His heart beat faster. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded, reaching gingerly for the curtains. He was still a good metre from the cradle and had to force himself to approach it again.
‘I’m the one you’re looking for,’ said the man. His hoarse, rather distorted voice sounded quite unfamiliar.
Marc drew back the curtain. The first thing he saw was the white pillow. Then he saw the numerals embroidered in red on the pillowcase:
13 / 11
Just as it dawned on him that this was today’s date, he spotted the baby monitor. He picked it up, staring incredulously at the mouthpiece – and almost dropped it when the man spoke again. ‘Please come and get me.’
He noticed the metallic echo only now, although the quality of the digital radio was several times better than that of a normal telephone.
He put the device to his lips and spoke straight into it: ‘What is all this?’
‘I. . . I’m an acquaintance. . .’
There was a hiss, followed by the sound of static on the line.
‘. . .an acquaintance of your wife. Please help me.’
‘Where are you?’
Another hiss, then the man said quietly: ‘I’m down here. In the cellar.’
46
It took Marc three times longer to descend into the darkness than it had to dash upstairs.
He had always avoided spending more time in the cellar than absolutely necessary. Not from a childish fear that some faceless monster was lying in wait for him behind the boiler, but because he felt satisfied that people were no more born to live in windowless dungeons than they were to fly through the air at an altitude of ten thousand metres.
To him, cellars were like the dark bed of a lake. Much as you enjoyed being on the surface, you had no wish to know what was swimming around below you. Brave souls held their breath and duck-dived a couple of metres down, but no one swam right to the bottom, where mud harboured the lake’s secrets, without a convincing reason – unless they’d lost something perhaps. A wedding ring, for instance, or a key.
Or his wife.
The plywood door leading to the steep flight of rough stone steps had been bolted from the outside. Whoever was waiting for him below was locked in. Marc wondered whether he really wanted to know who it was.
He slid the bolt aside, opened the door and felt for the switch on the wall, an old-fashioned black knob like an outsize wing nut. He turned it twice clockwise, then in the opposite direction. The darkness persisted.
‘Hello?’ he called down the steps. No response. The intercom display, which had been flickering a moment ago, suddenly went out. He remembered that mobile reception on some networks got worse the lower you went. On the other hand, the phone in his hand was independent of any provider.
‘Are you down here?’
He descended another step. His stomach gurgled and his persistent nausea sent bile surging up into his throat. Ignoring his body’s cries for help, which urged him to go to bed at last, take his pills and sleep for two solid days, he groped his way slowly down the rope the previous owner had installed in lieu of a handrail. A psychologist by profession, he had turned the cellar into a makeshift consulting room by facing the walls with tongue-and-groove and laying some grey industrial carpet. Sandra and Marc had always wondered what sort of people had consented to entrust a stranger with their mental problems in the bowels of the earth, especially as the old house often emitted such mysterious noises that even hanging up laundry down there could be an unnerving experience.
‘The old girl’s breathing,’ had been Marc’s stock joke when the creaks and groans overhead became louder than usual. Built in the 1920s, the house should have stopped settling long ago.
There were no creaks to be heard now, and the central-heating pipes were silent.
Marc had reached the foot of the steps. Blindly, he opened the fuse box secured to the wall in a niche beside them. He felt around, avoiding the toggle switches, until he found the lighter kept inside the box for emergencies.
The sulphurous yellow light of the little flame created an almost cosy atmosphere. Marc couldn’t understand why the cellar lights weren’t working. All the fuses were intact. Still, there were plenty of other more important things that were defeating him tonight.
‘Where are you?’ he called, raising his voice to drown the roaring in his ears. The quieter his surroundings, the louder his internal noises seemed to become.
With the lighter in one hand and the baby monitor in the other, he made his way into the passage connecting the former consulting room with the boiler room. They had removed the ugly, louvred sliding door, and Marc could see, despite the inadequate lighting, that the bare little room was deserted.
That leaves only one possibility.
He stepped over a redundant cable drum with the lighter held up in front of him like an Olympic torchbearer. His shadow followed a few metres behind.
Just before reaching the grey concrete fire door he paused to give his thumb a rest. When the flame went out, darkness enveloped him like a cloak. Depositing the useless baby monitor on the floor, he thumbed the flint wheel again and shielded the lighter with his hand when the flame started to flicker. Then, although everything within him balked at doing so, he pushed the heavy fire door open and entered the boiler room.
He was so startled he uttered an involuntary cry.
47
‘Christ! Who the hell are you?’ he demanded when he had recovered himself sufficiently not to turn and run. The psychological shocks he’d sustained in the last few hours had sensitized him to such an extent that he was becoming more and more fearful – and taking longer and longer to calm down.
The man, who looked even more frightened than Marc felt, was lying in the middle of the room on a bare iron bedstead.
‘Thank God,’ he groaned faintly.
He raised his head. That was all he could move, because his wrists and ankles were shackled to the bedframe. The flame of the lighter was reflected by the metal boiler on his left. As far as Marc could see by its feeble light, the man was wearing a suit and a tie, the knot of which had slipped sideways. It was hard to tell his age. Tall men tended to look older than they were.
‘What on earth’s going on here?’ Marc demanded. He came a step closer.
‘Water.’
The stranger tugged at his handcuffs. His fair hair was standing up all over his head. He looked like a comicbook character who has just received an electric shock.
‘Please bring me some water.’ His voice gave out on the last word.
‘Not until I know what you’re doing here.’
Marc caught a whiff of urine, presumably because the man had wet himself. Either from fear or because he’d been held captive for a considerable time.
But by whom?
For a moment Marc wondered whether it might be better to go outside and tell Emma. But he still didn’t know if he could trust her, and anyway, he doubted if she would be much help in her present state.
‘Who are you?’ he repeated.
‘I. . .’ The man paused to moisten a split lip with his tongue. ‘I’m here to warn you.’
‘About what?’
The man turned his head and looked towards the other end of the cellar, which was now in darkness. An old-fashioned mangle used to stand there, Marc recalled.
‘About the script,’ the man said softly.
‘What script?’
The man looked back at Marc, who involuntarily retreated a step.
‘My name is Robert von Anselm,’ he said. His voice sounded suddenly monotone, as if he were reciting something he’d learned by heart. ‘I’m your wife’s attorney.’
Nonsense.
‘You’re lying!’ The lighter flame flickered, Marc spat out the words so vehemently. ‘I always dealt with her legal affairs myself.’
‘No, no, no, you aren’t listening. I wasn’t your attorney or the family’s, just your wife’s.’
The bedstead creaked as the man’s
head sank back on the springs.
Sandra’s attorney? Why should she have employed a stranger to handle her affairs?
‘She came to see me shortly before the accident,’ Marc heard the man whisper.
‘What for?’
‘To alter her will.’
To alter it? He hadn’t even known there was a will. Sandra had always refused to make one.
‘I assume she did so at her father’s insistence,’ the man added.
‘I don’t understand. What did she alter, and what does Constantin have to do with it?’
The man looked back at the dark corner on his right.
‘You remember the film script your wife was commissioned to write?’
‘Of course.’
We’d been celebrating it on the day of the accident.
‘Do you know how much her agent sold it to the American production company for?’
‘No.’
‘One point two million dollars.’
Marc laughed incredulously. ‘You’re lying.’
The attorney coughed. ‘What makes you so sure?’
‘You don’t get that kind of money for a film debut. Besides, Sandra would have told me. We didn’t have any secrets from each other.’
‘Really? Have you read the script?’
‘How could I? She died before she could write a word of it.’
‘Are you sure?’
No, I’m not. After today, I’m not sure of anything any more.
The man was still staring into the gloom on his right. Marc held up the lighter and peered in the same direction, then made his way around the bedstead. As he did so, the outlines of a desk came into view. It was standing right beside the gas boiler.
‘But I’ve read it,’ he heard the man behind him say hoarsely. ‘That’s why I’m here. I was going to drop it in to you. I wanted to warn you.’
Marc went over to the desk, which he’d never seen before. Looking quite as incongruous down here as the attorney shackled to the bedstead, it was far too small for an adult, with tiny little side drawers big enough to accommodate a textbook or exercise book at most. Stuck in the recess designed to hold the base of a reading lamp was the stub of an Advent candle.
Marc lit it. Lying on the desktop was a sheaf of paper held together on the left with a cheap plastic binding.
‘Hey, what about my water?’ the attorney croaked from behind him, in the dark once more.
The pages felt damp, as if they’d been lying in a box in the cellar for a while.
Marc brushed some dust off the top sheet and read the title:
SPLINTER
A screenplay by Sandra Senner
The stranger was whimpering now. ‘Please untie me!’
But Marc was past replying. He had already turned over the page and begun to read. The very first lines were a shock.
48
Synopsis of SPLINTER
Marc Lucas, a lawyer-turned-social worker who deals with problem children, loses his pregnant wife in a car crash for which he is personally responsible. A few weeks after her death he sees a newspaper advertisement for a psychiatric clinic. The programme ‘Learn to forget’ is looking for people who have undergone experiences of a highly traumatic nature – people who want to erase the memory of them permanently and are therefore willing to participate in a memory experiment: the deliberate actuation of total amnesia. Lucas sends an email to the director of the clinic, and. . .
‘No!’
Marc groaned and bit the ball of his thumb. He felt so dizzy he had to lean on the desktop. His eyes roamed aimlessly across the page. Having already read the first paragraph twice, he began all over again in the hope that the letters would rearrange themselves into different words. But they didn’t. The truth remained as terrible as it was inexplicable.
This is my story. Sandra used my life as a. . .
His hands were trembling, his fingertips so numb that he turned over three pages at once. He read on, but it only got worse:
Marc’s mobile phone stops working and his credit cards have been invalidated. His life appears to have been usurped by someone else.
Returning to the clinic, he finds himself staring into a hole in the ground – a construction site. The building has disappeared.
Once again, Marc couldn’t bring himself to read the whole page; once again, he turned over impatiently, ever faster, ever more mystified by what he was reading. He knew it all at first hand – he himself had lived through it a few hours ago! Before long he was reading only snatches, only the lines that hit him in the eye.
. . .goes to the police. . .
. . .but this time the key fits. . .
. . .his wife never was in the flat. . .
. . .his father-in-law has also disappeared. . .
The more he read the less he understood. How could this be? How could Sandra have known all this? Worse still, how could she have foreseen the future?
He put the script down and stared at the title page, clasping the back of his neck.
SPLINTER
A screenplay by Sandra Senner
The numbness in his fingertips was slowly spreading up his arms, which now hung limply, wearily, at his sides. He felt an urge to turn and run, screaming, from the cellar. Nothing made sense any more. His life was a lie fabricated by a person he used to trust implicitly – someone who had risen from the grave and was trying to drive him insane.
But do lunatics reflect on their condition? Isn’t denial the very essence of a psychosis?
His mouth opened and closed. Not that he was aware of it, he was talking to himself, uttering his thoughts aloud. Tears ran down his cheeks and landed on the cover of the script.
Is this happening to me? Is it all real?
A tear smudged the big, curved ‘S’ of ‘SPLINTER’ and left a black dot above it, transforming the character into the Spanish version of a question mark. He sniffed, fingering the plaster on his neck again. And then, in the midst of an avalanche of incoherent thoughts, he came to an entirely logical conclusion.
This script must have an ending!
He picked it up again.
Why is all this happening? And how does it end?
He turned to the last page.
49
Nothing. The last fifty pages were blank.
Marc riffled the script through his fingers from the back until, about a third of the way from the front, he came across two pages that looked as if they didn’t belong. They were thicker than the rest and the edges were perforated and covered with rust marks. They were the concluding pages of the synopsis.
. . .He eventually faces up to the ghosts of the past and obeys a mysterious summons passed to him by a homeless tramp: apparently, his late wife wants to meet him. He goes to their old home, where, down in the cellar, he finds a film script written by her. To his horror, he discovers that the synopsis on the first few pages are an exact reconstruction of his recent experiences. He turns to the end to find out what happens to him, only to find that the concluding pages are blank.
So he turns back until he come across two somewhat thicker sheets with perforated, bloodstained edges. At the foot of one is a handwritten telephone number. . .
020 7438 1206
Marc’s gaze travelled downwards. Sure enough, the number looked as if Sandra had jotted it down on a menu card, though without the LOL.
His eyes stumbled back up the page until he found the line where he’d just broken off.
If Marc doesn’t think his fear could become still more intense, he’s mistaken. Obeying a sudden impulse, he opens the top-right-hand drawer of the desk. . .
He shut his eyes, then opened them and reread the last sentence.
Should I really. . .? What are you doing to me, Sandra?
He hesitated for a moment, then stuck his finger in the hole in the drawer and pulled. It was unlocked.
. . .and finds a mobile phone.
There it was: an old model with big keys. The display flashed, indicating t
hat the battery and signal strength were at full power. Like a man in a trance, Marc complied with the script’s insane directions.
He takes it out and keys in the phone number!
50
‘At last! Thank God!’
A professional boxer’s well-aimed punch couldn’t have hit him harder. It was Sandra’s voice that answered after the second ring, no doubt about it. A trifle sad, a trifle hesitant, but as unmistakable as a genetic fingerprint.
‘You’ve called me at last.’
He had missed that slightly husky quality, which always sounded a little lethargic and was at its sexiest just after she’d woken up, as sorely as he had her touch, the lip-smacking noises she made when she was dreaming, and her laugh, which had never failed to infect him however low he was feeling.
‘Sandra,’ he said, torn between tears and laughter, ‘where are you?’
For one moment, brief but long enough to bring more tears to his eyes, the whole crazy business was forgotten.
The accident. Her reappearance. The tramp. The attorney still begging for water behind him.
His joy at hearing her voice again was simply overwhelming. All that surpassed it was his disappointment when he realized it was a recording.
‘I’m so sorry. I’ll make it up to you, I promise.’
‘What? What are you talking about?’ Marc bellowed the words as if he could browbeat the answerphone into an explanation if only he yelled loud enough.
‘I’ll explain everything later. Soon, very soon. Just be patient for another few hours.’
Another few hours? What happens then?
He thought involuntarily of the hand-stitched pillow on the baby’s cot. Of the date on the pillow case: November 13th.
Today, ten days before the gynaecologist’s earliest estimate of their child’s date of birth.
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