The Nightwalker

by Sebastian Fitzek

  ‘Help!’ he screamed. Then again, alternating it with Natalie’s name. He rang the bell of every apartment door, not waiting to see if anyone opened up, instead stumbling to the exit and out on to the street.

  Snow blew into his face.

  A couple gave a start at the sight of him, and passers-by gaped in astonishment as he ran naked and covered in blood through the cold, screaming for help.

  In front of the supermarket on the corner, he broke down.

  No one spoke to him. No one wanted to get too close to a man who was clearly mentally disturbed, but Leon could see a cluster of curious people gathering around. Many had pulled out their mobile phones.

  ‘She’s still downstairs,’ Leon heard himself scream.

  Quickly. I have to tell them before I don’t have any strength left.

  ‘Hurry. He’s freezing to death,’ he heard a woman shout. Cars were beeping. Youths were laughing and taking photos.

  ‘Natalie’s downstairs. In the labyrinth.’

  They have to look for her. Maybe she can still be saved.

  Leon was shaking as though he had just received an electric shock, and then felt a blanket being laid on him. Someone asked what his name was, but that wasn’t important, so he just said: ‘Push the wardrobe to the side and go into the labyrinth. You’ll find Natalie behind the secret door.’

  ‘Yes, we’ll do that. But for now you need to come with us.’

  Car doors slammed, then everything around him was flashing in blue and white, and the man who was wearing a red high-visibility vest with a white cross grasped him by the shoulders while another grabbed his feet. Leon swayed.

  ‘Don’t you understand? He rammed a pen into her neck. The code for the secret door is a-Moll. You have to hurry.’

  ‘Of course. Calm down now,’ said the man, belting him securely to the stretcher in the ambulance. ‘Do you know who you are?’

  Leon tried to sit up and was pulled back by the restraints. ‘It was Siegfried. Siegfried von Boyten.’

  ‘Is that your name?’

  ‘No. His father built the house. He knew the secret world behind the wardrobe.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Noooo!’ screamed Leon, shaking at the restraints on his arm.

  They don’t believe me. Oh God.

  ‘Please, don’t waste any time. Natalie might still be alive. You have to look for her.’

  ‘In the secret world behind the wardrobe. Of course.’

  He felt something cold on his arm, then a prick, and the ambulance was moving, its siren blaring.

  41

  The patient hadn’t even been on the ward for half an hour, and already he was causing trouble. Sister Susan had tasted it, almost as soon as the ambulance opened its doors and the stretcher was pushed out.

  She could always taste it when problems rolled into the psychiatric department. She would get this strange sensation in her mouth, as though she was chewing on aluminium foil. It could even be unleashed by patients who at first glance seemed more like victims and not aggressive in the slightest; much like the man who had just activated the alarm in Room 1310.

  And at five to eight, of all times.

  If he could just have waited another five minutes, Susan would have been on her break. Instead, she had to rush along the corridor on an empty stomach. Not that she had much of an appetite in the evenings anyway. She took great care not to gain weight, even though she wasn’t much bigger than some of the anorexia patients being treated on the ward. The tiny salad and half an egg were part of her evening routine – as was, admittedly, a paranoid schizophrenic with hallucinations, but she would have gladly relinquished the latter.

  The patient had been found lying naked in the snow in front of a supermarket, covered in blood and with lacerations on his feet. He had appeared bedraggled, disorientated and dehydrated, but his gaze was alert and steady, his voice clear, and his teeth (teeth, as far as Susan was concerned, were always a sure indication of the state of the soul) showed no signs of alcohol, nicotine or substance abuse.

  And yet I could still taste it, she thought, with one hand on her bleeper and the other on her bunch of keys.

  Susan unlocked the door and entered the room.

  The scene before her was so bizarre that she stood in shock for a moment before pressing the bleeper to call the security team, who were trained especially for situations such as these.

  ‘I can prove it,’ screamed the naked man in front of the window. He was standing in a pool of vomit.

  ‘Of course you can,’ answered the sister, taking care to keep her distance.

  Her words sounded rehearsed rather than genuine, because Susan had indeed rehearsed them and didn’t intend them to be genuine, but in the past she had often been able to win time with empty platitudes.

  Not this time, though.

  Later, in its final report, the inquiry panel would establish that the cleaning woman had been listening to music on an MP3 player, something strictly forbidden during working hours. When her supervisor came by unexpectedly to do a hygiene check, she had hidden the device in the water meter cupboard next to the shower.

  But in the moment of crisis it was a mystery to Sister Susan as to how the patient had come into possession of the electronic device. He had ripped open its battery compartment and was holding a bent alkaline battery, which he must have chewed open with his teeth. Although Susan couldn’t actually see it, she pictured the viscous battery acid flowing down over the edges like marmalade.

  ‘Everything’s going to be OK,’ she said, trying to placate him.

  ‘No, nothing’s going to be OK,’ the man protested. ‘Listen to me. I’m not crazy. I tried to throw up to get it out of my stomach, but maybe I’ve already digested it. Please. You have to take an X-ray. You have to X-ray my body. The proof is inside me!’

  He screamed and screamed until, eventually, the security team came in and restrained him.

  But they were too late. By the time the doctors rushed into the room, the patient had long since swallowed the battery.

  ‘So, now you need to push me into the Tube,’ he announced triumphantly as he was pressed back on to the bed.

  ‘I tied myself up when I was sleepwalking, down in the labyrinth, do you see? And because Siegfried was just pretending to be me, the handcuff key must still be in my stomach.’

  ‘Sister, inform radiology,’ said one of the doctors, shaking his head.

  ‘And prepare for a stomach pumping,’ another added. ‘We have to get the battery out before it releases too much acid.’

  ‘Fuck the acid,’ screamed Leon. ‘It’s about the key.’

  His bed was pushed out of the room.

  ‘You’ll find the handcuff keys in my stomach or my bowels, and when you do please—’ Leon grabbed the hand of the doctor who was walking to the right-hand side of his bed. He had more hair on his face than on his head and a moustache that couldn’t hide his cleft lip.

  ‘Please go to my apartment and push the wardrobe back,’ Leon pleaded with him. ‘If it won’t move, then you can climb into the labyrinth through Frau Helsing’s bathroom.’

  ‘Into the labyrinth?’ asked the bearded man, introducing himself as Dr Meller.

  ‘That’s what I call it, yes. I can draw it for you. At the end of the first shaft there’s a fork in the path that leads to a secret door.’

  And to my wife’s corpse.

  Leon closed his eyes in exhaustion as he began to realise that he wouldn’t even believe himself. But it was too late anyway. If Natalie hadn’t died immediately after the stabbing, there was no chance she was still alive after all this time.

  ‘Do you mean the door with the DANGER sign?’ asked Dr Meller abruptly.

  Leon opened his eyes wide. ‘How do you know about that?’

  ‘The police confirmed your statement.’

  Unlike Sister Susan, the doctor seemed to be speaking earnestly. His words didn’t sound patronising, but honest.

  ‘You beli
eve me?’

  ‘Yes. A friend of yours, Sven Berger, was worried about you and wanted to check on you. About a quarter of an hour ago he found a man’s corpse in your apartment.’

  The stretcher came to a halt in front of some swing doors. Leon lifted his head. ‘And Natalie?’ He tried to sit up. ‘What about my wife?’

  Has she been found too?

  Fear of the truth sealed his throat shut.

  The doctor shook his head regretfully.

  ‘I don’t know. The police are trying to open a door, I heard, but it’s secured with a code.’

  ‘A-Moll,’ called Leon. ‘Please tell them that the code is: A-H-C-D-E-F-G-A.’

  The doctor nodded and a telephone appeared in his right hand. It seemed he was on the line with the police, because he asked if they had heard Leon’s last sentence.

  ‘No, he can’t be interviewed now, he’s swallowed a battery and we need to pump his stomach,’ said Dr Meller, trying to end the call. The person at the other end said something, and the doctor looked down at his patient with an expression of shock. Leon’s heart stopped.

  Have they found her?

  ‘The investigator wants to know what happened to the other tenants,’ asked Meller.

  Leon’s eyes widened. ‘Oh my God, did that psychopath do something to them too?’

  He thought of old Frau Helsing, who von Boyten surely can’t have had anything against.

  ‘No, erm . . .’ The doctor wandered out of his line of vision, then appeared again on the other side of the stretcher.

  ‘If I understood correctly, it sounds like no one’s there.’

  ‘No one? That’s impossible. Ivana never leaves her apartment in the evening.’

  ‘I’m afraid you don’t understand.’ Leon was pushed through the door into a tubular treatment room. ‘According to the police, your neighbours didn’t go out. They moved out. With all their valuables, cash and papers. All the house doors were open with the keys left in the outside.’

  ‘What? But why?’

  Dr Meller shrugged his shoulders cluelessly. ‘I don’t understand either, Herr Nader. But the police said the whole building looked like it had been evacuated.’

  Some months later

  Somewhere in the world.

  In a town you know.

  Maybe even in your neighbourhood . . .

  42

  Dr Volwarth waited for his colleagues’ applause to die down as he entered the conference room of the sleep laboratory.

  ‘Thank you. Thank you very much indeed.’

  He fiddled with the stud in his earlobe. Too much attention always embarrassed him.

  ‘It’s our joint success. You should be applauding yourselves.’

  The group, two women and two men, laughed politely.

  Only the chief doctor at the head of the table seemed disgruntled.

  ‘It’s a shame that any recognition will take a long time to come,’ he interjected.

  ‘You’re right, Professor Tareski.’ Volwarth’s eyes flashed with bitterness. ‘But we’re not the only ones in the history of medicine to have risked their own well-being and freedom in order to achieve groundbreaking discoveries in the name of science. Just think of our colleagues in the Middle Ages, who were forbidden under threat of the death penalty to open the human body.’

  He emphasised this statement with a raised index finger.

  ‘Over thousands of years, doctors and scientists had to steal corpses from cemeteries for dissections, and often paid with their own lives for this desire to research. The Church was afraid that the lies in the Bible would come to light if people realised that Adam wasn’t missing the rib Eve was allegedly made from. Back then it was the priests, and today it’s other do-gooders who stand in the way of progress.’

  The nurse by his side snorted with contempt and stopped stroking the cat on her lap for a short moment.

  Ivana Helsing was getting on in years, but she was one of his most reliable helpers when it came to the careful implementation of experiments. And she had also introduced him to the von Boytens, for which Volwarth showed her his gratitude with unconditional loyalty, even if she had a tendency to humanise the test subjects. Over time she had grown so fond of ‘darling Leon’, as she liked to call him, that in the end she had even pleaded for the experiment to be called off. Today she was happy and content that he had survived, even though Leon had not responded to her subliminal attempts to get him to leave the building. She hadn’t developed any fondness for Natalie, on the other hand. Luckily. If you want to break new ground in the field of medicine, you can’t be too sensitive. Subjects like Natalie and Leon, in this context, were nothing but animals in a laboratory. Whoever didn’t have the emotional strength to take the loss of a chimpanzee had no place in the field of research.

  ‘Anyone who carries out unapproved human testing must be prepared for contempt from the ignorant,’ explained Volwarth in a self-congratulatory tone.

  It was a vicious circle that his co-researchers knew only too well. Technically speaking, of course, the ethics of their profession required the approval of the test person. But sleep disturbances were anomalies of the subconscious. As soon as the test subject knew he or she was being observed, that changed the very behaviour that was to be investigated. No one slept in a laboratory like they did at home in their own bed. It was precisely for this reason that parasomnias were barely researched and the results gained in traditional sleep laboratories so inadequate. Tests provoking the violent excesses of sleepwalkers were considered unthinkable.

  ‘By letting Leon Nader believe for an entire year that he was living in his own familiar environment, we were able to make groundbreaking discoveries in the field of somnambulism research,’ said Volwarth proudly.

  Three years of planning. From the selection of the subjects to preparing the laboratory: his deceased patient Albert von Boyten, who he had treated in his clinic until his death, had been the creator of unique architectonic masterpieces, which Volwarth had found to be excellent for his purposes. Distributed all over the globe, von Boyten’s buildings had been constructed with secret levels between floors. The genius architect, a war child and Communist, had originally designed them as hiding places for the politically persecuted, but they were also excellently suited to being sleep laboratories. Beyond using them to observe the patients, it was also possible to expose patients to targeted stimulation.

  The apartments were connected via secret passageways that could be accessed at any time, in order to get test materials in and out while the test subject was either elsewhere in the building or asleep.

  The sleep phases which framed Leon’s sleepwalking activities were luckily incredibly stable, as is often the case with patients with such disturbances. These created the necessary time windows in which the researchers could painstakingly prepare their experiments, for example copying the edited videos on to Leon’s laptop. More complicated was the follow-up stage of the experiment levels in question. For this, Leon’s apartment had to be returned to its original state; the wardrobe, for example (which was fixed with an electromagnet), had to be pushed back, the head camera hidden and the laptop turned off. For as soon as Leon awoke, nothing could be permitted to remind him of his nocturnal activities.

  The deep-sleep phases were of such intensity that they had been able to undress and dress Leon, move him, and once even lay him in a bathtub.

  Volwarth looked over at Ivana. On her lap, Alba was purring and pressing her little head against her mistress’s hands so that she would start stroking her again. He couldn’t help but remember the stubbornness of the old woman when she had insisted that they use an artificial but convincing fur mock-up instead of a real cat corpse for the experiment in the bathtub.

  And yet despite all the personal differences in the team, everything worked wonderfully.

  Not for the first time, Volwarth felt proud of himself and his team.

  It had demanded a great deal of discipline, concentration and the precis
e implementation of the experiment procedure, but in the end all their efforts had been rewarded.

  ‘Firstly, we have conclusively proved that intense mental trauma is able to provoke the complicated process of sleepwalking,’ pontificated Volwarth.

  They all nodded contentedly.

  To start with, admittedly, they hadn’t known how to actively put Leon into a sleepwalking state, but researching that was part of the experiment, after all. And just like the bacteriologist Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, fate had played into their hands here too. Siegfried von Boyten had agreed to provide the house from his father’s inheritance on the condition that he himself be allowed to participate in the experiment. Leon, in turn, had only been selected as a test subject because of Natalie. Volwarth’s assertion to Leon that the hypnophobia from his childhood was so interesting that he still referred to it today was a lie. In actual fact, he had completely forgotten about Leon, until the day a colleague asked him for advice in a case where a patient was suffering from self-destructive sexual behaviour. When Volwarth encountered the familiar name of Natalie’s partner while reading the minutes from her sessions, he instantly saw the potential for his experiments: a sleepwalker and a mentally fragile girlfriend. The perfect conditions to test if and what degree of psychological pressure could unleash sleep disturbances. It had been Volwarth who made contact with Natalie and offered help. Not the other way round.

  ‘We have finally succeeded in proving the phase of sleepwalking to be an independent conscious state in which the patient is not just able to function and react, but also comprehensively communicate,’ Volwarth continued.

  He directed his colleagues to open the slim file in front of them on the table and look at the photo on the first page. It showed Leon Nader, clothed only in boxer shorts, standing in the corridor of the old laboratory.

  ‘In this picture, our patient was already in the third stage.’

  When Leon had woken up in his and Natalie’s bed after drinking a bottle of wine alone the night before, he thought he was awake. But, in reality, he was in a highly stable sleepwalking phase that began with Natalie’s flight and only ended once he went back in the bedroom and fell asleep again.