The Sandman

by Kepler, Lars

  134

  Saga’s heart is pounding in her chest. She can’t make any sense of her thoughts as she gets off the running machine. It’s not her job to protect other patients. She knows she mustn’t step out of her role as a schizophrenic patient.

  ‘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 sobs. ‘I’ll call for help … my skeleton slaves will come …’

  ‘Be quiet,’ Jurek says.

  He walks over to the running machine and removes the lead, yanking it out from the skirting board, 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 as she watches Jurek tie the lead round the handle on the side of the 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 round 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 moves slowly towards her own room. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do, can’t understand why no one’s come in.

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

  Saga keeps walking backwards with her heart pounding. A sense of unreality is spreading through her body.

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

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

  Saga goes into her room, walks over to the door and its 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 goes on 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.

  God, what should I have done? She’s burning up with anguish.

  Her feet, ankles and knees ache from the kicks.

  She doesn’t know if she could have saved Bernie by intervening. Maybe she could have, maybe Jurek wouldn’t have been able to stop her.

  But there was 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 at the door. Which had been desperate and pathetic, she thinks.

  She kicked on 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. She should have kicked harder.

  It felt like an eternity before any 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.

  The outcome depends on how tightly the noose squeezed the arteries in his neck.

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

  Since Saga returned to her room all she’s done is lie on her bed, feeling frozen. Dinner was dished out by the girl with the piercings, but she’s only eaten the peas and two mouthfuls of potato from the fish gratin.

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

  Saga switches on the lamp by her bed, then sits up and puts her feet on the floor. She turns her face towards the CCTV camera in the ceiling, towards 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.

  He had actually started talking to her in such a personal way that even Joona ought to be surprised.

  Saga thinks of how she broke the rule about not talking about her parents, her family. She just hopes that the officers listening don’t think she lost control of the situation. She persuades herself it was an attempt to deepen the conversation,. She was perfectly aware of what she was doing when she told serial killer Jurek Walter about one of the most difficult periods of her life.

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

  Saga massages her neck with her hand, and goes on staring at the eye of the camera. She must have been sitting like that for over an hour now.

  136

  Anders Rönn has logged in and is sitting in his room trying to summarise the day’s events in the unit journal.

  Why is everything happening now?

  The same day every month the staff go through the medicine store and other perishable goods.

  It takes no longer than forty minutes.

  He, My and Leif were outside the medicine store when they suddenly 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 lifeless 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 party, annoyed to have been called away in the middle of a game. The manager had looked at him and said that perhaps it had been a mistake to allow an inexperienced doctor to assume the role of senior consultant. His round face with its deeply dimpled chin quivered.

  Anders gulps and blushes when he recalls how he stood up and apologised, 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.

  ‘Are you still here?’

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

  ‘The hospital management want 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 rest-room if you like,’ he says.

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘I mean it. After all, I have to be here anyway.’

  ‘Are you sure? That’s really sweet of you.’

  He smiles at her.

  ‘Get a couple of hours’ sleep. I’ll wake you when I’m ready to lea
ve.’

  Anders hears her walk down the corridor, past the changing room and into the rest-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 again. He feels caught in that moment, the seconds when he was in her room, pulling down her trousers and underwear, and saw her white skin turn red after the two injections. He touched her as a doctor, but he looked between her thighs at her genitals, her blonde hair and closed vagina.

  Anders makes a note about a rearranged meeting, then clicks to open up past assessments, unable to concentrate properly.

  He reads through the report for Social Services, then gets up and goes out 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 Bauer is awake. Her bedside light is switched on. She is sitting quite still and staring at him, directly into the camera.

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

  Anders highlights patient room 3, and the image instantly fills the other screen. The lamp in the ceiling of the surveillance control room reflects off the dusty screen. He moves his chair closer. Saga is still sitting there, staring up at him.

  He wonders what she wants.

  Her pale face is lit up, and the skin on her neck is taut.

  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, looks at the guards and the closed door of the rest-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 grey 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 towards 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, dark eyes.

  ‘Are you scared of the dark?’ he smiles.

  ‘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 really doesn’t matter. He’s in charge of decisions about medication.

  ‘Wait there,’ he says, then goes and gets a tablet.

  When he comes back he can feel sweat between his shoulder blades. He shows her the plastic cup, she reaches her hand through the hatch to take it, 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 heard 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 quickly slips the pill under the inner sole of one of her shoes, then lies back on the bed.

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

  His silent cramps, the little thuds as his heels hit the door, follow her into sleep.

  Saga sinks steeply into deep sleep, into healing, falling sleep.

  At some point the hourglass gets turned over.

  Then, like warm air, she drifts up towards wakefulness and suddenly 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, deep 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 tiredness, but she can’t relax. Something is heightening her senses.

  The metal walls are clicking, and she opens her eyes again and stares over at the grey 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 there the whole time?

  He can’t see anything in the darkness.

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

  There’s a faint hissing sound.

  His head is nodding slightly.

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

  Air rushes in, the sounds expands, grows lower and fades away.

  The heavy door opens and she knows she must lie absolutely still. She ought to be sleeping soundly because of the pill. The nocturnal lighting from the corridor falls like shimmering powder on the young doctor’s head and shoulders.

  She’s wondering if he saw that she only pretended to take the pill, that 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 has come in because he thinks she’s taken the pill and is fast asleep.

  138

  This is madness, Anders is thinking as he shuts the door behind him. It’s the middle of the night, and 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 yet, practically unconscious.

  The door to the rest-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, he can’t think ahead, all he knows is that he has to come in and look at her again, has to come up with an excuse that will let him feel her warm skin beneath his fingers.

  It’s impossible to stop thinking of her perspiring breasts and the look of resignation she gave him when she tried to get away and her clothes pulled up.

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

  If anyone spots him, he can say he detected signs of sleep apnoea, 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 OK.

  Anders takes a couple of steps into the room, and suddenly finds himself thinking of fishing nets, lobster pots and fyke traps, large openings leading you on towards 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
can’t stop thinking about the time he gave her the injection. The memory of her back and buttocks are like a great weight inside him.

  He walks slowly over and looks at her in the darkness. He can see 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 pounding too hard in his ears.

  Her body is radiating warmth.

  He strokes her thigh softly, a gesture that any doctor might make. His fingers reach her cotton underpants.

  His hands are cold, they’re shaking and he’s far too nervous to be sexually excited.

  It’s too dark for the camera in the ceiling to be able to register what he’s doing.

  He lets his fingers slip cautiously over the underpants and in between her thighs, and feels the heat of her genitals.

  Gently he presses a finger into the fabric, running it along the lips of her vagina.

  He’d like to stroke her to orgasm, until her whole body is crying out for penetration, even though she’s asleep.

  His eyes have got used to the darkness and now he can make out Saga’s smooth thighs and the perfect line of her hips.

  He reminds himself that she is fast asleep, he knows that, and he pulls her underpants down without ceremony. She groans in her sleep, but is otherwise completely still.

  Her body is shimmering in the darkness.

  The blonde pubic hair, sensitive inner thighs, her flat stomach.

  She’ll carry on sleeping, no matter what he does.

  It makes no difference to her.

  She won’t say no, she won’t shoot him a look that’s pleading with him to stop.

  A wave of sexual excitement crashes over him, filling him, making him pant for breath. He can feel his penis swelling, straining against his clothes. He adjusts it with one hand.

  He can hear his breathing – and the thud and roar of his heartbeat. He has to get inside her. His hands fumble with her knees, trying to part her thighs.