JF03 - Eternal (5 page)

Kristina edged down the hall towards the lounge, the hand with the cleaning-fluid bottle held out hesitantly before her, the other offering uncertain support, tracing its way along the bookshelves that lined the hallway wall. As she did so, Kristina couldn’t help her trembling fingers registering a hint of dust on a shelf needing special attention.

She felt her anxiety ease as she stepped into the bright lounge and found nothing untoward, other than that Herr Hauser had left it particularly untidy: a whisky bottle and half-drained glass sat on the table beside the armchair; some books and magazines lay scattered on the sofa. Kristina had always marvelled that someone who was always so concerned about the environment in general could be so careless of his personal surroundings. Kristina Dreyer, the assiduous cleaner of other people’s homes, swept the room with her gaze, registering
and mentally timetabling the work that needed doing. But a former Kristina, a past-tense Kristina, screamed at her from deep within that there was death here: its wraith smell hanging in the stuffy air of the apartment.

She stepped back out into the hall. She stopped in her tracks, as if the energy from even the slightest movement had to be diverted to her hearing. A sound. From the bedroom. Something tapping. Someone tapping. She moved towards the bedroom door. She called out ‘Herr Hauser’ once more and paused. No answer, except the ominous sound from within the bedroom. Her grip tightened on the cleaning-fluid bottle and she threw open the door so hard that it banged against the wall and swung back, slamming shut again in her face. Again she pushed it open, more carefully this time. The bedroom was large and bright, with off-white walls and a polished wooden floor. The window was open slightly and a breeze stirred the vertical blinds, which tapped rhythmically against the window. Kristina let go the breath she did not know she had been holding with a half-laugh, half-sigh of relief. But still the anxiety didn’t fully leave her, and pulled her back out into the hall.

The apartment’s hall was L-shaped. Kristina moved with slightly more confidence now and made her way down to where the hall took a right turn and led to a second bedroom and the bathroom. As she turned the corner, she noticed that the second bedroom’s door was open, casting the bright sunlight from the windows onto the bathroom door, which was closed. Kristina froze.

There was something nailed to the bathroom door. She felt a nauseous surge of terror. It was some kind
of animal pelt. A small animal, but Kristina couldn’t guess what kind. The fur was wet and matted and bright red. Unnaturally red. It was as if the pelt had been freshly skinned and blood ran down the white painted surface of the door.

She edged her way towards the door, her breaths coming short and fast, the searchlight of her gaze locked on the oozing rawhide.

She stopped half a metre from the door and stared at the pelt, trying to make sense of it. Her hand reached out, as if to touch it, her fingers stopping just short of the glossy red fur.

It took a time too brief to be measured for her brain to analyse what her eyes were seeing and to make sense of it. The thought was a simple one. A simple statement of fact. But it ripped into Kristina and in that instant shredded her ordered world. She heard an inhuman shriek of terror reverberate along the hall and tumble out through the still-open front door. Somehow, as the fragile fabric of Kristina Dreyer’s world was rent asunder, she realised that the shriek was hers.

So much terror. So many long-forbidden memories flooding back. All from a single realisation.

What she was looking at was not fur.

Maria stood in the heart of the dreamscape field. As it always was in her dream, reality was exaggerated. The moon that hung in the sky was over-large and over-bright, like a stage light. The grasses caressing her naked legs and swirling silently to the command of an unheard breeze moved too sinuously. There was no sound. There were no odours. For the
moment, Maria’s world was stripped down to two senses: sight and sensation. She looked out across the field. The silence was broken by a soft voice with a hint of a Swabian accent. A voice that belonged somewhere other than the world she now stood in.

‘Where are you now, Maria?’

‘I’m there. I’m in the field.’

‘Is it the same field and the same night?’ the spirit voice of the psychologist asked.

‘No … no, it’s not. I mean it is … but everything is different. It’s larger. Wider. It’s like the same place but a different universe. A different time.’ Far in the distance she could see a galleon – its great white sails rippled insubstantially in a weak wind as it sailed towards Hamburg. It seemed to drift through the swirling grass instead of the water. ‘I see a ship. An old-fashioned sailing ship. It’s going away from me.’

‘What else?’

She turned and looked in another direction. A broken building, like a ruined castle, sat small and dark at the edge of the field, as if at the edge of the world. A cold, harsh light seemed to shine from one of the windows.

‘I see a castle, where the disused barn should be. But I am so far away from it. Too far away from it.’

‘Are you afraid?’

‘No. No, I am not afraid.’

‘What else do you see?’

Maria turned around and gave a small jump. He had been there, behind her, all the time. And because she had dreamed the same dream so many times before she had known he was going to be
there, yet she had still given a start when she found herself face to face with him again. But, as in all her dreams before, she felt none of the raw, stark fear that his face stimulated in her waking hours: whenever she saw it in a photograph, or whenever it appeared suddenly and unbidden from within the dark hall of memory where she tried to keep it locked up.

He was tall and his heavy shoulders were encased in an exotic armour and draped in a black cloak. He removed his ornate helmet. His face was built of sharp Slavic angles and possessed a callous handsomeness. His eyes were a piercing, bright and dreadfully cold emerald-green and they burned into hers. He smiled at her: a lover’s smile, but the eyes stayed cold. He stood close to her. So close that she could feel his chill breath on her.

‘He is here,’ she said, looking into the green eyes but speaking to a doctor in another dimension.

‘I am here,’ said the cruelly handsome Slav.

‘Are you afraid?’ Minks’s voice, the voice from another dimension, suddenly became fainter. Further away.

‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘Now I am afraid. But I like this fear.’

‘Do you feel anything other than fear?’ asked Minks, but his voice had faded almost beyond hearing. Maria felt her fear change. Sharpen.

‘Your voice is becoming faint,’ she said. ‘I can hardly hear you. Why is your voice fainter?’

Minks replied, but his voice had now drifted so far away and she couldn’t make out his answer.

‘Why can’t I hear you?’ Now there was a new magnitude to her fear. It burned furnace raw and
deep. ‘Why can’t I hear you?’ She screamed into the dark sky with its too-big moon.

Vasyl Vitrenko leaned forward, tilting down to kiss her on the forehead. His lips were dry, cold. ‘Because you’ve got it wrong, Maria.’ His voice was heavy with an Eastern European accent. ‘Dr Minks isn’t there. This isn’t one of your hypnotherapy sessions. This is real.’ He reached beneath his billowing black cloak. ‘This is no dream. And there’s no one here except you and me. Alone.’

Maria wanted to scream but couldn’t. Instead she stared as if hypnotised at the evil moonlight gleam on Vasyl Vitrenko’s long, broad-bladed knife.

Kristina had never seen a human scalp before, but she knew with absolute certainty that that was exactly what she was looking at. To start with, it had been the colour of the hair that had prevented her identifying it as something human. Red. Unnaturally red.

But there was now no doubt in her mind that this was human hair. Glistening wet hair. And skin. A large ragged disc of it. It had been nailed to the bathroom door with three panel pins. The top of it had folded over, revealing a little of the puckered bloody underside where the skin had been sliced and pulled away from the skull beneath. A long ‘Y’ shape of glistening red streamed from it and down the wooden bathroom door.

Blood.

Kristina shook her head. No. Not again. She had seen too much blood in her life. No more. Not now.
Not when she had just got her life back. This was so unfair.

She leaned forward again and felt her legs shudder, as if they were struggling to support the weight of her body. Yes, there was blood, but there was too much of it to be blood alone. And too vivid a red. The same vivid red as the sodden, matted hair.

Her pulse thudded in her ears, a tempo that increased as a simple but obvious thought hit her. Whose hair?

Kristina reached out with trembling fingers and pressed them against an area of the door’s wooden surface that was not streaked with glistering red.

‘Herr Hauser …?’ Her voice was high and tremulous.

She pushed and the door of the bathroom swung open.

Vitrenko smiled at Maria. He looped his arm around her back and pressed her close to him, as if they were about to dance. She could feel the unyielding solidity of his body tight against hers.

‘Do you love me?’ he asked her.

‘Yes,’ she said, and meant it. Her terror subsided. He eased his body from hers but still held her firm. He lifted the knife and ran its keen edge over her shoulders, her breast and let it rest just below her chest, its cold sharp tip pressing lightly into the soft space just below her sternum.

‘Do you want me to do it?’ he asked. ‘Again?’

‘Yes. I want you to do it again.’ She looked into the green eyes that still shone cold and cruel.

There was a crash of thunder. Then another. She
felt the knife-point pressure on her abdomen increase, and the keen pain as the tip pierced her skin. There were another two loud claps of thunder and the world around her dissolved into darkness.

Maria opened her eyes and found herself looking across at Dr Minks. He held his hands together before him as if he had been clapping. The thunder that had brought her back. She straightened herself up and looked around his office, as if reassuring herself that she was back in reality.

‘You closed me out, Maria,’ he said. ‘You didn’t want me there.’

‘He took control,’ she said, and coughed when she realised that her voice was shaking.

‘No, he didn’t,’ said Dr Minks. ‘You took control. He doesn’t exist in your dreams.
You
recreate him. You control his words and actions. It was your will that sought to exclude me.’ He paused and crumpled back into his chair, again examining his notes, but the frown did not fade from his brow. ‘You saw the same landmarks and motifs again?’

‘Yes. The galleon where the harbour-police patrol boat was that night and the castle where the old barn was. What I don’t understand is why it is all so elaborate in the dream. Why is he dressed in armour? And why is everything changed into some kind of historical counterpart?’

‘I don’t know. It could be that you are trying, in your mind, to place what happened that night into the past … A distant past: like a previous life, almost. Do you
feel
like it’s the same night as you were stabbed?’

‘Yes and no. It’s like the same night, but in another dimension or universe or something. Like
you said, as if it were a completely different time, as well.’

‘And, in this scenario, you let your attacker come close to you? You permit him to have close personal contact?’

‘That’s the thing I can never understand,’ said Maria. ‘Why do I allow
him
to touch me, when I can’t let anyone else touch me?’

‘Because he is the origin of your trauma. The source of your fear. Without this man, you would have no post-traumatic stress, no aphenphosmphobia, no panic attacks.’ Minks took out a thick leather-bound pad and started to scribble on it. He ripped a page out and handed it to Maria. ‘I want you to take these. I feel we have too big a mountain to climb with therapy alone.’

‘Drugs?’ Maria did not reach to take the prescription. ‘What is it?’

‘Propanolol. A beta blocker. The same sort of thing that I’d prescribe if you had high blood pressure. It’s a very mild dose and I only want you to take one eighty-milligram tablet on, well, difficult days. You can make it a hundred and sixty milligrams if it’s really bad. You don’t suffer from asthma or any respiratory problems, do you?’

Maria shook her head. ‘What does it do?’

‘It is a noradrenalin inhibitor. It restricts the chemicals that your body generates when you’re afraid. Or angry.’ Dr Minks thrust the prescription in Maria’s direction and she took it from him.

‘Will it affect my performance at work?’

Minks smiled and shook his head. ‘No, it shouldn’t do. Some people feel tired or lethargic with it, but not in the same way it would if I were to give you Valium. This might slow you down a little, but otherwise you
should feel no ill effects. And, as I said, I only want you to take it when you really feel you need to.’

Dr Minks stood up and shook Maria’s hand. She noticed that the psychologist’s palm was cool and fleshy. And rather moist. She pulled her hand away a little too quickly.

After confirming the following week’s appointment with Minks’s secretary, Maria made her way to the elevator. As she did so she paused to take two things from her shoulder bag. The first was a handkerchief with which she wiped vigorously at the hand that Minks had shaken. The second was her police service-issue SIG-Sauer nine-millimetre automatic, sheathed in its clip-on holster, which she attached to the belt of her trousers before pressing the button to summon the lift.

Kristina Dreyer stood framed in the bathroom doorway. She opened her mouth to scream, but her fear strangled the sound in her throat. For four years, twice a week, Kristina had cleaned Herr Hauser’s bathroom until it shone scalpel-bright. She had wiped every surface, swept every corner, polished every tap and fitting. It was a space so familiar to her that she could have navigated it with her eyes closed.