Enchanted By His Charm

Ken, one of the shareholders of Runestone Group and manager of its subordinate Vera Club, was one of the most reliable colleagues of Joseph and his closest partner. That explained why Joseph had spent so much time and money on this case.

Ken recovered consciousness after a little while, he raised his eyes to meet Irish's, and slowly he focused on a point, and difficulty asked, "Who are you?"

"I'm here to help you," Irish answered directly but with the video still on her mind. It was late at night. A woman took a bento to Vera Club, and a man opened the door for her. When she put the bento down and prepared to leave, the man changed and appeared very angry and suddenly took the fruit knife and stabbed her harshly. The woman tried her best to close the security door, but she left bloody handprints on the glass door. Then the scene changed, and the man jumped down from the window.

The man in the video was Ken. According to Joseph, the woman was Ken's wife. That day Ken had been at work alone, and his wife sent the meal for him. Nobody thought that this could happen. Vera Club was a high-end club with 24-hour monitoring. As a result, the scary case was recorded.

Luckily, the building Ken was in was not high at all. Otherwise, he would have been dead, and his body smashed into pieces.

Ken closed his eyes slowly with a distressed expression, "You can't help me, you can't... Where is Mr. Dover?"

"Ken, only I can help you." Irish stood up and came to sit beside him without answering his question. She wanted to help, but this video was questionable at best. And her instinct and professional sensibility reminded her that this case wasn't as simple as what was shown.

Ken slowly opened his eyes after her words, mouth trembling.

"You can call me Doctor Iri," Without much introduction, she believed that as he met her eyes, he expressed his intention to cooperate. "Ken, please tell me the truth. Do you have a habit of sleepwalking?"

Sleepwalk is just one of the sleep disorders. In the last few years, several murder cases have been due to sleepwalking and have raised the attention of many experts. Sleepwalking is a kind of behavior without consciousness, and the sleepwalker can't be convicted of a crime if they have hurt others while sleepwalking.

That was the first thing she thought of when she watched the video, Ken suffered from sleepwalking, and he killed his wife and tried to kill himself were all out of consciousness. She'd dealt with cases like this before. Once, a patient with severe somnambulism walked from the bedroom like a ghost, climbed up the balcony, and jumped down. That patient fell straight down like a balloon filled with lead, and his body smashed to pieces.

Irish thought this was the same, but Ken shook his head firmly and slowly, "No, I don't."

"That's easy to say, but are you clear about what happened?" Irish frowned her eyebrows slightly.

Ken opened his mouth but didn't answer immediately. After a while, he asked, "Is... Is my wife still alive?"

Irish looked at him quietly for a minute, "Yes."

"How is she still alive?!" Ken was very emotional and said this with many expressions. Terror filled his face and then spread to his eyes like boundless darkness, "Mr. Dover!"

"Why are you still calling for him?" Irish neatly bent over and asked.

"Doctor Iri, my wife is going to kill me! They two are to kill me!" Ken stared at Irish firmly with bloodshot and terrified eyes.

His voice was very hoarse.

Irish felt very terrified for any reason. She found that Ken didn't move his eyes from the start, and his pupils were white with a deathlike hue. She noticed it extremely clear and found that it was because of terror and desperation.

"Joseph? He's going to kill you?" She asked after a while.

Ken glanced at the other side of the room and soon said with a hoarse voice, "Yes. He's going to kill me. He and my wife are planning to kill me."

Irish looked up to the mirror not far away from her, only to find her clean face reflected by it. Then she took a deep breath and said deeply, "Now that he has the intention to kill you, if I give you a knife right now, would you kill him first?"

"I…" In Ken's deep eyes, there was a surprising mist, and soon it disappeared. But it was all observed. He seemed to be thinking. After almost two minutes, he muttered, "No... I need to hide. I can't let him find me. I can't…."

"If I give you a board, and nobody will see you with it, which part of your body would you put it on?"

Ken blurted out without thinking, "Behind me!"

Irish became silent, with her beautiful arched eyebrows turned down in a serious way.

"Doctor Iri, please help me. You said you would help me!" Ken turned to look crazy again and struggled to stay seated, his face turned with pain. He took deep breaths, "Every night, I have nightmares and dream that Joseph is trying to kill me, or dream that the two of them drown me, where it's so dark, and I feel cold and afraid. There is a long dark passage... I can only swim along this passage. It's very narrow, and at the other end, there is a gloomy old house full of thorns..."

"Have you ever gone into the house?" Irish stared at his face and asked word by word.

"I have it nearly every day." Ken's whole body shivered, and his lips appeared paler.

"What's in the house?" He must have remembered this nightmare very clearly if he had had this nightmare every night.

"There is a coffin..." Ken's teeth ground together due to stress, and it sounded brutal. "I see my brother lying in the coffin, but then he flies away with wings. And then... I see my wife. She... Staying with JosephThey...they take a knife to stab me..." At this point, he was crying and then shouted hysterically, "I've had enough! I've had enough!"

Irish looked at him and sighed deeply with a more serious expression.

****

As she left the care unit, it was already noon. A gust of wind blew with a pleasant fragrance, and beside the pool, the willow tree drooped. It was a large green field at first sight. The clean and blue sky was just like a colored glaze. Springtime in New York was always so beautiful and so short.