The Nightwalker: A Novel

by Sebastian Fitzek

  His gaze wandered to her hand with the ripped-off thumbnail.

  What can’t I do? Torture you any more?

  He didn’t dare look her in the face, so great was his fear of seeing the truth.

  ‘You have to . . .’

  Stay here? Save you? Is that what you wanted to say?

  Hope sparked inside him, and he leaned forwards to be able to understand her more clearly.

  ‘Don’t worry, sweetheart. I know I can’t fall asleep again.’

  ‘NO!’

  She reared up in one final, despairing lurch, then sank down again, robbed of all energy.

  ‘No? What do you mean?’

  That I should fall asleep after all? But that doesn’t make any sense.

  Natalie’s breathing became shallower, her voice still just a whisper, but it shattered Leon with the strength of a hurricane when she said: ‘You’re wrong, it’s exactly the opposite.’

  ‘The opposite? What do you mean, the opposite?’ he asked anxiously, then a terrible thought sprang into the car of the rollercoaster, the tracks spiralling through Leon’s mind, going up, turning in a loop and shooting into his consciousness at an unbelievable speed:

  It’s not about the fact that I can’t fall asleep.

  It’s exactly the opposite.

  I have to stay . . . like this.

  I CAN’T . . . WAKE UP!

  35

  Wake up.

  Just two simple words, but with the impact of an explosion.

  The first explosive charges of the looming realisation detonated with painful force within Leon’s head.

  I can’t wake up?

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ he protested flatly, abruptly recognising how strange his voice sounded. Or had he been slurring the whole time as though he were drugged?

  Leon stood up and tried to step away from the bed, but his legs refused to obey him. He was tempted to laugh, but even his lips felt numb. His face was frozen into a mask.

  ‘Are you trying to say I’m dreaming?’

  That I’m just imagining all of this? You? The labyrinth? Our conversation?

  ‘No,’ cried Natalie in despair.

  ‘No what?’ Leon shouted. ‘What’s happening to me?’

  I’m not sleeping. I’m not awake. So what am I?

  Natalie tried to answer him, but her lips moved without a sound.

  ‘What am I?’ Leon held on to her head, which was sinking downwards.

  She needs water. A doctor.

  He remembered Volwarth and how he had explained why he didn’t believe Leon was capable of being violent during his sleep, and all of a sudden Leon understood what Natalie had been trying to tell him this whole time.

  Of course. Volwarth.

  Not asleep. Not awake. What am I?

  The psychiatrist had given him the answer to this question just a few days ago.

  . . . strictly speaking the so-called sleepwalker isn’t actually asleep. He is in another, barely researched state of consciousness between being asleep and being awake. I call it the third stage.

  A stage in which Leon, as he suddenly understood, was imprisoned. Right now. The psychiatrist had diagnosed it perfectly: No matter what you say, I don’t believe you harmed your wife in your sleep.

  Not in my sleep.

  No.

  In a conscious, criminally liable state.

  Leon grabbed his head with both hands and stared at Natalie, who had plunged once more into another, hopefully pain-free world. He tried to fight the terrible truth: that he wasn’t violent when he was sleepwalking.

  But when he was awake!

  That was when he had planned the architecture of his torture chamber, built doors in the walls and created another world beyond his apartment.

  The door behind the wardrobe, the two-way mirror, the blood in the bath . . .

  Everything he could remember right now, he had experienced not in a conscious, awake state, but as a sleepwalker.

  ‘That can’t be true,’ he heard himself say as though from a great distance, but deep inside he knew it was very probably true. Volwarth had told him about similar cases.

  In the decades that I’ve been researching and treating parasomnias, I’ve encountered almost everything: people who clean their apartments in the deep-sleep phase . . .

  Or who crawl along tunnels, climb down into shafts, up ladders.

  Sleepwalkers who have coherent conversations with their partners and even answer questions.

  For example on the telephone with Natalie’s best friend Anouka, Sven, the police, or over tea with Ivana.

  I had patients who did washing in the night and even operated complicated devices.

  Complicated devices like a head-mounted camera. Like a laptop in front of which Leon had sat and watched videos, in the mistaken assumption that he was awake. But he hadn’t been sleeping either. Everything had really happened, except on a new, third level of consciousness, in the third stage, between being awake and asleep.

  I freed Tareski, and opened the secret door. And right now I’m standing in front of my tortured wife. Stroking her hair from her forehead, kissing her dry lips and talking to her. It’s while sleepwalking that I reflect on the state I’m in. And it’s a state that I can’t be permitted to leave. Not yet. Because I become a danger not when I sleepwalk, but when I’m awake.

  Leon stared at Natalie, who seemed to be losing consciousness completely, while he was clearly in the process of waking up.

  The whole time he had thought he could remember his dreams, but it was exactly the opposite. As a sleepwalker, he had no memory of what he had done in his conscious state.

  That’s why he couldn’t remember the door codes or the postcard on the fridge or the fact that Sven had collected the architectural model. And that’s why the policeman had asked him why he wasn’t looking him in the eye. That was why Sven had fled, scared. Those two, at least, had noticed his state.

  Oh God. No.

  Leon saw the open packet of pills he had put on the nightstand.

  The more caffeine I took, the more pills I swallowed . . . the sooner I will wake up.

  And what will happen then?

  Leon began to shiver.

  It’s all exactly the opposite.

  This whole time he had been asking himself whether he was leading a double life in his sleep. Now he didn’t know who he was in real life. What would he do once he regained consciousness?

  Was he a perpetrator? Or a victim?

  Did his presence put Natalie in danger? Or make her safe?

  He could feel it wouldn’t be much longer now, that he would soon leave the third stage, presumably by falling into a brief intermittent sleep before finally waking up.

  As a murderer? Or a rescuer?

  Leon knew he couldn’t leave these answers to fate. He had to take precautions against the worst of all possibilities, and use the last remaining seconds he had.

  He grabbed the handcuffs from the table and clapped one around his left wrist. Then, with the last of his strength, he dragged himself over to a heating pipe on the wall, approximately five paces from the bed. As he knelt down, he could no longer see Natalie, only hear her vegetative groans.

  ‘Everything’s going to be OK,’ he called to her as he yawned, longer and deeper than ever before. Then, with the open end of the handcuffs, he chained himself to the pipe.

  ‘I won’t hurt you any more.’

  He patted at his breast pocket, relieved to feel the fountain pen he had found in the hiding place in the adjoining passageway. Leon wrote a single word on the palm of his right hand, and four numbers on the left.

  Finally, he pulled the headband with the camera back onto his head, opened his mouth, placed the handcuff key on his tongue and swallowed it.

  Just a few moments later he changed states of consciousness.

  36

  Leon was awoken by a persistent ringing. For a while the shrill tones had formed part of his dream, the rest of which he could no
longer remember just a few seconds after waking up. Natalie had been in it, as had a cellar, vault doors and long, dark passageways, but then the acoustic stimuli had become too intense to be filtered out by his brain. Unable to ignore the ringing of the telephone, Leon had opened his eyes.

  How is that possible?

  It was pitch black in the room, and he fumbled blindly for the light switch on the nightstand. The smell of clean washing and softener assailed his nose as he turned to the side. For an instant he felt irritated that Natalie had ignored his superstition and changed the bed-sheets during the Twelve Nights. Then he remembered that this was the least of his worries right now.

  If the ringing phone in the hallway had been the cause of him waking, the sight of the empty half of the bed brought him crashing back to reality.

  I’m alone.

  ‘Yes, I’m coming,’ he called in irritation as he flung back the blanket, wondering whether he had drunk too much or too little yesterday. His voice was hoarse, his mouth was dry, and his throat felt like he had been gargling with glass shards.

  Speaking of glass, I really need to repair that ceiling lamp.

  He looked around for his clothes. Instead of his jeans and sweatshirt, a pair of blue overalls were draped over the bureau, and the boots that he only ever wore on building sites were under the chair.

  What the hell are they doing there?

  Still drunk from a sleep that seemed to have depleted rather than increased his energy, he shuffled into the hallway naked and grabbed the telephone from the docking station.

  ‘Yes?’

  At first all he heard was a static crackle, making him think his adoptive parents, whom he had sent on a cruise as a Christmas present, were trying to call him from the ship. Then a familiar voice said hesitantly: ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Sven?’

  Leon pushed his hand through his unkempt hair and wondered why it felt so dirty. Stiff with dirt.

  ‘What are you calling me in the middle of the night for?’

  ‘The night? It’s afternoon.’

  ‘What?’

  Leon went to the kitchen to get some water.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  He opened the door, causing Natalie’s Van Gogh postcard with the sunflower motif to come loose from the magnetic board and fall to the floor.

  ‘I’m not in the mood for jokes,’ said Sven, as Leon stood rooted to the spot in front of the fridge.

  ‘That’s not possible.’

  The green digits of the LED clock on the fridge door blurred in front of his tired eyes, but there could be no doubt that they confirmed Sven’s claim: 17.22.

  That can’t be possible. I can’t possibly have slept that long. He ached so much that he felt more like he had just helped someone to move house.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ groaned Leon. ‘Did I miss an appointment or something?’ He had a vague memory about a client’s birthday party.

  ‘Yes, but that’s not why I’m calling.’

  Even though Sven was speaking slowly, he was struggling with every other word.

  ‘You sound agitated,’ said Leon tentatively so as not to insult his friend, who couldn’t stand it when people brought up the subject of his speech impediment. ‘Has something happened?’

  Did we lose the commission?

  In the days since Natalie had left him for what seemed like no apparent reason, he had thrown himself into his work. He had sat working on the model day and night and hadn’t left the apartment once, not even to go to the office, which was why Sven had come by to pick it up.

  ‘It should be me asking you that. Are you feeling better now?’

  ‘Better?’ Leon opened the fridge and reached for the long-life milk. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘You were completely out of it last time I saw you. I felt guilty about having left you alone afterwards, but the thing with the cat was just too much.’

  ‘When did you see me? What cat? What the hell are you talking about?’ He took a slug of milk straight from the carton; while Natalie was taking her ominous ‘time out’, at least she couldn’t have a go at him about this. It was the only advantage of his forced single existence, which he would gladly relinquish if she would just come back.

  ‘I’m talking about yesterday,’ stuttered Sven, even more agitated. ‘When I brought the model back.’

  ‘Back?’

  Leon could only remember Sven having picked it up. Since then he hadn’t heard anything from him.

  ‘Yes. Back to your study,’ insisted Sven. ‘I put it on your desk.’

  ‘If that’s supposed to be a joke, it’s not funny.’

  Leon put the milk back, and as he did so he saw that the palm of his right hand was smeared with ink.

  Laptop?

  He gaped at his hand as though it didn’t belong to him.

  When did I scribble the word ‘laptop’ on myself? And why?

  His confusion mounted when he noticed he had also used his left hand as a notepad.

  07.05.

  He couldn’t imagine why he had noted down these numbers, for God knows he didn’t need a reminder of this date. It was the day his biological parents had died in the car accident.

  ‘Go and look if you don’t believe me,’ demanded Sven.

  ‘For what?’ asked Leon, still not really present.

  ‘For the model.’

  A sense of foreboding rose up in him as he left the kitchen, becoming terrible certainty as he entered his study.

  It’s started again.

  The proof stood before him. In the middle of the desk. The model he had been working on for the last few days was back, covered by Post-its with Sven’s suggested adjustments on them.

  ‘Is everything OK?’ he heard his partner ask, and answered in the affirmative even though absolutely nothing was OK any more.

  ‘And you dropped it off with me yesterday?’ he asked flatly.

  ‘Yes.’

  Leon went over to the desk and touched the roof of the accident and emergency department with his index finger.

  ‘I was here? You spoke to me?’

  ‘More or less. You were very incoherent and your mind seemed to be somewhere else.’

  Sven’s stutter was getting more pronounced. It took twice as long as it normally would for him to get the words out, but that was fine by Leon right now. His brain was working slowly, as though the handbrake was on, and the slower Sven spoke the more time he had to understand what was going on.

  Leon closed his eyes. ‘I’m really sorry, I don’t think I even know my own name right now.’

  ‘Well, yesterday you certainly didn’t. You were a completely different person, Leon.’

  I know. I always am when I sleepwalk.

  ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but as your best friend I have to ask.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are you on drugs?’

  Leon shook his head. ‘No, that’s not it.’

  It’s much worse.

  Not seeming to believe him, Sven persevered. ‘My brother used to take LSD. Whenever he was high, he would get this absent, empty look on his face, and talked in just the same paranoid way as you did yesterday.’

  ‘That may well be, but I swear I’m not taking anything.’

  My dark side is something else.

  ‘Then it’s really just because Natalie disappeared?’

  ‘Hang on a minute, who said she disappeared?’

  ‘You,’ retorted Sven, speaking in a surprisingly loud voice now.

  Leon snorted. ‘That’s ridiculous. She just needed a bit of time to herself. I told you about her card, remember.’

  . . . I need some space . . . to figure out where we should go from here . . .

  ‘That’s why I’m calling, Leon. Because I don’t know what to believe any more. First you tell me Natalie left you after a fight. That you woke up in the morning and she wasn’t there.’

  ‘Exactly. You told me to give her some time and distract myself with work.
’

  ‘And I thought that was what you were doing. Then you call me at the party and tell me about the injuries you supposedly inflicted on her. And yesterday you completely lose it and tell me you imprisoned her in a labyrinth behind your wardrobe.’

  ‘Whaaat?’ Leon laughed in disbelief. ‘Now I should be asking you if you’re on drugs.’

  He walked from the study to get something to put on. The apartment had become cold and he was shivering.

  ‘It’s not funny, Leon, and to be honest I don’t know what worries me more. The way you acted yesterday or the fact that you claim not to be able to remember it.’

  ‘I’m not claiming —’ Leon corrected Sven on his way into the bedroom, but he didn’t manage to finish, for he felt a searing pain in the sole of his foot.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Sven asked as he heard Leon cursing.

  ‘Sorry, I trod on something.’

  Leon bent down, unable to believe what he had in his hands.

  The last time he had worn such a device was many years ago, during the therapy sessions with Dr Volwarth.

  ‘So, anyway, you were completely out of it,’ Sven continued, his words accompanied by a gradually surging tinnitus in Leon’s ears; a sure sign he had a migraine coming on.

  Or worse.

  With the headband that he had just found on the floor, he was holding further proof in his hands that his nocturnal phases had started again.

  When did I buy this camera?

  The lens of the motion-activated head camera was smudged and a cable hung loose at the side, as though it had been put together in a hurry. By someone who hadn’t been concentrating that much, because he was under massive stress.

  Or because he wasn’t conscious.

  ‘You even wanted to show me a video you supposedly filmed of you looking for Natalie in your sleep.’

  A video?

  Along with the tinnitus, a surreal, schizophrenic feeling was welling up in Leon. On the one hand, everything Sven was saying seemed to make sense. On the other, it was as though his friend was speaking to him in a foreign language.

  He clamped the telephone between his chin and shoulder so that he had both hands free to inspect the headband. If Sven was talking about a video, there must be some kind of replay function.