‘And who is the photographer in this?’ I asked, holding up the photo of Stephomi and I.
‘You,’ my friend replied. ‘The camera was hidden and on a timer.’
‘And why would I send myself a photo warning against you?’
The scholar smiled wryly. ‘Because you know me too well, Gabriel. You wanted me to leave you alone and not try to befriend you after you lost your memory. You wanted to be alone. I didn’t much care for the idea. You know the rest. I suppose you were trying to instil a wariness against me if I should happen to turn up.’
‘Then what about Anna Sovanak? Did I know that her body would be left beneath the Weeping Willow?’
‘How could you?’ Stephomi asked, watching me carefully. ‘Indeed, as I understand it, you hardly knew the woman.’
‘Then why-?’
‘Coincidence, Gabriel,’ Stephomi said sharply. ‘You couldn’t have known that her killer would leave her body beneath the monument. I presume your reference to it on the back of the photo was simply because you knew she was Jewish. Take my advice, don’t waste time looking for logic in what you have done.’ He gestured at the things spread out on the table before us. ‘You wanted to torment yourself. Nothing more.’
We were silent for a moment. Yes, surely Stephomi was right. I could not possibly have known where Anna Sovanak’s body would appear. It was nothing more than a coincidence.
‘My memory loss was a stupid accident,’ I said at last, ‘How could I possibly have known it was going to happen? How could I possibly have planned for it?’
Stephomi shrugged. ‘I don’t know, Gabriel. When I questioned you about it before, you told me to back off. You said you knew what you were doing.’
‘Was I losing my mind?’ I almost whispered. ‘Was I different before? Was I this strange, twisted person?’
This was something that had been bothering me for a while. Was I really me? Or had my amnesia caused the reset button to be pushed so that I was just this blank slate once again? Starting from scratch.. having to rebuild my personality again through my experiences… my environment…
‘No, you were much the same before,’ Stephomi replied. ‘But…’
‘But what?’ I asked, latching on to his hesitation immediately.
Stephomi sighed. ‘Well, Nicky phoned me about a week before she died. She was… she said she was worried about you. She wanted to see me but I was in Japan at the time and couldn’t get back.’
‘Why was she worried?’
‘She wouldn’t tell me on the phone. I would’ve been in England within the next couple of weeks and I was going to go see her then.’ He shrugged. ‘To be honest, I expect it was just that you told her you could see devils and it freaked her out.’
‘You mean she didn’t already know?’ I asked.
‘No. It’s not an easy thing to tell someone. But whatever your state of mind beforehand, you certainly weren’t at all balanced after they died. So don’t try to make sense of what you did. You won’t find any. You wouldn’t listen to reason and you wouldn’t listen to me. To be honest, I really don’t know the true extent of what you did and why.’
He sounded tired and I realised when I looked at him that there were bags of weariness beneath his eyes that he had not been able to disguise. When I asked him about it, he replied with an uncharacteristic impatience. ‘It’s starting, Gabriel. It’s all about to begin. Can’t you feel it? As a person of the In Between, I’m surprised you can’t sense it. Have you not been having dreams? Mirror visions? Things like that?’
‘I’ve had those from the beginning,’ I replied, thinking of the recent appearance of Lilith in my dreams but not wanting to discuss it with my inclined-to-mockery friend.
‘It’s building like static,’ he went on. ‘It’s been itching away at me, like nails on a blackboard, keeping me awake and filling my mind with… disturbing images that I can’t block out.’
I gazed at him in the dim snugness of the ancient cellar and knew that he was right. Perhaps it was my imagination, but even as we sat there I thought I felt power-surged currents brushing the hairs of my arms as they swept by. Rubbing my arm absently, I asked, ‘What do you think will happen? Is there anything we can do that will make any kind of difference at all?’
I had expected Stephomi to give his usual brusque answer that, of course, as mere humans, there was nothing we could do to influence the centuries-old War that had for so long been raging between Satan’s angels and God’s. But for some time, Stephomi simply gazed thoughtfully at me, tapping the tips of his slender fingers on the edge of the wood-polished table.
‘Shall we go for a walk?’ Stephomi asked at last, standing up abruptly.
‘I… what? Where?’
‘Anywhere.’
‘But… it’s below freezing outside!’
‘I need some fresh air,’ Stephomi said. ‘And I’d rather not have this conversation inside. There aren’t so many people outside on a day like this.’
Feeling perplexed, I got up and followed Stephomi from the hotel and out into the savagely cold air. I was glad of the ankle-length black coat I had brought with me, and did the buttons up all the way to my neck. Still the cold chafed my fingers and face. How strange to think that warm autumn had been so short a time ago. The sudden descent into winter seemed unnaturally fast.
‘It’s colder than it should be for this time of year,’ Stephomi remarked as we walked. ‘Have you noticed?’
I nodded wordlessly. It was a strange kind of chill that seemed to settle over the city at night and couldn’t be shaken off during the day. Several castle spires were visible as we walked further, the striking outline of the Hilton at our back. Our feet crunched on the frozen gravel path we were walking down. I noticed as we went on that the pressure of my weight was actually snapping the frozen pebbles in two, like brittle lengths of glass. The coating of frost over the buildings and the cobbled roads was only paper-thin, and yet still it had not melted in the slightly brighter warmth of day. And although there was neither rain nor snow on the ground itself, the air seemed thick with a kind of softened ice that blew into our faces and wetted our clothes.
‘Feels like the air itself is freezing, doesn’t it?’ Stephomi said, echoing my own thoughts.
We soon reached the Fisherman’s Bastion. It’s so beautiful that if I lived closer I would go there every single night before returning to my apartment. It’s basically something between a castle and a city wall, sprawling along the top of the hill overlooking the Danube, with great glassless windows and hollow towers you can climb into, each having open arched doors and the same windows carved into the rock. There are covered walkways with cobbled paths, and curved, sweeping wide staircases with white knights set into the walls and stone lions perched on top of pillars. It would have looked beautiful at any time of year, but when it’s sparkling with glass beads of frost that cling to every spire and turret; every frozen knight and lion coated in pale blue ice, it is even more breathtaking and I really could sit there for hours. I love this city; I truly think it must be the most beautiful in the whole world, and I’m so thankful that I live here. If I had to live anywhere other than Budapest, I know I would be miserable.
We stopped in one of the covered towers and stood at an arched window overlooking the icy Danube. The view before us was incredible. Spires and towers rose up from the smaller buildings, and the whole city glittered in its winter coat of frost, like a vast enchanted ice palace straight from the pages of a fairytale. The Hungarians seem to revel in their adeptness at capturing elusive Beauty in their churches, their monuments, and the angel-graced bridges that arch gracefully over the Danube.
‘We have a little problem,’ Stephomi said softly.
I glanced at him, eyebrow raised. ‘Little problem as in “ The Antichrist is coming ” or little problem as in you can’t find your house keys?’