The Nightwalker: A Novel
Page 6
His right eyelid began to twitch, a reflex Leon was unable to control. He guided the cursor of the mouse towards the replay button, then, after a few seconds of hesitation, clicked on it.
An input field popped up, requesting the password Leon had set up yesterday. He entered four digits, and the recording began. At first all he saw was shadows, which made him feel a little calmer. Despite his exhaustion, his body had clearly gone through several dream and deep-sleep phases, tossing and turning so restlessly in bed that the motion-activated camera was triggered. In the images, which had that typical greyish-green and slightly grainy look of those produced by a night-vision camera, he was able to make out how he trampled the blanket to the foot of the bed then pulled it up again, and how he gripped the big pillow like a life jacket, only to push it away a few minutes later.
As the camera only recorded while he was moving, during the first two hours of sleep it hadn’t even captured ten minutes, and Leon began to hope that his nocturnal activity would be equally unspectacular to the end of the video film – that is, until the timer in the lower right-hand corner of the picture came to the 127th minute.
It began harmlessly. Even though Leon had expected these images, they were still a shock.
Suddenly, with a jolt, the perspective changed. He had sat up in his sleep, and now he was looking around. Slowly, as though he was seeing the room for the first time and wanted to commit every detail of it to his memory, the camera wandered from left to right. If the images before were unclear and flickering, now it was as though the camera was mounted on a tripod.
Like a robot, thought Leon, remembering that steady, mechanical movements were typical of sleepwalkers. Most roamed around like lifeless shells pulled by an invisible cord, and Leon was sure that the sight of them often awoke comparisons with zombies and the undead. His own movements, too, seemed like they were being steered by some unknown hand.
He recoiled in shock at the sight of himself, blurred by the camera shadows, as he walked in profile past the wall mirror next to the door. With the camera on his head, his appearance was reminiscent of the awful photographs of apes in animal laboratories when their skulls were opened up to measure their brain activity. Except that, unlike those poor creatures, he was not jammed into a clamp, but able to move around freely, albeit unconsciously.
The monitor went dark for a moment, then, two steps later, he was on Natalie’s side of the bed, as he could see from all the photographs about underground bunker worlds that lay on her nightstand.
Leon turned round and compared the image with how things looked now. The photographs were still in the same place, exactly as in the video.
But the drawer is open!
Just as he turned back to the monitor, Leon’s right hand wandered into the camera’s field of vision. Holding his breath, he watched himself open Natalie’s drawer and take out a pair of latex gloves.
Why in God’s name did she have something like that in her nightstand?
Leon leaned forwards and grabbed the monitor with both hands as though he wanted to shake it. If someone had rung the doorbell right then, he wouldn’t have heard it. They would have needed to set off a firework right next to his ear to tear his attention from the screen.
He wasn’t sure if his brain was consciously slowing down the sequence of images, or if he really was pulling the gloves on as slowly and deliberately as the recording showed.
Leon tried to change the volume. Then he realised that, in his agitated state the day before, he had completely forgotten to activate the microphone software. So he was hearing the creak and snap of the gloves only in his imagination. Besides that, the recording was completely silent. No footsteps, no breathing, no rustling as he shuffled his way across the bedroom.
Where am I going?
Keeping his gaze fixed on the monitor, Leon reached down to touch the slipper socks on his feet, giving a start when his touch dislodged some dried earth from the bobbled soles.
Where have I been?
Leon watched himself march slowly but purposefully towards the wardrobe from which Natalie had been pulling her clothes in tears that unforgettable morning. Instead of opening it, as Leon expected himself to do, he paused, motionless, in front of it. For so long, in fact, that the recording stopped. But then the pictures jolted back, with a quick pan upwards to the bedroom ceiling, and Leon walked into the gap between the bureau and the wardrobe.
He watched as, with a force he would have never thought himself capable of even in his conscious state, he pushed the old wardrobe to the side in his sleep.
But why?
Leon stopped the recording and looked at the wardrobe to his left. It was the only piece of furniture they had inherited from the previous owner, because Natalie had thought it so beautiful – now it looked like a threatening monolith, exerting an air of danger.
He stood up from the chair, his knees trembling.
He couldn’t even begin to imagine how he had moved this heavy monstrosity in the night. Leon knelt down and felt the scrape marks on the parquet floor. They were neither slight nor new. Completely the opposite: deep grooves had been cut into the wood like train tracks, as though the wardrobe had frequently been moved back and forth over a long period of time.
Leon stood up once more.
Like on the recording, he pressed both hands against the side of the wardrobe, took a deep breath and pushed against it with all his strength. At first it refused to budge even a millimetre, but on the second try it moved with astonishing ease.
On the first attempt, admittedly, Leon had given himself a splinter when his hands slipped, and he found himself regretting having taken off the gloves. In the end he didn’t need much longer than he had on the video. The wardrobe creaked and groaned, and the parquet floor screeched in protest, but after a few sweat-inducing seconds he had pushed the thing about a metre and a half to the side.
And what now?
Panting, he took a step back – and clapped his hand in front of his mouth.
That’s not possible.
In disbelief, Leon stared at the object on the wall he had just exposed.
I must be hallucinating.
But there was no doubt.
Where the wardrobe had been just moments ago was a door that he had never seen before in his life.
11
Do you see that door, there in the wall?
Only a ghost can hear its call.
Suddenly, the melody was back. The ditty from his childhood – one of many that Leon’s biological father had dreamed up to embellish the bedtime stories he invented – was buzzing around in Leon’s head like a fly trapped under a glass.
Behind the door lies a hiding place.
But don’t go through. Run far, far away.
Even though he had never been into the strong room of a bank, Leon imagined the doors to be just like the one he was currently stretching his hand out towards. It looked like the secure door to a vault containing important documents, money or gold bars.
Ignore this warning and it won’t be long before
You lose yourself behind the door.
The metal-clad door was barely a metre-eighty high, almost his own height, and looked much too heavy and bulky for the doorframe it was riveted to. In place of a door handle were two tilted twist locks that had to be turned in a clockwise direction.
He who crosses the threshold at night
Can never go back, try as hard as he might.
In total confusion Leon placed the palm of his hand against the mysterious door. He had expected to hear a humming in his head, to see blurry, shadowy pictures dancing in front of his eyes, to perceive colours with more intensity or at least to smell some disturbing scent – something that would signal he was starting to lose his mind. But it seemed he wasn’t yet teetering on the threshold between insanity and reality. He didn’t even have a bad taste in his mouth. Everything he saw and felt, every one of these sensations was undeniably real: the cool door, the digits of the
locking mechanism, worn out from frequent use . . . this damn door in my bedroom!
Behind the wardrobe.
It exists. It isn’t a dream.
Or is it?
Leon turned round and looked towards the bed in fear that he would see himself sleeping there, but the sheet was crumpled and the mattress empty. His gaze fell on the camera at his feet, which must have fallen off while he was sleepwalking, and he was reminded of the video. With two quick paces, Leon was back at the laptop and he pressed play again. The sensation of watching a stranger intensified; he almost felt like a voyeur, slightly ashamed and fearfully anticipating what would happen next.
On the monitor Leon watched himself standing in front of the newly exposed door for some time, as if rooted to the spot. As he did nothing but breathe for minutes on end, he decided to speed up the replay, making his reflected persona on the monitor look like a flagpole swaying in the wind. Only after another ten minutes of the video did Leon change his position, and from then on everything happened very quickly. It was over so suddenly that he didn’t manage to press pause in time, and he had to rewind it to see it again.
That’s unbelievable, he thought. Even watching it again, the events on the laptop monitor lost none of their morbid, schizophrenic fascination.
Initially, it seemed like he was about to make his way back to the bed, for on the recording Leon had turned round. But he glanced up at the bedroom ceiling, then spun back round so quickly that the picture went blurry.
Once the camera’s image correction program started functioning again, Leon was already done with the first of the two twist wheels. With practised hand movements, he moved the second into different positions; it all took no longer than a second or two. Then the heavy door seemed to snap open of its own accord, only a few centimetres, but enough for Leon to be able to reach both his hands into the gap and pull it open.
What’s behind it? The question shot into his mind as he kept his gaze fixed on the laptop screen, trying not to miss a single detail.
Unfortunately, from that moment on there weren’t many more images. Everything in Leon was screaming out to discover what lay behind the door; the door that shouldn’t really even exist. At the same time, as he watched himself sleepwalking over the threshold, he felt afraid of himself in a way he had never experienced before.
Where am I going? What’s behind the door?
As Leon stepped through the door in his sleep, he didn’t duck down enough to prevent the camera from hitting the doorframe. The device came loose from his head and fell to the floor, where, for just a few seconds, it recorded Leon’s back disappearing into the darkness.
Then the film stopped, but Leon still couldn’t pull his gaze from the computer.
As though hypnotised, he stared at the monitor until the screensaver eventually washed away the black video window before his watering eyes.
Only then did he stir, getting up and walking slowly back to the door in the wall.
‘OK, let’s think about this rationally,’ he said to himself, intertwining his fingers to stop them from trembling. ‘If you’re not asleep, and you haven’t lost your mind, the door must be real. And if it’s real . . .’
. . . it must be possible to open it again.
He didn’t have the strength to utter this last thought out loud.
It didn’t take long for an even greater fear to rise up in him, above the realisation that he was leading a double life played out behind closed doors: it was that, in his conscious state, it would be impossible to repeat the movements he had made in his sleep.
In the video he hadn’t hesitated for a second, determinedly turning the wheel locks into the necessary positions. Clearly he knew the combination in his sleep.
But only in his sleep.
Here and now, he didn’t have the slightest idea of what he needed to do to open the locks.
12
‘A second entrance?’
At the beginning of the telephone conversation the man with the brash voice had sounded merely impatient, but now Benedict Bauer was clearly annoyed. ‘What the hell gives you that idea, Herr Nader?’
Leon had prepared a white lie in advance before calling the building custodian. ‘We’re thinking about renovating our bedroom, and behind the wardrobe there are some markings that I can’t find an explanation for.’
One floor above, Michael Tareski was just beginning his daily piano practice. The chemist had discovered his musical passion late in life, and spent at least an hour a day practising the scales.
‘I wouldn’t want to drill or hammer in a nail in the wrong place,’ said Leon, continuing to fib. ‘Is it possible that there’s something concealed behind the wallpaper?’
‘I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about. I gave you the plans when you moved in, remember?’
‘Yes, I know,’ agreed Leon. At this moment he was sat at his desk in front of the floor plans, which had been included with the rental contract. He’d had to fight for them; originally the custodian did not want to hand them over, presumably to make it more difficult to check the calculation of the rent in the contract against the measurements of the apartment.
‘There’s no further entrance indicated on my plans . . .’
‘There you go then.’
‘But perhaps they’re not . . .’
‘Not complete? Are you implying that we carry out shoddy work?’
‘No, of course not . . .’
‘But?’
Leon closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
But there’s a door behind the wardrobe in my bedroom, and I have no idea what it’s doing there.
The clumsy piano-playing above his head was getting louder. Leon looked up at the ceiling.
‘I really don’t mean to cause any trouble, Herr Bauer . . .’
‘Good, then I suggest we end this conversation now, otherwise I’m going to miss my train.’
‘Yes, of course. Just one last question: is it possible the last tenant changed something without informing you?’
‘Rebecca Stahl?’ The custodian laughed spitefully. ‘I very much doubt it.’
‘What makes you so sure?’
‘The last tenant was blind. She couldn’t even manage to operate the lift, let alone build a new entrance to her bedroom.’
‘OK, I see,’ said Leon, his tone as flat as his emotions. If he hadn’t been sitting down, he would have looked around for a chair.
‘Please forgive the interruption,’ he said, and was about to hang up when Bauer bluntly asked if something was going on with him.
‘You’re behaving more and more strangely, Herr Nader. And to be honest the apartment is much too sought-after to be wasted on eccentric tenants.’
‘What do you mean by eccentric?’
‘You’ve been causing trouble ever since you moved in. First you insisted on being given the floor plans . . .’
‘I’m an architect. Those kind of things interest me.’
‘Then you bombard me with emails asking to speak to the owner.’
‘For the same reason. I’ve admired the work of Professor von Boyten, who died far too young, ever since my student days, and I would have liked to speak to the son about his genius father . . .’
‘Yes, but he didn’t want to speak to you. Siegfried von Boyten has never wanted contact with any of his tenants,’ said Bauer, letting the second half of his sentence – and especially not with you – hang unspoken in the air.
In the background, Leon heard a train station tannoy announcement.
‘If you don’t change your behaviour, Herr Nader, then I’ll have no choice but to dissolve our contract.’
‘My behaviour? What’s that supposed to mean? Is it against the law to call up the custodian now or something?’
‘No. But running around naked in the hallways and frightening other tenants is.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ asked Leon in confusion, before it occurred to him what the custodian was talking about.
‘Spare me the excuses. Instead, turn your attention to clearing all the bicycles, shoes and other objects out of the hallway by the day after tomorrow,’ barked Bauer into the phone by way of goodbye.
‘Why?’
‘Because the renovations on the staircase begin the day after tomorrow. Maybe you would do better to read the notices instead of studying your floor plans, Herr Nader.’
With that he hung up.
At the same time the piano-playing on the floor above died away too.
13
It was a while before Leon dared go back into the bedroom. And yet he didn’t know what would be worse: standing in front of the closed metal door in the wall again, or finding the wardrobe in the same position as before, as if it had never been moved.
He delayed the moment by going into the kitchen. Leon hadn’t eaten or drunk anything for a long time now, but he was so nervous that he didn’t feel hungry or thirsty, even though his stomach was gurgling relentlessly like a central-heating pipe. He wanted to make some tea to calm it down a little, but couldn’t find the kettle, which left him wondering why Natalie would bother taking that old, lime-scaled thing.
Once he had taken a drink of water from the tap, his bladder started to press, and he went to the bathroom to relieve himself. Washing his hands, he looked at his face in the mirror. His eyes looked as though he had conjunctivitis. A multitude of burst blood vessels had turned the whites red, providing a strange contrast to the dark shadows beneath them.
He let the water run cold, then splashed some from the basin on to his face. But the enlivening effect he sought failed to materialise, so he leaned over and held his head under the tap.
To begin with he kept his eyes closed, and when he opened them he got such a shock that he jerked his head up, banging his forehead against the tap.