The Asylum (36 page)
Authors: Johan Theorin
She stops. ‘Not here, well not as far as I know, anyway.’
‘But somewhere else?’
The woman looks at him closely. ‘Haven’t you heard what he did in Gothenburg?’
‘No?’
‘He murdered a whole load of people. Went crazy. Ran around and stabbed them out in the street, one after another.’
Jan listens; it’s all he can do. He is incapable of moving.
‘Legén? He killed people?’ he finally brings himself to ask.
The woman nods. ‘Everybody in the building knows about him.’ She sighs and adds, ‘Nobody wants him living here. They should have kept him in St Psycho’s … That’s where they locked him up.’
Jan stares at her. ‘But he used to
work
there, surely? In the laundry?’
The woman nods again. ‘Later on, yes. But they have former patients working there, as I understand it … They’ve got quite a mixture of nutcases and doctors up there.’
His neighbour sighs yet again, and carries on down the stairs with her laundry basket.
Jan follows her and quickly collects his own laundry. Then he goes back upstairs, and notices that his door is ajar. He forgot to close it.
Did Legén hear the entire conversation with his neighbour?
He stops in the doorway, wondering what to do, but eventually he walks in.
Legén is still sitting at the kitchen table; he has topped up his coffee cup. He looks at Jan. ‘You’re back, then,’ he says.
He has also lit his pipe, but he doesn’t look happy. ‘I heard what the old bag said. The whole bloody place could hear her.’
Jan doesn’t know what to answer; he can’t stop looking at Legén’s hands, holding the pipe and the coffee cup. The hands that held the knife when he ran amok in the street.
At last Jan opens his mouth to say something. ‘Were you happy up there at the hospital?’
Legén continues to suck on his pipe, so Jan goes on: ‘I mean … you were there for a hell of a long time.’
‘My whole life,’ says Legén, puffing on his pipe. ‘But I didn’t murder anyone.
No, nein, nyet …
I was in there because of my mother.’
Jan looks at him.
‘My mother was immoral, as they said back then … in the
thirties
she had children by several different men, and she liked to party in the street, if I can put it that way. And she wasn’t ashamed of it. So she was the one they locked up; in those days St Patricia’s was a mental hospital and a kind of general institution. I was a child, I was just taken in with her. And that’s where I stayed.’
‘So you never … stabbed anyone?’
‘That’s just gossip,’ Legén says. ‘People will always talk … there’s no end to it.’
Jan nods without speaking.
Trust people
, he thinks.
He sits down at the table. ‘I’ve got a question. If the fire alarm goes off up at the hospital, what happens in the laundry?’
‘We’ve practised this,’ Legén replies, as if he still works there. ‘We know what to do … If the smoke doesn’t kill us, we turn off the machines and go up to the main entrance.’
‘You don’t use the lift?’
‘No one uses the lift. Not if there’s a fire.’
After a brief silence, Legén puts down his pipe and takes a litre bottle of pale-yellow wine out of his plastic bag. He places it in front of Jan. ‘Try this,’ he says. ‘It’s not the best batch I’ve ever made, but it’s not bad … And it all ends up as piss anyway.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Are you going to get someone out?’ Legén asks after a brief silence.
‘Not at all.’ The denial is automatic. ‘No, I just want to—’
‘If you do,’ Legén interrupts, ‘choose someone who deserves it. Some of the people in there ought to be allowed to change places with some of the lunatics out here.’
The Unit
Rami’s escape attempt didn’t succeed – Jan knew that as soon as he heard screams and shouts and the sound of breaking glass out in the corridor.
He listened but did nothing; he just stayed in his room and carried on working on his comic strip about the Secret Avenger. The shouts and screams were followed by a huge crash further down the corridor, then the sound of running footsteps.
Jan went over to the door. He heard another door slam shut, then even more loud voices. A whole chorus of them.
Then silence.
Jan waited a little while longer before peering cautiously into the corridor. Everything was quiet and deserted, but when he went and knocked on Rami’s door, there was no reply.
This time he knew immediately where they had taken her, so he went down to the cellar. To the locked door of the Black Hole.
‘Rami?’ he called.
He could just hear her voice through the door: ‘Yes.’
‘What happened?’
‘One of the ghosts saw me and told on me. So I hit her.’
Jan assumed she was talking about the pale girls. ‘So they caught the squirrel,’ he said.
‘They caught me straight away,’ she said. ‘I didn’t even manage
to
get outside … I bit them, but there were four of them. Just like your gang.’
Jan didn’t know what to say.
We can’t win, Rami
. That was what he always used to think, at least before he met her.
‘How long do you have to stay in there?’
‘They didn’t say. Years, maybe … But it doesn’t matter, because I know what I’m going to do when they let me out.’
Jan didn’t ask any more questions, because he knew that Rami would never give up. He sat outside the door and waited, just to provide support. Eventually he spoke again. ‘If you do it again … I’m coming with you.’
‘Are you?’
‘Yes.’
And it was true – he didn’t want to leave the security of the Unit, but he would go anywhere with Rami.
‘Do you know where I’m going to go?’
‘Where?’
‘To Stockholm. That’s where I have to go … my older sister lives there.’
‘OK,’ Jan said.
‘We’ll form a band when we get there. We can play in Sergels Torg in the city centre, and use the money we get to make recordings … and we’ll never, ever come back here.’
‘And what about the pact?’ Jan asked.
Rami seemed to be thinking things over. ‘You can fulfil your part of the bargain later … and I’ll fulfil mine, if you give me your address.’
‘OK. I have to go now, Rami … I’ve got a counselling session.’
‘With your psychobabbler?’
‘Yes … but it’s OK, he listens.’
‘I listen too,’ said Rami.
‘I know.’
‘Will you come and see me tonight? If they let me out?’
‘I …’ But he couldn’t go on. He could only say the last three words silently to himself:
love you, Rami
.
‘Why do you lock us up?’ Jan asked.
‘Lock you up?’ Tony said.
‘Down in the cellar. There’s a locked room.’
‘It’s only if someone is violent. For their own sake … so they don’t harm themselves. They just have to stay in there for a little while, until things calm down … just as everybody has to stay in here for a little while.’
Jan didn’t respond, so the psychologist leaned forward. ‘How are you feeling now, Jan?’
‘Fine.’
‘Have you made some friends here?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Good. And what about those self-destructive thoughts you were having? Have they gone now?’
‘I think so,’ he said.
‘So maybe it’s time you went home, then?’
They wanted to get rid of him, Jan realized. He had been here
for a little while
. They probably needed his room for someone else. ‘Don’t know,’ he said.
‘You don’t know. But you can’t stay here, can you?’
Jan didn’t answer.
But if Rami’s escape plan didn’t work, it was a tempting thought: to stay behind the fence for the rest of his life, never have to face the world again. Never have to face the Gang of Four.
‘It’ll be good to get home,’ Tony said. ‘You can go home, go back to school … make friends and start living. And think about what you want to be.’
‘What I want to be?’
‘Yes … what kind of job would you like to do?’
Jan thought this over. He had never really considered it, but he replied, ‘Maybe I’d like to be a teacher.’
‘Why?’
‘Because … I’d like to look after children. To protect them.’
After the session Jan drifted around the corridors. It was almost time for dinner, and he could hear voices from the TV room. He
went
down to the cellar, but the door of the Black Hole was wide open. They had let Rami out.
Fifteen minutes later she came into the dining room, after everybody else, when Jan was already eating at a table by the window. But Rami went and sat on her own at a corner table. That’s the way things had been over the past few days – the more time they spent together, the less often they ate together. It was as if their liaison had to be kept secret from everyone else in the Unit.
But she looked at him from time to time, across the tables. Both of them knew what they wanted.
Jan went back to his room after dinner and stared at the white wall.
You’re going home soon
.
But he didn’t want to go home. There were no friends waiting for him at home, just the Gang of Four.
He heard the door of Rami’s room open and close about half an hour later.
He waited a bit longer. At nine o’clock the lights in the corridor were dimmed, and at quarter past nine he crept out of his room to Rami’s door. He could hear a low murmuring from inside; Rami was talking on the stolen telephone. Jan waited until everything went quiet, then he knocked.
She opened the door a fraction, saw who it was and let him in.
‘Who were you talking to?’ Jan asked.
‘My sister. She says she’s waiting for me. She needs me.’
‘So you’re off to Stockholm?’
‘You already know that.’
‘When?’
‘First thing tomorrow … Are you coming with me?’
Jan nodded, and took out a piece of paper. ‘This is my address,’ he said. ‘They’re saying I have to go home, so just in case … I’m not allowed to stay here.’
Rami tucked the piece of paper in the pocket of her jeans. ‘Do you
want
to stay here?’ she asked.
‘Sometimes … Everything’s so calm in here. And you’re here.’
She held out her arms, and he went to her.
‘We’ll take care of the Psychobabbler and the Gang of Four,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘I promise.’
49
CRAZED ATTACK BY MOUNTAIN LAKE.
Jan is sitting in his apartment reading the headline in an old newspaper cutting; he reads it over and over again.
Crazed attack
. He thinks about the term. An attack carried out by a crazy person. Someone else. Not the person who writes the words, and not the person who’s reading them.
Someone else. But who?
It’s Friday evening and he’s back from work. There is exactly one week to go until the fire drill, and Lilian is still determined to go ahead with her plan to take Ivan Rössel to task in the visitors’ room. She and Hanna have started whispering to Jan as well now, not only to each other. Now he knows what is going on, they obviously want to be sure he is with them.
Jan has only promised not to tell on them, nothing else.
As he was cycling past the hospital on his way home, he saw Dr Högsmed striding along by the wall. The doctor recognized him and raised his hand; Jan waved back with a smile, and watched him disappear through the steel door. Perhaps he was going up to his office to try out the hat test on someone.
Högsmed is probably a good psychiatrist, Jan thinks, but he has no idea what goes on in the hospital at night. He doesn’t know about the secret route from the pre-school, or the secret letters and the meetings in the visitors’ room. Högsmed thinks that everything
at
St Patricia’s is ticking along nicely, just the way he and the board have planned it.
But Jan believes the desire to kick against routine is part of human nature; both children and adults are constantly tempted to bend the rules.
A week to go. Time cannot be stopped.
Jan feels stressed by the ticking clock, just like when he was at Lynx.
He takes out the old diary again – the one Rami gave him in the storeroom at the Unit. He looks at the picture on the front, the Polaroid Rami took the very first time they met. He is surprised at how young and healthy he looks, bearing in mind how close to death he had been the day before the picture was taken. First almost completely dehydrated in the sauna, then drugged with sleeping tablets, bleeding from wounds inflicted with a razor, and almost drowned in a pond. And yet he is staring straight into the camera, with his head up.
The diary contains not only his own memories and thoughts. There are also some folded newspaper cuttings, and perhaps they are the reason why he has kept the diary. He has taken them out and read them from time to time, late at night.
The first is an entire page, with a big black and white picture of a rock jutting out several metres above the shining surface of a lake, with that headline, CRAZED ATTACK BY MOUNTAIN LAKE, followed by a subheading:
Two boys killed on camping trip
.
Jan has read the article time and time again over the past fifteen years or more, and he practically knows it by heart at this stage.
Two boys aged fifteen and sixteen were attacked and killed last night by an unknown assailant. The boys were camping on a rocky outcrop above a mountain lake twelve kilometres outside Nordbro when they were attacked
.
According to the police the murderer appears to have slit the tent open with his knife, then inflicted multiple stab wounds on both boys before rolling them up in the tent and pushing it into
the
lake. The severely injured boys were unable to get out of the tent, and drowned
.
The article continues for two more columns, with comments from a detective inspector and a certain amount of speculation.
There is another cutting from the following day:
THIRD VICTIM FOUND
Teenage boy with severe head injuries discovered by roadside
It seems likely that a hit and run driver is responsible for the condition of a 16-year-old boy who was found in a shallow ditch outside Nordbro early on Wednesday morning. The boy was unconscious and was suffering from head injuries, multiple lacerations and several broken bones. He was taken to the emergency department at the Western Hospital, but has yet to regain consciousness
.