‘TomTom can sense danger,’ Alina said. Superfluously. One didn’t need an animal’s sense of smell to know that something here was badly wrong.
No, you’re mistaken. There can’t be anything here. We’re merely pursuing the hallucinations of a blind visionary.
I pulled the door open.
I was naturally familiar with movies in which some idiot ventures barefoot into a cellar instead of listening to the audience’s advice and running a mile from the mad axeman who’s lurking down there. It was, therefore, completely out of the question for me to set foot on those stone steps – even though I felt impelled to do so by professional curiosity, and even though Lea and Toby might be desperately waiting for us in the Eye Collector’s hideaway only a few metres below.
TomTom’s instincts were sound. We shouldn’t court danger, I fully realized that. At least for the first few moments. At least until I heard those frightful, inhuman sounds that could only be coming from a creature that needed my help at once, not half an hour from now.
‘Jesus, what’s that?’ Alina asked, sounding a trifle more apprehensive than before.
Somebody’s dying down there, I thought. I opened my mobile and texted our location to Stoya.
It happened just after I’d sent the text and was about halfway down the flight of steps: a motion sensor activated an overhead light. Down here in the cellar, immediately below the living room, it was suddenly as bright as day.
More’s the pity.
When my eyes had recovered from the dazzling glare, I looked down into the little chamber with the rough-hewn walls – its vaulted ceiling was reminiscent of a wine cellar – and started to tremble.
How dearly I yearned for the darkness I’d just left.
What wouldn’t I have given to be spared the sight that met my eyes.
37
When light penetrates our cornea, passes through the pupil and finally hits the retina’s sensitive photoreceptors, an image results, at least on a very small part of the retina: the macula lutea or ‘yellow spot’. What really results is more than one image, because our optic muscles ensure that the eyes never remain still but scan an object for fractions of a second, building up an overall picture out of countless details. Thus, our brains process a flood of neural stimuli into visual patterns by comparing what is seen with what is already familiar to us. Strictly speaking, the eye is merely a tool or extension of our true organ of sight: the brain, which never permits us to see reality, only an interpretation of the same.
But the sight that bludgeoned its way into my skull in the bungalow’s cellar was without precedent. My brain had no recollection of anything comparable with such a horrific spectacle. I had never seen anything so appalling.
The woman looked like an exhibit in an anatomical collection, the only difference being that her spatchcocked body was still alive. At first I assumed that the hissing ventilator beside the couch was solely responsible for the fact that her bisected chest continued to rise and fall. Sadly, though (I wished so ardently she were dead, God forgive me), the mouth beneath the mask with the laryn-geal intubator was open and breathing heavily. Moreover, her eyes were rolling. I clutched my mouth.
This can’t be true. It isn’t real – it’s just an optical illusion. We’re merely acting on a blind girl’s hallucinations...
I blinked, but I couldn’t blot out the frightful images. Neither the couch, nor the ventilator, nor the...
... telephone? What on earth is a telephone doing on the instrument table beside this dying woman?
I could only infer the victim’s sex from her long hair and breasts, whose nipples had already rotted away. She certainly wasn’t a kidnapped girl of nine, but her age was impossible to guess, the more so since all her teeth and several fingers and toes were missing.
‘What’s going on down there?’ Alina’s voice broke in on my thoughts. She had evidently defied TomTom and was now standing where I had triggered the motion sensor, halfway down the steps. TomTom was waiting one step below her, panting and trembling with agitation.
‘I can’t tell you,’ I said in a choking voice, at pains not to contaminate the crime scene by an unguarded movement.
I don’t know what to do. God in heaven, this is more than I can endure.
The image of the woman who was no more than a living, breathing wound refused to disappear, even when I briefly shut my eyes.
She was done up in a way I’d never seen before. Her entire body was sheathed in transparent film like an outsize joint of meat in a freezer bag. The madman responsible for this perversion must have sucked out all the air, with the result that the plastic film clung tightly to the flesh beneath the shredded skin.
When the purpose of this dawned on me I started to retch.
Because of the neighbours. So that her animate corpse doesn’t smell as much as it rots away.
She had been sealed up in transparent film like some kind of vacuum-packed foodstuff.
‘Need any help?’ asked Alina.
‘No, I...’
Help? Yes, of course I need help.
I looked at my mobile and groaned.
Naturally not. We’re in a cellar. No reception.
Worse still, the connection must have been severed in the entrance because my phone was displaying a text message in the outgoing mail. My attempt to send it had failed. Stoya didn’t know where we were.
Swiftly, I turned my back on the scene of martyrdom in front of me and went back to the foot of the steps.
‘We must get out of here and call—’
Bang!
‘Alina?’
I almost bellowed her name, the unexpected noise had given me such a shock. She was now trembling as noticeably as TomTom.
‘What was that?’
No, please not. Don’t let it be that!
I had noticed the current of fresh air at the top of the steps, before I had started down.
Damn it!
We had left all the doors open on our route from the front door and along the passage to the cellar. The wind had got up since our arrival. It was still moderate, still not a winter gale, but strong enough to send a draught whistling through the house and...
‘Shit!’
Hurrying up the steps past Alina and TomTom, I aimed a furious, despairing kick at the cellar door, which had just slammed shut.
I rattled the handle, then threw my weight against the door, but my shoulder was no match for the expanse of metal that barred our way out. The mobile in my hand displayed no reception bars, even up here, so I squeezed past Alina and the dog and went back down the steps.
‘What are you going to do? Come on, tell me!’
I ignored Alina’s impatient question and checked to see if the telephone on the instrument table was working.
Well I’ll be... It’s connected!
I hadn’t seen such an ancient phone since the eighties. It still boasted a rotary dial.
Like Grandma’s. Everything reminds me of Grandma, not just the smell of death.
Even the dialling lock was there, a relic of the days when long-distance calls still cost the earth and you automatically secured your telephone against uninvited callers before going away on holiday. The tiny lock permitted only two numbers to be dialled: the 1 and the 2.
But they’re enough for me. I don’t need more than two numbers to call the emergency services.
I inserted my forefinger in the finger plate.
1... 1... 2.
In some strange way, the dial’s old-fashioned purr seemed to harmonize with the hiss of the ventilator beside me. I held my breath and strove with all my might to avoid looking at the living corpse on my right.
The phone rang.
Once. Twice.
The third time, darkness enveloped us.
36
(6 HOURS 11 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)
FRANK LAHMANN (TRAINEE JOURNALIST)
‘Where is he?’
Thea Bergdorf must have snuck up behind him. He wonde
red how long she’d been watching him.
‘I know you keep in touch with him, laddie, so don’t mess me about!’
The editor-in-chief was now confronting Frank like a goalkeeper intent on defending his penalty area by any available means, physical violence included. She made a point of wearing tight-fitting, cream-coloured trouser suits that suited her about as well as a shrunk pinstripe suit would have suited a bouncer. She was quite frank about the fact that she set no store by outward appearances.
‘I’ve got where I am because of my fat backside, not in spite of it,’ she’d informed a dumbstruck business tycoon at her paper’s New Year’s party. ‘If I were young, pretty and anorexic I’d waste too much of my time screwing the wrong men.’ She obviously possessed a sense of humour, but Frank couldn’t detect a trace of it in her current demeanour and the peremptory tone of voice.
‘For the last time: Where is Zorbach at this moment?’
Frank uttered a weary groan and ran his fingers through his hair. ‘He asked me not to tell anyone.’
‘I’m his boss, in case you’d forgotten.’
‘I know, but he’s my mentor.’
‘Oh, you think that embroils you in a conflict of interests, do you?’ Thea’s lips twisted in a sarcastic smile. ‘Very well, I hereby release you from it. You’re fired!’ And she turned on her heel.
‘What?!’ Frank jumped up from Zorbach’s chair and hurried after her. ‘Why?’
She didn’t even turn round. ‘Because I can’t tolerate subordinates withholding important information from me. I asked you to tell me at once if Zorbach called you. You ignored that and went on playing by your own rules. Well, tough.’
‘But this makes no sense,’ Frank exclaimed angrily. ‘You certainly won’t get any information out of me if you fire me.’
‘Oh, you’ve no need to tell me a thing.’ She finally came to a halt, but only to point to the reception area, whose automatic doors were just opening.
Two men walked into the newspaper office.
Thea gave Frank an evil smile. ‘I’m sure the police will have more effective ways of extracting the truth from you.’
35
(6 HOURS 10 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE) ALEXANDER ZORBACH
‘Hello, yes?’ The amiable voice at the other end of the line was puzzling in itself, and the background noises sounded even less appropriate to an emergency call centre. The mélange of alcoholic laughter and discordant singing might have been emanating from a karaoke bar.
‘Turn the music down,’ the man called, as if to confirm that a boisterous party was in progress in the background. Someone actually seemed to have heard him, because the thudding disco bass abruptly lost some of its volume.
‘Am I through to emergency?’
‘Eh? Emergency? Oh sure, of course!’ The man’s laughter was as long and loud as his speech was slurred. He was quite clearly drunk – certainly not the kind of person you wanted to answer the phone when you dialled 112.
‘Sorry, I wasn’t expecting your call so soon.’
Expecting it?
‘Are you taking the piss?’ I yelled. ‘I’m standing beside a woman in urgent need of medical assistance, and...’ I broke off. Something had started to vibrate, and it wasn’t the ventilator.
‘Ah yes, the Murder Game. I get it. Just a minute.’
I heard a rustle of paper. The next moment, he sounded as if he was reading out a prepared text: ‘“I did warn you. You shouldn’t have challenged me, but you insisted on joining in the game. Very well, listen carefully, here are the rules.”’
‘The rules? What rules?’
The vibration, which had intensified, was now superimposed on a sound that was vaguely reminiscent of a vacuum cleaner.
What’s going on here? What the hell is happening to us?
‘There are always rules in these shitty games, amigo.’
The man on the phone belched softly. ‘Oops, sorry,’ he said with a laugh.
‘Who are you?’ I shouted.
‘Oh, fuck, sorry, I’ve screwed this up. But it was such short notice. Normally I get my instructions at least a week in advance. Just so happens we’re throwing a party and I’ve already had a couple. That’s why I didn’t catch on at first, comprende?’
No, I don’t. I don’t understand why I’m having to bandy words with a tipsy imbecile when I dialled emergency on behalf of the decomposing woman with whom I and my blind companion are shut up in a dark cellar.
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘Okay, but you must promise not to tell anyone, right?
I used to do a lot of this stuff, that’s why my number’s still on the Internet, but these role-playing games get really boring after a while. I only agreed to spout this rubbish because the guy on the phone promised me a hundred euros.’
Role play? Oh God, the Eye Collector must have put a call through to a student who thought he could earn a few extra euros by passing on clues to the participants in an interactive manhunt.
Except that this is no game. Not, at least, for anyone but the Eye Collector himself.
‘The man who gave you money to answer the phone when I dialled this number – what were his instructions?’
‘Well, to read you this email.’
I coughed, suddenly beset by the unpleasant sensation that the air I was breathing had grown thinner.
‘“You still have fifteen minutes’ worth of oxygen,”’ the man read out. The monotonous vacuum-cleaner noise had become an incessant hum. ‘“That’s how long it will take for the pumps to suck the air out of the cellar. If you haven’t come to solve the riddle on your own, it’ll run out even sooner. But a game isn’t a game unless the players have a chance of winning. You can turn off the pump and win!”’
He paused. Someone in the background uttered a raucous obscenity.
‘Well, go on.’
‘That’s it.’ He gave a sheepish laugh.
‘What do you mean, that’s it?’
How was I expected to turn off the pump that was transforming our prison into a vacuum chamber when I didn’t even know where it was? I clasped my dry throat.
‘Hey, amigo, don’t tell him I screwed up, will you? Got to go now.’
The music had grown louder again. The man seemed to have moved to another room. He sounded as if he were standing in the middle of a dance floor.
‘No, don’t hang up!’ I yelled above the background noises and the mechanical hum of the suction pump. ‘There must be something else!’
‘No, amigo, honestly there... Hey, just a minute.’
He broke off, and I clamped the old-fashioned receiver to my ear even harder.
‘Hell, I almost missed it. The subject of the email, I mean.’
‘What is it?’ I asked as calmly as I could manage.
Stay calm. I forced myself to breathe slowly and deeply. You still have plenty of time, I tried to tell myself. Even though Alina and TomTom are also using up oxygen and the cellar’s capacity is only a few cubic metres, ten minutes is plenty long enough to work out a plan.
‘What’s the subject, damn it?’
I heard a last rustle of paper at the other end of the line. Then the man said something that finally blew my mind.
‘Just three words, amigo: “Remember your mother!” ’
34
My mother died in our kitchen on the morning of May 20, shortly after some flour got up her nose while she was baking. Her best friend, Babsi, who happened to be visiting, yelled at the foreign on-call doctor to examine her nose.
‘She held her nose!’
Babsi repeated this at least a dozen times. Not only when they lifted Mother on to the stretcher and slid her into the ambulance under the neighbours’ wondering gaze, but also to the staff in the intensive care ward: ‘Why on earth did she hold her nose?’
Babsi thought it obvious that this was what had made the pressure build up in her brain and caused the aneurysm to burst. It wasn’t until much later that
a doctor with tired eyes and projecting teeth informed me that my mother couldn’t have averted the bleed even if she’d sneezed into a handkerchief in the normal way.
‘The cerebral haemorrhage probably occasioned the sneeze reflex. Either that, or it was purely coincidence that she got something up her nose just when the aneurysm burst. Anyhow, it wasn’t that which caused the stroke.’
How comforting. So my mother wasn’t hooked up to a battery of ultra-modern hospital equipment because she was too stupid to sneeze normally. Her time had come, that’s all. Very reassuring.
Today, five-and-a-half years after the event, she was in the clinical ward of a private nursing home. Her room resembled a showroom for hi-tech aids to intensive care. The medically correct term for her condition was apallic syndrome or waking coma. Whenever I visited her I felt tempted to wrench off the clipboard at the foot of her bed, cross out the diagnosis, and substitute ‘deceased’. Because that’s what she was to me: dead.
My mother may still have experienced phases of waking and sleeping, and her organs hadn’t stopped functioning thanks to an abundance of pills, infusions, tubes and instruments. The doctors and nurses may well have thought that this constituted living, but to me she had died in our kitchen on May 20 five-and-a-half years ago.
I also knew that she would think the same if her brain were still capable of entertaining a single, lucid idea.
‘Promise me you’ll never let it come to that!’
Her tone on the way back from the nursing home had been almost imploring. We’d paid Granny a visit – an even more harrowing occasion than usual. Granny had apparently chucked her turds around the dining room (‘See what I can do!’) and then tried to eat her own hair. By the time they let us in to see her she was in the seventh heaven, pharmaceutically speaking, and dribbling the way she used to when dozing in front of Little Lord Fauntleroy.
‘Dear God, I don’t want to end up like that,’ my mother told me tearfully in the car. Then she extracted a far too ambitious promise from me never to leave her alone in a situation in which she had ceased to be in command of her senses.