The Nightwalker: A Novel Read online

  Damn it, what does this mean?

  The water had washed a tuft of hair from his scalp, but that wasn’t what was unsettling him. When he was under emotional stress, he always tended to lose a little hair, but it was just a temporary problem. This time, though, something else had come away with the hair, and it was turning the water into a brown sludge.

  Horrified, he ran both his hands through his hair, then stared at his smeared palms.

  How can that be possible?

  He had had a shower yesterday, and now his hair was as dirty as the fur of a dog that had been rolling around on the floor. And it smelled like it, too.

  He held a finger in front of his nose and breathed in, and for an instant the smell transported him into a mouldy cellar.

  Where have I been?

  Leon stared at his dirty hands, remembering the earth he had noticed on his socks earlier.

  He gave a start and ran back into the bedroom. The mysterious door was still there, the wardrobe pushed aside, and now that he had switched on the ceiling light he could see the specks of dirt he had left on the parquet floor during his nocturnal expedition.

  He sat down at the laptop and started the recording from the beginning again. On the very first replay he noticed a peculiarity that he had registered before but not given much thought to: the panning of the camera up. It happened twice. The first time before he heaved the wardrobe to the side in his sleep. The second was just before he opened the mysterious door.

  Why do I keep looking up?

  Leon stood and went over to the approximate spot where he had also stopped on the recording, half a metre from the vault door. Then he craned his head backwards.

  At first glance he couldn’t make out anything unusual; that is, if you didn’t count the hairline fracture that ran across the white-washed plaster. Leon noticed it now for the first time, but for a building of this age such things weren’t unusual. It snaked like a crack in the shell of a hard-boiled egg over to a hook in the ceiling. An ugly chandelier had once hung from the hook, a heavy monstrosity that they had got rid of the day they moved in.

  The hook, however, had remained, because Natalie wanted to hang an indoor plant or some other decorative object on it to make the room more homely. Directly next to it was a shell-shaped lampshade made of frosted glass, concealing a bulb. For ages he had wanted to replace the shade with a new one that gave out warmer light. Now the sight of it irritated him, even though he couldn’t have said why at first look. It was only once he was at the foot of the bed, directly beneath the light, that Leon realised what was bothering him.

  He thought it was a speck of dust, then he thought the black fleck inside the glass lamp was a dead insect that had crept through a gap, unseen by the naked eye, and never found its way out again.

  In under a minute he had hauled a stepladder out of the small storage space and into the bedroom. Leon placed it under the lamp. He had to leave the room for a second time to fetch his toolbox from the study, then, armed with a screwdriver, he climbed the steps.

  Even up close he couldn’t make out what was inside the shell. From his new vantage point, standing at the top of the ladder, the glass cover, curved like an eyeball, seemed a lot bigger. And heavier.

  Carefully, so the shade didn’t fall on him, he began loosening the four thick screws holding the lamp to the ceiling. As he did so, he noticed signs of wear and tear on the screw-heads. One screw was quite loose, while the last initially refused to budge at all. Only with a great deal of force did he manage to unscrew it, and then Leon made a grave mistake, letting the screwdriver slip from his grasp, and, as he tried to grab it, he began to teeter. So as not to follow suit behind the tool, he had to let go of the lamp, which meant its entire weight hung on only the last screw. Of course, it didn’t hold for long.

  The shade lurched to the side, wrenching out the screw, and fell, shattering as it hit the floor.

  Shit.

  Cursing, Leon climbed down from the ladder and knelt on the parquet to search the shards for the contents of the shell. But given that he didn’t know what he was looking for, he didn’t hold out great hopes of finding it.

  He needed to gather up the shards anyway, piece by piece, and as carefully and thoroughly as possible so that he wouldn’t cut himself later. Luckily, the shade had broken into several large pieces, of which two had shot so far under the bed that Leon decided to leave them there. The other pieces he stacked on top of one another like fruit bowls, with the intention of fetching a plastic bag and the vacuum cleaner. But he didn’t get to that, instead picking up the smallest shard, carefully and with his fingertips, for this piece had the sharpest edges.

  What in God’s name . . .?

  He turned the shard over and looked at the object, curved like a contact lens and filed off at the edges, still clinging to the glass from its underside.

  What is it?

  Morphet shot into Leon’s mind. The thing had a surface structure and consistency that wasn’t unlike the cockroach’s shell, albeit a different colour. At close proximity it was clear that it came from a human hand. Dry blood crusted the underside of the keratin plate.

  ‘A fingernail?’ whispered Leon, hoping he was wrong. It was painted a mud-like colour and had been extracted almost completely intact. But there could be no doubt as to whose thumb it once belonged to.

  14

  Volwarth had once compared the subconscious to the deep sea. The further down you go, the greater the danger of being crushed by its strength, and if you surface again too quickly, your head could explode.

  Leon looked at the torn-off thumbnail, sensing that he was only at the beginning of a long dive. He had put his head under the water just once, and already he had made unimaginable discoveries, of which the door in the wall behind the wardrobe was definitely the most disturbing.

  He turned the nail over, from lacquered, manicured surface to its underside, which until recently had still been united with his wife’s thumb. At the sight of the encrusted blood underneath, the thought of how much pain Natalie must have suffered made him close his eyes and take a deep breath.

  He looked at the nail again, and only now, on the second glance, did he notice the details. On the underside blood had crusted, but lower down, barely visible to the naked eye, the surface seemed a little too even.

  Leon opened his toolbox and took out a halogen torch. Not able to see much more even with that, he reached for a Swiss pocket knife, which contained a little magnifying glass. The magnification wasn’t perfect, but it was enough to be able to make out punctures on the nail. With a tiny object, someone had scratched a series of numbers into the encrusted blood.

  ‘One,two, zero . . .’ whispered Leon. He broke out in a cold sweat and his heart seemed to stop for a second, his neck and calf muscles cramping up as if he was preparing to take flight. The final number – a four – a little offset and barely decipherable in the second row, completed his birth date: the twelfth of April.

  Slowly, but with his pulse racing, he turned to the door in the wall.

  Is it possible that . . .

  He stood up to check his suspicion. It suddenly felt a lot warmer than it had a few minutes ago, even though the heating in the bedroom had been turned down to the lowest setting, because Natalie preferred to sleep with an open window and temperature of sixteen degrees. Leon, on the other hand, needed absolute quiet at night and insisted on closed windows and doors, even though there wasn’t much street noise in this neighbourhood anyway. Turning down the heating had been their compromise.

  Abrupt sadness eclipsed his tense, fearful nervousness as he stood before the vault door, the thumbnail clasped in his fist. He tried with all his might to suppress thoughts of Natalie, but the tighter he balled his fist, the stronger his conviction became that he might never again get the opportunity to squabble with his wife over the temperature in the bedroom.

  A relationship is a battle, his mother had once said to him, meaning it in a positive sense. It’s
not fighting that poisons a marriage, but indifference.

  ‘I hope you were right,’ said Leon, continuing his whispered monologue as he moved the uppermost of the two wheel locks on the door. Because based on how things looked right now, it was not indifference, but a brutal fight that had torn Natalie and him apart.

  A fight to the death?

  Leon turned in a clockwise direction until the ‘1’ was beneath the marking arrow above the cogwheel. At once he felt the locking mechanism react to the position into which he had turned the wheel. The click that swiftly followed as he turned the wheel to ‘2’ confirmed his theory. And once Leon had turned the second wheel to the numbers ‘0’ and ‘4’, forming the month of his birth date, the same thing happened that he had witnessed on the video recording: click!

  The vault door sprang open.

  Leon’s initial reaction was irrational. He looked around the bedroom, as if for any witnesses to this unbelievable event. Once he had assured himself that he was still alone, he stretched his fingers out, worried that they would be crushed the very second he laid them in the gap around the door.

  I can’t believe I’m really doing this.

  It moved more easily than he expected for a door of its weight, as the hinges were well greased. As soon as he had it completely open, the air turned colder, and this time it wasn’t his overwrought psyche playing tricks on him. Cool air was streaming into the bedroom through the dark opening in the wall.

  It was stale and smelled of paint, reminding him of the tool cellar where his father had always built the Carrera track at Christmas. And it also smelled like the dirt he had washed out of his hair earlier. Leon squinted and tilted his head to the side, but even as he moved closer, he could only make out the black-painted walls of a small room that didn’t seem to have any floor.

  It was as though he had opened the portal to a black hole.

  He reached for the torch again and, keeping his distance from the door, shone it into the darkness. It wasn’t a wise decision.

  For beyond the threshold there really was no floor, just an abyss, opening up like jaws the of a beast of prey, as Leon suddenly thought. He even thought he could make out the teeth, stretching back into the neck of this supernatural being. In reality they were just the rungs of a ladder set into the brickwork, leading deeper and deeper down into the darkness.

  Out of fear that an ill-advised movement might make him lose balance, Leon knelt and shone the torch down into the shaft, which was spherical. The beam became thinner and thinner, not reaching the bottom. The walls were rough and uneven, and here and there black-painted bricks jutted out of the chute, which became increasingly narrow as it stretched down.

  And I climbed down this in the night?

  Leon thought back to the self-assuredness he had observed in his sleepwalking self. The schizophrenic feeling of being in another body during his conscious state intensified.

  His knees trembling, he stood up and made the decision to sort through the facts calmly before going any further.

  There must be a logical explanation for all of this.

  For Natalie’s injuries. The trainers. The thumbnail.

  For the door.

  Dr Volwarth had said that he was fine. That he wasn’t violent. But Dr Volwarth had seen neither the video nor the shaft, opening up in his bedroom like a portal to another world.

  A shaft, from which cold cellar air was still streaming.

  Along with a noise that Leon had heard many times in his life, and which was getting louder every second.

  That’s impossible, he thought, creeping back towards the vault door. Once again he directed the beam of the torchlight down into the abyss, which wasn’t actually necessary, because the classical melody had its own light source: a display that was blinking in rhythm with the tinkling sound.

  ‘Natalie,’ cried Leon, pressing his hand over his mouth.

  His wife’s mobile phone, which she had been holding when she left the house a few days ago, lay at the foot of the shaft and was ringing non-stop.

  15

  In the end it happened despite all his attempts to prevent it. He fell.

  Leon had, however, been sensible enough to pull on the work overalls he wore for site visits. His fingers, gripping the metal rungs, were clad in his work gloves, and thanks to the thick rubber soles on his steel-capped boots, his feet were sure not to slip.

  He had attached the torch to the tool belt of his overalls so that it shone straight down, even though as he climbed he was avoiding looking into the depths. Step by step, rung by rung, he fumbled his way down towards the mobile phone, which had stopped ringing as soon as he crossed the threshold of the door.

  It wasn’t long before he had descended more than halfway. Even though it was getting cooler with every metre, beads of sweat were gathering on his forehead. He tried to ignore it, but it got worse so he stopped to wipe the back of his hands across his eyes.

  It happened as he was descending the last third. By now Leon had developed a method; he knew how far down to stretch his right leg to reach the next rung, how far he had to go before his foot would reach the step and he was able to release his left hand and bring it down so that it could grip the next rung, after which this succession of movements could be repeated with his left leg and right hand. Leon felt sure he could do the last few metres with his eyes closed if he needed to, and it was this mistaken belief that was his downfall.

  Several things happened at once: Leon heard a light knocking that seemed to be coming from his apartment’s front door above, just as his foot stepped into nothingness. For the first time the space between the rungs had changed, if only slightly. He didn’t have a foothold, and then the phone beneath him began to ring again.

  With the unmistakable classical ringtone that Natalie had only recently picked, except this time much louder.

  Leon gave such a start that he released his right hand – too quickly. He literally jumped down to the next rung. And by chance this one had been either badly made, weakened by age or, for some reason or other, not securely fastened to the wall. As soon as Leon’s foot landed on it, he knew the rung wouldn’t hold his weight. By then it was too late.

  He just had time to grip one hand around the metal strut, cushioning his fall a little. But he still ended up swinging to the side like a window shutter and banging his hip against a protruding brick, causing his torch to come loose from the belt and fall. He didn’t hear the glass shatter because of the phone ringing, but the fact that the beam of light was immediately extinguished spoke for itself.

  ‘Shit!’ cried Leon into the darkness. Only the weakly flickering phone display was still casting light across the floor, like a glow worm.

  It took him almost as long to descend the last section as it had the whole preceding stretch, because he didn’t want to make another mistake. By the time he finally felt solid ground under his feet, the telephone had long since gone silent, as had the knocking on the apartment door, and it took Leon a while to find the phone on the dry floor, which was covered by a thick blanket of dust.

  In the process he stirred up so much dirt that he sneezed, which down here sounded like a small explosion. The sound was reflected by the brickwork, then amplified and sent back as a dull echo. With these acoustics, no wonder the ringing of the phone had been so loud. Even a gentle cough sounded like the crack of a whip.

  Where in God’s name am I?

  Leon snapped the mobile open and gasped for air. When he saw the photo used as the background, he knew he was holding Natalie’s phone in his hands. It was a portrait of her, one of those typical snapshots that people take of themselves, head thrown back, mouth stretched into a broad smile, all in hope that the outstretched hand was at such an angle that the camera wouldn’t cut off the forehead or only capture the upper body.

  First the identity bracelet in the fixing bath. Now the mobile phone down here. Natalie, what happened?

  Leon erased the message announcing sixteen missed calls an
d several voicemails. Most were from him. The other incoming calls, including the last, had been dialled from a withheld number.

  For a mobile phone, the illumination from the display was surprisingly strong, but it wasn’t enough to give him a good look at this mysterious place. In spite of the anxiety gripping him, Leon tried to approach things systematically. He imagined the floor of the shaft as a clockface, and made a mark in the dust directly in front of the wall, as twelve o’clock. Using it as a starting point, he groped his way along the brickwork, until, after a three-quarter-turn to around nine o’clock, he stumbled into another rung. At first glance it didn’t seem to serve any purpose, for he couldn’t make out any further struts above it. So it wasn’t another way up.

  Leon put the mobile in the breast pocket of his overalls and gave the strut a shake. It moved, and for a second he thought he had pulled it off the wall, but the weight in his hands was too heavy for that. As he heard a creaking sound, he realised he had just found another door.

  This was made of plywood, not metal like the one above, and so was much easier to move. Thanks also to it being not much bigger than the door to a dog kennel, as Leon could see when he shone the mobile on it again.

  He held his arm out in front of him as far as possible to illuminate the tunnel beyond the newly discovered opening. Given that the entrance was small, he imagined the passageway would be the same, but when he shone the phone up, the light met no resistance – if he could squeeze through the gateway he would be able to stand up in the room beyond it.

  But do I want to?

  Leon looked up the shaft to the light from his bedroom, feeling as though he had been buried alive, with only weak signals from the outside world making their way through.

  He stood up and shook the rungs of the ladder – apart from the one on which he had lost his balance, they were firmly attached to the brickwork. So he shouldn’t have any problems getting back up, as long as he didn’t get lost down here.

  And it seems I know the way even in my sleep.