‘Again?’
‘Yes,’ said Minks. ‘Again.’ He gestured for her to relax into her seat.
‘We’re going back to your dream. Back to where you see your attacker again. I’m going to start counting, now. We’re going back, Maria… one… two… three…’
9.00 a.m.: Schanzenviertel, Hamburg
Kristina left the door open, leaning the vacuum cleaner and her cleaning tray as checks against the door spring; leaving her escape route clear. Old instincts started to rouse themselves from somewhere deep within her, awoken by the scent of fresh death in the air. She became aware of a rhythmic rushing noise and realised that it was the sound of her pulse in her ears. She reached down and picked up a spray bottle of cleaning fluid from her tray, gripping it tight in her trembling hand, like a gun.
‘Herr Hauser?’ She called into the hall, into the quiet rooms beyond. She strained to hear any sound, any movement. Any sign of something living within the apartment. She gave a jump as a car drove past on the street outside, the thudding bass of raucous American dance music synchronising with the pulsating rush of blood in her ears. The apartment remained silent.
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.
9.10 a.m.: Eppendorf, Hamburg
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.