The Nightwalker

  ‘The police seized it.’

  ‘What?’

  Leon didn’t know where to start. Ideally he would have liked to tell his friend about the door and the labyrinth, the thumbnail and the bloody blouse, but he couldn’t do that on the telephone – and especially not while Sven was at a party.

  Leon summarised the events of the last few days as briefly as he could, omitting the details that would cast doubt on his sanity.

  Once he had finished, Sven’s voice sounded even shakier than before, and Leon wasn’t sure if it was exclusively down to the cold. ‘So you’re telling me your wife ran into the street in a distraught state, and you’re scared you might have hurt her in some way?’

  ‘Yes. And I’m afraid there’s proof.’

  ‘Sorry?’ said Sven. ‘The line is bad. What was the last thing you said?’

  ‘There’s proof.’

  ‘The photos on your phone?’

  ‘Not just that.’

  ‘I’m not understanding any of this,’ said Sven after a thoughtful pause.

  Believe me, neither am I.

  ‘Didn’t you tell me during our last phone conversation that Natalie said she needed some space and that she was going to take some time for herself?’

  ‘What? No, what gives you that idea?’

  ‘Look, I’m not mad, you know,’ protested Sven. ‘You told me about the card she left you.’

  ‘What card?’

  ‘The one she pinned on your kitchen door before she went.’

  All of a sudden Leon felt like his muscles had frozen. It took all of his strength of will to order his legs to carry him into the hallway.

  ‘You must be mistaken,’ he said to Sven, even though the proof was right in front of his eyes. Next to the newsletter from the building management, there was a postcard with an orange and yellow flower motif. Carefully, as though it might turn into dust, he freed it from the magnet and flipped it over.

  Dearest Leon, began the brief note, composed by Natalie in her unmistakable handwriting. The postcard in his hand was shaking so much that he had trouble deciphering the lines that followed.

  I need some space. I can’t tell you any more than that, I’m afraid, just that I need to take a few days to figure out where we go from here. Don’t worry. I’ll be in touch as soon as I’m strong enough.

  Your Natalie

  No postage stamp, no watermark. And yet here it was. In his apartment. In his hands.

  Without realising, Leon had let his hand holding the phone fall to his side, and once he put the handset to his ear again he heard an engaged tone. Thinking he had lost the connection to Sven, he pressed redial, in the process answering a new incoming call.

  ‘United Deliveries, Customer Service, good morning . . .’

  ‘Who?’ asked Leon, utterly confused.

  ‘We would like to apologise for the inconvenience, Herr Nader.’

  Leon was about to hang up on the woman with the impersonal sing-song voice, but then she said, ‘We’re very sorry, but for some reason your last order seems to have gone missing.’

  Leon shook his head in frustration. ‘I don’t have time to talk right now. And besides, I received everything.’

  ‘Really? Oh, then the mistake must lie with the delivery company. Because we don’t have your confirmation of receipt.’

  No wonder with that idiot of a courier.

  Without saying goodbye, Leon switched back to the call with Sven.

  ‘Are you still there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The background atmosphere had changed now. His friend’s voice sounded closer; presumably he was no longer outside and had managed to find a quiet spot in Adomeit’s house after all.

  ‘You’re right . . . Leon had gone back into the living room with the postcard and laid it on the dining table next to Natalie’s diary. ‘There really is a note from her.’ He looked at the dappled sunflowers on the front. Van Gogh. How appropriate. He was also an expert in madness.

  ‘But I can’t remember how it got on to the kitchen door.’ His voice started to crack. ‘I can’t remember so many of the things I do in my sleep.’

  ‘Leon, I—’

  ‘Please, let me finish.’

  ‘No,’ Sven cut in. ‘Now it’s time for you to listen to me, Leon.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘You know I’ve never really warmed to Natalie. And I’m saying this to you now as a friend, even at the risk that I might not be one afterwards.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t trust her. She’s playing games with you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Just think about how rushed your wedding was. Why do you think she wanted everything to be so quick?’

  ‘But I proposed to her.’

  ‘Yes, but you always wanted to have a big wedding. She wanted it to be secretive and really small. Why?’

  ‘That was down to both of us.’

  ‘Really? And did you make a pre-nup in all the rush?’

  ‘What do you mean? She’s the one with the rich parents, I’m the charity case.’

  ‘And what about our business, Leon? If we get this commission, it’s only the beginning.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you’re getting at.’

  ‘I’m just listing the facts. You’re the one who needs to put two and two together.’

  ‘The facts are that something awful has happened to Natalie. Before she left me.’

  ‘You mean the injuries?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They looked terrible, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘As real as the make-up you guys put on for Halloween?’

  Boom. Another blow to the gut.

  ‘You’re crazy, Sven,’ said Leon listlessly.

  ‘And you’re looking at things from too one-sided a viewpoint. Who was it that told me so proudly that Natalie was a genius of transformation? Maybe she’s deceiving you.’

  ‘Sven . . .’

  ‘No, trust me. You couldn’t hurt a fly. I know you.’

  ‘Perhaps not well enough,’ Leon interjected, his voice louder. ‘I’m holding a diary in my hands in which she wrote that I was hurting her. And that she was so afraid of me that she didn’t want to keep our child.’

  Beside himself with rage, he flung the book away. It somersaulted across the room, opening up into a ‘V’ shape and shedding some pages, before crashing into the wall near the door.

  He regretted his outburst at once, but he couldn’t take it back.

  ‘I’m just trying to help you,’ stuttered Sven as Leon bent down to pick up the pages from the parquet floor. There were two drawings and a photo, which he must have missed when going through the diary. He recognised the location in the snapshot, even though this picture was even more dark and shadowy than an ultrasound image.

  With great effort, Leon was able to decipher the word, written in old-fashioned script above a picture of a lightning bolt.

  DANGER

  Before, he had thought he saw it at the end of a tunnel. But now he realised his mistake. The wall on which the warning sign hung wasn’t a wall at all, but a door. And on the blurry photo in his hands, it was slightly ajar.

  All at once Leon felt so exhausted that he needed to sit on the floor so as not to fall over.

  ‘How long will it take you to get here?’ he asked Sven, who by that point had asked several times if his friend was still on the line.

  ‘I’ve been drinking. I won’t be able to leave until tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Please hurry. I have to show you something.’

  26

  The second descent was even harder than the first, primarily due to the equipment Leon was carrying. This time he didn’t want to be reliant on the sketchy background illumination of a mobile phone.

  Nor did he want to venture into the labyrinth without protection, for fear that he really had escaped a genuine danger earlier and not just a stray cat. Leon had armed himself with a pocket torch an
d a crowbar, something that could be used as both a tool and a weapon.

  Because he wanted to keep both hands free, he stowed most of it away in his tool belt, which he wore around his hips as he made his way down the ladder for the second time.

  But, most importantly, he was now documenting every one of these steps with the head camera. He only hoped the radio signal would be strong enough to reach from the secret passageways of the labyrinth up to the laptop in the bedroom.

  For now he was using the built-in miniature headlamp of the motion-activated camera as a light source. As he descended into the abandoned tunnel with this instrument strapped to his head, he didn’t just look like a miner, he felt like one too. This time Leon avoided the falling hazard towards the bottom of the shaft by leaving out the loose rung.

  Once at the bottom, he surveyed the remains of his first expedition into the unknown. The sight of the shattered torch on the floor was a warning not to test his luck again. He had escaped unscathed, albeit shell-shocked, the first time. But next time there might be more than just damage to his possessions.

  ‘I’m now going to crawl through a low tunnel,’ said Leon, in case the images were too dark for the camera.

  He didn’t want to leave any room for doubt if anyone looked at the proof later.

  Once again Leon got down on all fours, and once again he crept head first through the roughly hewn stone shaft. Surprisingly, even the light didn’t make it any easier.

  A constrictive pressure descended on his chest, and he couldn’t help but think of being buried alive; of people who, after some horrific mistake, wait for rescue and have to ration every breath until the oxygen supply eventually runs out.

  No one knows where you are. No one will look for you. Who knows if the passageways here are even stable?

  In his visions, he was trapped by stones and debris, his arms broken, with no chance of using the mobile phone.

  Leon paused, held his breath and listened to his heart, which refused to settle and was making the pulse in his neck flutter. When he couldn’t hold it any longer, he gasped greedily for air, air that smelled of dust, earth and his own sweat.

  But not of clean washing . . .

  That’s what was missing!

  Both the droning sound of the washing machine and the smell had vanished. Only the cold remained, but right now Leon was glad about that. His body was seething with tension, and he would use any way of cooling off he could find. Ideally he would have liked to take off his gloves, but he didn’t want to risk injuring his hands.

  ‘I’m just reaching a passageway,’ said Leon, standing up. ‘I’ll call it the tube.’

  Last time he had only been able to touch the rough walls, but now he saw that the tube was significantly shorter than he remembered.

  Leon had almost reached the fork at the end when he felt a gust of air on his legs, carrying something with it that almost knocked him over. And yet it wasn’t a physical object or living being, but a voice.

  ‘Help! Please, I need help . . .’

  ‘Natalie?’ shouted Leon. He had recognised his wife’s voice instantly, even though it was very faint.

  A fleeting waft, no louder than a whisper underwater.

  ‘Natalie, where are you?’

  No answer. His call echoed into the labyrinth, the depths of which he didn’t know and in which he was at risk of losing himself, in every sense of the word.

  ‘Natalie, don’t be afraid.’ He was just about to add, I’m coming to help you, when he heard more voices.

  A man and a woman. At very close proximity. He turned off the light on his headband and held his breath.

  Who is that?

  The voices, which seemed weirdly familiar, were coming closer.

  But from which direction?

  The woman’s words were too faint to make out, but what he heard was enough to intensify his fear for Natalie.

  Are they coming from up ahead?

  ‘Damn it, not again,’ he heard the man curse, and Leon turned in the darkness towards the voice.

  No, they’re coming from behind. Or are they?

  ‘Why weren’t you more careful? Hurry up. You have to get it out again somehow.’

  There was a crashing sound, and Leon, who by spinning around had lost his bearings, stared into what seemed like a never-ending wall of impenetrable darkness.

  He freed the crowbar from his tool belt and held it at head height like a club. Ready to strike.

  As exhausted as he was nervous, he grabbed hold of his headband to activate the camera lamp once more. Then something blinded him so completely that he had to shut his eyes.

  When he opened them again, a woman was standing right next to him, crying.

  27

  The shock penetrated Leon’s whole body so intensely that he hit out instinctively.

  Hard. With all his strength. Without thinking for even a second.

  He hit the woman, who had her black hair pulled into a tight ponytail, right between the eyes. He wasn’t able to swing far because of the low tunnel, but at least the tip of the crowbar must have ploughed deep into the bone of her skull.

  Yet Frau Falconi stood there unmoving, before she spoke: ‘Man, I’m not even sure if the damn thing is still in there.’

  Staring at the cleft in her face, Leon felt like he was having an out-of-body experience. Then his neighbour from the first floor rolled her tear-filled, red-rimmed eye, the lid of which she was holding with both index fingers to stop herself blinking, and it dawned on him what must have happened.

  Frau Falconi’s head really was just an arm’s length away from him, but she wasn’t on his side of the passageway. She was on the other side of the wall! In front of her bathroom mirror!

  ‘Can a contact lens just disappear behind the eye like that?’ Leon heard her husband ask. His voice, like his wife’s, was muffled.

  Leon stretched his arm out and tentatively touched the splinter he had made in the panel on the wall with his crowbar. The glass was at head height, and was roughly as big as a flatscreen TV.

  A two-way mirror!

  From here Leon had a direct view into his neighbours’ bathroom, while Frau Falconi could only see herself in the mirror, which on Leon’s side must be strengthened with thick, soundproofed safety glass. His arm was sore from the impact of the crowbar jolting back into his bones. Frau Falconi, on the other hand, had heard and felt nothing, and continued the search for her lost contact lens unperturbed.

  ‘No, the connective tissue stops them from going behind your eye and disappearing into your head,’ she answered her husband, who had come into the bathroom.

  Like his wife, his Italian roots were unmistakable: thick dark hair, brown eyes and healthy-looking tan skin even in winter. But in contrast to the well-groomed appearance of his wife, the husband was quite scruffy. While she wore a white, figure-hugging blouse, he had on a creased linen shirt hanging down over his pot belly. ‘It’s always the same with you. We need to talk about something important, and you start messing about.’

  ‘Of course. I’m just poking my eyeball around specifically to annoy you.’

  The couple’s voices were coming from a small gap directly above the mirror, presumably connected to the bathroom’s ventilation system.

  Leon noticed a movement in the background, then saw the husband opening a bathroom cabinet and fetching out a brightly coloured sports bag.

  ‘Our money’s getting tight, darling.’

  ‘You mean, my money.’

  Herr Falconi pulled his face into a derogatory grimace behind her back.

  ‘I saw that,’ said his wife, without turning round.

  Leon, who so far had been fixated on Frau Falconi’s tear-stained face, took a step closer to the mirror to get a better look at the man. ‘Will you be fetching some more soon?’ he asked, fanning through the bundle of notes he had taken from the bag.

  ‘That should be enough for now,’ sighed Frau Falconi, who had taken a step away from the sink. Tha
nks to her fingers, her eye was now so bloodshot barely any white could be seen. Her nose was running too, but she made no move to blow it.

  ‘For now, yes,’ said the man, stuffing the money into the back pocket of his trousers.

  ‘But if things carry on like this, soon we won’t be able to afford the rent.’ He made a fawning bow and feigned an apologetic expression. ‘Sorry, I mean of course that you won’t be able to pay the rent.’

  ‘Let me worry about that,’ said Frau Falconi, grabbing a tissue from the box on the basin. She was just about to blow her nose when she stopped abruptly and cocked her head to the side. It was a few moments before Leon heard what had caught her attention.

  A soft melody.

  No, not a melody. Scales.

  Herr Tareski on the fourth floor had begun his piano practice again, and for some reason it was making Frau Falconi smile. She listened for a short while, as though enchanted, then followed her husband out of the bathroom. Leon didn’t know what was bothering him more: that he had been plunged back into darkness, into a world between worlds that he understood less and less with every new discovery, or that, shortly before the light went out, he had the feeling Frau Falconi had given him a conspiratorial wink through the mirror.

  28

  An hour later Leon had switched sides. Now he was no longer standing in the tunnel, but in the bathroom; and it wasn’t the Falconis’, it was his own.

  He took another swing, smashing the crowbar into the mirror again. But unlike down in the labyrinth, the glass here shattered, revealing a concrete wall.

  No two-way mirror. Logical.

  Leon laughed, close to hysteria.

  After all, why would you want to spy on yourself?

  And even if he did – was it plausible that he had constructed this world of shadows in his sleep: the wardrobe? The labyrinth? The mirror?

  He wheezed, breathless from the fast climb and still exhausted from the fruitless attempts to open the door in the small passageway.

  After the Falconis had disappeared, he remained in the darkness for a while, listening for further scraps of conversation. But he couldn’t shake his confusion, numbed by the shock of realising that he could spy on his neighbours from down here. At some point (and he didn’t know whether minutes or hours had passed) he turned the light on again and made his way to the DANGER sign.