‘Please bring me some water.’ His voice gave out on the last word.
‘Not until I know what you’re doing here.’
Marc caught a whiff of urine, presumably because the man had wet himself. Either from fear or because he’d been held captive for a considerable time.
But by whom?
For a moment Marc wondered whether it might be better to go outside and tell Emma. But he still didn’t know if he could trust her, and anyway, he doubted if she would be much help in her present state.
‘Who are you?’ he repeated.
‘I…’ The man paused to moisten a split lip with his tongue. ‘I’m here to warn you.’
‘About what?’
The man turned his head and looked towards the other end of the cellar, which was now in darkness. An old-fashioned mangle used to stand there, Marc recalled.
‘About the script,’ the man said softly.
‘What script?’
The man looked back at Marc, who involuntarily retreated a step.
‘My name is Robert von Anselm,’ he said. His voice sounded suddenly monotone, as if he were reciting something he’d learned by heart. ‘I’m your wife’s attorney.’
Nonsense.
‘You’re lying!’ The lighter flame flickered, Marc spat out the words so vehemently. ‘I always dealt with her legal affairs myself.’
‘No, no, no, you aren’t listening. I wasn’t your attorney or the family’s, just your wife’s.’
The bedstead creaked as the man’s head sank back on the springs.
Sandra’s attorney? Why should she have employed a stranger to handle her affairs?
‘She came to see me shortly before the accident,’ Marc heard the man whisper.
‘What for?’
‘To alter her will.’
To alter it? He hadn’t even known there was a will. Sandra had always refused to make one.
‘I assume she did so at her father’s insistence,’ the man added.
‘I don’t understand. What did she alter, and what does Constantin have to do with it?’
The man looked back at the dark corner on his right.
‘You remember the film script your wife was commissioned to write?’
‘Of course.’
We’d been celebrating it on the day of the accident.
‘Do you know how much her agent sold it to the American production company for?’
‘No.’
‘One point two million dollars.’
Marc laughed incredulously. ‘You’re lying.’
The attorney coughed. ‘What makes you so sure?’
‘You don’t get that kind of money for a film debut. Besides, Sandra would have told me. We didn’t have any secrets from each other.’
‘Really? Have you read the script?’
‘How could I? She died before she could write a word of it.’
‘Are you sure?’
No, I’m not. After today, I’m not sure of anything any more.
The man was still staring into the gloom on his right. Marc held up the lighter and peered in the same direction, then made his way around the bedstead. As he did so, the outlines of a desk came into view. It was standing right beside the gas boiler.
‘But I’ve read it,’ he heard the man behind him say hoarsely. ‘That’s why I’m here. I was going to drop it in to you. I wanted to warn you.’
Marc went over to the desk, which he’d never seen before. Looking quite as incongruous down here as the attorney shackled to the bedstead, it was far too small for an adult, with tiny little side drawers big enough to accommodate a textbook or exercise book at most. Stuck in the recess designed to hold the base of a reading lamp was the stub of an Advent candle.
Marc lit it. Lying on the desktop was a sheaf of paper held together on the left with a cheap plastic binding.
‘Hey, what about my water?’ the attorney croaked from behind him, in the dark once more.
The pages felt damp, as if they’d been lying in a box in the cellar for a while.
Marc brushed some dust off the top sheet and read the title:
SPLINTER
A screenplay by Sandra Senner
The stranger was whimpering now. ‘Please untie me!’
But Marc was past replying. He had already turned over the page and begun to read. The very first lines were a shock.
48
Synopsis of SPLINTER
Marc Lucas, a lawyer-turned-social worker who deals with problem children, loses his pregnant wife in a car crash for which he is personally responsible. A few weeks after her death he sees a newspaper advertisement for a psychiatric clinic. The programme ‘Learn to forget’ is looking for people who have undergone experiences of a highly traumatic nature – people who want to erase the memory of them permanently and are therefore willing to participate in a memory experiment: the deliberate actuation of total amnesia. Lucas sends an email to the director of the clinic, and…
‘No!’
Marc groaned and bit the ball of his thumb. He felt so dizzy he had to lean on the desktop. His eyes roamed aimlessly across the page. Having already read the first paragraph twice, he began all over again in the hope that the letters would rearrange themselves into different words. But they didn’t. The truth remained as terrible as it was inexplicable.
This is my story. Sandra used my life as a…
His hands were trembling, his fingertips so numb that he turned over three pages at once. He read on, but it only got worse:
Marc’s mobile phone stops working and his credit cards have been invalidated. His life appears to have been usurped by someone else.
Returning to the clinic, he finds himself staring into a hole in the ground – a construction site. The building has disappeared.
Once again, Marc couldn’t bring himself to read the whole page; once again, he turned over impatiently, ever faster, ever more mystified by what he was reading. He knew it all at first hand – he himself had lived through it a few hours ago! Before long he was reading only snatches, only the lines that hit him in the eye.
…goes to the police…
…but this time the key fits…
…his wife never was in the flat…
…his father-in-law has also disappeared…
The more he read the less he understood. How could this be? How could Sandra have known all this? Worse still, how could she have foreseen the future?
He put the script down and stared at the title page, clasping the back of his neck.
SPLINTER
A screenplay by Sandra Senner
The numbness in his fingertips was slowly spreading up his arms, which now hung limply, wearily, at his sides. He felt an urge to turn and run, screaming, from the cellar. Nothing made sense any more. His life was a lie fabricated by a person he used to trust implicitly – someone who had risen from the grave and was trying to drive him insane.
But do lunatics reflect on their condition? Isn’t denial the very essence of a psychosis?
His mouth opened and closed. Not that he was aware of it, he was talking to himself, uttering his thoughts aloud. Tears ran down his cheeks and landed on the cover of the script.
Is this happening to me? Is it all real?
A tear smudged the big, curved ‘S’ of ‘SPLINTER’ and left a black dot above it, transforming the character into the Spanish version of a question mark. He sniffed, fingering the plaster on his neck again. And then, in the midst of an avalanche of incoherent thoughts, he came to an entirely logical conclusion.
This script must have an ending!
He picked it up again.
Why is all this happening? And how does it end?
He turned to the last page.
49
Nothing. The last fifty pages were blank.
Marc riffled the script through his fingers from the back until, about a third of the way from the front, he came across two pages that looked as if they didn’t belong. They were thicker than the rest and the edges were perforated and covered with rust marks. They were the concluding pages of the synopsis.