Page 234 of The Sleepwalker
Mälaren is the third biggest lake in Sweden, stretching from Köping in the west to Stockholm in the east.
Viewed from above, its countless bays, channels, islands and skerries resemble a tangled web, as though a child has blown droplets of watercolour paint across a sheet of paper.
Despite the patchy GPS coverage, Joona tracks his progress using the electronic nautical chart, convinced he has found the best way to reach Bernard’s house under the circumstances.
Time could be running out.
Bernard is in an intense phase of killing, displaying near-senseless violence.
He has mercilessly executed witnesses, purely to avoid being caught, and his drive is all-consuming. Nothing seems to be able to stop him.
* * *
Hugo’s mind starts to wander as he sits by the hot fire, eating his second hotdog. The sausage is charred on one side, cracked on the other.
Bernard coats his last piece of hotdog in Dijon mustard, pops it in his mouth and helps himself to more potato salad.
Agneta’s untouched plate is on the floor beside her armchair. She doesn’t look well, with a greyish tinge to her face and beads of sweat glistening at her hairline.
The wind is still howling down the chimney, and there isanother loud crack outside as a branch breaks.
Hugo turns to the window and watches the swirling snow. The memory he touched upon a few minutes ago comes back to him: as a child, while sleepwalking, he had climbed out of the window in this room and fallen into the large rhododendron outside. All he really remembers is how upset his father was afterwards, interrogating his mother about what happened, going through the whole thing over and over again and demanding to know why she hadn’t reacted to the alarm.
Bernard had made her cry when he said that Hugo could have died.
‘You never said what you’d remembered,’ Bernard reminds him, tossing his crumpled napkin into the fire.
‘Huh?’
‘I mentioned the accident on the swing, and you said you remembered.’
‘He was only a child,’ Agneta speaks up.
‘I didn’t ask you.’
‘Dad, what’s going on? Are you drunk or something?’ Hugo asks, watching the napkin catch fire and turn black.
‘I’m just interested, that’s all,’ Bernard replies, forcing himself to speak softly.
‘I remember falling off the roof and you being mad at Mum,’ Hugo says.
‘She was supposed to be looking after you. I was away, we’d had motion detectors fitted in your room.’
‘It was an accident.’
Bernard’s eyes drift to one side, and Hugo follows his line of sight over to the lamp with the grey snakeskin shade.
In the pulsing light from the stove, it almost looks like it is breathing.
Adrenaline courses through Hugo’s veins as fragments of the hypnosis session come back to him. He doesn’t notice that hehas dropped his glass.
In his mind’s eye, he is a child again, bathed in pulsing pink light as he stares through the window in the door in the corridor.
His father has fashioned a kind of poncho out of the black shower curtain from the bathroom in the basement, the one with a pattern of skulls and bones.
Hugo’s stomach turns, and he swallows hard repeatedly.
Skulls, thigh bones, ribs, knees and fingers.
