LITMIR.BIZ

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said, trying to sound casual.

      “Mm.”

      Simone giggled and hid her head under the pillow.

      “Maybe I was having a dream,” I said evasively.

      Simone was now shaking with laughter underneath the pillow.

      “Did you dream you were rocking?”

      “Well—”

      Simone looked up with a big grin. “Go on, answer the question,” she said, her voice perfectly controlled. “Did you dream you were rocking?”

      “Daddy?”

      “I must have.”

      “But,” Simone went on with a laugh, “why were you lying on top of me when you—”

      “Time for breakfast,” I said.

      I saw Benjamin grimace as he got up. The mornings were always the worst. His joints had been immobile for several hours, which often led to spontaneous bleeds.

      “How are you feeling?”

      He held on to the wall for support as he stood.

      “Just a minute, little man, I’ll give you a massage.”

      Benjamin sighed as he lay down and let me gently bend and stretch his joints. “I don’t want a shot,” he said dejectedly.

      “Not today, Benjamin, the day after tomorrow.”

      “Don’t want it, Daddy.”

      “Just think about Kalle,” I said. “He’s diabetic. He has to have injections every day.”

      “David doesn’t have to,” he complained.

      “But maybe there’s something else he finds difficult,” I said.

      There was a silence. “His daddy’s dead,” Benjamin whispered.

      “See?” I finished massaging his arms and hands.

      “Thanks, Daddy,” Benjamin said, getting up slowly.

      “Good boy.”

      I hugged his slender little body, but as usual I suppressed the urge to hold on until he squirmed to get free.

      “Can I watch Pokémon?” he asked.

      “Ask your mother,” I replied, and heard Simone shout “Coward!” from the kitchen.

      After breakfast I sat down in the study and called Lars Ohlson. His secretary answered, and I chatted with her for a few moments before asking if I could have a word with Lars.

      “Just a moment,” she said.

      I was intending to ask him not to mention me to Frank Paulsson, if it wasn’t already too late.

      After waiting a minute or so, she came back on the line. “Lars isn’t available at the moment.”

      “Tell him it’s me.”

      “I already did,” she said stiffly.

      I hung up without a word, closed my eyes, and realised that something wasn’t right. Perhaps I had been conned; presumably Eva Blau was far more troublesome than Lars Ohlson had told me.

      “I can cope,” I told myself.

      I wasn’t thinking of Eva Blau as a potentially dangerous person then, at least not primarily. My foremost concern was that she would throw my hypnosis group out of balance. I had assembled a small number of men and women whose problems and backgrounds were completely dissimilar. Some were easily hypnotised, others not. I’d wanted to achieve communication within the group, to help each of them move out of their shells and begin to develop new relationships, both with others and with themselves. The one thing most of them had in common was a feeling of guilt, a burden that had caused them to withdraw. Yet, while they blamed themselves for having been raped or tortured or otherwise abused, their burden was compounded by their having lost all trust in the world. I’d worked hard with them to forge the fragile bond that now existed among them, and I was worried that the addition of Eva Blau might separate them.

      During our last session, the group had gone to a deeper level than we’d ever managed before. After our usual opening discussion, I’d made an attempt to put Marek Semiovic under deep hypnosis. All my past efforts had failed; he’d been unfocused and defensive.

      In hypnosis, the practitioner may try to find a starting point, often a familiar or idealised place that the subject can imagine and from which he can proceed without fear or anxiety. I hadn’t yet found that starting point with Marek.

      “A house? A football pitch? A forest?” I suggested.

      “I don’t know,” Marek replied, as usual.

      “Well, we have to start somewhere.”

      “But where?”

      “Try to imagine the place you’d have to return to in order to understand the person you are now,” I suggested.

      “Zenica, out in the country,” said Marek, his tone neutral. “Zenica-Doboj.”

      “Good,” I said, making a note. “Do you know what happened there?”

      “Everything happened there, in a big building made of dark wood, like a castle, a landowner’s house, with a steep roof and turrets and verandas.”

      The group was focused now; everyone was listening; they all realised that Marek had suddenly opened a number of inner doors.

      “I was sitting in an armchair, I think,” Marek said hesitantly. “Or on some cushions. Anyway, I was smoking a Marlboro while … there must have been hundreds of girls and women from my home town passing by me.”

      “Passing by?”

      “Over the course of a few weeks … They would come in through the front door, and then, they were taken up the main staircase to the bedrooms.”

      “Was it a brothel?” asked Jussi, in his strong Norrland accent.

      “I don’t know what went on there. I don’t know anything, really,” Marek replied quietly.

      “Did you ever see the upstairs?” I asked.

      He rubbed his face with his hands and took a deep breath. “I have this memory,” he began. “I walk into a little room and I see one of my teachers from high school, and she’s tied to a bed, naked, with bruises on her hips and thighs.”

      “What happens?”

      “I’m standing just inside the door with a kind of wooden stick in my hand—and I can’t remember anything else.”

      “Try,” I said calmly.

      “It’s gone.”

      “Are you sure?”

      “I can’t … I can’t do any more.”

      “All right, fine, that’s enough,” I said.

      “Wait a minute,” he said, and sat without speaking for a long time. Then he sighed, rubbed his face, and stood up.

      “Marek?”

      “I don’t remember anything!” he said, his voice shrill.

      I made a few notes; I could feel Marek watching me all the time.

      “I don’t remember, but everything happened in that freaking house,” he said, looking at me intently. I nodded.

      “Everything that’s me—it’s in that wooden house!”

      “The haunted house,” said Lydia, from her seat beside him.

      “Exactly,” he said, “it was a haunted house,” and when he laughed, his face was etched with anguish.

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