Free The Hypnotist by Lars Kepler

look in. She’s on her bed. She has her glasses on, but her eyes are shut and she’s panting. Her face is white. Her arms and legs are totally stiff. Then she throws her head back so her throat is stretched right out, and she starts to kick the bottom of the bed with her feet. She just keeps kicking, faster and faster. I tell her to stop, but she keeps kicking, harder. I yell at her but the knife has already started to stab and Mum rushes in and pulls at me and I spin around and the knife moves forward; it just pours out of me; I need to get more knives, I’m afraid to stop, I have to keep going, it’s impossible to stop. Mum is crawling across the kitchen floor, it’s all red, I have to try the knives on everything, on me, on the furniture, on the walls; I hit and stab and then suddenly I’m really tired and I lie down. I don’t know what’s happening, my body hurts inside and I’m thirsty, but I just can’t move.”
    Erik stays with the boy, down there in the bright water, their legs moving gently. He follows the wall of rock with his eyes, farther and farther down, endlessly, the water gradually turning darker, blue fading to blue-grey and then, temptingly, to black.
    “You had seen,” asks Erik, hearing his own voice tremble, “you had seen your father earlier?”
    “Yes, down at the soccer field,” Josef replies.
    He falls silent, looks unsure, stares straight ahead with his sleeping eyes.
    Erik sees that the boy’s pulse rate is increasing and realizes that his blood pressure is dropping at the same time.
    “I want you to sink deeper now,” Erik says softly. “You’re sinking, you’re feeling calmer, better, and— ”
    “Not Mum?” asks the boy, in a feeble voice.
    Erik risks a guess. “Josef, tell me, did you see your older sister, Evelyn, as well?”
    He observes the boy’s face, aware that, if he’s wrong, the conjecture can create a rift in the hypnosis. But he feels he must take the leap, because if the patient’s condition begins to deteriorate again he will have to stop completely.
    “What happened when you saw Evelyn?” he asks.
    “I should never have gone out there.”
    “Was that yesterday?”
    “She was hiding in the cottage,” the boy whispers, smiling.
    “What cottage?”
    “Auntie Sonja’s,” he says.
    “Tell me what happens at the cottage.”
    “I just stand there. Evelyn isn’t pleased. I know what she’s thinking,” he mumbles. “I’m just a dog to her. I’m not worth anything . . .”
    The smile is gone. Tears stream from Josef ’s eyes, and his mouth is trembling.
    “Is that what Evelyn says to you?”
    “I don’t want to, I don’t have to, I don’t want to,” whimpers Josef.
    “What is it you don’t want to do?”
    His eyelids begin to twitch spasmodically. “What’s happening, Josef ?”
    “She says I have to bite and bite to get my reward.”
    “Who? Who do you have to bite?”
    “There’s a picture in the cottage, a picture in a frame that looks like a toadstool. It’s Dad, Mum, and Lisa, but— ”
    His body suddenly tenses, his legs move quickly and limply, he is rising out of the depths of hypnosis. Carefully, Erik slows his ascent, calming him before raising him a few levels. Meticulously, he closes the door on all memory of the day and all memory of the hypnosis. Nothing must be left open, once he begins the careful process of waking him up.
    Josef is lying there smiling when Erik finally moves away from his bedside and leaves the room. He goes over to the coffee machine. A feeling of desolation overwhelms him, a sense that something is irrevocably wrong. He glances up when the door to the boy’s room opens. The detective strolls over to join him.
    “I’m impressed,” says Joona quietly, getting out his cell phone.
    “Before you make any calls, I just want to stress one thing,” says Erik. “The patient always speaks the truth under hypnosis. But it’s only a matter of what he himself perceives as the truth. His memory is as