The Devil's Sanctuary (34 page)

WITH A CRASH
the great stone door hit the ground, throwing up clouds of what Daniel first assumed was dust. He was surrounded by happy, jubilant voices. Someone wrapped a blanket around his shoulders and led him out. He stood there, blinded, as he rubbed his eyes and blinked tiredly, like a bear woken from hibernation.

A moment later he realized why he hadn’t been able to see anything through the crack, why everything outside had been so white and silent.

Himmelstal was completely covered in snow! In soft, flowing layers it covered the fringe of trees at the top of the Wall, the rooftops over in the village, and the banks of the frozen river.

But where in the valley was he? Confused, he stared at the black railings and the crooked stone crosses that looked like they’d been decorated with whipped cream.

“You were lucky,” a guard panted, leaning exhausted against the railings. “That door probably wasn’t meant to be opened before the Day of Judgment.”

Daniel turned around. The fallen door was embedded in the snow, and behind it gaped the dark entrance to a little temple. Shit, he was in the leper cemetery! The mausoleum. He’d come back from the grave!

Two other guards led him toward the vans that were parked down on the road.

“What about Tom? Where’s he?” Daniel asked, turning back to look at the opening to the monument again.

“Tom?” the guards said in surprise. “Is
he
here somewhere?”

At that moment Tom appeared out of the darkness. The usually stoic guards couldn’t help a gasp of terror as Tom slid out of the door to the grave, half naked, head shaved, peering suspiciously around him like a ghost fleeing from Hades.

After a second or so the guards recovered from the ghostly apparition and, with their usual speed and efficiency, handcuffed Tom, threw a blanket over his naked shoulders, and led him off toward another van.

A third van arrived, and before it had even stopped Corinne leaped out of the passenger side. Red cheeked and wearing a fur-edged hat she padded toward Daniel through the snow. She hugged him hard, then kissed him on the cheeks, mouth, and chin.

Then she took a step back and looked at his head.

“You’re going to need a few stitches,” she declared.

Daniel would never have imagined it could feel as good as this to get into one of the guards’ vehicles. He and Corinne sat down in one of them, while Tom was put in another.

“What a stroke of luck that we managed to get you out of that awful grave,” she said as the engine started up and the van rolled off along the recently cleared road.

She took off her hat, crept in under his blanket, and rested her head in the crook of his neck.

“Am I going to the clinic now?” Daniel whispered.

At least that was what he was thinking, but he wasn’t sure if the words had passed his lips. His consciousness was coming and going like a radio with a weak battery.

For a brief moment he had an out-of-body experience and could see the van from above, describing its elliptical path around the narrow, wintry valley. Round and round, with a short stop at the care center building, then round again. A merry-go-round that always took him back to the clinic. Where everything began again. There was no way out. Maybe there wasn’t actually a world outside the valley. And never had been.

“Only to get you patched up,” Corinne said, gently nuzzling his head. “I’ll be with you. God, I’m so glad you’re here. We’ve been searching like mad. The guards would never have found you if they hadn’t seen that red flag against the white snow.”

“Flag?” Daniel said uncertainly. “Oh, that was Tom’s undershirt, with my blood on it. He tied it to a metal rod and managed to squeeze it through a crack. I thought he’d gone mad.”

“Of course he’s mad. But he saved your life,” Corinne said, rubbing her face against his neck like a cat.

IN THE
guest suite of the old main building Daniel and Corinne were lying together in a double bed for the first time.

“Are you sure we can leave here tomorrow? Both of us?” Daniel said.

Corinne was lying against his shoulder. Outside the tall windows with their open velvet curtains, snowflakes the size of feathers were falling through the darkness.

“No one’s going to keep us here,” she said. “They’ve got no right to. Doctor Pierce has gotten hold of all your personal details from Sweden, and you’re going to be getting out of here as soon as possible. Didn’t he say that when you spoke to him?”

“He said they’re launching an investigation into Fischer’s activities, and that they’ll need to talk to me later. If that’s true, they’re going to have to come to me,” Daniel said, banging his fist against the mattress. “Once I’ve left Himmelstal, I’m never setting foot here again. And I want to be gone by the time Max arrives.”

“You will be.”

She stroked her hand over his cheek and temple, and the bandage covering the stitches on his shaved head.

“It’ll be lovely to get away from here,” she whispered.

“I don’t understand how you could stay here voluntarily,” Daniel said. “What was the attraction?”

“The excitement, I think. My dad was a mountaineer. It’s in the blood.”

“What about the power? What was it like, controlling someone else’s brain by remote control?”

“It was…fascinating,” she said hesitantly.

“I can imagine. Making the bad good. Playing God.”

“Yes. I suppose it was a bit like that.”

She curled up under his arm and they lay there together in silence, just watching the snowflakes fall outside.

“How well did you know Mattias Block?” Daniel asked after a while.

He noticed a change in her body when he mentioned the name.

“He was the one I got on with best when we were training. We became good friends,” she said in a faint voice, as if the memory pained her.

“Just friends?”

She sighed.

“You’re not going to get jealous of a dead man, are you? We were in love with each other. But relationships between crickets were strictly forbidden. When we were let out into the valley to carry out our tasks, we weren’t allowed to have any contact at all. I can’t forgive Doctor Pierce for assigning Mattias such a dangerous subject as Adrian Keller. He was the wrong person for that.”

“What about Max? Did he ever try to seduce you?”

“Of course.”

“But you stopped him with your bracelet?”

“Yes. When he got too close…click.”

She held out her arm and pressed the index finger of the other hand to her wrist, as if she were pressing a button, only pretending because the bracelet was no longer there.

“He used to say it was my freckles. As soon as he saw them, he lost the urge.”

“It must have been fun to be able to toy with a man that way.”

Corinne leaned up on her elbow and kissed him.

“It’s every woman’s deepest wish,” she whispered as she playfully ran her finger down his chin, neck, and chest. “Being desired, but being able to put a stop to it whenever you want. That’s so obvious for men, but not for women. If we show any kind of interest, we have to follow through, don’t we? All these stupid alarms and sprays that you clutch in your pocket on the way home at night. Deep down you know they don’t work. But this worked.”

“But not on me,” Daniel said. “You’ve got no defense against me.”

He pulled her back down, kissed her, and put his hand on her stomach.

“It’s too early to feel anything moving,” she said.

But he left his hand there. Like a protective dome it rested above the life that had blossomed against the odds in that wicked place. And within a couple of minutes her deep breathing had lulled him into the deepest and most relaxed sleep he had ever experienced in Himmelstal.

SNOW WAS
falling gently between the mountains.

The diggers that had stopped work on the new site when the snow started were once again in action as a team of men fought to dig people out after the cave-in.

The collapsed part of the tunnel system had come as a great surprise to the works manager, seeing as the system didn’t stretch that far according to the plans he had been given. To his horror he had discovered that the entire hillside was riddled with passageways like a rabbit warren, something that had obviously been unknown to his explosives experts.

Daniel and Corinne were sitting in the clinic lobby, ready to leave. Her suitcases were over by the entrance. He himself had no luggage. The heat from the open fireplace had made them take off their coats and lay them across the sofa. He was fidgeting impatiently.

“Why isn’t the car here?”

“It’ll be here as soon as they’ve plowed the road into Himmelstal,” Corinne replied calmly, taking the glass of
glühwein
that one of the hostesses offered her. The hostess offered one to Daniel as well, but he declined with a shake of his head.

“And you’re sure it’s going to take us out of the valley?” he said. “I won’t believe that until I see it.”

He looked up at the stuffed fox head on the wall. The firelight was reflecting off its teeth, giving them a red glow.

Another hostess leaned over the counter of the reception desk with a phone in her hand and called out, “They’ve found two more. Only minor injuries.”

Eight bodies had been recovered from Doctor Fischer’s underground clinic so far, including Doctor Kalpak and Fischer himself. Twenty people had been found alive in their cells and had been moved to the real care center aboveground. Among them was the hostess who had gone missing, as well as two nurses who had worked for Karl Fischer before resigning without notice and going home—or so everyone had assumed.

At the time of the accident the clinic’s sponsor, Greg Jones, had been in one of the guest rooms. He had been so shocked by the events that he had immediately sent for his private helicopter and left the valley.

Daniel stood up, went over to the entrance, and looked out. He didn’t like all this snow.

The phone at the desk rang. The hostess took the call, then turned toward them and said, “The road’s open now. The car will be ready to leave in five minutes. Have you got everything?”

When they came out the snow was still falling, but very lightly and slowly. The car wasn’t some old van but a comfortable BMW that was otherwise used for driving visiting researchers in and out of the valley. The driver put their bags in, then opened the back door with a calm, sweeping gesture. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion, as if the snow were slowing everything down. For a terrible moment Daniel was convinced it was all a dream and that he was going to wake up and discover that there was no car ready to drive him away.

“Are you really going to drive us out of Himmelstal?” he asked anxiously.

“Of course,” the driver said.

Corinne got into the backseat and adjusted her hat, which had been knocked askew when she climbed in. Daniel got in beside her, and she took his hand and smiled at him encouragingly.

With slothlike slowness the car rolled down the slope and into the woods, where snow-heavy branches surrounded them like a tunnel. He realized that the driver couldn’t drive faster with the road in this state, but the slowness was still excruciating.

They reached the bottom of the valley and falling snow surrounded them like billowing lace curtains. The mountains were vague, scarcely visible, and inside the car it was gray and dark.

“If it carries on like this the roads will get blocked again and we’ll have to turn back to the clinic,” he muttered.

“Don’t worry. The snowplows will be working nonstop,” Corinne said.

But there really was a great deal of snow on the road, and the car had to slow to a crawl.

They passed the leper cemetery. The broken entrance to the tomb gaped empty, dark and frightening, like the portal into the underworld that it actually was. Farther up the slope they could see the search team looking for more survivors in the collapsed tunnels. He gave Corinne’s hand an involuntary squeeze, and she gave him a kiss that tasted of cinnamon and warm wine.

Slowly they made their way through the valley. The snow had made the landscape unrecognizable. It was hard to believe that these sleeping white fields had only recently been green with lush grass.

Suddenly Daniel remembered something.

“That time we lay in the grass and you talked about children. When you said what you missed most in Himmelstal was children. You were crying. Was that all an act?”

Corinne gazed out into the milky haze. In the gloom inside the car her brown eyes looked almost black.

“I had to play my part,” she said quietly. “If it had gotten out that I wasn’t a proper resident, I’d have been taking a huge gamble. There were so many rumors about spies working for the doctors. I don’t think anyone ever suspected me, but Mattias obviously got unmasked somehow, and he paid a terrible price. I don’t know what Keller did to him, but he must have fled the house in panic, otherwise he wouldn’t have run straight into one of those snares.”

She was drowned out by a clattering noise, and the inside of the car was lit up by orange light as a snowplow came up behind them. The driver pulled as close to the edge of the road as he dared, stopped, and let the snowplow pass. They drove on, sticking close behind it, and its rotating light lit them up as if they were in a disco.

“You sounded so genuine when you were crying,” Daniel said. “You were distraught.”

He looked at her face, flickering yellow and red as she replied, “I’m an actress, Daniel.”

“So how much of you has been real, and how much has been an act?”

“It’s hard to say. Do you want a percentage?”

“What about our love? Is that an act for you?”

They had reached the far western edge of the looping road. Another road led off it, with an illuminated sign flashing a warning in red that they were entering Zone 2.

Ahead of them the snowplow carried on round the curve, back toward the clinic.

“God, no,” she said. “You mustn’t think that.”

The driver stopped at the junction with the other road. The windshield wipers were going at top speed.

A guard emerged from a little concrete hut. He was clutching the collar of his uniform together, huddled against the snow. He glanced inside the car, then went back into the hut.

A moment later the sign flashed green and they drove on. Corinne was sitting up straight and motionless as she stared ahead through the windshield.

The alpine world lay in front of them. When Daniel leaned down and peered up through the car window, he could just make out the imposing mountaintops behind the curtain of snow. Neither of them said anything.

Shortly afterward they reached another warning sign that switched to green as they approached. A barrier slid open and the snow that had settled on it slid to the ground in a long, thin sausage. Slowly they drove through and the barrier sank down again behind them.

They were out of Himmelstal.

Corinne leaned her head against his shoulder and the car drove on along the winding road, like a tiny toy in the immense landscape.