Something I’m responsible for?
Leon knew that feeling, and he couldn’t ignore it any more. Much like the flu, it had begun with symptoms that could be suppressed at first, but which ultimately end up seizing the entire body in an iron grip: he was afraid. Afraid of a real person who was lurking down here and who he had never before encountered in his life, even though they had always been in close proximity. He was afraid of himself. Of his other, sleeping self.
For this reason, ironically it ended up being the voice of cowardice that stopped him from contacting the building management, Sven, Dr Volwarth or even the police.
Leon wanted to find out what was waiting for him down here before he fetched back-up. And as he crept head first through the narrow entrance into the darkness, he was already fearing the worst.
16
It was the barely noticeable smell of fresh washing that made Leon come to an abrupt halt. From one second to the next, he was no longer in the world between worlds that he had stepped into through his wardrobe but back in his childhood.
He had been ten years old at the time, his surname still Wieler, when his biological father Roman first told him about the Ghosts of the Twelve Nights. Sarah Wieler had rebuked her husband considerably for this after finding out. She was of the opinion that such horror stories were not for children of Leon’s age, that they would only make his night terrors worse. And she was right. That same night Leon had nightmares about the ghosts being in his wardrobe, and of the misfortune they had already brought upon many a family.
‘Do you know why your mama doesn’t do any washing between Christmas and New Year?’ Roman had asked, by way of beginning the story. Leon had instinctively grabbed his father’s hand, as if in fear that the answer alone could cause him to stumble.
Whenever he thought back to that day, as he did now, on all fours in the darkness, every detail of that Sunday stroll came rushing back: the cold wind in his face, the snow under his boots, their gloved, interlinked fingers, the Christmas decorations in the windows of the neighbouring houses.
‘I’m guessing you’ve never heard about the Ghosts of the Twelve Nights, have you? They hide themselves away all year, and there’s just one time when they dare to venture out. And that time is coming. The Twelve Nights; that’s what we call the time between Christmas and New Year.’
‘What do the ghosts do?’ Leon wanted to know. His father nodded as though he had asked a particularly clever question.
‘They are the opposite of guardian angels. Misfortune befalls the houses they live in. And during these days they are on the search for new families.’ ‘Will they come to us, too?’
‘Only if we use the washing machine. Not many people know this, but these ghosts need wet washing to survive. They creep into the wet bed-sheets, into your socks or trousers, and once everything is dry they cling there for a year.’
To this day Leon still didn’t know where in the world this superstition came from, but in the days that followed that walk he had scrupulously made sure his clothes didn’t go anywhere near the laundry. And he was horrified when, on New Year’s Eve, he found his older sister’s blouses hanging on the washing line. She had laughed at him when he begged her to remove the wet shirts from the house immediately. From that day on he lived in the irrational certainty of a ten-year-old convinced his bedroom had been seized by evil spirits. His parents’ attempts to reassure him were all in vain.
It was months before he stopped insisting his mother check under the bed or in the wardrobe after turning out the lights, to see if a ghost might be hiding there. The night of the seventh of May was the first that Leon no longer gave any thought to the Twelve Nights, having calmed down by then. He could remember the date so precisely because it was the night before the accident.
Fate?
Leon was shivering with cold; because of his rigid stance on the hard ground it had penetrated his limbs. He shook himself free from his memory-filled paralysis. Ever since the accident he had refused to do washing between Christmas and New Year. This made it all the more disturbing to him that here, of all places, he was confronted with the scent of softener and detergent. Whoever was responsible for it clearly didn’t know the legend of the Twelve Nights.
Or they are ignoring it.
Leon activated the display of the mobile again, for the screensaver had vanished into the darkness, and saw that he didn’t need to crawl any longer. The subtle scent of washing had disappeared too, or maybe Leon just couldn’t smell it any more on account of the fact that his senses were focused on figuring out his new surroundings.
The passageway stretching out in front of him looked like a mining tunnel that had been carved into the rock with some blunt device. Pitch-black, uneven walls made a channel of varying size. Even over his head the height kept changing, and he had to stretch his hand out to prevent himself from banging into a sharp edge.
The ground beneath his feet felt strange. As Leon walked along, it gave a little like a forest path and when he knelt down, he was able to dislodge some earth. The path sloped downwards, intensifying the unsettling sensation of approaching an underworld that it would be better not to enter.
The tension mounted with every step, and became so intense he was convinced he could feel a subtle vibration spreading through his whole body. He wasn’t claustrophobic, but right now he could easily imagine how it felt to be one of those people who avoid enclosed spaces. Whenever the light on the mobile cut out, and he found himself in complete darkness for a split second, it was as though the blackness hit him in the face. He could feel his heart hammering in his chest and the blood rushing in his veins, and his mouth become dry.
‘Natalie?’ he called tentatively. He had made it to the end of the passageway and found himself before a fork in the path. Calling his wife’s name probably had an equally slim chance of success as trying to navigate the tunnel system down here by himself. But what else was he supposed to do? Go back upstairs? Call Volwarth? Or the building management?
He came to the conclusion that this probably wasn’t as bad an idea as he had initially thought. At least he now had proof of a second entrance to his bedroom, one that for some reason hadn’t been included in the floor plans.
But who put it there? And why? And what was Natalie’s phone doing down here?
Leon shone the light to the right, into the shorter part of the fork. After just a few steps the path ended at a wall on which hung a warning sign: ‘DANGER’ was written in old-fashioned script, directly above an image of a lightning bolt as warning of high voltage.
Leon decided to contact Dr Volwarth before doing anything else; this would give him a witness who could testify that he wasn’t hallucinating. But then he realised the psychiatrist would be on the plane now, well on his way to Tokyo.
He still wanted to turn back, out of fear of getting lost down here. Who knew how many forks might be lying ahead? He had stumbled into a labyrinth. After all, the architect of the building, Albert von Boyten, had also been known as a landscape artist, whose artfully created mazes attracted international renown. Did he give this building a maze too, albeit one made of stone rather than tall hedges?
Leon called his wife’s name again before he turned to leave, but then something happened that stopped him from heading back: he suddenly realised that he had been mistaken. The vibration that he had put down to a trick of the senses was real. It existed – and not inside, but outside his body, and now he could not just feel it, but hear it too.
Leon tilted his head to the side and took a step towards the sound – the longer of the forked paths. The light of the phone’s display had a greenish tinge, which made it even harder to see. If Leon wasn’t mistaken, the walls in this part of the tunnel were smooth and even.
He put his hands out to touch the sides, tentatively, as though he might be electrocuted: to his left, he felt an even surface. To his right, the brickwork was clad with some coarse material.
With every step, the background noise
became louder. Leon suspected that an inaudible, deep bass was causing the regular vibrations coming from the walls.
And what the hell is . . . that?
He had only gone a few metres before he stumbled upon a door handle.
Leon held the mobile up, and discovered he was right. There really was a door built into the right-hand side of the passageway – all the more disturbing was how incredibly normal it looked.
He pressed down on the handle, which was astonishingly warm to the touch, and expected to hear a creaking or squeaking, but the door opened almost silently. In the very same breath, the sounds around Leon died down and the vibrations ebbed away.
Clearly the door was used often, for the hinges were well oiled.
The room he entered was barely bigger than Natalie’s dark room, and reminded him of the plywood crates every tenant had been given as cellar space, and which you needed to put your bicycle into upended so that it fit.
Leon’s next thought was that he had stumbled into some homeless person’s night-time shelter. The light from the mobile revealed a threadbare mattress on the floor, a half-opened removal box and several plastic bags, the contents of which he was reluctant to investigate. Judging by the smell, they contained rotting food products and other household waste.
Leon’s foot became entangled with a scrunched-up sheet. As he bent down to remove it, he saw the box was full of objects, one of which he recognised.
But that’s impossible . . .
He reached for the kettle that he had been searching for earlier in his kitchen. To Leon’s astonishment, it was full to the first marker, as though it had been used down here not so long ago.
But that doesn’t make any sense.
Leon looked around for a power point. Right next to the door, he saw a multi socket in the wall. A small, familiar-looking table lamp had been plugged into it. It was a cheap one, without a shade or base, nothing more than a bulb attached to a pliable stem. Unless he was mistaken, Natalie had used it in her flat-share as a bedside lamp, and had never unpacked it from the box after they moved in together.
He flipped on the switch. The bulb lit up, if only weakly, a scene that made Leon doubt his sanity more and more.
To his right, next to the door, there was an old garden chair with a rusted frame. The seat had been covered with the catalogue from an electronics store, under which there was a cigar-shaped bulge.
Leon formed his index finger and thumb into a pincer and pulled the catalogue from the chair, revealing a pile of white paper, the kind he used in his study for architectural drawings. And on the top, right in the middle of a sheet, was the fountain pen! The graduation present from his adoptive father which he had been looking for on the telephone table so that Volwarth could make out the prescription. Speechless, Leon stared at the golden pen, its nib pointing at him like a compass needle. He picked it up, revealing a column of figures noted carefully on the paper, which until then had been hidden by the pen.
Guessing it to be a phone number, Leon tapped it into Natalie’s mobile so he could look it up later, but before he had entered the last digit he froze in shock. Natalie’s phone had recognised the number. It was saved as a contact, and Leon was just as unable to explain this as he was the circumstances that led him down into this hiding place.
Dr Volwarth?
What was his psychiatrist’s number doing in his wife’s mobile phone?
Clueless, he stared at the carefully input address details.
He and Natalie had talked many times about the sleep disturbances of his childhood, and he was sure to have mentioned the name of the doctor who had treated him back then, but that still didn’t explain why she would have the address of Dr Volwarth’s practice, his email address and even an emergency telephone number.
Were the two of them in contact?
Under normal circumstances he would have looked for a logical, harmless explanation. But, down here, things were neither normal nor logical.
And they certainly aren’t harmless.
He studied the hiding place more closely in the light of the lamp. He paused. Held his breath, tried to stay calm. And looked at the floor again.
What he thought was a bed-sheet, the thing he had stumbled over . . . was in fact something much worse.
He leaned over and grabbed at the material, which felt soft, as though it had just been washed – then he saw the rust-coloured flecks that had seeped into the cotton’s flower design where the smooth material became ruffled.
Leon closed his eyes, and the image of Natalie kneeling in front of the wardrobe and cramming her things into the suitcase shot back into his mind. The memory of her flight from the apartment had imprinted itself in his head like a tyre track in wet concrete. He felt sure he would be able to recall every detail of this scene, again and again, to the very end of his life, even the insignificant things – for example, what top Natalie had been wearing: the flower-patterned one with the ruffled sleeves.
Natalie? Where are you?
Leon was about to bury his face in the material, to inhale his wife’s scent, insofar as it was still present and not overpowered by other smells (cellar, blood, fear) – but then the light went out.
There was a soft clink, indicating that the lamp’s bulb had blown, and this, combined with the unexpected plunge into darkness, startled Leon so much that he dropped the phone.
He fumbled around on the dusty floor for it. The oppressive fear that he would never find his way out of this underworld again was almost overpowering him when, there in the darkness, something brushed against Leon.
17
Leon yelled out, jumping at the sound of his own voice. He hit out at his trouser leg where he had felt as though someone was trying to grab hold of him. As he did, his fingers touched the mobile he thought he had lost. He clasped his fingers tightly around it as though it were a dumbbell.
The battery made a beeping sound to announce that it was now at under 20 per cent as he activated the display for the umpteenth time, convinced that it would light up a grotesque face with bleeding eyes. He was expecting a wide-open jaw and fangs just centimetres away from his face, ready to bite, chew, swallow.
But all he saw was the open door.
I have to get out of here!
Leon pulled himself to his feet and stumbled out of the room. Without stopping to think, he ran in the wrong direction, away from the fork that would have led him back to the ladder.
After a few metres he stumbled into a stone ledge and stopped to look around, but there was nothing but the impenetrable blackness of the passageway. Leon’s thoughts were racing as quickly as his pulse. He needed to get back upstairs fast, without having to pass the room again. Only now did he realise he still had the blood-smeared blouse in his hands. His fingers had cramped up around the material. He stuffed it into his overalls, then talked himself into going back the way he had come. If he didn’t, the danger of getting lost would be too great. And if there really was something down here lying in wait for him, it could be anywhere; it wouldn’t necessarily be waiting in that room to jump out at him.
Then there was a rustling sound. Right next to him.
It’s just some animal. A rat, perhaps. Or Morphet, he tried to reassure himself, but in vain. His survival instinct was stronger than his sense of reason.
Leon edged away, turned and ran, crashing into a wall and completely losing his sense of orientation. The only thing he had to go on was the rustling behind his back, which had now become a loud scraping, one he wanted to get as far away from as possible. But the noise grew louder the further he stumbled along the passageway, the contours of which he was only able to guess at in the weak gleam coming from the mobile.
Suddenly, a jolting pain shot through his shoulder, forcing him to stop. He looked at the thing he had run into, and recognised the metal rungs in the wall. It vibrated like a tuning fork as he grabbed it. Then he heard the rustling sound behind him again, louder and nearer, and in that second Leon realised there
were two different sounds hunting him. They were coming from different directions. As they slowly made their way towards him, a metallic scraping sound droned above his head, albeit from a considerable distance. To Leon, it seemed less alive and therefore less dangerous.
Once he had discovered a second rung in the brickwork at head height, he didn’t hesitate for one more second.
He made his way upwards hand over hand, and this time it was the ascent that would lead him into the unknown.
18
Rung by rung, Leon climbed towards the din, and rung by rung he became increasingly unsure that he had made the right decision. It wasn’t just the droning, scraping and stamping – the vibrations, too, were becoming stronger.
But the irrational fear of what was behind him and the hope of escaping this labyrinth of darkness drove him on.
The way up seemed instinctively more promising than staying down there in the cellar.
His arms were sore and becoming heavier with every bar he grasped, but he forced himself to keep up the pace and even quicken it. Then, sooner than expected, he collided with the top of the shaft.
In shock, he almost let go of the last rung. He didn’t even want to think about what could have happened if he had fallen backwards into the darkness. If the shaft was as deep as the one he had discovered behind his wardrobe, he would have broken his spine or neck. Probably both.
And if the obstacle he had crashed into above had not given way a little, the collision would have been much more painful.
Slowly, Leon stretched his left hand upwards, but the trapdoor on top of the shaft was very heavy. He hunched his back and climbed further up to try to lift it with his shoulders. He braced himself against it, feeling like he was carrying a sack of coals on his back. In reality, he was opening a trapdoor, which tipped to the side with a clatter as Leon climbed up into a room.