The Child

by Sebastian Fitzek

  ‘I’ll naturally pay for any damage I’ve caused.’

  Stern produced his wallet from the breast pocket of his suit.

  ‘No, no,’ Picasso protested, ‘we don’t do that here.’

  ‘You misunderstand me. I was going to give you my card.’

  ‘You can put it back. Can’t he?’ The old man in the wheelchair nodded, cocking one of his bushy eyebrows with a look of amusement. Unlike the hair on his head, which was sparse, they presided over his sunken eyes like two big tufts of steel wool.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand.’

  ‘You just gave us both a nasty shock, and Herr Losensky can’t take too much excitement after his second heart attack. Can you, Frederik?’

  The old man shook his head.

  ‘So a few euro notes won’t be enough to get you off the hook just like that.’

  ‘What will, then?’ Stern wondered if he was up against two lunatics. He grinned nervously.

  ‘We want you to bow down in shame.’

  Stern was about to tap his forehead and walk off when he saw the joke. Smiling, he bent down and retrieved the black baseball cap he must have knocked off the old man’s head, then gave it back to him.

  ‘Perfect. Now we’re quits,’ Picasso said with a laugh. His elderly protégé chuckled like a schoolboy.

  ‘Are you a fan?’ Stern asked as the old man carefully adjusted the cap with both hands. It bore the legend ABBA in gold letters.

  ‘Of course. Their music is divine.’ Losensky lifted the peak of his cap once more and tucked a strand of snow-white hair beneath it. ‘What’s your favourite ABBA number?’

  Stern was rather at a loss. ‘I don’t really know,’ he replied. He wanted to visit Simon Sachs and talk about yesterday’s events with him. He wasn’t in the mood for small talk about a 1970s Swedish pop group.

  ‘That makes two of us,’ Losensky said with a grin. ‘They’re all good.’

  The wheelchair’s brand-new tyres whirred across the shiny floor as Picasso set it in motion again.

  ‘Who did you want to see?’ he called over his shoulder.

  ‘I’m looking for Room 217.’

  ‘Simon?’

  Stern caught them up again. ‘Yes, do you know him?’

  ‘Simon Sachs, our orphan?’ said Picasso. He took another few steps, then paused outside a gunmetal-grey door marked ‘Physiotherapy’. ‘Of course I know him.’

  ‘Who doesn’t?’ the old man muttered as he was wheeled into a big, light room equipped with wall bars, foam mattresses and sundry keep-fit machines. He sounded almost hurt that the conversation had ceased to revolve around himself.

  ‘Simon is our little ray of sunshine,’ Picasso said enthusiastically. He brought the wheelchair to a halt beside a massage table. ‘It’s a shame about him. First he has to be taken into care because his mother nearly starves him to death, and now they’ve found a tumour in his skull. A benign one, so the doctors say, because it isn’t forming any metastases. Bah!’

  For a moment Stern thought the nurse was going to spit on the floor at his feet.

  ‘I don’t know what’s so benign about the thing if it goes on growing and ends by occluding his brain.’

  The door to an adjoining office opened and an Asian girl in judo gear and tiny orthopedic shoes came in. Losensky obviously fancied her because he started whistling ‘Money, Money, Money’ again, but this time it sounded more reminiscent of a labourer’s wolf-whistling at a pneumatic blonde.

  Back outside in the passage, which was rather busier now, Picasso pointed to the second door on the left beside the staff room.

  ‘That’s it, by the way,’ he told Stern.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Room 217. Simon’s got it to himself, but you can’t just waltz in there.’

  ‘Why not?’ Stern feared the worst. Was the boy so ill you couldn’t enter his room without sterile clothing?

  ‘You haven’t brought him a present.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Visitors always bring flowers or chocolates. Or at a pinch, when the patient’s a boy of ten, a pop magazine or something of the kind. You can’t turn up empty-handed, not when he could be dead a week from now …’

  The nurse left his sentence unfinished. Catching sight of something out of the corner of his eye, Stern swung round and located the source of the alarm signal, a flashing red light above a door. Then he hurried after Picasso, who was already on his way to the emergency, and caught him up just outside Room 217.

  3

  He had woken up the first time just before four and rung for the nurse. Carina hadn’t come, which troubled him far more than his unremitting nausea. In the mornings this hovered somewhere between his throat and his stomach and could usually be brought under control with forty drops of MCP solution. Only when he woke up too late and the pains in his head had already welded their iron bands around his temples did they sometimes take several days to return to 4 on the scale.

  That was how Carina always gauged his general condition. The first thing she asked him for every morning was a number, 1 meaning pain-free and 10 unendurable.

  Simon couldn’t remember when he’d last been better than 3. Still, it might happen today if the sad-looking man remained at his bedside a little longer. It was good to see his face again.

  ‘I’m sorry if I gave you a shock. I only meant to turn the television on.’

  ‘That’s OK.’ Agitation had given way to relief when it transpired that Simon had pressed the alarm bell by mistake. Having satisfied himself that the boy was all right, Picasso had left him alone with the nervous Stern.

  ‘Carina likes you,’ said Simon, ‘and I like Carina, so I guess I like you too.’ He drew up his knees, forming an inverted V under the bedclothes. ‘Is it her day off?’

  ‘Er, no. That’s to say, I don’t know.’ Somewhat awkwardly, Stern pulled a chair up to the only bed in the room and sat down. It struck Simon that he was wearing almost the same clothes as he had when they met at the factory two days ago. His wardrobe evidently contained several copies of the same dark suit.

  ‘Aren’t you feeling well?’ he asked.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Carina would say you look like something the cat brought in.’

  ‘I slept badly.’

  ‘But that’s no reason to look so grim.’

  ‘It is sometimes.’

  ‘Oh, I know what’s bothering you.’ Simon reached into the compartment beneath his bedside table and brought out a wig. ‘You never spotted it, did you? It’s all my own hair. They cut it off before Professor Müller started on me with his ink eradicator.’

  ‘His what?’

  The boy deftly clapped his wig over the fluffy down on his head.

  ‘They treat me like a little kid in here sometimes. Of course I know what chemotherapy is, but the medical director explained it to me like I was a baby. He said there was a big, dark patch inside my head, and the tablets I took would dissolve it. Like ink eradicator, in other words.’

  He saw Stern run his eyes over the side table beside his bed.

  ‘I’ve stopped taking interferon. The doctor said I could manage without it now, but Carina told me the truth.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘The side effects are too dangerous.’ Simon grinned faintly and raised his wig for a moment. ‘They can’t eradicate the thing without killing me. A month ago I got pneumonia and had to spend some time in intensive care. There was no more chemo or radiotherapy after that.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m not. At least I don’t get nosebleeds any more, and I only feel sick in the mornings.’ Simon sat up and wedged a bolster behind his back. ‘But now it’s your turn,’ he said, doing his best to sound like one of the grown-ups in the crime series he watched on television. ‘Are you going to take my case?’

  Stern laughed, looking likeable for the first time.

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  ‘The thing is, I’m afraid I did somethi
ng bad, and I don’t want to …’

  … die not knowing whether I’m really guilty, he’d been going to say, but grown-ups always reacted so strangely when he mentioned death. They looked sad and patted his cheek or quickly changed the subject. Simon left it at that because he felt the lawyer had understood in any case.

  ‘I’ve come to ask you a few questions,’ Stern said.

  ‘Carry on.’

  ‘Well, first I’d like to know exactly what you did on your birthday.’

  ‘My session with Dr Tiefensee, you mean?’

  ‘Precisely.’ Stern opened a leather-bound notebook and proceeded to write in it with a little ballpoint. ‘I’d like to know all about it. What happened to you there and anything you know about the body.’

  ‘What body?’ Simon stopped grinning when he saw the look of dismay on Stern’s face.

  ‘Well, the man whose remains we found. The one you—’

  ‘Oh, you mean the man I killed with an axe,’ said Simon. He was relieved to have cleared up any misunderstanding. His lawyer still seemed rather perplexed, however, so he tried to explain with his eyes shut. He found that to be the best way of concentrating on the voices in his head and the terrible scenes that became more and more vivid the more often he lapsed into unconsciousness.

  The man suffocating in the garage with a plastic bag over his head.

  The child screaming on the hotplate.

  The blood on the walls of the camper van.

  He could bear to think of those scenes only because they were so remote. Decades away.

  In another life.

  ‘But that was only one dead body,’ he said quietly, opening his eyes again. ‘I’ve killed lots of people.’

  4

  ‘Hang on, not so fast. Take it slowly, one thing at a time.’

  Stern went to the window and ran his fingers over a drawing stuck to the pane. Using crayons, Simon had drawn a remarkably realistic church with a lush green field in front of it. For some reason he had signed his drawing ‘Pluto’.

  Stern turned to face the boy.

  ‘These unpleasant, er, memories …’ he searched for a better word but failed to find one. ‘Have you always had them?’

  ‘No, only since my birthday.’ The boy took a carton of apple juice from the bedside table and stuck a straw in it. ‘I’d never had a regression before.’

  ‘So tell me. How did it go, exactly?’

  ‘I thought it was fun. The only trouble was, I had to take off my new trainers.’

  Stern smiled at Simon in the hope of steering his flow of words into channels of greater interest.

  ‘The doctor works in a great building. He said it was near the television tower, but I never saw it while we were there.’

  ‘Did he give you anything to eat or drink during your visit?’

  Any medication? Psychiatric drugs?

  ‘Yes, some warm milk and honey. That was great too. Then I had to lie down on a blue mattress on the floor. Carina was there – she wrapped me up in two blankets. I was really warm and cosy. Only my head was sticking out.’

  ‘What did the, er, doctor do then?’ Stern hesitated before using the professional title because he felt sure Tiefensee’s qualifications must have been forged or purchased.

  ‘Nothing, really. I didn’t see him after that.’

  ‘But he was still in the room?’

  ‘Yes, of course. He just talked and talked. He had a nice, soft voice like the doctor in the radio series I listen to.’

  ‘And what did Herr Tiefensee tell you?’

  ‘He said, “I don’t normally do this with children of your age.”’

  What a relief, Stern thought sarcastically. So the conman only cons adults as a rule.

  ‘But he made an exception because of my illness and Carina.’

  Carina. Stern wrote her name in his notebook and filled in the ‘a’s with his ballpoint. He resolved to question her about her relationship with this charlatan immediately afterwards. Tiefensee couldn’t have been a random choice on her part.

  ‘He asked me a lot of questions. What were the nicest times I’ve ever had? Where did I like being best? On holiday, with friends, or just mucking around? Then he told me to shut my eyes and imagine myself in the most wonderful place in the world.’

  Putting the subject into a somnambulistic state. Stern gave an involuntary nod as he recalled the keyword he’d encountered several times on the Internet last night. After making his ill-considered call to Sophie he’d sat down at the computer. One single search command had brought up innumerable websites belonging to parapsychological crackpots and obscure freaks, but also some respectable sources that addressed the subject of regression seriously. Most of them pointed out the inherent dangers. While not disputing the possibility of reincarnation as such, several warned of potential damage to the psyche, for example if a regression subject relived a severe trauma from his or her past while under hypnosis.

  ‘I imagined a lovely beach,’ said Simon. ‘I was having a party with some friends, and we were all eating ices.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘I got very tired. At some stage the doctor asked if I could see a big electrical switch.’

  Simon’s eyelids were fluttering, and Stern was afraid he might pass out again, purely as a result of recounting his memories. But the boy hadn’t coughed yet, and he knew from Carina that, ever since his pneumonia, coughing had always preceded an epileptic fit or a spell of unconsciousness.

  ‘So I looked for a switch in my head. The kind you turn lights on and off with.’

  ‘Did you succeed?’

  ‘Yes, it took a while, but then I saw one. It was kind of spooky, because I had my eyes shut.’

  Stern knew what was coming next. To manipulate patients, the therapist had to deactivate their consciousness. Switching off the mind with the aid of an imaginary light switch was a favourite method. After that, parapsychologists could talk a patient into believing things at their leisure. All that puzzled Stern was what motive Tiefensee could have had. Why Simon? Why a terminally ill boy with an inoperable tumour? And why hadn’t Carina taken all this in? She might be a little scatty and believe in supernatural phenomena, but she would never have permitted a child to be abused in this way, least of all one that was a patient in her care.

  ‘At first I couldn’t do it – I couldn’t keep the switch down,’ Simon went on quietly. ‘It kept clicking up again. It was funny, but Dr Tiefensee gave me some sticky tape.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No, not really. Only in my imagination. He told me to imagine taping the switch down, and it really worked. It stayed down and I got into a lift.’

  Stern said nothing for fear of distracting the boy, because now came the regression proper: the descent into his subconscious.

  5

  ‘Inside the lift was a brass plate with a lot of buttons on it. It was up to me which one I chose, so I pressed the one marked 11. There was a jerk and the lift set off. It went down a very long way. When the doors finally opened I got out and saw …’

  … the world before I was born, Stern amplified in his head. It surprised him when Simon completed the sentence quite differently.

  ‘… nothing. I couldn’t see a thing. Just total darkness.’

  The dreamy look in Simon’s eyes had disappeared. He had a drink of his apple juice. As he replaced the carton on the tray on his bedside table, his T-shirt rode up. Stern froze inwardly. For an instant he had glimpsed an elongated birthmark just above the boy’s hip bone.

  The scars of the reincarnated! he thought involuntarily. This skin blemish bore no resemblance to those of Felix or the boy on the DVD, but it reminded him inescapably of the article on Ian Stevenson he had read that very morning. The late professor and senior psychiatrist at the University of Virginia was one of the few reincarnation researchers whose case studies were seriously discussed by reputable scientists. Stevenson had believed that moles and birthmarks were like spiritual maps
indicating where people had been injured in previous lives. The Canadian parapsychologist had amassed hundreds of medical records and autopsy reports and found them to contain striking similarities to the skin defects of allegedly reincarnated children.

  Stern strove to concentrate on what Simon was saying. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘How did you know about the murdered man’s body if you didn’t see it while you were with Dr Tiefensee?’

  ‘Well, I did see something, but not until I woke up. Carina said I’d been asleep for two hours. I remember how sad I felt. It was my birthday, and all at once it was nearly over. It was already dark outside.’

  ‘And these unpleasant memories came back to you when you woke up?’

  ‘Not right away. Only when I was sitting in the car and Carina asked me how it had gone. That was when I told her. About the pictures, I mean.’

  ‘What pictures?’

  ‘The ones in my head. I only see them very dimly. In the dark. It’s like when I’m dreaming just before I wake up. Know what I mean?’

  ‘Yes, maybe.’ Stern did know what the boy meant, but his own daydreams were nowhere near as morbid. Except when he thought of Felix.

  Simon turned his head and stared thoughtfully out of the window. Stern thought at first that he had lost interest in their conversation and expected him to fish a computer game out of the bedside cabinet at any minute. But then he saw that the boy’s lips were moving silently. He was obviously searching for the right words to describe his impressions.

  ‘Once, back in the children’s home,’ he began quietly, ‘the light bulb in the cellar had to be changed. We were all scared of going down there, so we drew matches and I lost. It was really spooky. The bare bulb was hanging from the ceiling on a length of flex. It looked like a tennis ball, all yellow and furry with dust and cobwebs. And it made clicking noises like Jonas – that’s a friend of mine. He can crack his knuckles really loudly. It sounded just like that. The light went on and off, and each time it sounded the way Jonas does when he cracks his knuckles. Or used to until some grown-up told him he should stop because he’d wind up with gout and rheumatism.’