Leon was just about to go back into the study to start his computer when he remembered the word on his right palm.
Laptop.
There was only one portable computer in the apartment.
‘Are you still there?’ he heard Sven ask.
Without answering, he went into the bedroom. He pushed the chair to the side and picked up the carefully folded but completely soiled overalls from the desk.
What the hell . . .?
He had expected to find Natalie’s laptop beneath them. Not the USB stick attached to it, blinking rhythmically.
Leon opened the laptop and gave a start when, with a gentle hum, it awoke from standby mode.
‘Hey, Leon, why have you gone quiet?’
Because I can’t find the words. No, more than that. I’m afraid I can’t find part of myself.
A replay window for video files had appeared on the screen, and all of a sudden Leon no longer felt cold. His whole body was numb, insensitive to external stimuli.
He balled his right fist, pressed his fingernails hard into his palm, and before he could even ask the question as to whether he should dare do it, he had stretched his hand out and moved the mouse towards PLAY.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ asked Sven anxiously.
Nothing. Nothing’s wrong.
The video file didn’t start. Instead, an entry field appeared, demanding a password.
Damn it, how am I supposed to be able to remember a password I chose in my sleep?
Leon held his breath in shock. Slowly, he turned the palm of his left hand up and stared at the two pairs of digits, separated by a full stop.
07.05.
‘I’ll call you back in a minute,’ he said to Sven, hanging up. Then he typed the date of the car accident into the laptop.
The replay started at once.
37
At first there was nothing to see but dark flecks, twitching across the screen in various degrees of shadow. Then, as the sound of rattling breaths suddenly strained the loudspeakers, the image became brighter. Threads of light snaked across the picture like the tentacles of a jellyfish.
The contrasts sharpened and the contours of a room became increasingly clear, reminding Leon of his bedroom. The large bed, filmed from the perspective of someone sitting on the floor, certainly looked identical to the one he had woken up in a little earlier.
There was a jolt on the screen, and while the camera focused on a table leg, Leon heard a metallic clanking that sounded like a chain – reminding him of something that he couldn’t figure out at first.
Handcuffs?
Then he heard a voice that wasn’t his own and which seemed to be coming from the bed. The person lying on it wasn’t visible, but Leon didn’t need to see to know who was sobbing his name.
Natalie!
He stared at the monitor with his eyes wide, and suddenly a flood of memories almost knocked him off the chair. It wasn’t a dream!
I was there. In the labyrinth. Behind the door. With her.
He vaguely remembered a door behind the wardrobe, the dark passageways and the secret code (a-Moll), and the handcuffs he had used to chain himself to a heating pipe.
To prevent the worst from happening.
Leon felt as though someone had managed to install a dream camera in his head, saving the images he normally forgot right after waking up.
But I wasn’t sleeping. And I wasn’t awake either.
On the recording, the rasping breaths turned into a choking sound. He instinctively put his hands to his throat, suspecting he knew why it was so raw and why it still hurt to swallow.
The key. Natalie’s life insurance policy.
He stared fixedly at the monitor.
The picture began to shake, and he heard a guttural groan. Then the camera tipped down and Leon saw a wave of vomit flow over the worker’s boots on his feet.
As he continued to retch on the video, Leon groped his hand over to the overalls next to him on the desk and felt the dried sick on the trouser legs. A quick glance at the boot under the chair confirmed that they were soiled too. And one of them was missing the bootlace.
‘No, no!’ roared Leon at the laptop, as though he could somehow prevent himself from picking the key out of the pool of vomit.
Please, don’t let me do it. Let it stop, he pleaded in his thoughts. But it didn’t stop. The recording ran on mercilessly. The image was blurred because the camera was so close to the pipe, but the audio was clearer than ever now.
A handcuff scraped across metal, then clicked loudly, and when the camera abruptly rushed upwards Leon knew he had freed himself from his shackles.
My God.
The sight that revealed itself to him from a standing perspective was exactly as Leon had expected: Natalie lay stretched out on the bed as though on a crucifix, chained with a dog collar. But unlike in his dream, she was fully conscious.
The camera moved closer to her face, so close that Leon could make out the fine pores on her nose and the encrusted blood on her chin covering the small freckle he had kissed so often in these last years. She blinked, blinded by the light of the head camera. Fat tears tumbled down from both the open and the injured eye.
‘Leon?’ she asked, and the camera image moved up and down affirmatively.
‘Leon, I’m so sorry.’
You? You’re sorry?
She sounded exhausted and breathless, but not panicked. Like a human being who had come to the end of their journey.
‘I didn’t mean to betray you.’
‘Betray me?’ Leon asked the monitor. With tears in his eyes, he touched the crackling surface of the laptop and traced his index finger along his wife’s split lip.
‘Leon, please. Forgive me.’
‘Oh God, darling.’
Of course. Whatever you’ve done, I’ll forgive you, he thought. All I want is to have you back here with me.
But his alter ego, down in the labyrinth, didn’t seem to want to forgive his victim. A shadow fell across his wife’s beaten face.
‘Please, please don’t . . .’
‘No, no more pain . . .’
They both began to speak at the same time.
Natalie was pleading at the camera and Leon at his computer. He prayed that he was in one of his sleep paralyses right now, one from which he could only free himself with loud screams. But unlike usual, he had long realised that this wasn’t a dream.
Something golden flashed on the monitor. It was a few moments before Leon recognised the tip of his own fountain pen.
Please . . . No!
‘I love you,’ they said, almost simultaneously. He, up in his bedroom. She, down in the torture chamber. And while Leon screamed out his despair, Natalie only sounded sad and resigned. He could see in her face that she knew what was awaiting her.
Natalie closed her uninjured eye just before it happened. Just before he rammed the fountain pen into her neck, with such force that almost half its length disappeared.
‘Noooooo!’
Leon screamed, jumped up, grabbed the metal chair he had been sitting on and threw it across the room against the wall mirror. Cracks spread across the glass like a spider’s web, then jagged-edged splinters came away, falling to the floor. At the same time, four hundred litres of water gushed onto the bedroom floor. The metal chair had rebounded from the wall into Natalie’s aquarium, smashing a section of the glass panes.
Please no. Don’t let it be true.
In tears, Leon buried his face in his hands, biting his fingers so hard that the pain would have ripped him out of the dream if it had been one. But it was real. The fountain pen in Natalie’s neck, her punctured windpipe, her choked wheezing, the whistle with every breath that became first longer, then quieter, her slowly twitching body, her head slumping forwards. And the unbearable silence that set in, still far from being the end of the recording.
Leon continued to look through his fingers, covering his eyes, unable to bear the sight for longer than a
second at a time. The monitor picture with Natalie’s motionless body in the centre shook and blurred, but this time it wasn’t down to the recording. Leon’s eyes had transformed into torrents, and his body was shaking convulsively.
He wiped his tears away with the back of his hand, and as he did so his gaze fell on the business card next to the computer.
Kroeger?
Leon had never seen the card before, never heard the name, and didn’t know what it was doing there, but the embossed signet on the front told him what he had to do next.
The police! I have to call the police!
To use the telephone, he needed both hands. He was in shock, and so overwhelmed that he had even forgotten the number of the emergency services. By the time he remembered, there was a dramatic change on the screen.
His alter ego in the torture dungeon seemed to have finally had his fill of the sight of Natalie’s motionless body, and moved just as the camera started to go into standby mode. The image flickered back on.
What now? What am I going to do now?
The camera panned left behind the bed to the spotlight and table, which Leon had a vague memory of. The sex toys spread out on it also seemed eerily familiar.
‘I’m sorry,’ he sobbed.
What have I done? And why?
He didn’t understand why she had asked for his forgiveness. And he was unable to believe what happened next.
Just as at the entrance, there was plastic sheeting hanging from the ceiling at the far side of the room. It parted in front of the camera as though moved by some invisible hand, exposing a door. Just one kick with his boot and it sprang open.
There’s a second exit? I could have just gone to fetch help?
Leon’s despair had reached a new level that usually only suicidal people reach. The telephone in his hand had been forgotten for now.
Where am I going?
Behind the door some steps, steep like a fire ladder, headed upwards in a zigzag pattern. Leon heard himself panting after just the first few steps.
He didn’t want to watch any more. He wanted this to be the end. Over. Finished. Like the rest of his life.
But his sleepwalking self was nowhere near finished. Step by step, he climbed up. Step by step, his breathing on the tape became more laboured, and even in the bedroom an invisible clamp tightened around Leon’s ribcage.
What else have I done?
Once he got to the top of the steps, the picture became blurry again, just as at the beginning of the recording. Leon leaned towards the flickering monitor, so close that the picture before him resolved into individual dots.
The spotlight of the head camera focused on something that looked like a chipboard panel. Leon saw himself stretch his hand out and press the panel inwards.
On the video, another secret door opened.
At the same time Leon felt a gust of cold air at the back of his neck, and a shadow wandered across the screen. Then he suddenly heard everything in duplicate.
The creak of the secret door opening.
The crunch of the boots on the glass shards.
And even though there could only be one possible explanation for this, it took Leon far too long to react.
He stared at the screen, paralysed by the sight of a young man’s back, a man who was staring at a laptop monitor, not wanting to believe that he wasn’t watching a stranger.
But himself.
He didn’t want to believe that he wasn’t watching a recording. But the present.
Late, much too late, he turned to the hole in the wall from which until just a moment ago his splintered bedroom mirror had been hanging, where a man was now standing in a puddle on the flooded parquet floor. He was around the same height as Leon, of a similar stature. With brown hair, blue overalls, a sweatshirt and a pair of worker’s boots, the right one of which was missing its bootlace.
The stranger had on a headband with a camera attached to it, the lamp of which was shining right into Leon’s eyes. As a result, he was unable to see the man’s face as he ran forward, as quick as lightning, to tear Leon into a maelstrom of pain. And a whole new dimension of darkness.
38
Like sleep, the process of waking up is an underresearched medical mystery. So as not to be woken by each and every noise, the brain restricts the intensity of external stimuli. However, it isn’t in a permanently muffled state. Several times per hour, it shifts for a few moments into a near-conscious mode. In this brief phase the brain stretches its feelers into the world outside the dream, like a submarine does its periscope, to check if it would be advisable to change the state of consciousness, for example if the sleeping person is in danger.
Generally speaking, outside the near-conscious sleep stage only very strong stimuli are able to wake the person from sleep. The loud ringing of an alarm clock, for example, or a stream of cold water or intense pain – like the pain that brought Leon Nader back to reality.
For a while he had tried to fight against the thing around his neck, which was now pulling him upwards. Even with his eyes shut, he had realised that the pain shooting along his spine would only become more bearable if he gave into the pull at his head. Besides this, the more he struggled, the harder it was to breathe.
Hearing his neck vertebrae crunch, Leon opened his eyes wide. He was sat on the floor completely naked, his legs stretched out, his back against the bed, but if he didn’t want his own weight to break his neck, he would have to get up as quickly as possible.
His legs were like rubber. At first he only managed to get to his knees. The pressure around his throat lessened, but the fought-for space quickly disappeared.
Leon looked to the hook on the ceiling, where the previous tenant’s chandelier had hung and over which the rope of his noose was being pulled.
The stranger who had come into his bedroom through the secret passageway behind the mirror stood in front of the bureau with an expressionless gaze, pulling at the other end of the noose like a hoist.
Leon doubted that he had the strength to stand, but he had no choice. If he didn’t want to suffocate, he had to straighten up.
‘Stop,’ he croaked, as Natalie’s murderer forced him to his feet.
Oh God. What now?
To try to keep his balance, he flailed his arms, which strangely weren’t tied. His hands, however, were encased in thick latex gloves. Whenever he tried to grab the rope over his head, the psychopath at the other end pulled even more strongly, making Leon fear that his larynx would burst.
‘No,’ coughed Leon, choking. ‘Please don’t.’
He rolled his eyes in panic and noticed a chair next to him. He had thrown it against the mirror earlier, but now it was upright, and within his grasp.
As if wanting to reward him for the discovery, the killer loosened the rope, and Leon hooked the chair towards him with his leg. But as soon as he had, the man mercilessly pulled him upwards once more. And he only stopped once Leon had clambered on to the chair.
‘Please, carry on,’ the man laughed, fastening the rope to the radiator beneath the window with a complicated-looking knot.
Not just his voice, but his appearance in general seemed familiar to Leon – aside from the fact, of course, that the man had made a great deal of effort to copy Leon’s physical appearance.
‘Who are you?’ Leon croaked, craning his neck a little. He was surprised he could even get a word out. To stop him from freeing the rope from the hook by jumping, the maniac had pulled it so tight that he had to stand on tiptoes if he wanted to avoid losing consciousness.
The man trying to hang him was his age, perhaps a little younger, and apart from a slightly over-large nose and missing left earlobe, there was nothing remarkable about his appearance.
‘I have a delivery for you,’ he laughed, waving a CD case that he had just pulled from the breast pocket of his overalls.
Then he left the room briefly, returning with a kitchen stool in his hand. His soles squeaked on the wet floor.
He sat
down in front of the laptop and put the disc in.
Please, God, make it stop. Don’t let it get any worse.
From where he was, Leon could see the right half of the monitor. Every time he moved his head he ran the risk of lacerating his neck, but he still wrenched it to the side when Natalie’s face appeared on the screen. Her right eye was shimmering violet, her eyelids were swollen shut, and when she tried to speak her tongue jutted against a cracked front tooth.
Leon couldn’t bear to see the pictures that reminded him of his darkest nightmares, and of the fact that he would never see his wife alive again.
But even without the images, the mental torture didn’t stop, for there was nothing Leon could do to stop himself from hearing. The psychopath had turned the volume of the video up to the maximum so that Leon didn’t miss a single word of Natalie’s acoustic goodbye note, which she had dictated for him in a trembling voice:
Leon, I’m so sorry, she began. I’m coward, I know. I should be telling you all this to your face. That’s what you deserved. But I don’t have the strength, so I’m choosing this unusual way. So that, even if it’s impersonal, you at least hear it in my own words.
‘Stop the tape!’ gasped Leon in the break between her words.
But I’m not sure if I’m going to have enough strength to put this confession in our letterbox. If it turns out I’m too cowardly even for that, then I’ll at least leave you a card on the kitchen door.
Leon closed his eyes, then had to open them again at once, feeling like he was about to lose his balance and strangle himself.
Right now, while I’m recording this, you’re still sleeping, he heard Natalie say.
I’m going to pack my things in a moment, and hope you won’t wake up while I’m doing it. I think you’re having nightmares again. Your night terrors have got worse, presumably because you can sense something’s wrong. How right you are, my darling. And it’s my fault and mine alone.
Leon turned back towards the bureau, in front of which the killer was standing. He had stopped the recording. The frozen image of Natalie suggested that she had recorded it with her mobile in her dark room. Leon could make out the photographic equipment in the background.
The Nightwalker Page 17