Page 198 of The Sleepwalker

Lars Grind pinches his lower lip between his index finger and thumb.

Hugo’s eyes are closed, his tongue just visible between his slightly parted lips.

As Erik talks, Joona notices that the teenager’s breathing – the rising and falling of his chest – begins to follow the same rhythm.

The hypnotist has taken them down to the seabed twice now, he thinks, and they have found the wreck.

During the first session, they caught a glimpse of the murderer, wearing a wig and carrying an axe. During the second, that was followed by vivid segments of the killing itself through the window at the back of the caravan.

They didn’t have enough time for Erik to find an accessible routeintothe caravan. The minute Hugo sets foot inside, he still jumps forward to the moment when the police officer woke him on the floor.

Traumatic imagery, followed by a blank.

In his nightmare – which drives his sleepwalking – Hugo is following his mother, the pair of them running away from a man who seems to be some sort of living stack of human bones.

In reality, he saw a man being murdered through a window and fell back into the grass without waking up.

He got to his feet and went into the caravan in an attempt to save his mother, who only existed in the dream.

The sights he witnessed there were so awful that he was unable to file them away in the usual place.

Episodic memory is stored first in the hippocampus, then consolidated in the neocortex. Most of it is forgotten, though some of it does linger among the nerve cells and synapses.

‘You are now deeply relaxed, listening only to my voice,’ says Erik.

The hypnotist guides Hugo through a scene in which he is leaving a party and making his way down a long wooden staircase. He starts talking about the light from the chandelier gleaming on the varnished handrail, the red carpet, the brass stair rods, Hugo’s soft footsteps and the way the murmur of theguests, the music and the clinking of glasses all get fainter and fainter.

Erik watches the teenager’s slow breaths in and out, successively making his voice more monotone.

He counts down from one hundred, talking about the stairs and reminding Hugo to focus on his voice, to let everything else fade like the sound of the party on the floor above.

‘Thirty-two, thirty-one .?.?. You are still making your way down the stairs,’ says Erik. ‘And in a few minutes, when I get to zero, you will be back at the campsite in Bredäng, in area G. It’s the middle of the night, and you are sleepwalking .?.?. You have plenty of time to stop and look at whatever you want. You’re calm, and you’re in complete control of the situation .?.?. This time, you won’t see any of the nightmare that brought you here. Your mum isn’t here and you aren’t being chased by a skeleton man .?.?. The campsite is closed for the winter, the sky is dark, and it has just started to snow.’

The perpetrator probably wasn’t still in the caravan when Hugo went inside, Joona thinks. From his own reading of the blood at the scene, the actual violence was over relatively quickly. Despite the brutal dismemberment of the victim post-mortem, all of the blood – regardless of whether it had sprayed, spattered, been trampled or dragged – was coagulated to the same degree.

Standing quietly around the bed, Joona and the others all find themselves breathing slowly and in unison as Erik continues towards zero. It is as though the whole room is now in a kind of trance, following the hypnotist’s diving bell into the dark abyss.

The heat from the radiator causes the curtains to billow outwards from the wall.

Joona studies Hugo’s face and notes that it now looks soft and childlike, relaxed.

Erik lowers his voice and leans into the young man.

‘Thirteen, twelve, eleven .?.?. You have now reached the bottom of the stairs, and you can no longer hear the party,’ he says. ‘Ten, nine .?.?. You’re walking straight down the hall .?.?. Eight, seven, and through the main doors .?.?. Six, five, out onto the stone steps .?.?. Down the last few, four, three, two, one .?.?. and zero, you are now back in the campsite.’

Agneta rubs her mouth, unable to tear her eyes away from Hugo.

‘It’s night, and the snow is falling on the grass and the caravans,’ says Erik. ‘But you can see a light up ahead.’

‘Yes,’ Hugo mumbles.

‘The light is coming from the windows in the caravan.’

‘Yes.’

‘There is someone there .?.?. in the darkness outside.’

‘A woman .?.?. with blonde hair,’ Hugo says, licking his lips. ‘She’s holding an axe, and she goes over to the door and opens it.’