In some sinister, unspoken manner, his rigid pose conveyed scorn and defiance. It was a silent challenge.
Jonas couldn’t look at that black mask for long. He felt he was staring into a void. Unable to endure its emptiness, he averted his gaze.
Then he looked back at that black head, that hole of a face.
He went into the bathroom and cleaned his teeth. Paced up and down, humming to himself. Returned to the TV.
Black head, motionless body.
The Sleeper was sitting there like a dead man.
Little by little, as if in slow motion, he raised his right arm. Extended his forefinger. Pointed at the camera.
Froze.
14
Was there really no chance of getting to England?
That was the first thought that occurred to him when he woke up. Would it be possible to get from the Continent to the British Isles?
Images took shape in his mind’s eye. Motorboats. Sailing ships. Yachts. Helicopters. With him on board.
He sat up in bed and looked round hurriedly. The camera was in its place and had clearly been recording. The room had undergone no noticeable changes. He went over to the mirror and pulled up his T-shirt, turning this way and that. He nearly dislocated his shoulder in an attempt to look at his back. He also checked the soles of his feet. He stuck out his chin and his tongue.
Before making breakfast he explored the whole flat in search of the unexpected. Nothing suspicious came to light.
He was feeling fresher than he had the previous day. His nose wasn’t blocked up any more, his throat wasn’t sore and he’d almost stopped coughing. This swift recovery surprised him. His immune system seemed to be functioning well.
During breakfast scenes from last night’s dream came back to him in quick succession. He reached for a notepad and pencil so as to record them, at least in rough outline.
He had entered a cavern suffused with a dark red glow. Visibility was restricted to a few metres. There were people around him, but they didn’t see him and he couldn’t communicate with them. The cavern led past a cube-shaped rock thirty metres high. The passage around the cube was two metres wide.
He climbed a rope ladder to the plateau overhead. The roof of the cavern was some seven metres above him. Fixed to it were the spotlights that gave off the dull red glow.
He saw three bodies lying on the plateau. A young couple on one side, a young man on the other. He recognised all three. He’d gone to school with them. They must have been dead for years, because they looked awful. Although they were skeletons, they had faces. Contorted faces and twisted limbs. Their mouths were open. Their eyes bulging. But they were skeletons.
The man lying by himself was Marc, whom he had sat beside in school for four years. The face wasn’t his, though. Jonas knew the face but couldn’t remember whose it was.
The policemen and paramedics he passed still didn’t speak to him, nor was he able to address a word to them. In some mysterious, non-verbal manner he learnt that the trio had died from rat poison, possibly self-administered. The strychnine had brought about dreadful convulsions and an agonising death.
It was warm on top of this rocky cube imprisoned in a cavern. Warm and still. All that occasionally broke the silence was a sound like wind ruffling a sheet of plastic.
And there were the corpses.
The faces of the dead were suddenly right in front of him. The next moment, he couldn’t see them any more.
All this had some bearing on himself, Jonas realised. It held some hidden significance. Rat poison, cavern, he jotted down. Laura, Robert, Marc dead. Not Marc’s face. Convulsions, decay. Silence. Red glow. A tower. Suspect a wolf walled up in the rock face. Behind it the ultimate horror.
*
At the far end of the block he found a fifth-floor flat he thought would be suitable. The view from the balcony was absolutely ideal; he could even set up two cameras there. He wrote down the address and marked the spot on his street map.
He allocated another two cameras to the Heiligenstädter Brücke. One would film the Brigittenauer embankment while the other, on the other side, would take in the bridge itself and the exit road to the Heiligenstädter embankment. If he set up one camera on the Döblinger Steg, filming the bridge, and another pointing in the opposite direction, he would not only cover the entire area but get some attractive shots, and up to this spot he would have to make use of only one stranger’s flat.
Spittelauer embankment, Rossauer embankment, Franz-Josefs-Kai, Schwedenplatz. Parking the car on the tramlines, he marked the thirteenth camera on his plan. That meant it was time to turn his attention to the other side of the canal.
He spun round at lightning speed.
The leaves of the trees beside the hot-dog stands were rustling in the breeze.
The square, a motionless expanse. The windows of the chemist’s, unlit. The ice-cream parlour. The steps leading down to the underground station. Rotenturmstrasse.
He turned on the spot. Not a movement anywhere. He could have sworn he’d heard a sound he couldn’t identify. A sound of human origin.
He pretended to scribble something on his notepad. Head down, eyes swivelling in both directions until they ached, he watched and waited to see if the sound was repeated. Again he spun round.
Nothing.
He drove across the Danube Canal. Camera No. 14 he reserved for the Schwedenbrücke and Obere Donaustrasse intersection. At the corner of Untere Augartenstrasse he explored a building in search of another elevated camera position. He found two unlocked flats and chose the upper one. It was almost bare of furniture, and the sound of his footsteps on the old parquet floors echoed around the rooms.
His route took him from Obere Donaustrasse to Gaussplatz and from there into Klosterneuburger Strasse, which came out on the Brigittenauer embankment. The last camera but one would film the intersection of Klosterneuburger Strasse and Adalbert-Stifter-Strasse from the north. The last was also camera No. 1. He would set it up on the Brigittenauer embankment, fifty metres past his front door in the direction of Heiligenstädter Brücke.
Jonas shut his notepad. He was hungry. He took a few steps towards the entrance. Turned once more.
Something was making him feel uneasy.
He got into the car and locked the doors.
*
While driving along he noticed that a door was open. He backed up. It was the entrance to the Gasthaus Haas in Margaretenstrasse.
‘Come outside!’
He waited for a minute. Meanwhile, he memorised the layout of the street.
He went inside and searched the premises cautiously. He remembered having eaten there once with Marie. Years ago. The restaurant was jam-packed and the food nothing special. Their meal had been spoilt by the people at the next table. A bunch of drunken racegoers with lots of gold around their necks and wrists, they had loudly debated the chances of various horses and tried to outdo each other in name-dropping.
A friend who was interested in canine science had once explained to Jonas why so many small dogs will attack far more powerful members of the same species despite the risks involved. It was all down to breeding. Having once belonged to a far bigger breed, they hadn’t yet got it into their heads that they no longer measured ninety centimetres from shoulder to paw. In a sense, small dogs believed themselves to be the same size as their opponents and flew at their throats regardless.
Jonas hadn’t gathered whether this theory was based on scientific research or just a leg-pull on his friend’s part, but one thing he had grasped: Austrians were exactly like those dogs.
*
As he walked through the half-cleared flat he had an urge to start work again. He was feeling better, so there was no reason why not.