Page 50 of The Sleepwalker

‘Yup,’ Hugo replies, scratching his tattooed forearms.

‘And does it look like this, or how it was when you were younger?’

‘Like when I was younger.’

‘Could you describe it for me?’

‘Listen .?.?. I really don’t feel like we’re getting anywhere here,’ says Hugo. ‘And I seriously need to study.’

‘I know,’ Joona replies, holding his gaze. ‘But I’d like to remind you that we’ve got a sadistic killer on the loose, and that’s no small thing.’

When he turns back out into the hallway, Joona gets a glimpse of another bedroom straight ahead. He can see a large bed with a grey quilted throw, a floor lamp with a grey snakeskin shade and a grey lambskin armchair.

Joona and Hugo make their way down the stairs, turning right and passing the narrow entrance to reach another hallway with white panelling.

On the wall to the left, there is an old Chinese abacus.

Joona gets a brief look at the lounge at the end of the hall before Hugo shows him into his current bedroom.

‘You’re in a nightmare when you sleepwalk,’ he says. ‘That’s what drives you, but you’re also seeing reality – furniture, people .?.?. Yet when you wake up in the morning, you don’t remember anything you really saw.’

‘Pretty much, yeah.’

‘But if you’re woken while you’re sleepwalking, you’re still in contact with the part of your brain responsible for storing real visual impressions.’

‘Maybe. I dunno. How would I know?’

The large bed is unmade, and there are books and pieces of clothing strewn across the floor. The round lampshade sways softly in the draught.

An armchair has been pushed up against a door that doesn’t seem to be in use.

On the wall above the desk, there is a framed page from the manuscript of Cormac McCarthy’sBlood Meridian, complete with clear imprints from the typewriter.

In the half-open desk drawer, there is a pack of condoms,a pale-blue handkerchief and a black plastic vape. On a spiral-bound notepad, Joona notices the words, ‘I can never catch up with her in my dreams, but in reality, I’m getting close.’

18

A cluster of bare trees races by on the right-hand side of the road, followed almost immediately by a small, frostbitten churchyard.

After leaving school for the day, Hugo caught the commuter train to Uppsala, where he changed to the number eight bus.

He is listening to music and gazing out of the window as the road winds its way past dark fields, barns and corrugated steel buildings, but when the bus approaches Ultuna, he presses the stop button, gets up and moves towards the middle doors.

He gets off outside the old specialist rehabilitation unit.

The air is raw and damp on his face.

With his rucksack slung over one shoulder, he starts walking along Dag Hammarskjölds väg.

Hugo remembers his father driving him out here when he was younger, explaining that Ultuna had once been a cult site for the Old Norse god Ull.

As ever, he turns off onto the narrow road past the pumping station.

For the past fifteen years, the psychologist and neurologist Lars Grind has been running a sleep research project here in collaboration with the university hospital, treating and studying various parasomnias with a particular focus on somnambulism.

Hugo was admitted to the specialist rehabilitation unit whenhe was six, and was later moved over to the newly established Sleep Science Lab.

He remembers next to nothing from his first meeting with Lars Grind, nor any of the nights of careful monitoring while the doctors tried out various medications.