is shaking his head as tears spring to his eyes.

  Saga keeps moving backward. A sense of unreality is spreading through her body.

  Jurek kicks the chair away, then walks through the dayroom and straight into his own room.

  Bernie is dangling in the air with his feet just off the floor. He tries to pull himself up with the cord, but he isn’t strong enough.

  Saga goes into her room and walks over to the door with the reinforced glass window. She kicks at it as hard as she can, but all she can hear is a muffled thud from the metal. She pulls back, turns and kicks again, backs up and kicks, then kicks again. The solid door vibrates slightly, but the heavy sound of her kicks carries into the concrete walls. She continues kicking until, finally, she hears agitated voices in the corridor, followed by rapid footsteps and the whirr of the electric lock.

  135

  The lights in the ceiling go out. Saga is lying on her side in bed with her eyes open.

  What should I have done?

  Her feet and ankles ache from the kicks.

  She doesn’t know if she should have intervened. Maybe she could have. Maybe Jurek wouldn’t have been able to stop her. But there’s no doubt that she would have exposed herself to danger and ruined any chance of saving Felicia.

  So she went into her room and kicked the door. She kicked the door as hard as she could, hoping that the guards would wonder where the noise was coming from and finally glance at their monitors.

  But nothing happened. They didn’t hear her for a long time. She should have kicked harder.

  It felt like an eternity before the voices and footsteps approached. She’s lying on her bed and trying to tell herself that the staff got there in time, that Bernie is now in intensive care, that his condition is stable.

  She’s thinking that Jurek might have tied a bad noose, even though she knows that wasn’t the case.

  * * *

  —

  Saga lies in the darkness, remembering Bernie’s face as he shook his head with a look of total helplessness. Jurek had moved like a shadow. He had conducted the execution dispassionately, simply doing what he had to do. He had kicked the chair away and then walked, without hurrying, into his room.

  Saga switches on the lamp by her bed, then sits up and plants her feet on the floor. She turns her face toward the CCTV camera in the ceiling, toward its black eye, and waits.

  As usual, Joona was right, she thinks, as she stares at the camera’s round lens. He thought there was a chance that Jurek would approach her. Jurek had started talking to her in such a personal way that even Joona would be surprised.

  Saga broke the rule a
bout not discussing her parents, her family, but it worked. She just hopes that the officers listening don’t assume that she lost control of the situation.

  She’s never forgotten what Jurek Walter has done, but she hasn’t felt threatened by him. She’s been more scared of Bernie. Up until the moment when Jurek hanged him with the cord.

  Saga rubs her neck with her hand and continues to look into the eye of the camera. She sits like this for over an hour.

  136

  Anders Rönn has logged in and is sitting in his office trying to summarize the day’s events for the medical records.

  Why is everything happening now?

  The same day every month, the staff clean out the medicine stockroom. It takes no longer than forty minutes.

  He, My, and Leif were outside the stockroom when they heard the noise.

  Deep rumbling, echoing within the walls. My dropped the inventory list on the floor and ran to the surveillance control room. Anders followed her. My reached the large monitor and cried out when she saw the image from Patient Room 2. Bernie was hanging against the door to the dayroom. Urine was dripping from his toes, forming a puddle beneath him.

  Anders’s skin is still crawling. As a result of the suicide in the ward, he was summoned to a crisis meeting of the hospital committee. The hospital manager came straight from a children’s birthday party, annoyed to have been called away. The manager looked at him and said that perhaps it had been a mistake to allow an inexperienced doctor to assume the role of chief.

  Anders blushes when he recalls how he stood up and apologized, stammering and trying to explain that, according to his medical notes, Bernie Larsson had been extremely depressed, and that he had found the transfer difficult.

  “You’re still here?”

  He looks up to see My standing in the doorway, smiling wearily at him.

  “Hospital management wants the report first thing tomorrow morning, so you’re probably going to have to put up with me for a few more hours.”

  “Tough shit,” she says with a yawn.

  “You can go and lie down in the staff room if you like,” he says.

  “Don’t worry.”

  “I mean it. I have to be here anyway.”

  “Are you sure? That’s really sweet of you.”

  He smiles at her.

  “Get a couple hours’ sleep. I’ll wake you up when I’m ready to leave.”

  Anders hears her walk down the corridor, past the changing room, and into the staff room.

  The glow from the computer screen fills Anders’s little office. He clicks to open the calendar, then adds some newly arranged meetings with relatives and care workers.

  His fingers pause above the keyboard as he thinks about the new patient. He feels caught in that moment, the seconds when he was in her room, pulling down her pants and underwear. Her white skin had turned red after the two injections. He’d touched her as a doctor, but he had also looked between her thighs at her genitals, her blond hair and closed vagina.

  Anders types in a note about a rescheduled meeting. He’s unable to concentrate properly.

  He works on the report for Social Services, then gets up and goes over to the surveillance control room.

  As he sits down in front of the large screen to look at the nine squares, he immediately notices that Saga is awake. Her bedside light is switched on. She is staring into the camera, directly at him.

  Feeling a strange weight inside him, Anders looks at the other cameras. Patient Rooms 1 and 2 are dark. The security doors and dayroom are quiet. The camera outside the room in which My is resting shows nothing but a closed door. The security staff are beyond the first security door.

  Anders highlights Patient Room 3, and the image fills the second screen. He moves his chair closer. Saga is still sitting there, looking up at him.

  He wonders what she wants.

  Her pale face is lit up.

  She massages the back of her neck with one hand, rises from the bed, and takes a couple of steps forward, all the while looking up at the camera.

  Anders clicks away from the image, gets up, and glances at the guards and the closed door of the staff room.

  He goes over to the security door, runs his card through the reader, and walks into the corridor. The nocturnal lighting has a flat gray tone. The three doors are glowing dully, like lead. He walks up to her door and looks in through the reinforced glass. Saga is still standing in the middle of the floor, but turns to look toward the door as he opens the hatch.

  The light from the bedside lamp is shining behind her, between her legs.

  “I can’t sleep,” she says with big, imploring eyes.

  “Are you scared of the dark?” he says, smiling.

  “I need ten milligrams of Stesolid. That’s what I always used to get at Karsudden.”

  He’s thinking that she’s even more beautiful and slender in reality. She moves with a strange awareness, confident in her body, as if she were an elite gymnast or a ballerina. He can see that her tight, thin vest is damp with sweat. The perfect curve of her shoulders, her nipples beneath the fabric.

  He tries to recall if he’s read anything about sleeping problems in her notes from Karsudden. Then he remembers that it doesn’t really matter. He’s in charge of decisions about medication.

  “Hold on,” he says, then goes and gets a tablet.

  When he comes back he can feel sweat between his shoulder blades. She reaches her hand through the hatch to take the plastic cup, but he can’t resist teasing her: “Can I have a smile?”

  “Give me the tablet,” she says simply, still holding out her hand.

  He holds the plastic cup in the air, out of reach of her outstretched hand.

  “One little smile,” he says, tickling the palm of her hand.

  137

  Saga smiles at the doctor and maintains eye contact with him until she has the plastic cup. He closes and locks the hatch but remains outside the door. She retreats into the room, pretends to put the pill in her mouth, gets some water, and swallows, tipping her head back. She’s not looking at him, isn’t sure if he’s still there, but she sits down on the bed for a while and then turns out the light. Under cover of darkness, she slips the pill under the inner sole of one of her shoes.

  Before she falls asleep, she sees Bernie’s face again, tears filling his eyes as he puts the noose around his neck.

  The little thuds as his heels hit the door follow her as she sinks into a deep sleep.

  The hourglass turns.

  Then, like warm air, she drifts up toward wakefulness and opens her eyes in the dark. She doesn’t know what’s woken her up. In her dream, it was Bernie’s helplessly kicking feet.

  A distant rattling sound, perhaps, she thinks.

  But all she can hear is her own pulse inside her ears.

  She blinks and listens.

  The reinforced glass in the door gradually appears as a rectangle of frozen seawater.

  She closes her eyes and tries to go back to sleep. Her eyes are stinging with exhaustion, but she can’t relax.

  The water heaters in the walls are clicking. She opens her eyes again and stares over at the gray window.

  Suddenly a black shadow appears against the glass.

  She’s instantly wide awake, ice-cold.

  A man is looking at her through the reinforced glass. It’s the young doctor. Has he been standing out there the whole time?

  He can’t see anything in the darkness.

  But he’s still standing there in the middle of the night.

  His head is nodding slightly.

  Now she realizes that the rattling sound that woke her was the key slipping into the lock.

  Air rushes in. The sound expands, grows deeper, and fades away.

  The heavy door opens. She knows she must lie absolutely still. She should be sleeping soundly because of the pill. The lighting from the corridor shimmers on the young doctor’s shoulders.

  She wonders if he saw that she only pretended
to take the pill, if he’s coming to get it from her shoe. But staff aren’t allowed in patients’ rooms alone, she thinks.

  Then it dawns on her: the doctor is here because he thinks she’s taken the pill and is fast asleep.

  138

  This is madness, Anders thinks as he shuts the door behind him. It’s the middle of the night. He’s gone in to see a patient and is now standing in her darkened room. His heart is pounding so hard in his chest that it actually hurts.

  He can just make out her figure in bed.

  She’ll be sound asleep for hours, practically unconscious.

  The door to the staff room where My is sleeping is closed. There are two guards by the most distant security door. Everyone else is asleep.

  He doesn’t actually know what he’s doing in Saga’s room. All he knows is that he had to come in and look at her again, had to come up with an excuse to feel her warm skin beneath his fingers.

  He can’t stop thinking about her perspiring breasts and the look of resignation she gave him when she tried to get away and her bra pulled up.

  He repeats to himself that he’s only making sure everything’s okay with a patient who’s just taken a sedative.

  If anyone sees him, he can say he detected signs of sleep apnea and decided to go in and check, seeing as she’s so heavily medicated.

  They’ll say it was an error of judgment not to wake My, but the intrusion itself will be regarded as justified.

  He just wants to make sure everything’s okay.

  Anders takes a couple of steps into the room. He suddenly finds himself thinking of trap nets and lobster pots, large openings leading you toward smaller ones, until, eventually, there’s no way back.

  He swallows hard and tells himself he hasn’t done anything wrong. He’s exceptionally conscientious about his patients’ welfare. That’s all.

  He walks over slowly and looks at her in the darkness. She’s lying on her side.

  Carefully, he sits down on the edge of the bed and folds the covers back from her legs and backside. He tries to listen to her breathing, but his own heartbeat is too loud in his ears.