‘Hi there,’ he tried to say, but dizziness overcame him. He had the feeling that the objects around him were growing smaller and more compact. Everything was happening infinitely slowly. He opened his mouth to scream. Heard a noise. Felt as if he could actually touch the speed at which he was pursing his lips. When he fell out of bed and felt the floor beneath him without hearing the noise, when everything seemed normal again, he was filled with a sense of gratitude that immediately gave way to exhaustion.
16
He didn’t know the painting he was looking at. It depicted two mendwarfed by some windmills in the background and holding a big dog on a leash. A colourful picture. He’d never seen it before. The radio alarm clock on the bedside table was as unfamiliar to him as the bedside table itself and the old-fashioned bedside light, which he mechanically turned off.
The TV wasn’t his, nor were the curtains and desk. Nor was the bed. It wasn’t his bedroom, his home. Nothing here belonged to him except for the shoes beside the bed. He had no idea where he was or how he had got there.
The room had no personal touches at all. The TV was small and shabby, the bedding stiff as cardboard, the wardrobe empty. Lying on the window sill was a bible. A hotel room?
Jonas slipped his shoes on, jumped up and looked out of the window. A stretch of woodland met his eyes.
He tried the door. It was locked. The key was attached to a metal tag. It clattered against the lock as he rattled the handle. He unlocked the door and opened it a crack, looked left. A musty-smelling passage. He hesitated before opening the door wider and peering round the doorpost to the right. At the end of the passage he made out some stairs.
His door had a ‘9’ on it. He’d guessed rightly. On the way to the stairs he passed some other rooms. He tried the door handles, but all the doors were locked.
He went down the stairs and walked along a passage to a door at the end. Beyond it lay another passage. The walls were decorated with children’s drawings. The inscription beneath a sun with ears read: Nadja Vuksits, aged 6, from Kofidisch. A piece of cheese with smiling faces instead of holes was by Günther Lipke from Dresden, a kind of vacuum cleaner by Marcel Neville from Stuttgart, a farmhand wielding a scythe by Albin Egger from Lienz. The last picture, which had been painted by Daniel from Vienna, Jonas identified with difficulty as a sausage firing a bullet.
He turned the corner and nearly bumped into a reception desk. The drawer beneath it was open. On the receptionist’s chair was an open folder containing postage stamps. Lying on the floor, lit by the greenish glow from some neon tubes on the ceiling, were two glossy postcards.
The automatic door whirred open. Hitching up his trousers by the belt, Jonas went outside. His hunch was confirmed: he was in Grossram. He’d woken up in a motel room in the motorway service area.
Either someone else was responsible for this, or he himself was. But that he simply couldn’t believe.
It was cold and windy. Jonas, who was in his shirtsleeves, shivered and rubbed his arms. He lifted the flap of the letterbox next to the entrance and peered inside, but it was too dark to see anything.
The Spider was in the car park. He took the keys from his trouser pocket and opened the boot. The shotgun wasn’t there, but he hadn’t expected it to be. He removed the crowbar.
The letterbox didn’t have many good leverage points. He began by trying to force the flap the postman opened with a key, but the tip of the crowbar kept slipping out of the crack. Eventually he lost patience and inserted it in the mouth of the letterbox itself. Bracing his chest against the crowbar, he leant on it with all his weight. There was a crack, the crowbar gave way beneath him, and he fell flat on his stomach.
He swore, rubbing his elbows, and looked up. The top of the letterbox had broken off.
He fished out envelope after envelope, postcard after postcard, careful not to cut himself on the jagged metal. He read most of the postcards. Letters he opened, skimmed their contents and tossed away. The wind blew them over to the filling station, behind whose windows lights were burning dimly.
6 July, Grossram service area.
He stared at the card in his hand. He had written these words not knowing what lay ahead of him. This G with a flourish, he’d written it without having any idea how things were in Freilassing, Villach or Domzale. Twenty-five days ago he’d posted this card in the hope that it would be collected. This letterbox had been spattered with rain and scorched by the sun, but no postman had come to clear it. What he’d written had been imprisoned in the dark for over three weeks. In solitude.
He tossed the crowbar into the boot and started the engine, but he didn’t drive off right away. His hands tightened on the steering wheel.
What had happened the last time he sat here?
When had he sat here last?
Who had sat here last?
Either someone else.
Or himself.
*
Although he noticed nothing unusual outside the block of flats on the Brigittenauer embankment, he was warier than normal. When the lift door opened he hid round the corner until he heard it close again. He only got in the second time. On the seventh floor he leapt out so as to catch any potential enemy off guard. He realised how stupid he was being, but it always helped him over the difficult moment of decision. The sense that he was being active, attacking, gave him some feeling of assurance.
The shotgun was leaning against the wardrobe. ‘Morning,’ he greeted it. He cocked it. The noise sounded good.
He glanced into the toilet and the bathroom. Went into the kitchen and looked round. All was as it had been. The glasses on the sofa table, the dishwasher open, the video camera beside the TV. The smell, too, hadn’t changed.
The change in the bedroom he spotted immediately.
A knife was sticking into the wall.
Protruding from the wall at the spot the Sleeper had thrown his weight against it in that recording was the hilt of a knife that looked familiar. Jonas examined it. It was his father’s knife. He tugged at it. It refused to give. He wiggled it. The knife didn’t move a single millimetre.
Jonas looked more closely. The blade was embedded, up to the hilt, in the concrete wall.
He took hold of the handle and tugged with both hands. They slid off. He dried them on his shirt, wiped the handle and tried again. No effect whatever.
How could anyone drive a knife so deep into a concrete wall that it couldn’t be pulled out?
He looked at the camera.
*
Jonas boiled some water. Leaving the herbal tea to brew, he cleaned his teeth in the living room. Doing it at the basin in the bathroom would have meant turning his back on the door.
He looked out of the window while the electric toothbrush was humming against his teeth. The clouds had moved on. It might be a good day to set up the cameras.
In the bedroom he leant against the doorpost and eyed the knife embedded in the wall. Perhaps it was a message. An order to go into buildings and search them thoroughly, to get to the bottom of things. The Sleeper wasn’t evil, he was just a well-meaning prankster.
He emptied his trouser pockets but found nothing that hadn’t been in them the day before.
Opening the freezer drawer, he took out the goose he’d got from the supermarket, which he planned to cook for dinner. He put it in a big bowl to thaw and made sure the casserole was clean.
He carried his herbal tea over to the sofa table, then went to get some sheets of cardboard, a pair of scissors and a pencil. He cut the cardboard into rectangles the size of visiting cards. Without giving any thought to the wording, which he promptly forgot, he wrote on them in quick succession. After a while he counted them. There were thirty. He put them in his pocket.