The Nightwalker

by Sebastian Fitzek

  Either way, the consequence remained the same: if he wanted to test his suspicion, Leon would have to choose another entrance to the world between the apartments. And for that, only one possibility remained.

  He unlocked the chemist’s front door. Tareski was still the worse for wear, but significantly better than before. By now he had managed to get himself on to the couch and wasn’t coughing as loudly. Leon didn’t know whether his neighbour had recognised him or not, but right now he didn’t care.

  All that mattered was getting back to the DANGER door in the labyrinth as quickly as possible.

  In the stairwell, Leon was met by a dull hammering and the screeching of a chainsaw, which immediately swallowed up the mysterious scales of the piano.

  The scent of fresh woodchips hung in the air. Judging by the noise level, the builders were on the ground floor.

  My God, has that much time really passed already?

  Leon thought back to the notice from the building management. When he last looked at the magnetic board on the kitchen door, the renovation work had still been three days away. And now the workers were here, tearing up the floorboards on the steps.

  He wanted to take the lift, but it was stuck on the ground floor, presumably blocked by the builders (Be prepared for long waits!). Leon had no patience, so he took the stairs.

  Luckily for him, the works on the stairs had not progressed very far, so he was able to get to the second floor unobstructed, where he smoothed his hair with the palm of his hand and a little spit before ringing on the front door.

  The din on the ground floor was so loud that he couldn’t hear any sounds coming from inside the apartment. Impatient, he dispensed with all politeness and rang the bell repeatedly, until eventually the door edged open and a bony foot appeared in the gap.

  ‘Herr Nader?’ asked Ivana Helsing in surprise, once she had managed to open the door fully. She hadn’t been able to use her hands, because she was holding a pile of small packages covering the expanse from her belly button to her chin.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting you,’ she said, bending awkwardly to balance her load on a chair next to the bureau. ‘I thought you were the delivery boy I arranged for a pick-up.’

  Ivana didn’t seem disturbed by Leon’s appearance. Even the head camera flapping around his neck failed to draw a reaction. She was a little dishevelled herself, and looked considerably older than during their last encounter. The shadows under her eyes were darker, her skin greyer, and her hair was sticking up at odd angles from her head as if he had woken her.

  ‘eBay,’ she said and grinned impishly, glancing at the packages. ‘You don’t want to know what some people with strange fetishes order from old people like me. Well, you’re married to an artist, so I’m sure you’re not unfamiliar with such things. And these little packages help me to enjoy my retirement more.’

  ‘Sure,’ answered Leon absent-mindedly, not even listening properly to what Ivana was saying. He was distracted by the sound of heavy footsteps stomping down the stairwell from above.

  Who could that be?

  No one lived above him but Tareski.

  ‘May I come in?’ asked Leon nervously.

  To his surprise, the old woman hesitated. ‘Well, I’m not really prepared for guests right now, you see.’

  The heavy footsteps, surely those of a man, came closer.

  ‘I understand. But the builders seem to have damaged my water pipes.’

  Ivana’s eyebrows knotted together in surprise behind her glasses. ‘But I thought they were just working on the steps?’

  ‘Yes. Crazy, isn’t it? They can’t explain it either. But it’s happened somehow, and now I’m without water.’

  Leon didn’t dare turn round. If the person who was marching down the steps couldn’t see him yet, then any moment now they would reach the spot where they would be able to.

  ‘And how can I help you?’ asked Ivana.

  ‘I hate to ask, but could I use your toilet?’

  The look Ivana was giving him must have been the same one he had given the courier who brought the camera. Except that Leon, unlike that joker, was serious. Deadly serious. He had to go to Ivana’s bathroom, and as quickly as possible, even if it wasn’t to go to the toilet.

  ‘Well, I . . . of course. No problem.’

  Ivana moved aside and Leon slipped past her, just as the steps behind him got not only louder, but significantly quicker.

  He shut the door hastily. Ideally he would have liked to look through the peephole, but that would only have made his neighbour more nervous.

  ‘It’s along there,’ she said, showing him what he already knew. ‘And please ignore the mess.’

  ‘No problem. This is really very kind of you.’

  Leon walked past the room that had previously contained a box and was now completely empty. The carpet billowed under his feet, and with his loose boot he had to take care not to trip.

  ‘She’s back now, by the way,’ he heard Ivana say as he was about to open the bathroom door.

  He whipped round to face her. ‘Who?’

  The old woman smiled so broadly that he saw the dentures in her upper jaw gleam.

  ‘So you didn’t see her?’ she asked with a relieved smile.

  Leon turned back to the living room, towards which his neighbour was pointing with her outstretched hand, and suddenly felt like his ribcage was about to break from the sheer force of his pounding heart.

  That’s impossible.

  And yet there she sat. As if nothing had happened to her. As if she had never disappeared.

  Full of beans.

  ‘Come here, Alba,’ called Ivana, patting her thighs as she did so. But the black cat just swished her tail, not even considering giving up her comfortable position on the armchair in front of the fire again.

  33

  Exhausted, Leon climbed down as quickly as he could. This time, though, he felt less like the shaft led down into some hidden world between worlds, and much more that it led into his subconscious.

  He had locked Ivana’s bathroom door, pushed the bath mat to one side and discovered a dull tile beneath, the rear edge of which jutted up a little from the floor. All he had to do was press down on it firmly and the tile came loose from its position, transforming into a lever with which to open the hatch.

  With every step he took down into the darkness, the voices in his head became louder, all asking more or less the same question.

  Are you still in your right mind? Or is all this just an illusion?

  The darker it became, the more unsure Leon was as to whether he was really experiencing all this: the dead cat, the choking chemist, the secret entrance in the bathroom.

  The cold rungs in his hand.

  Once he got to the bottom, Leon put the camera headband back into position and activated the lamp, which once again would be his only light source.

  He hadn’t bothered closing the hatch door behind him. It would only be a matter of time before old Helsing started to worry and went to check why he hadn’t come out of the bathroom.

  Leon could only hope that a decent amount of time would pass before she found a way to open the bathroom door from the outside.

  He just needed a few minutes to confirm his suspicion.

  To open the door with the DANGER sign.

  To find out what I did in my sleep.

  At the end of the passage, he touched the secret door’s exposed input screen lightly. He had already tried so many wrong combinations that he was worried the electronic lock would block further attempts.

  Leon pulled out the sheet music that he had put in his pocket in Tareski’s apartment and smoothed it out.

  He felt like he was holding the solution to the puzzle in his hand.

  The violin is the key!

  The violin key.

  His sleepwalking self had heard Tareski’s piano playing and created a memory trigger. To open the door, he didn’t need to enter a password, but a series of notes.

&nbs
p; The ones behind the violin key!

  He looked at Tareski’s sheet music, and for the first time in his life felt grateful that his adoptive parents had tortured him with trumpet lessons for years when he was a child. Without that the dots and lines would have meant nothing to him.

  Voices disturbed Leon’s concentration, a murmur at a distance, as soft as the sound of a television in the neighbouring apartment. But they were voices, plural, and one of them sounded like Ivana, as though she had fetched help and discovered the hatch in her bathroom.

  So quickly?

  Leon turned back to the secret door and the sheet music. All of a sudden his biological parents came into his mind. The accident. He wondered why these terrible memories were haunting him now, of all times. Leon stared at the sheet music in his hands, and it felt like a cog in his mind clicked into position, exposing a previously blocked chain of thoughts: Moll.

  The surname of his first foster parents.

  The ones who sent me away. Because, in my sleep, I stood in front of their son’s bed with a knife.

  Adrian Moll.

  A-Moll.

  A-H-C-D-E-F-G-A

  The voice in Leon’s head urging him to be quick quietened down as he pressed the corresponding buttons. When he got to the final ‘A’, with the noises behind him getting louder and closer, the voices in his head died away completely.

  There was a sound as though someone had trodden on a cockroach, and the lock opened.

  Leon put his whole body weight against the door, and a gap appeared in the wall as it opened.

  It wasn’t even half open before he heard the tortured whimper of a woman, and he knew that he had found her.

  34

  Opaque plastic sheeting, as if from a cold store, obstructed Leon’s view of something that, fundamentally, he didn’t want to see. He pictured his wife, bound and gagged, in a bare room with concrete walls and blood stains, doubled over in pain on a rusty chair.

  He was right about the bound and gagged part. But the rest was even worse than he had imagined.

  Leon shoved the sheeting to the side, smelled the sweat and odours of a suffering, sick person, stumbled a step forwards across the wooden floor into a room, and for a moment couldn’t understand what he was seeing, for he was in . . .

  . . . my own bedroom?

  Slowly, as though in a trance, he touched the wardrobe to his left, next to a wall. Then he registered the bureau beside it, the metal chair, a few of his clothes strewn over it.

  Leon’s eyes darted around, searching for an anchor to keep them from the lifeless human being on the mattress. She was half-sitting, half-lying, and illuminated by a lamp on the bedside table next to the big double bed that looked exactly the same as his own. Just like almost everything down here looked like his bedroom. Someone had created the room and it was so perfect at first glance, in the otherwise bare cellar, that for the first few moments Leon had really thought he was in his own apartment.

  Now, as soon as he realised it was a copy, he stumbled forwards.

  ‘Natalie!’

  It was more a croak than a scream. The shock slowed his breathing, and his movements. Leon felt like the air had transformed into syrup, as though he was only able to fight his way through it like a swimmer.

  Over to the bed. To Natalie. To the blood.

  She was bound in the same posture as on the photo the detective had shown him. Her arms above her head, chained to the bed-posts, her head bound with a dog collar.

  ‘Darling, sweetheart, Natalie?’

  He tried words, caresses, strokes, kisses, but he couldn’t get through to her. Natalie was whimpering, but she wasn’t conscious. Her head hung slackly, her chin propped against her naked chest. He touched her cheek gently, lifted her head, and a red thread of mucous freed itself from the corner of her mouth, dropping on to her chest. Her breasts were smeared with dirt and blood. The welts on her skin looked as though they had been inflicted by a riding whip.

  Leon covered his face with his hands in shock.

  This wasn’t me. It couldn’t be. Or could it?

  ‘Natalie, darling. Did I do this?’

  He lifted her chin carefully. Her right eye was buried beneath a bruise. With the other, she blinked sluggishly.

  ‘Natalie, darling. Can you hear me?’

  Even if his wife had been conscious, she wouldn’t have been able to answer him. A black rubber gagging ball was in her mouth. She had bitten into it so hard that Leon feared he wouldn’t be able to take it out without breaking even more of her teeth. In the end he managed it.

  Next he inspected her ties, but to get the handcuffs off, he would need a key or a bolt cutter.

  Leon looked around and reached for the bedside lamp to light under the bed. Then he stopped; there were two defunct spotlights next to a camera tripod.

  They don’t belong to me. Or do they?

  He spotted a low table, covered with black latex film and with a variety of objects on top.

  ‘Hmhmm.’

  He looked at Natalie, unsure as to whether she had just groaned his name, and stroked her dull hair.

  ‘Can you hear me?’

  No reaction.

  Leon promised her that he would be back soon, and went over to the table. He was repulsed by the wild collection of sex toys spread out on it: dildos, whips, lube, chains, various clamps, even a gas mask lay at the ready, along with another pair of handcuffs and keys. He picked them up and returned to Natalie.

  I didn’t do this. These don’t belong to me.

  He knelt down next to her and tried first her left wrist and then the other, but the key wouldn’t fit, and he was unable to find any others, not even in the drawers of the nightstand, which he tore open one after the other, finding nothing but porno magazines.

  ‘Lon?’ he heard Natalie murmur next to him.

  Now her groans sounded very much like his name, but beyond that he still couldn’t get through to her. Leon suspected she was talking in her sleep and reacting subconsciously to his voice and touch – leaving her alone now would mean sacrificing the fragile connection.

  But he didn’t have a choice. He had to get help.

  As quickly as he could, he hurried through the sheeting back to the secret door, only to encounter the next shock. The door must have been equipped with a fire protection mechanism or something which had pushed it closed automatically and locked it. As on the outside, the inner side of the door had an entry field, but this time the electronic lock didn’t react to the a-Moll combination.

  Leon tried every other combination of letters he could think of. His name, Natalie’s, other musical keys . . . He even typed ‘help’ in different languages, but all it brought him was an increasing feeling of exhaustion. He yawned, fighting the urge to lie on the floor there and then.

  Just briefly. To build up some strength.

  If Natalie hadn’t called his name again, her voice filled with fear and pain and unmistakably clear this time, he might have given in to the pull threatening to make him sleep.

  When he got back to his wife, she opened her uninjured eye.

  Her breathing quickened erratically as she recognised him. Her ribcage rose and fell as though she was trying to draw in air before diving underwater.

  ‘Stay calm, darling. I won’t hurt you.’

  Not any more.

  She began to tug at her handcuffs.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked, then understood her panicked reaction as he saw the reflection of light in her pupils.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m awake.’ He pulled the headband with the camera down over his chin, until it hung slackly around his neck like a necklace.

  ‘I’m not here to film you.’

  Or to hurt you.

  She didn’t seem to believe him, continuing to pull at her handcuffs.

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t open them,’ Leon said resignedly. He omitted to mention that he had the same problem with the exit and that she was imprisoned here with him. Nor did he tell her
that he was struggling just as much as she was to stay conscious. He would have thought that the horror he was living through right now would have activated his last survival instincts. But, instead, it seemed to have killed them off.

  ‘Please . . . you have to . . .’ groaned Natalie.

  She was so weak she couldn’t even finish her sentence.

  ‘Yes. I know.’

  I have to stay awake.

  ‘Please don’t . . .’

  Leon yawned, hating himself for doing it now of all times. But as inappropriate as it was, he couldn’t fight his body’s need for sleep any longer without some kind of help.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he whispered, kissing her on the forehead. ‘It will all be over soon.’

  As soon as I’ve found a way out of here. He remembered Ivana and the sound of voices in the shaft, and it gave him hope.

  ‘I’m sure they’re already looking for me, Natalie.’

  His wife sniffed, a bubble of snot bursting. Then she said something that tore Leon’s heart in two.

  ‘. . . hurts so much, you have to . . .’

  ‘I will, darling. I’ll stop. I’ll never hurt you again.’ He felt tears pricking his eyes. I’m so sorry. I change when I sleep. I’m no longer myself.’ Leon pulled the packet of caffeine pills from his pocket. ‘Here, look. These are yours, I’ll take them. I’ll stay awake until help comes.’

  And not sleepwalk any more. I’ll never hurt you again.

  His mouth was so dry that he struggled to swallow two tablets at once, and when he had finally managed it, Natalie’s eye began to twitch. It was less a question of minutes than seconds until she lost consciousness once more.

  ‘You can’t . . .’ she mumbled again, but this time it sounded less like pleading. Not as though she wanted to ask him something, but instead like she wanted to tell him something.