The Nightwalker: A Novel Read online

  Nor do I, thought Leon, opening the microwave and starting to cough again. He had found the origin of the acrid smell.

  ‘Is everything OK?’ asked Anouka.

  No. Nothing, nothing at all, is OK.

  With his fingertips, he reached for the trainers in the microwave, but was unable to lift them. The rubber soles had melted on to the microwave plate, and the sight awakened a memory of a time that Leon had so far regarded to be the worst in his life.

  Without saying goodbye, he hung up on Anouka and hurried out of the kitchen, along the hallway and into his study. He had to lift up the cardboard model of the children’s hospital, which the architectural firm had been planning to enter into the competition for the new build, in order to open the topmost desk drawer. After rummaging around for a while, he found the worn-out looking notebook that he had once used to record important phone numbers. He hoped the number hadn’t changed. After all, it was over fifteen years since he last dialled it.

  It rang for what felt like an eternity, before someone picked up.

  ‘Dr Volwarth?’

  ‘Speaking. Who is this?’

  ‘It’s me. Leon Nader. I think it’s started again.’

  4

  ‘Thank you for coming so quickly.’

  Dr Samuel Volwarth acknowledged Leon’s conversation opener with an indulgent smile and made himself comfortable on the sofa. ‘I don’t normally do house calls, but I have to admit, you made me curious. Yet again.’

  Leon had reached the psychiatrist just as he was about to set off on a trip. Dr Volwarth was due to depart for a congress in Tokyo and had made a detour on his way to the airport to pay a flying visit to his former patient.

  Now they were sat in the living room while the taxi outside waited on double yellow lines. But despite this, Volwarth looked completely relaxed and composed, just as Leon remembered him. It was a peculiar feeling to be sitting opposite him again, after such a long time.

  The psychiatrist didn’t look to have aged by even a day. As before, his hair was long and tied in a grey ponytail. It seemed he was still making the greatest effort to be different. But his appearance, despite being scandalous to Leon back in his childhood, now just looked extrovert: Volwarth’s leather trousers, his cowboy boots, the swallow tattoo on his neck. Searching for signs of the passing of time, Leon could only find them in the details: the corners of his mouth drooping a little lower, the rings under his eyes a shade darker. And the doctor had replaced his pearl earring with a discreet silver stud.

  ‘It’s been a hell of a long time, hasn’t it? Almost an entire beach must have passed through the hourglass since we last saw each other.’

  Leon nodded. It was seventeen years since his concerned parents had driven him to Volwarth’s private clinic for the first time.

  Back then, however, he still hadn’t called Klaus and Maria his parents. In the first years after the accident, it would have felt like a betrayal of his biological parents, who he’d lost at the age of ten. A depressed, suicidal alcoholic had intentionally driven down the wrong slip road of the motorway. The head-on collision claimed three victims. Only two passengers survived: Leon, who even now could remember that he and his sister were singing along to ‘Yellow Submarine’ on the radio when the headlights suddenly appeared ahead of them; and the wrong-way driver, who came out of it with just a broken collarbone. An ironic twist of fate that only the Devil could find amusing.

  The days after Leon had woken up in hospital as an orphan felt like living under a diving bell. He listened to the doctors’ diagnoses, the recommendations of the child psychologists and the words of the woman from the youth welfare office, but he didn’t understand them. The lips of those who examined him, cared for him and – in the end – wanted to offload him to replacement parents, had moved and produced noise but no meaning.

  ‘It’s a lovely place you have here,’ said the psychiatrist now, almost two decades later, his gaze fixed on the stuccoed ceiling. ‘An old build with a lift and parquet floor. South-facing balcony, and I guess around four bedrooms. It can’t have been easy to find something like that in this neighbourhood.’

  ‘Three bedrooms. But yes, it was definitely the proverbial needle in the haystack.’

  Natalie had stumbled across the rental notice by chance while out for a walk and had written to the owner without holding out any great hopes. They even thought it might be a hoax, because a choice piece of property like this was more likely to be advertised in the glossy catalogues of the luxury estate agents than on the post of a street lamp.

  They’d spent a whole year on the waiting list and had to submit one guarantee after another before finally being accepted by the building management. Even today Leon still didn’t know what tipped the balance in their favour, making them come out ahead of a host of other applicants. Such a desirable and far-from-cheap apartment would normally only be granted to tenants with a fixed income. Not to two freelancers with uncertain commission prospects.

  ‘Did you know that I recently spoke about your case again at a symposium?’ the psychiatrist suddenly asked.

  Volwarth seemed to be observing Leon’s every reaction, and – not for the first time since the doctor walked into the apartment – Leon felt like he was back in the therapy sessions that had defined a significant part of his childhood. While other boys were heading out to the Baggersee, playing football in the gravel pit or making a treehouse in the garden, this man had been cabling him up, plugging him into a computer and rummaging around in his soul with his never-ending questions.

  ‘So what was the catalyst that made you want to see me?’

  Leon stood up. ‘That’s what I’d like to show you.’

  He turned the television on with the remote control. The ancient video recorder underneath, however, he had to operate manually. He had hauled it up from the cellar just an hour before, given it a quick dust and connected it to the flatscreen monitor. It was a miracle the clunky monstrosity still worked. The spooling VHS tape crackled with every turn like a badly oiled cog.

  ‘You kept our old tapes?’ asked Volwarth in astonishment as he saw the first images appear on the screen. He had given them to Leon at their last session, as a parting gift from the successfully completed therapy.

  ‘Well, would you look at that.’

  Volwarth had stood up right next to Leon, his gaze fixed on the screen.

  The grainy, slightly yellowed images showed Leon’s eleven-year-old face in close-up. Back then he had still been chubby-cheeked and a little dumpy, not anywhere near as slim as he was today. On the recording, he was sat bolt upright in his pyjamas on the edge of a bed in a child’s room. The bed-sheets were those of a popular football team, and a poster of Michael Jackson had been tacked on to the wardrobe in the background. He hadn’t chosen either of them. Nor the bed, the room or the adoptive parents into whose care he had been passed. They were already the second couple to try with him. But they were the first to enlist a doctor to get to the bottom of his problems.

  ‘Do you know what we’re planning to do tonight, Leon?’ asked Volwarth on the tape. Even his voice sounded just the same as it did today. The psychiatrist was standing out of sight behind the camera, into which little Leon was blinking nervously. His eyes were red-rimmed and he looked exhausted, because he had slept only a few minutes for the third night in a row. But he nodded.

  ‘It’s an experiment that we haven’t yet carried out with a child of your age. It’s completely harmless, nothing will happen to you. I just want you to know this: nothing will happen against your will here. You can tell me if you’d prefer not to do it after all.’

  ‘No, it’s OK. But it won’t hurt, will it?’

  ‘No,’ laughed Dr Volwarth good-naturedly. ‘It might pinch a little when you lie down, but we’ve cushioned everything well.’

  With these words, the psychiatrist appeared in the picture. His back obscured the view for a brief moment, then Volwarth could be seen trying to fasten something to the boy
’s head. When he stepped aside again, Leon was wearing a shining metal ring that ran around his forehead, with a fist-sized object attached to it that was vaguely reminiscent of a miner’s lamp.

  ‘The thing on your head is a radio-controlled sleep camera,’ explained Volwarth in a calm voice.

  ‘And it films everything I do while I’m dreaming?’

  ‘Yes, it’s motion-activated, which means it comes on as soon as you get up. We’ve made an exception this time and left off the electrodes that measure your brainwaves and muscle and eye movement. There are no cables, so you can move around freely. There’s just one thing I want you to do for me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This is the only device like this we have in the institute, and it was very expensive. So please don’t take a shower with it on.’

  Leon smiled, but his eyes looked sad. ‘I don’t know what I do when I’m asleep, though. I can never remember.’

  ‘That’s exactly why you’re going to wear this sleep camera tonight.’

  ‘And what if I do something bad again?’

  Volwarth frowned. ‘What do you mean again? We’ve spoken about this at length, Leon. You’re a sleepwalker. There are thousands of sleepwalkers in this country alone, it’s nothing bad.’

  ‘So then why did the Molls want me to leave?’

  Watching it now, years after he had said these words for the first time, Leon winced. His stomach started to cramp up. Moll.

  Too many unbidden memories were linked with this name. Today he knew that it hadn’t been his first foster parents’ fault. Leon understood why they wanted to be rid of him, even if, at the time, he felt like an unwanted pet brought back to the animal home for not being house-trained.

  ‘Frau Moll thought I was a murderer. She screamed it in my face.’

  ‘Because your foster mother was scared. You know yourself what she saw. It would have scared the heck out of you too, right?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘You see, it’s just a completely normal reaction. When someone sleepwalks, to others they look like a ghost. But it’s not dangerous.’

  ‘So why did I have a knife in my hand?’

  As I stood there in the children’s bedroom. Over her son’s bed.

  To this day it still wasn’t clear if he really wanted to hurt nine-year-old Adrian that night. How Leon got into his bedroom was a complete mystery, because to get there he had to go down one floor, and the designer stairs in the Molls’ house didn’t have a banister, which made them a challenge even awake. But the biggest puzzle was the bread knife Adrian’s mother caught the sleepwalking Leon with. He had been holding it in both hands, like a dagger, above the chest of the sleeping child. The knife wasn’t from the Molls’ kitchen, and Leon hadn’t been able to explain how it came into his possession. This put as much fear into him as the question of what would have happened if Frau Moll hadn’t been woken by the creaking floorboards and gone to check what was happening. Adrian himself had been completely unaware of both the sleeping visitor and the impending danger.

  ‘Believe me, Leon. You’re not a bad person,’ Volwarth was saying on the tape. In spite of the bad picture quality, Leon could see in his own eyes that he didn’t believe the doctor. Which was hardly a surprise.

  The very next morning the Molls had informed the welfare office that they could no longer have him in their house. After a few days in the home he found a new place to stay with the Naders: a sweet-natured, childless couple who wanted a child much too desperately to be scared off by Leon’s history. They did the right thing and obtained the best possible psychiatric treatment for him with Dr Volwarth, even though they couldn’t really afford the expensive examinations, like the video analysis that Leon had dug out again now.

  ‘With the help of that camera on your head, we’ll be able to prove that there’s a harmless explanation for everything,’ said the young Dr Volwarth on the tape.

  ‘Even for this?’ The eleven-year-old leaned over and pulled a plastic bag out from under the bed, holding it up to the camera.

  ‘Oh God,’ exclaimed Volwarth as the child pulled an indefinable clump out of the bag and presented it to the camera.

  ‘What the hell is that?’

  5

  Without waiting to hear the answer he had given the doctor back then, Leon stopped the video and gestured for Dr Volwarth to sit on the sofa.

  ‘It’s like it was yesterday,’ said the psychiatrist with a far-away smile as he sank back down into the leather upholstery.

  For him the images from the past seemed to wake pleasant memories, which was certainly not the case for Leon.

  ‘You gave me a real shock back then, Leon. For a second I was genuinely scared that you were about to show me a dead animal.’

  ‘No,’ said Leon, reaching under the coffee table for the shoebox he had put there. He opened the lid and showed his guest the contents. ‘Luckily, it wasn’t an animal.’

  ‘You kept these too?’ asked Volwarth.

  Leon shook his head. ‘They’re not the same trainers. I found them in my microwave this morning.’

  ‘Today?’

  Volwarth leaned over, looking intrigued.

  ‘Yes. This morning. The day after my wife left me.’

  The psychiatrist reached for the stud in his earlobe and played with it for a moment.

  ‘You’re married,’ he asked after a brief pause.

  The question surprised Leon.

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘You’re not wearing a ring,’ explained Volwarth.

  ‘Sorry?’

  Leon touched the ring finger on his left hand (Natalie had suggested they wore them on the side of their hearts, even though in Germany it was traditional to wear them on the right) and, confused, registered only the indent in his skin left behind by the ring.

  ‘I must have taken it off in the bathroom,’ he murmured, even though that was practically impossible. It was much too tight and could barely be moved even with oil or soap. Leon had been planning to take it to the jeweller’s.

  Volwarth fixed him with a long analytical stare, then asked: ‘Do you want to have children?’

  ‘Yes, definitely. Natalie stopped taking the pill the day we moved in here, about a year ago now.’

  ‘But she left you anyway?’

  ‘It looks that way.’

  Leon summarised the peculiar events for Dr Volwarth, who became increasingly agitated as the story progressed, before clapping his hands together and cutting Leon off: ‘No matter what you say, I don’t believe you did anything to your wife in your sleep.’

  ‘But we can’t rule it out.’

  Volwarth made an appeasing hand gesture and clicked his tongue. ‘Theoretically, sure. In the decades that I’ve been researching and treating parasomnias, I’ve encountered almost everything: people who clean their apartments in the deep-sleep phase, sleepwalkers who have coherent conversations with their partners and even answer questions. I had patients who did washing in the night and even operated complicated devices. In one case a marketing manager typed entire presentations into his computer and sent them by email to his co-workers. Another got into the car while asleep and drove twenty-three kilometres to the neighbouring town . . .’

  ‘. . . to stab his mother-in-law with a kitchen knife,’ continued Leon.

  Volwarth grimaced regretfully. ‘Unfortunately, yes. The Kenneth Parks case was all over the press, and it wasn’t the invention of some horror film director.’

  ‘So there are people who become violent in their sleep,’ persisted Leon.

  ‘Yes, but that applies to less than one in a thousand sleepwalkers.’

  ‘And what makes you so sure I’m not one of them?’

  Volwarth’s expression turned thoughtful, nodding as though Leon was a student who had asked a clever question.

  ‘My experience tells me. And the results of my studies. As you know, somnambulism is one of the least-researched phenomena in medicine. But in recent years my clinic h
as made some ground-breaking discoveries. Starting with the fact that the very definition “sleepwalking” is flawed. Sure, the night-time activities mostly occur in the deep-sleep phase, but strictly speaking the so-called sleepwalker isn’t actually asleep. He is in another, barely researched stage of consciousness between being asleep and awake. I call it the third stage.’

  Leon tugged nervously at the skin over his Adam’s apple. Volwarth’s descriptions reminded him of his own sleep paralysis, from which he always struggled to wake.

  ‘In long-term studies, where we put the entire family under clinical observation, we were able to find out that the sleepwalkers’ violence is primarily directed towards loved ones.’

  ‘There you go!’ Leon clapped his hands together. ‘Now you yourself are saying that—’

  ‘But . . .’ Volwarth raised his index finger ‘. . . there are always warning signs. Had Natalie ever complained that you were rough with her in your sleep?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you ever strangle or hit her in the night?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Believe me, you would know if you had. Of course you can’t remember your night-time activity the next morning, but your wife would certainly have told you. Sleepwalkers don’t just tear their partners’ fingernails out from one night to the next, or punch their teeth in. It begins gradually.’

  ‘But I saw it,’ retorted Leon.

  ‘What exactly did you see?’

  ‘Her bruised eye,’ answered Leon with agitation. ‘I already told you about Natalie’s injuries.’

  ‘But you also told me that you had just woken up from a horrible nightmare involving a cockroach.’

  ‘What’s your point?’ asked Leon, feeling rattled.

  The psychiatrist leaned forwards on the sofa. ‘It was dark. Could it perhaps have just been eye makeup, which in your half-asleep state you confused with a black eye?’

  ‘I don’t think so, no. And that wouldn’t explain her thumbnail, either.’