by Helen Grant
The trouble was, Egbert’s klootzak of a boss had caught him playing it during working hours. OK, Egbert had to concede, he’d caught him playing it more than once. And he was not happy.
Egbert’s view was that if you employed technical virtuosos you had to understand that they weren’t just going to sit there from nine to five like good little galley slaves. It riled Egbert that Paul – sorry, Meneer De Bock – didn’t get that. He ranted at Egbert for ten minutes, and then he gave him a verbal warning.
While Paul was ranting, Egbert tuned out. He pretended he was listening to white noise. He heard the bit at the end all right, though. He would have liked to punch Paul in his self-satisfied, stupid face, but he didn’t want to lose the job. All that justifiable frustration made him feel twitchy, though. He thought he’d go and take it out on a house somewhere. Someone else’s house.
Maybe this time he wouldn’t repair anything. That was a crap idea anyway, and he’d only gone along with it because if he hadn’t agreed, he wouldn’t have been accepted into the group. Egbert thought it would be a lot more fun to break into a place with a decent amount of expensive hardware in it, and customize it a bit for his own amusement. There were a few places like that amongst the houses visited by the Koekoeken. Expats with more money than sense, who got someone in to set stuff up for them because they didn’t know how to do it themselves (Idiots, thought Egbert). Then half the time they didn’t use it anyway.
Egbert could think of at least one place he’d love to do. A little work could screw up their multiroom AV nicely. Ultimately pointless, since nobody would know it was him, but in a way that made the exercise all the more beautiful; he would be doing it just because he could.
When Meneer Klootzak De Bock had gone for his usual long lunch, Egbert logged on to the Koekoeken website and checked out the locations that were available. Several of them were useless – Egbert had no interest whatsoever in ancient properties with barely a phone line in them – but he found one he recognized, one that would be perfect for his evening’s entertainment. He made sure to signal his interest in it, thus warning everyone else off. He didn’t want some stupid idiot turning up at the same time.
Two evenings later he went to the house. It was on a quiet residential street in Sint-Genesius-Rode, south of Brussels, not far from the main road that ran alongside the Zonienwoud. He took a tram and a bus and then walked the rest of the way. He didn’t worry about anybody noticing him; he dressed nondescriptly and kept his head down. There was never anyone walking about on that particular street at night anyway; they drove in and out in their expensive cars but they didn’t actually walk anywhere. All the same he glanced swiftly around before he started on the gate. The street was deserted. There was a car parked on the grass verge perhaps a hundred metres away, but the lights were off and the engine wasn’t running.
The lock on the gate was so simple that it was almost insulting. Egbert rolled his eyes. Morons. Why do they even bother locking it?
When he was on the other side he closed the gate again and then turned to look up at the house. It was the sort of place that sent estate agents into paroxysms of delight. Egbert thought it looked like a stack of kids’ building blocks. Tall and white and flat-roofed with enormous floor-to-ceiling black-framed windows and so many different levels that it made you dizzy to look at it; it might have reminded Egbert of one of Escher’s impossible architectural drawings, if he had taken an interest in art (which he didn’t). There was a balcony high up above him with a black railing to match the black windowframes, and something else that looked like a blocky turret.
There were no roller shutters on any of the windows, which were made of reinforced glass for security. This meant that it was risky in the extreme to put on any lights. Instead, Egbert was armed with a Maglite torch; thanks to the towering laurel hedge screening the house from the road he was pretty sure that didn’t represent much of a risk of detection.
He made short work of the front door locks, and that put him in an even worse mood. Too easy. He could never understand why his former friends in the lock-picking club back home in Holland had made such a fuss about his predilection for breaking into houses. These people were so stupid they deserved to be broken into.
All the same, he was surprised when he found the alarm system was already off. No buzzing, no flashing lights. He walked right across the spacious hallway and it didn’t trigger so much as a single beep. Not just stupid, but careless too.
He didn’t switch on the Maglite straight away. It was a moonlit night, and with those enormous windows he could see pretty clearly. First of all he went into the living room and poured himself a very large measure of the expensive whisky in the drinks cabinet. The glass was large and very heavy. Like everything in the house, it was outsized. Egbert stared out of the huge windows at the vast expanse of moonlit garden and wondered whether the owners were like that too; he imagined a family of giants – Americans, Texans maybe, with broad fleshy shoulders and bellies to match and calves like ham hocks. A lot of Dutch people were tall too but Egbert wasn’t. He told himself that he despised that kind of physical robustness. The sooner it was possible to upload yourself into cyberspace entirely, the better. Then they’d see who was the giant.
He wandered back into the hallway, taking the glass with him, and started up the staircase. The first time he’d come here, he had found the experience unnerving. Like the rest of the house, the staircase was aggressively modern; it was constructed of some kind of burnished metal, and when you ascended it, the steps gave back a kind of metallic echo that made it sound as though someone were coming up after you. Now, of course, that didn’t bother him. He knew he was alone.
He ignored the bathroom with its gleaming jacuzzi and the master bedroom with the water bed, and headed for the study, slipping the Maglite out of his pocket. He put the whisky down on the carpet for a moment. Time to party.
He actually had his hand on the door knob when he heard it. Downstairs, a door closed.
Shit. It dropped from him in an instant, that feeling of smug invincibility, like a tawdry cloak sliding off his narrow shoulders and puddling on the floor. Suddenly his heart was beating so wildly that he thought he might throw up. The Maglite fell from his grasp and rolled away somewhere in the dark. He dropped to his hands and knees on the thick, expensive carpet, knocking over the tumbler of whisky as he did so. He felt the liquid under his clutching fingers, soaking into the pile. I’ll have to clear that up, he thought in some remote, detached part of his mind, the part that was not short-circuiting with fear.
He did his best to listen, but it was difficult to hear anything other than the sound of his own ragged breathing shivering through his teeth. Calm down, Egbert told himself, but the mere knowledge that there was something he needed to stay calm about was like throwing petrol onto the flames of his rising panic.
In the instant of silence between the drawing in of one breath and its release, he heard the distinctive sound of someone stepping onto the metal staircase. Oh shit. This cannot be happening.
He could hear the individual footsteps on the stairs now, ringing out forcefully against the metal treads like the blows of a hammer on an anvil, each followed by that tinny metallic echo. Whoever it was wanted to be heard, and that meant they knew that Egbert was up there. That this could not mean anything good was clear; people with respectable intentions do not stalk wordlessly through a darkened house, as Egbert himself very well knew.
The sound of the approaching tread galvanized him into action. He got to his feet, forgetting the spilled whisky and the lost torch, and looked about him, searching for an escape route. Not the study; that was a dead end. He went towards the master bedroom instead; there were two doors leading off that, one of them into a dressing room and the other into a bathroom which had a second door leading back onto the landing further down.
In his panic he managed to run into the doorframe with a thud that the person coming up the stairs must have heard. Too late to worry about that, howe
ver. Whoever it was must know he was here; the thing was to stay one step ahead. He fumbled his way around the doorframe and staggered into the master bedroom.
It was completely dark in here; thick drapes covered the windows. Egbert had a rough memory of the layout of the room from previous visits, but now he was unable to think clearly, unable to think of anything but getting away, and he blundered into a chair in the darkness.
When he straightened up he was disorientated. He felt the smooth surface of a desk or dressing table but he had no idea where in the room it was or which way he was facing. His fingers brushed a trailing flex. A lamp. For a split second he hesitated. If he turned on a light, his location would be completely obvious. On the other hand, he was now completely lost. Another half a minute of flailing about in the darkness trying to fight his way past pieces of furniture and he would have lost his chance of escape altogether. He ran his fingers up the flex until he found the little button and pressed it.
Nothing happened.
Egbert pressed the button again, pressed it several times with feverish urgency. The light remained obstinately off. He tugged at the cable. It seemed to be firmly plugged in, because there was no give in it. Shitshitshit. He couldn’t believe his evil luck. The bulb must have blown.
He began to move across the room in the dark, holding out his hands in front of him, straining all the time for the sound of those footsteps on the stairs. Now he could hear nothing, which meant the person was on the landing carpet. Egbert lunged forward, and felt wallpaper under his palms. He moved sideways, keeping the contact with the wall, feeling for the bathroom door.
He touched the light switch almost at the same moment that he felt the edge of the doorframe. Instinctively he pressed it.
Nothing.
Finally it dawned upon Egbert that there was no light because the power was off completely. It was more than just a blown bulb. He heard a furtive tread entering the darkened bedroom and he seriously doubted it was the electrician. He tore open the bathroom door, stumbled inside and slammed it shut behind him, fumbling for the lock.
He really thought he might throw up. The taste of bile was acrid in his mouth. He managed to twist the lock shut, and then he staggered away from the door on legs that felt as though they would give way beneath him. The bathroom had a huge slanting skylight in the ceiling through which the moonlight poured, silvering his terrified reflection in the big rectangular mirror. He heard as much as saw the stealthy turning of the door handle. In another moment it would occur to whoever was on the other side of the door that he had locked it, and that the only way to get at him was to go back through the bedroom onto the landing.
Egbert fled through the other door.
As he ran for the head of the staircase he glanced behind him, and what he saw nearly dropped him in his tracks from sheer fright. Part of the shock was the fact that he didn’t really believe the evidence of his eyes, not one hundred per cent. His knees were suddenly weak beneath him and part of him wanted to let them give way, to let himself crumple to the floor and bury his face in the elegant modern shag pile carpet, because what he was seeing couldn’t possibly be there.
Instead he somehow managed to force himself forward and start down the stairs, but fear made him clumsy, and he lurched this way and that, jarring himself painfully on the metal banister. He wasn’t really seeing the staircase leading down to the ground floor anyway, because his mind was still full of what he had just seen coming after him.
A hunter. An honest-to-God hunter. Egbert knew it was crazy but that was what he had seen, outlined against the huge window at the other end of the landing. The guy had looked about two metres tall – that might be fear magnifying him in Egbert’s mind but he was big anyway, broad-shouldered and muscular, and he was absolutely armed to the teeth: there was something hanging at his side and something else that looked horribly like a crossbow slung across his back – but that wasn’t the worst thing, because that was the jaunty little hunting hat perched on his head. The weapons were bad enough because nobody wandered around a darkened house at night with a private arsenal on their back just for the fun of it, but it was the hat that signalled the guy’s intentions. He was hunting, and Egbert was the quarry.
It was kind of ironic in a way because Egbert had been in this position a thousand times already, but online. He’d had countless fights like the ones in The Matrix, he’d lost dozens of avatars to monsters and zombies and guys just like the one who was following him down the stairs right now, guys who were armed to the teeth and more than a little bit crazy. He’d practically rolled in digital body parts. The gorier the better. Handgun? Cool. Machine gun? Awesome.
Now he was discovering something new: that there was nothing awesome at all about weapons when they were real ones and the other guy had them all. As he fled down the stairs he was gibbering with fear.
He ran straight for the front door, but it wouldn’t open. It could have been something as simple as the guy pushing a bolt across but there wasn’t time to stop and find out. He darted through an open doorway into the living room but there were no outside doors here, just the huge floor-to-ceiling windows.
He ran over to them anyway and banged on the glass, but it was that reinforced stuff. From outside you probably couldn’t even hear him thumping on it. He suddenly had a very clear image of how he must look from the other side, of what someone would have seen if they had been standing there in the garden: a pale, terrified face with an open mouth like a dark circle, screaming noiselessly, palms slapping the glass without ever making a sound. But there was nobody out there. The lawn was silver in the moonlight and as flawlessly blank as a bowling green.
Egbert stopped banging on the glass and ran for the far door. He was not thinking clearly now; the house had become a maze to him. He forgot everything he had learned on previous visits.
The door led into a hallway with a set of stairs at the other end, leading down into the basement. There was no other way out. He wrenched open a door on the way down the hall; inside was a home gym, the dim shapes of a treadmill and exercise bicycle and weights machine visible in the gloom. Nowhere to hide. He didn’t bother to close the door, but ran on down the hallway.
The stairs at the end descended into a black pit. The basement had no windows to admit moonlight, and without electric lights it was utterly dark. Egbert wasn’t particularly suggestible when it came to dark places, and he was a lot more frightened of what was behind him than he was of the black basement. He went down the stairs as quickly as he could, holding onto the handrail for guidance.
It was cold in the basement, much colder than it had been on the ground floor. It was like stepping outdoors. For a few moments it disorientated him. He imagined a huge underground cavern, stretching out for metres in all directions, arching overhead like the dome of a cathedral.
Egbert stretched out a trembling hand and touched the cool matt surface of a wall. Instantly the darkness contracted around him to the width of a coffin. Now he felt claustrophobic. He had to suppress a rising feeling of hysteria as he felt his way along the wall. After a few moments he stopped and listened. His mouth was horribly dry.
There was no sound of anyone coming after him down the stairs. What was the guy doing?
A moment later he found out. There was an audible click followed by a hum as the electricity came back on.
Egbert tried to make himself think rationally. He no longer cared two straws whether anyone outside the house saw a light go on or not. The question was whether it would give him any advantage to turn the lights on or not. He could run from his pursuer more quickly if he could see where he was going, but he’d be instantly visible too. He glanced back towards the stairs and saw the lighter patch at the top, faint as a sketch. There was no one there, not as yet. He decided to creep onwards in the dark, in the hopes that he could find a hiding place.
The first door he came to was locked. He turned the handle twice, stealthily, but the door was not going to open. He did his bes
t not to think about what would happen if every single door down here were locked, if he were wandering further into a blind alley.
When he reached the second door, he hardly dared try it. It opened though, on the first attempt. The floor in here was tiled – he could tell from the slippery polished feel of it under his shoes. There was a slight slope to the floor. Egbert guessed that it was a shower room. He reached out and touched the wall and was not surprised to find tiles there too.
He closed the door very slowly and carefully, listening all the time, terrified of making any sound that would give away his location. Once the door was closed, the darkness was so absolute that it almost hurt to look at it, or look into it. Egbert located the door lock by touch. There was no key; it was a simple lever that turned to the side. It was stiff, and he didn’t dare work at it too forcefully in case it made a noise. It turned about forty degrees and then it wouldn’t go any further without a struggle. Egbert let go of it. He huddled against the wall, listening fearfully, shrinking away from the door. If he kept silent, if he kept the light off, if the lock held, he might just escape notice. It was a faint hope but it was the only one he had. He pressed his knuckles to his mouth and tried very hard not to whimper.
De Jager came down the stairs very slowly and carefully. He had plenty of time, after all. There was no other way out. He knew that the first door on the corridor, the one that probably led into the garage, was locked. He had tried it himself earlier in the evening. The prey had almost certainly gone through the second door, which led into the wet room. De Jager padded up to the closed door and listened. Sure enough, he heard a tiny sound that might have been a smothered gasp or a sob. He let himself savour the moment before he opened the door.
The wet room was the perfect place as far as he was concerned; it could have been made for killing. Run both taps for twenty minutes and most of the mess would have gone down the drain. No need for anything as clean but inherently laborious as strangulation; he could indulge himself this time.