The Devil's Sanctuary

by Marie Hermanson

  Daniel was staring at him in astonishment. He hadn’t heard anyone approaching. How had Karl Fischer gotten there? To judge by the way he was dressed, he had walked. Daniel now saw that he had a walking stick in his hand.

  “Was that your number I just dialed?” he asked, thoroughly bewildered.

  “Of course, what did you want? It’s been a while since we last spoke, but I’ve been very busy with a group of guest researchers. Well, at least we’ve met up now.” Doctor Fischer walked quickly toward him, swinging his stick. “Very unusual to see you in this part of the valley. You’ve been paying Adrian a visit, perhaps? I was thinking of calling in to see him myself. So, what’s on your mind, my friend?”

  “There’s something…I mean someone up there,” Daniel said in an unsteady voice, pointing up into the tree.

  “Really?”

  With his hand raised against the sky, Karl Fischer peered upward.

  “Goodness, look at that! Isn’t that Mattias Block?” he exclaimed, sounding as if he’d just bumped into an old friend on the street. “So we’ve found him at last!”

  When Daniel returned to Keller’s house with Doctor Fischer, Kowalski and Sørensen were standing by the car, ready to leave. Keller was inside the cage, taking care of his falcons.

  Daniel felt slightly giddy. The sight of the dead body had been a shock, but at the same time he was relieved it wasn’t his brother.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” Karl Fischer said. “Our friend here has made me aware that one of our residents is in the vicinity. It would appear that he had the misfortune to tread on one of your traps, Adrian. From what I could tell, it must have happened some time ago. You haven’t noticed anything?”

  Adrian Keller carried on with what he was doing without answering.

  “Obviously we need to get the poor fellow down. I’ll send some guards. Well. I don’t think there was anything else.”

  He turned to Kowalski and Sørensen.

  “Perhaps one of you gentlemen would be so kind as to drive me and Max back to the village?”

  The black Mercedes meandered slowly round the bends on the hill down toward the bottom of the valley. Sørensen was driving, with Karl Fischer beside him. Daniel and Kowalski were sitting in the back. Kowalski smelled strongly of aftershave, something herbal and flowery, almost feminine. Daniel glanced at him. Kowalski was looking ahead with a neutral face and kept his hands folded over a flat briefcase, which Daniel assumed contained the small bags of cocaine.

  “Isn’t it strange?” Karl Fischer said enthusiastically. He wasn’t wearing his seatbelt and kept turning to face the backseat. “We’re such creatures of habit in the way we see things. How we’ve searched for him! All over the valley. But no one ever thinks of looking up, do they?”

  46

  THE GIRL in reception smiled at Daniel.

  “How can I help you?”

  It was the hostess with the black-rimmed glasses, the one who had been in reception just after Max disappeared.

  “The morning patrol told me my brother arrived yesterday. He was asking after me here in reception. Perhaps you were the person he saw?”

  “No. Sofie was on duty then. But there ought to be a message here somewhere.”

  Daniel waited impatiently while she looked behind the counter.

  “Ah, here it is.”

  She had spotted a note pinned up on a notice board, adjusted her glasses, and read it out loud: “‘Max Brant’s brother visiting. Can’t get hold of Max. Ask Max to come to reception.’ The message isn’t signed. But it must have been Sofie who wrote it. Her shift starts at two o’clock. Come back then.”

  As Daniel emerged from the main building one of the guards’ vehicles came driving up. It stopped in front of the care center, and a small crowd of residents had gathered before the guards even had time to open the rear doors. A moment before the park had been as good as deserted, but now they were here, some fifteen people, staring at the doors of the van as they were pulled open and the stretcher lifted out.

  He had seen this before. Whenever anyone was brought to the care center, wounded or dead, there were always a few spectators already in position, and more of them gathered like flies drawn by some imperceptible smell. And there was always someone who knew what had happened and who the injured or dead person was, even in cases where the body was covered up and invisible, as it was on this occasion.

  As he walked past them he heard the name being whispered: “Mattias Block.” He looked at the gathering of residents and wondered what they were feeling. But all he could see were unconcerned faces. The whispers seemed merely to be statements of fact.

  Daniel went to the cafeteria for lunch. At five minutes to two he was back in reception.

  Sofie, a slender doe-eyed creature, was standing behind the counter sorting something. Her hostess’s outfit was slightly too large for her and looked more like a school uniform.

  “You were here when my brother arrived yesterday, weren’t you?” he said.

  She looked up and shook her head firmly.

  “No visitors arrived while I was on duty.”

  “So it wasn’t you who wrote that note?” Daniel said, pointing at the notice board behind her.

  She took the note down and read it.

  “No,” she said solemnly. “It wasn’t here during my shift. Someone must have pinned it up later.”

  “And who was on duty after you?”

  “Mathilde.”

  “Mathilde? She’s the one I spoke to a little while ago, isn’t she? She didn’t write the note. She said it must have been you,” Daniel said, taken aback.

  “We were the only two working in reception yesterday. How odd. Hang on, I’ll just have a look in the register.”

  She opened the green ledger where Daniel had signed in when he first arrived. That felt like a lifetime ago.

  “We haven’t had any visitors for the past two weeks.”

  She closed the ledger, shrugged, then added breezily, “Looks like someone’s joking with you.”

  She was about to crumple the note up when Daniel held out his hand.

  “Could I have that?”

  It had been Max’s voice he had heard, he was convinced of that. The range of the local mobile network was restricted to the valley. It wasn’t possible to call in from outside. Max had been somewhere nearby. And for some peculiar reason, it looked like he had used Karl Fischer’s cell phone.

  Daniel recalled an event during the only Midsummer’s Eve the brothers had celebrated together. Anna and their father had rented an old pilot’s cottage on the Bohuslän coast for the summer and invited Daniel and his mother for the holiday. The whole family had played hide and seek in the overgrown garden. When it was Max’s turn to hide they couldn’t find him. In vain they searched all the likely hiding places—the patch of fruit bushes, the outhouse, the woodshed and vegetable store—then expanded the search to cover the jetties, fishing huts, and cliffs. When they found an old well with a rotten wooden lid in the neighboring yard their anxiety increased still further. Someone hurried home to get a ladder and a flashlight but found Max sitting in his room upstairs eating the last remnants of the cake. He had simply gotten fed up with the game and gone inside. From his window he had watched the others searching for him, amused at their concern.

  Was he sitting laughing somewhere this time too?

  There was no answer when he knocked on Corinne’s door, and she wasn’t answering her cell. She couldn’t be at the bierstube because it wasn’t open yet. Daniel started to get worried.

  A short while later he found her in the church. It was a long time until Mass, and she was completely alone in the large building. Daniel stopped in the archway by the door and watched her without letting her know he was there.

  Corinne was standing in front of the oblong box of candles on the altar rail. A ray of sunlight was filtering through the cherubs in the stained-glass window, coloring her face pink. She stuck a candle into the sand, lit it, and crossed he
rself, the way he had seen Father Dennis do.

  She stood for a while, looking at the candle, then went over to a small painting of the Madonna and Child. She inserted another candle into the candleholder in front of the picture and lit that as well.

  Daniel took a few careful steps into the church. She turned around in a flash, her hand frozen in the middle of crossing herself. The candle flickered.

  “God, you scared me,” she gasped, dropping her hand. “What are you doing, creeping about like that?”

  “Sorry. I didn’t want to disturb you,” he said, stopping in the aisle. “I was just wondering where you were. Do you want me to leave? If you’d rather be alone…”

  “No, no. I just wanted to call in here before I start work. Come here.”

  She held out her arms to him and he hurried over and kissed her. Her cheeks were damp and warm, as if she’d been crying.

  “Anyway, where have you been? I was worried about you,” she said. She was holding his face in her hands and looking at him sternly. “Have you heard? They’ve found Mattias Block.”

  “I was the one who found him.”

  “You?” she exclaimed in surprise.

  He told her about that morning’s strange events.

  “Can I see the note?” Corinne asked.

  He took it from his pocket, smoothed it out, and handed it to her.

  “Do you recognize the handwriting?”

  She held it closer to the candle in front of the painting.

  “This isn’t anyone’s handwriting,” she said thoughtfully. “This has been spelled out with exaggerated neatness. Like a birthday card. Someone making a real effort.”

  She glanced at her watch.

  “I have to go home and get ready,” she said, putting the note in her pocket. “Karl Fischer’s bringing the visiting researchers to the bierstube this evening. It’s their last day in Himmelstal.”

  47

  THE MOOD in the room seemed excellent as Daniel sat down at his favorite table in the corner.

  Corinne sang her ever-popular song about cows and rang her bell, and her accompanist, the man in the Tyrolean hat, then sang a duet with her that Daniel had never heard before.

  The visiting researchers, who were excited and slightly drunk, were seated at two tables that had been pushed together close to the stage. They joined in the simple chorus—“Falleri, fallera”—and stamped their feet in time, making the whole floor shake. They were at the end of an intensive week. From morning to evening they had been confronted with evil and suffering in a highly concentrated scientific environment. But now, in the expert company of Karl Fischer and with a few guards discreetly spread out around the room, they felt secure and relaxed.

  The music fell silent and the performers left the stage. The visiting researchers cried out for an encore, but Corinne waved them off with a smile. The Tyrolean man disappeared in the direction of the kitchen, and Corinne sat down at Daniel’s table. With beads of sweat on her brow she gratefully accepted the tankard of beer that Hannelore’s henpecked husband put down in front of her.

  “They make me sick,” she said in a low voice with a sideways nod toward the researchers, then went on: “I checked out that note. Compared it with other handwritten notes.”

  “What notes?” Daniel asked.

  “All sorts. Notes written by the staff at the clinic. I couldn’t find anything that resembled your note. But like I said, I don’t think whoever wrote it used his or her own handwriting. But I did find something else interesting.”

  She put her hand in the pocket of her apron and discreetly slid a folded sheet across the table. Daniel unfolded it on his lap and looked at it. It was a handwritten lyric.

  “The Shepherdess,” he read. “When the sun goes up…”

  “The other side,” Corinne said.

  He turned the sheet over.

  “What’s this?”

  “Max’s medical notes,” she said quietly. “A copy of the first page.”

  It was hard to read in the dim light, but it did actually look like a page from a patient’s records.

  “How did you get hold of this?” he asked in astonishment.

  “I haven’t got time to explain right now. It was a printout that was produced around the time when Max was admitted here. Personal details and background information. One thing’s particularly interesting. Look at the top, the patient’s date of birth. Then farther down, under the heading ‘Family background.’ Max and his brother Daniel have the same date of birth. Same day, same month, same year. Twins, in other words.”

  Daniel looked up.

  “All this is correct. So why are Gisela Obermann and Karl Fischer claiming that Max doesn’t have a twin? Haven’t they read his notes?”

  “That’s what I thought as well,” Corinne said. She leaned over the table and said in a whisper, “So I logged into Max’s notes and took a look at what they say now.”

  Daniel stared at her. The beads of sweat were shimmering on her brow, but the misted tankard of beer was still standing untouched on the table.

  “How can you get access to another resident’s medical notes?”

  Corinne made a sign that he should keep his voice down. She looked over her shoulder. One of the visiting researchers had stood up and seemed to be delivering an improvised speech to Karl Fischer.

  “Never mind about that,” she whispered. “So, I checked Max’s records to see what they look like now and compared them with the printout that was produced when he first arrived. Obviously his file is much more comprehensive now. But his personal details are the same. With one exception: Max’s date of birth. It’s been changed from October twenty-eighth, 1975, to February second, 1977. Max is now two years younger.”

  “Why would anyone change that?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m wondering.”

  “Are there many people here who have access to the residents’ medical notes?”

  “Only the staff. The doctors, psychologists, and other researchers. Some of the nurses.”

  “And you,” Daniel added pointedly.

  She pretended not to hear him. She leaned forward again, squeezed his hand under the table, and whispered. “You have to get out of here, Daniel. Himmelstal is a dangerous place, and I believe there are things happening here that shouldn’t be happening. The staff aren’t much better than the patients.”

  “But now they’ll have to let me go. However you got hold of that old printout of Max’s records, it shows that I’ve been telling the truth all along. Max and I are twins, and this makes my story credible.”

  Corinne glanced at the visiting researchers, who had just gotten another round of beer. Then she turned to Daniel and went on in a low voice, still holding his hand.

  “We’ve got even stronger evidence than that. I lit two candles in the church today. One was for Mattias Block, my friend who met his death in the valley. The other was a candle for life. For the first time, life has been created in Himmelstal.”

  “What do you mean?” Daniel said, bewildered.

  “I’m pregnant,” she whispered.

  His head was spinning.

  “You can’t be. You’ve been…”

  He couldn’t bring himself to say the word “sterilized.” It sounded so harsh and final.

  Corinne shook her head slowly. She squeezed his hand hard under the table.

  “I’m as fertile as you. We’re going to have a child, Daniel.”

  At that moment the drawn-out notes of the accordion echoed around the room. The man in the Tyrolean hat was standing onstage again. Corinne pulled out a lipstick and hastily applied some to her lips, then adjusted the lacing of her dirndl. As the visiting researchers applauded enthusiastically, she walked over to the stage and began to sing, with gently swaying arms, “Im grünen Wald dort wo die Drossel singt.”

  The visiting researchers cheered. The man in the baseball cap raised his huge tankard and Karl Fischer tapped out the beat on the table.

  Daniel paid
and left the bierstube. The leaded windows were open wide and the singing and accordion music followed him down the alley.

  He recalled what Samantha had said about Corinne’s background. Was she really pregnant, or was this just wishful thinking, madness?

  If it was true, then she was no ordinary resident. So who was she, then?

  PART 4

  48

  NOTHING WAS visible from the outside except a tall, dense fir hedge. If you looked between the branches you could make out a heavy steel fence immediately behind it. There were two gates in the hedge: a large one, wide enough for vehicles, and, in the side facing the clinic buildings, a smaller one where Daniel had seen a group of doctors emerge early one morning, then walk over toward the care center in formation. That was when he realized that the area inside the fir hedge contained the doctors’ housing.

  He rang the bell beside the gate. A young male voice answered over the speaker. Daniel leaned toward the intercom and said, “My name is Daniel Brant. I’d like to see Doctor Obermann. It’s important.”

  “Sorry,” the voice said. “No visitors are allowed in here. You’ll have to try to find her in her office.”

  “I’ve already tried there. But apparently she’s at home. Please, tell her I’m here, and that it’s important,” Daniel said with as much gravity and authority as he could muster.

  “One moment.”

  The speaker fell silent. In the distance came the noise of the diggers preparing the site for the new buildings farther up the slope. After a few minutes there was a bleep and the gate opened automatically and incredibly slowly.

  Inside he found himself in a different world.

  There were a dozen or so single-story bungalows surrounding a lawn with a fountain at its center. There were flowerbeds with a few solitary late roses, trees with yellowing leaves, and a brick barbeque.

  It was a peaceful, secluded place. It made Daniel think of the walled palace gardens of the Arab world, lying like hidden treasure, protected from prying eyes in the midst of bustling cities.