The Eye Collector

  ‘I said I’m home. I’m also thirsty,’ Alina replied. She smiled faintly when I turned to her. With her ramrod straight stance and her eyes shut, she looked like a girl waiting for a farewell kiss from her boyfriend. I turned away and stared straight into my own face.

  It was no illusion.

  The picture on the screen had momentarily changed when the young couple walked past the gallery, but I hadn’t registered that until just now, when Frank turned round.

  The ‘installation’ was filming passers-by!

  ‘Well, mister ace reporter, how about it? Coming in for a drink?’ Alina asked with a touch of impatience.

  I massaged the back of my neck, surprised to find that my headache had gone until I remembered the Maxalt I’d taken. Logically, the angle from which I could see myself on the TV screen indicated that the camera must be located somewhere above me and at an angle. Sure enough, I spotted the flashing LED on the gallery ceiling and over to my left.

  I sidestepped once, then again, until I was out of the camera’s range. Only two seconds later the screen was again filled with snow.

  ‘Well, thanks for the chat,’ said Alina, but I continued to ignore her.

  Instead, I confirmed my suspicion by testing the motion sensor a second time. I moved to the right once more, and once more the screen reacted.

  ‘Exactly what time did the Eye Collector visit you yesterday?’ I asked eagerly, but this time it was Alina who didn’t answer.

  When I looked at the entrance to the flats, she and TomTom had disappeared inside.

  50

  (8 HOURS 25 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)

  ALINA GREGORIEV

  Home again. The smell of her flat was the first reassuring sensation she’d sensed in hours.

  It was a familiar blend from various rooms. The hours-old aroma of breakfast coffee lingered in the air together with that of her expensive perfume and the cheap, vinegar-based cleanser her home help swore by. Today was Thursday, and so, during her absence, the woman had overlaid the dusty odour of the books in the living room with the scent of fresh laundry.

  Alina drew several deep breaths and smiled.

  She hadn’t smoked for once.

  ‘Come here, doggy. You’ll get something to eat right away.’

  She removed TomTom’s harness and knelt down to unzip her boots. She wondered as she did so if the Others always paused on entering their homes and drew several deep breaths before they removed their coats.

  The Others.

  She had always, throughout her life, tried to avoid being given special treatment, not only at kindergarten but in school and especially at college. Her desire to be a normal member of society was so extreme that she’d once applied to be a lollipop lady, or, in American parlance, ‘school-crossing guard’ – a curiosity that had even found its way into the local news section of a Californian newspaper. The school principal had naturally rejected her request, but she was at least permitted to assist her sighted best friend. Alina was still convinced that she could have managed by herself. She could tell whether a vehicle was approaching and – more importantly – whether it was accelerating or pulling up. Most of the Others found that inconceivable.

  The Others, who grab your arm uninvited and shepherd you across the street when mobility training has taught you how to get by without assistance.

  The Others, who think that the blind recognize people by running their hands over their faces, a procedure only to be found in kitschy Hollywood movies.

  The Others, of whom I’ll never be one.

  Alina put her rucksack down, then pulled off her red dredlock wig and deposited it on the chest of drawers in which she kept all her other wigs; her ‘masks’, as she called them.

  A television documentary she’d chanced to see many years ago (no blind person speaks of ‘listening’ to TV) had made clear to Alina the extent to which hairstyles send out signals and characterize people. When asked to describe the perpetrators of crimes they’d witnessed, people tended to remember their hair, and the more noticeable this was, the better they recalled it. Psychologists ascribed this to the fact that one’s eye is drawn first to a person’s face and hair – hence nicknames such as ‘Curly’ or ‘Carrot Top’.

  Alina had been nineteen when she first shaved her head and startled her friends by wearing a long, dark pageboy wig. Now the possessor of some fifty different ‘masks’, she could transform herself, according to mood, into a peroxide blonde bimbo, a raven-haired dominatrix, or a rustic innocent in braids.

  And today I felt like manga punk, she thought as she made her way along the passage and peeled off her sweaters one by one. Her maisonette comprised the fifth and sixth floors of the old apartment block and was accessible by lift. Earlier on, when she hadn’t felt so sure of herself, she would use the lift to get to her consulting room on the fifth floor, but now she generally went down the narrow spiral staircase.

  Alina pulled the T-shirt over her head and made her way to the bathroom, stripped to the waist. As in the homes of most blind people, everything – tables, chairs, vases – had its own allotted place, and the cleaner had strict instructions not to move anything. She also had to vacuum up every crumb. Alina liked to walk around barefoot but hated the idea of treading on anything – or in it.

  It’s been a fiasco, the whole thing, she thought. Not because nobody believed her. Nor because she’d turned down several patients just to go on this wild-goose chase.

  But because I couldn’t help the child.

  The faint ticking of the old grandfather clock indicated that she’d reached the balustrade overlooking her practice’s reception area.

  Or children.

  She wondered why she’d seen only one child and tried to suppress the thought that the girl might no longer be alive.

  It wasn’t the first time her visions hadn’t been a hundred per cent accurate. Nor the first time she’d begun to doubt her gift.

  Her flashbacks normally spanned a few seconds only. They were short sequences in which she saw accidents or blood-soaked bedclothes, saw her father strangling someone or her mother stirring rat poison into baby food. These distressing visions beset her sporadically, although they didn’t happen every time she touched someone. That was why she guessed they occurred only when she came into physical contact with people who carried a heavy charge of negative energy. Like the classmate who hit on her at a college shindig and slapped her face when she refused to go to bed with him. He didn’t let up until she told him to stop raping his sister. She informed the police at once of her suspicion but wasn’t believed until the young man’s body was found. He had hanged himself, but not before violating his sibling one last time.

  The passage opened out and her surroundings became somewhat brighter. She paused and turned to face the wall, as she always did, running her fingers over the smooth surface that reflected the light she always left on in the bathroom across the way.

  Day and night.

  Most of her visitors were surprised by her apartment’s light-flooded rooms and numerous mirrors, just as they wondered why her living room contained a huge photographic blow-up, two metres square, of an abandoned gold-mining town. An ex-boyfriend had given her such a graphic description of Michael von Hassel’s sepia masterpiece that she could taste the dust in the dilapidated saloon on her tongue. She could also hear the picture whenever visitors stood in front of it, lost in admiration of the technique with which the artist had created such a breathtaking work.

  As for the mirrors, Alina liked the cold, smooth feel of them under her fingertips. She also liked their reflective properties, which proved her sensitivity to light and shade: a residue of what still linked her to the Others’ world since the explosion. Besides, she quite often entertained sighted visitors.

  Slipping off her jeans, panties and socks, Alina stood naked in front of the wall mirror. A faint draught played around her ankles, and she felt herself getting gooseflesh. She put a hand to her close-shaven head and ran her forefi
nger over the decorative labyrinth the hairdresser had incised into the stubble at her request. Then she slid her hand down the back of her neck and fingered her tattoo, going right up to the mirror in the vain hope of discerning at least the outlines of her figure just once, for a fraction of a second, so as to compare it with the mental picture her sense of touch painted day after day.

  She knew that her breasts were too small for most men’s taste, but they were firm and needed no bra. Her nipples seemed to compensate for this inadequacy because all her lovers to date, both male and female, had spent an eternity stroking, squeezing or sucking them. Luckily, they were her most erogenous zone apart from her feet.

  Her hand slid down to her stomach, stroked her pierced navel and strayed to her hips.

  ‘If you were a car,’ John had quipped on one occasion, ‘you’d be a 1968 Mustang.’ She often walked around the flat naked, simply because she felt happier without any clothes on and didn’t have to put on an act with John. ‘Angular and compact but timelessly elegant.’

  Alina had no idea what a Mustang looked like but found this a delightful compliment, especially as her father had always driven a Ford.

  Oh John...

  Too bad he was away on holiday with his boyfriend. And, to make matters worse, on a backpacking tour of Vietnam, where she couldn’t just call him and sob down the phone. She debated what time it was in New York, where Ivan lived, and wondered how he would react to an unexpected call from his big sister. They hadn’t managed to keep in touch after she left the States for Germany. Although they undoubtedly loved one another and their annual birthday and Christmas cards came from the heart, they didn’t do anything else to keep in contact.

  Not a sound basis for sharing a horrific experience like mine.

  Alina turned to face the bathroom. She had chosen the strongest halogen lights in the DIY superstore. John always moaned about her ‘Gestapo dazzlers’ whenever he stayed over at her flat, but for her they generated no more than a faint recollection of light. They did, however, help her to get her bearings when making up her face in the bathroom mirror. Her best girlfriend had shown her how to do this, but she would never get the hang of the confounded eyeliner, not in a hundred years.

  She stooped to pick up her discarded clothes and went into the bathroom. While her bath was running she used a gadget that recognised colour to check whether she’d put on a white or coloured T-shirt that morning. ‘White,’ said a high-pitched electronic voice. The little device, which fired a beam of light at articles of clothing and identified their colour by the light’s reflection, was one of the world’s finest inventions apart from the Internet. At least for blind people who cared whether their nice white blouse had acquired a greenish tinge because they’d once more washed their whites and coloureds together.

  Having identified the colour of her socks and panties in the same way and dropped them into the appropriate laundry basket beside the loo, Alina went out into the passage again and shut the bathroom door behind her. She could only faintly hear the water gushing into the free-standing enamel bathtub as she set off for the kitchen, where she planned to put two handfuls of dried food in TomTom’s bowl.

  But she never got that far. Another two steps, and her foot encountered something warm.

  Something soft.

  She smiled. ‘Well?’ she said, giving the retriever a gentle nudge with her toe. But TomTom didn’t budge. Instead, his body tensed even more.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  She took a step to the right, meaning to walk past him, but he blocked the move.

  ‘Aren’t you hungry?’

  She bent down and tried to pat him, but he didn’t lick her hand in the usual way.

  ‘What is it?’

  He’s rigid, concentrating hard. He refuses to be distracted because...

  She shivered suddenly.

  TomTom had been trained – at a cost of 20,000 euros – to prevent his owner from having accidents. From unprotected obstacles, potholes, open manholes.

  But there’s nothing like that on the way to my kitchen.

  ‘Come on, let me pass,’ she said, trying to thrust him aside. But TomTom did something unique in her experience.

  He started to growl.

  The ominous sound mingled with the monotonous murmur of the bathwater, creating an almost hypnotic atmosphere.

  What the devil’s going on? Alina felt her body stiffen like the dog’s. She had suddenly noticed what TomTom had clearly sensed some time earlier: the familiar smell of her flat had undergone a change. It had taken on a masculine note.

  Cinnamon. Cloves. Alcohol.

  A man’s strong aftershave.

  ‘Hello?’ she called, her voice puncturing the murmuring sounds. She almost vomited with terror when she felt his breath on her ear.

  ‘Stop playing,’ he said in a low voice.

  The man, who had appeared from nowhere, laid his hand on her bare shoulder. Almost tenderly, which made it infinitely worse. At the same time, she felt a cold, metallic object prod her cheek.

  Alina swung round and lashed out impotently. She drew a deep breath in preparation for the cry that slowly took shape in her throat and emerged as a guttural roar. She aimed a second blow at thin air, turned anticlockwise, and lost her balance, knocking a vase off a chest of drawers. The heavy lead glass vessel landed on her foot and forced another cry from her lungs.

  The unbearable pain coincided with something else: her eyes were flooded with light.

  Bright as a flash of lightning. Like an overexposed photo...

  Then she fell to the floor.

  And into the depths of another vision.

  49

  ALINA GREGORIEV (VISION)

  The room is dark and the sick woman isn’t alone. Someone can be heard breathing in a bed nearby. At least one other person in the room is dying like her.

  Dying.

  Without a doubt.

  The smell of disinfectant is no match for the perfume of death, the stench of rancid breath, suppurating bedsores and watery excreta.

  ‘Here I am again,’ she hears herself whisper in a man’s voice.

  Quickly, breathlessly. Hoarsely.

  The woman, who has her mother’s eyes but is unknown to her, doesn’t answer. How can she, when there’s a transparent mask over her face?

  The device resembles a shadow Alina can’t interpret, probably because it’s unfamiliar to her. Because she never saw one as a three year old or can’t remember doing so.

  Something in the room is beeping, like a digital alarm clock left to its own devices.

  A door behind her creaks open and the room grows lighter. Someone claps their hands. ‘How nice of you to look in again,’ says a woman’s resonant voice. A shadowy figure flits over to the other bed behind her.

  A rustling sound. A current of air created by the raising and lowering of bedclothes. Pillows are plumped. Someone moans.

  Alina reaches for the hand on the bed; grey, papery skin on a starched white sheet.

  The sick woman’s chest slowly rises and falls. There are times when her heart seems to debate whether or not to go on beating.

  Leaning forward, she brushes a strand of hair off the old woman’s forehead and kisses her.

  Gives her arm a final squeeze before she goes.

  And then, at about the same moment as the siren goes off in the distance, she turns to the bedside table and straightens a small, rectangular object.

  A photo frame.

  The picture in it shows neither father nor mother, so it can only be of a child. A boy or a girl. The shadowy form in the photo is impossible to identify. She can only make out the eyes. Or rather, the eye. The other is invisible.

  Or not there at all.

  She turns and looks at the open door. The siren grows louder. At the same time, the world around her darkens...

  The flashes of light turn back into black specks, and the black specks combine to form a shroud of all-embracing darkness...


  ... in which Alina recovers consciousness, roused by the burglar alarm of the art gallery six floors below. And by someone hammering on her front door.

  48

  (8 HOURS 17 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)

  ALEXANDER ZORBACH

  She opened the door in the nick of time. Another moment, and the bulky thing would have slipped through my bleeding fingers. I had climbed the stairs, misjudging not only my physical condition but the weight of the machine I’d stolen from the gallery.

  Alina let me in without a word, trembling all over.

  I put the HD-DVD recorder down. ‘What’s happened?’ she asked dully. I might have asked her the same thing.

  As if it weren’t enough that she was facing me stark naked and making no move to cover herself, she had suddenly lost all her hair as well. That was accounted for by the wig on the chest of drawers beside the door. But far more disconcerting was the fear that I sensed in every fibre of her body. She was breathing fast, with her arms hanging limp at her sides and her hands trembling uncontrollably. For one who attached such importance to expression, her face now resembled a rigid mask. She had been weeping. Big fat tears had rolled down her cheeks, streaking them with eye shadow and accentuating her doll-like appearance.

  I reached for her instinctively, but she retreated a step.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ she whispered, fending me off with both hands.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

  ‘He was here.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Who the hell do you think?!’ she yelled, and I felt almost glad she was capable of such an outburst. Blazing anger was preferable to fear. ‘The swine had his knife with him. The knife he uses to...’ She left the rest unsaid. It wasn’t necessary.

  I ran my eyes over her naked body to see if the Eye Collector had injured her anywhere, but all I saw was the rather too thin but undeniably shapely figure of a young woman whom I would, under other circumstances, have found sexually attractive. Correction: whom I found sexually attractive even under present circumstances, though I swiftly suppressed the thought.