The Hanging Girl by Jussi Adler-Olsen Read Free Book Online

stood up straight when the better-off guests of the park and building sauntered by, and tried to rediscover that part of her that could get her away from the wall.
    As fate would have it, Shirley—the only friend she had and who lived in the room two doors down—invited her to come along to something she called Nature Absorption Intro.
    Shirley was into the occult and as such very open on her views and expectations of life. She listened to heavenly inspired music, had an interest in Polynesian kahuna fortune-telling, and used playing cards or the tarot before making decisions. Through all these changeable guidesshe’d encountered in her life, she’d gained insight, as she called it. Wanda never knew exactly into what, but Shirley could make her smile like no one else.
    And now she wanted to introduce Wanda to Atu Abanshamash, who, according to the website, was the beautiful radiant spirit who’d come from the Scandinavian dream world to London with his new teaching that could sweep everything else to one side and create a complete understanding of the energy and connections of all humanity.
    Shirley was ecstatic and the price was reasonable, so if Wanda wanted to come along she would pay. It could be so much fun if they had something to share together.
    *   *   *
    Atu Abanshamash Dumuzi was not like the gurus Wanda had seen in Shirley’s myriad of brochures and on the TV. He didn’t sit in the lotus position or in a carved chair in elevated serenity. He wasn’t preachy, and he was neither fat nor ascetic. Atu Abanshamash was a real man of flesh and blood, who with a smile and a twinkle in his eye showed them the path to how the study of nature absorption could renew a person to such a miraculous degree that you finally felt as if each and every cell in your body could suddenly resist any sort of attack, and that your body in its entirety melted together with the universe that surrounded it.
    The universe and the energy of the sun were Atu Abanshamash’s mantra. And there, in that simple light Bayswater apartment, where the Nature Absorption Academy London branch was housed, he walked around those sitting on the floor and regarded them with magical eyes, making their throats blush and shoulders sink while they in rhythm to his words inhaled well-being deep down in their lungs.
    “Abanshamash, Abanshamash, Abanshamash,” he chanted slowly in a deep voice, and asked them to follow him in chorus.
    When they’d sat for a while with their eyes shut repeating the mantra, Wanda noticed her sense of orientation and desire to return to reality disappear.
    “Open your eyes now and look at me,” Atu said to his followers.“Abanshamash, Abanshamash,” he whispered, stretching his arms, causing his light yellow coat sleeves to fan like angel wings. “I see you,” he whispered. “I see you now for the first time, and you are beautiful. Your souls are beckoning to me. You are ready.”
    “You are as beautiful as the sun itself,” he said afterward to each man and woman as he walked in between them.
    When he came to Wanda he stood very still for a moment and let his eyes disappear into the abyss of her own. “You are as beautiful as the sun itself. You are as beautiful as the sun itself,” he said twice this time. “But do not listen to anyone! Do not even listen to me! Listen only to your own Atman, your own soul, and surrender yourself.”
    As if she was under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs, these words penetrated Wanda like a long-awaited recognition and clarity. Of their own accord, her eyes opened, her skin burned, and her hands twitched with the sort of cramp she knew only from her orgasms.
    With lowered head, he caressed her cheek, returning ten minutes later to stretch out his palms toward her a few centimeters from her forehead.
    “Let yourself relax, my flower. You have been through the first journey toward the rapture and rebirth of the empty moments, and now you are ready,” he finished.
    Then