... the basketball hoop!
It was even where Alina had said: beside the garage and not above the doors.
‘Let me put it conservatively,’ I said. ‘Whoever lives here must be his electricity supplier’s prize customer.’
Alina seemed to have stored her few visual memories better than a sighted child, perhaps because no new impressions had superimposed themselves on the old images she’d retained from her third year of life. In any event, she still had a vivid recollection of Christmas in California, so I didn’t find it hard to give her a rough idea of the illuminations, which would have induced a migraine in anyone who looked at them for long. I could well understand why all the neighbours had copied the bungalow’s owner and closed their shutters.
‘You mentioned the basketball hoop and a Coca-Cola, but you didn’t say anything about reindeer and Father Christmas.’
Alina shrugged. ‘I can’t remember anything like that.’
I took a step towards the hoop. The green ring was reflecting the pre-Christmas illuminations. It made a curiously new impression, as if it had been only just been put up.
‘Well, what now?’ I heard Alina ask behind me. Fine snowflakes landing on her wig glittered in the reflected glow.
Telling her to wait in the driveway, I tried to open the gate that gave access to the path between the garage and the house, which evidently led to the main entrance facing the garden. Unsurprisingly, it was locked. I would normally have rung the bell, but there was neither a nameplate nor a bell, so I reached through the bars and turned the knob until the gate sprang open. Having assured Alina that I wouldn’t be long, I made my way round the back of the house.
The massive wood-panelled door looked as if it might be reinforced with steel on the inside. As usual in a residential area like this, a CCTV mounted on a buttress projected downwards like a bird of prey poised to swoop on its quarry. On the door, roughly at chest height, was a long, illuminated display panel.
It looked just like the ones in the windows of lottery agencies or cheap amusement arcades, except that the red electronic letters gliding across the LED display from right to left weren’t advertising a jackpot. As I strained my eyes to read them, they spelt out the words of a familiar Christmas song:
Jingle bells, jingle bells,
jingle all the way
I went up to the door and looked in vain for a bell. All the external shutters at the rear of the bungalow had also been lowered.
Oh, what fun it is to ride
in a one-horse open sleigh
Being very close now, I made the mistake of looking straight at the ribbon of text. The luminous letters seemed to sear my hypersensitive eyes like branding irons.
Dashing through the snow
in a one-horse open sleigh,
o’er the graves we go,
laughing all the way
I quickly averted my eyes from the illuminated display and wielded the heavy bronze door-knocker.
Nothing. Not a rustle, nor a shuffling footstep, nor any sound indicative of someone’s willingness to answer the door.
Perhaps the occupants are asleep, I thought, convinced in any case that I was standing outside the wrong house. If there was a right one.
Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way... I started to hum the words in my head. Incredible how the anodyne melody had bored its way into my brain so swiftly, just because of the words on the illuminated display.
Dashing through the snow in a one-horse open sleigh, o’er the...
I stopped short. The bells in my head abruptly fell silent. What had I just been humming? Over the graves we go?
Wondering how on earth I’d hit on such a morbid variant, I looked at the display again. The relevant lines reappeared:
Dashing through the snow
in a one-horse open sleigh,
o’er the fields we go...
Hm, all quite normal.
I could have sworn I’d seen the altered wording for one brief moment, but there was no sign of it now.
My weary, watering eyes must have played a trick on me. No wonder, considering I’d hardly slept at all in the last few days, spent my waking hours hunting a madman, and wound up on the run myself.
Laughing all the way.
Bells on bobtail ring
Wondering whether to knock again, I was just about to resume humming along when the words before my eyes changed once more. This time there was no room for doubt.
The key’s beneath the pot.
Use it and you’ve had your lot.
I let out a yell and staggered backwards – and yelled even louder when I bumped into the figure hovering in the darkness behind me.
40
‘Did you see that?’
I was stupid enough to address that question to Alina. Unlike me, she was highly amused by my terrified squawk.
‘To be honest,’ she retorted, ‘I’m wondering which of us has a pair of eyes in their head.’
‘I’m sorry, but...’ I hesitated, not knowing how to explain what had just happened to me. Especially as the display was once more reeling off the traditional innocuous lyric and I couldn’t have explain what I’d just seen, even to a sighted person.
‘Why didn’t you stay out front?’ I asked in a whisper, looking at TomTom. She had let him off the lead, but he was hugging her side and licking some snow off his paws.
She smiled defiantly. ‘I didn’t feel like spending another half-hour in the cold, waiting for his lordship to involve me in some more third degree.’
‘I didn’t give Traunstein the third degree...’
At that moment I caught sight of an overturned flower pot. It was lying on the lawn not far from Alina. Kneeling down, I detached it from the half-frozen ground with a faint sound like someone smacking their lips. Several small beetles, their night’s repose disturbed, scuttled off into the darkness. Then I spotted the black, faux leather wallet. It contained a single key.
The key’s beneath the pot.
Use it and...
‘What is it?’
Slowly, feeling half-dazed, I brushed past Alina on my way back to the door.
She caught me by the sleeve and insisted on being told what had happened, so I did my best to explain. If she doubted what I’d seen, she didn’t show it. On the contrary, my story of the warning on the display seemed to fill her with a spirit of adventure.
‘I’m coming with you,’ she said when she heard me insert the key in the lock.
Just to see if it fits. Sure, Zorbach. And now? What are you going to do now you’ve unlocked it?
‘No, you stay here and send for help if I’m not out in five minutes,’ I said, well aware that Alina wasn’t the kind of person to take orders from a man like me. A blind girl who’d learnt to ride a bike wasn’t afraid of spooky houses.
There was a click and the door swung open, seemingly by itself.
Use it and...
‘Hello?’ I called into the darkness ahead of me.
Nothing. Just a dense, dark, impenetrable hush.
... you’ve had your lot...
‘All right,’ I thought, reactivating my mobile so as to be able to summon help if necessary. Then, with Alina and TomTom at my heels, I went inside.
It’s only a harmless bungalow, as imagined by a blind girl. What could happen to me in there that’s so terrible?
39
(6 HOURS 20 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)
TOBY TRAUNSTEIN
He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep. He wasn’t even sure he had been asleep, for when he woke up in the dark he felt sleepier than ever before.
Air was his first thought, because he felt he was suffocating. Then he hit his elbow on something hard. Wood.
Not soft any more was his second thought. The walls of his prison were no longer soft and yielding. He thought he must be lying in a coffin.
Groping around on the floor, his hands came into contact with the material that had enclosed him until recently. It
felt like the surface of his waterproof jacket, or like his jeans that time the Advent candle dripped wax on them. Thin, elastic material with a zip running round the sides. Just a minute, was it a...
... a case? Yes, of course. They’d zipped him up in a black case with wheels like the one Dad always took with him on business trips. Except that it was much bigger – capacious enough to hold a boy’s body.
But where am I now? First I was in that shitty trolley case...
Okay, it’s a game. Jens and Kevin shut me up, but they also gave me something to escape with.
The coin.
Although he somehow couldn’t imagine his friends putting a coin in his mouth, he didn’t want to think of an alternative. Better to be at the mercy of his pals than a stranger.
Okay, the coin was for the zip fastener. What else is here?
Maybe a key or a lighter. Or a mobile phone.
Yes, a phone would be great.
He would call the police or Mum. Or even Dad, if he had to, but Dad never answered because he was far too busy, and...
Just a minute. Daddy once got angry with Lea and me because he thought we’d pinched his mobile. He went on and on at us until Mummy found it in his case and handed it to him.
In the outside pocket of his case!
Of course. Those cases have pockets... Maybe...?
Toby pulled the case towards him and felt for the external zip fasteners, opening one after the other. He eventually found something in a small, narrow side pocket.
A screwdriver?
Incredulously, he ran his fingers along it from the wooden handle and steel shaft to the blunt end. Then he started crying.
How the hell can I call Mummy with a broken screwdriver?
This time the tears that sprang to his eyes were tears of rage. He was unwise enough to clench his fist and punch the wooden wall of his prison. It sounded hollow. The pain made him cry all the more.
Fuck you, Kevin and Jens! What have you shut me up in?
Toby blew on his knuckles the way Mummy always did when he came home bruised after playing. He was involuntarily reminded of his seventh birthday, when his grandfather had given him the silliest present ever: an ugly, pot-bellied wooden doll you could unscrew into two halves. He’d asked the old man if it wasn’t meant for Lea.
Oh Lea, why aren’t you here with me now? And what am I supposed to do with a screwdriver that’s lost its tip?
‘You have to let the dolls out!’ He could hear his grandfather’s quavering voice in his head. And then he remembered what the stupid present was called: a babushka. Grandpa had said something about Russia and told him that babushkas were a big hit there because each doll could be unscrewed to reveal another one inside it.
Oh God, I’m inside a babushka!
Every place of confinement he escaped from would prove to be inside another. First a trolley case, then a wooden box.
What’ll come next?
Probably an even bigger box, but just as dark and airless.
Toby coughed. He felt he was losing his balance and crouched down. All he’d done by escaping into the box was buy himself some time.
And a bit more air, but that’s running out too.
The case had been wrapped in a plastic film he’d only just managed to tear. And now, after only a few breaths, his lungs were subject to the same pressure. Even though the dark box was still as impervious to light, he was starting to see stars.
He wondered for a moment if he ought really to exert himself and use up the air even faster, but he decided he had no choice.
Galvanized by a mixture of rage and desperation, he used the end of the broken screwdriver to stab one point in the side of the box again and again.
38
(6 HOURS 18 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)
ALEXANDER ZORBACH
At the age of nine, when I was old enough to cross Berlin by public transport on my own, I was given the job of taking Granny her lunch every Sunday. Granny didn’t like coming to us because she had no love for my father – who, significantly enough, was her son – and she only liked me when I came bearing her favourite fare: Königsberg meatballs.
I think the only feature of our family home she really liked was the big television set in the living room, on which she watched Little Lord Fauntleroy every Christmas, only to fall asleep every time.
Whenever I think of Granny, I’m reminded of her open mouth and the rivulet of saliva that used to trickle down her double chin as the final credits were unfolding. I can’t be sure, but I’m very much afraid she departed this world without ever seeing the end and must still, even in the hereafter, be excoriating the Earl of Dorincourt, whose miraculous change of heart she always missed.
My Sunday visits continued for only six months, after which she fell over in her kitchen and had to go into a nursing home. However, those few encounters had been enough to crystallize my certainty that death isn’t a living creature – not the Grim Reaper familiar to one from horror stories – but a smell.
A multifarious, omnipresent, ultra-pervasive smell dominated by the reek of a cheap toilet cleaner as inadequate to overpower the scent of excrement in the toilet as peppermint creams were to disguise the stale breath of an old woman with ill-fitting dentures. Whenever my grandmother opened the door to me, I was assailed by that ‘death perfume’, as I secretly called it: an amalgam of sweat, urine, advocaat and warmed-up leftovers mingled with the sweet-and-sour aroma of greasy hair and cold farts. I always pictured it in a bottle with a death’s head on the label.
If that concentrate actually existed , I thought as my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, someone had spilt a vast quantity of it inside this bungalow.
‘Pooh,’ said Alina, ‘this place needs airing badly.’
‘Hello?’ I called for at least the fourth time. ‘Anyone at home?’
The fact that so little of the glare outside penetrated the venetian blinds made me feel unpleasantly claustrophobic. All there was to guide me was the faint light from the door, which was ajar. I felt for a switch on the wall, but nothing happened when I turned it on. I swore beneath my breath.
‘What’s that?’ said Alina, who had made her way past me and was groping her way round a table in the middle of the room. She could hardly be puzzled by the absence of light in there, so I guessed it must be the cold that surprised her.
‘There’s no power. Presumably that’s why the heating isn’t on.’
‘I don’t mean that.’
‘What, then?’
‘That hissing sound. Can’t you hear it?’
I held my breath and cocked my head without knowing exactly what had caught Alina’s attention and where it was coming from. I heard... nothing.
‘It sounds like a spraycan,’ she whispered.
TomTom had also pricked up his ears, which usually hung limp. With the dog close beside her, Alina was making for the far end of the room. The darkest end, in other words. I was amazed yet again by the self-assurance with which she advanced across unfamiliar terrain.
Perhaps we become more fearless if we can’t see the dangers the world has in store for us, I thought. Perhaps that was the sole benefit of her disability. What we don’t know doesn’t worry us. Did that mean that what we can’t see doesn’t exist ?
The living-room floor was covered with badly-laid parquet or laminate that creaked faintly beneath Alina’s feet. Following her more by ear than by eye, I stumbled over something that was too low for a table and too heavy for a flower vase, possibly a work of art: a small sculpture or one of those ugly china dogs whose open mouths catch dust in the homes of the wealthy. Then, to my right, I saw a faint finger of light that showed me the way out of the living room and into an adjoining passage.
Heavens. My sense of direction was poor enough at the best of times – I was capable of going astray in a deserted car park. And now this!
The dim yellowish glow was coming from the far end of the passage, as I saw when I emerged from the black hole behind me.
My pupils must have been the size of coins, so the night light plugged into the skirting board seemed to dazzle me like a halogen spotlight.
I couldn’t help thinking of Charlie, and my stomach turned over again.
Charlie... Headstrong, sex-starved, big-hearted Charlie, murdered by the madman who had chosen me to be, willy-nilly, a participant in his game and the finder of her children. There had been a so-called ‘darkroom’ at our usual rendezvous, the Hothouse: an unlit room in which total strangers could copulate on latex mattresses. Anonymous sex with invisible partners was a form of self-gratification I’d never been attracted to, unlike Charlie. She had been so desperate, she wanted to sample all life had to offer.
I had once followed her into the darkroom, only to leave it as soon as I felt a stranger’s hands on my body. I couldn’t even tell their owner’s sex, although total darkness never prevailed in there. As soon as someone drew aside the heavy baize curtain covering the doorway, a handful of weary photons descended on the entwined forms, producing as vague a memory of daylight as the night light plugged into the wall at Alina’s feet.
She had already reached the end of the passage and was standing immediately outside a heavy metal fire door, which was slightly ajar. TomTom had planted himself directly in front of her with his shaggy body up against her legs, preventing her from going any further.
‘Wait,’ I said, catching her up. I quickly saw that the retriever had good reason to bar his mistress‘s path. Beyond the door, a steep flight of steps led down into the bungalow’s cellar.
‘Hear that?’ Alina whispered, and I detected a trace of fear in her voice for the first time.
‘Yes!’
I not only heard it, I could smell it as well. The rhythmical hiss of the spraycan had become louder, the ‘death perfume’ stronger.
Eye Collector, The Page 18