Eye Collector, The (24 page)

A multifarious, omnipresent, ultra-pervasive smell dominated by the reek of a cheap toilet cleaner as inadequate to overpower the scent of excrement in the toilet as peppermint creams were to
disguise the stale breath of an old woman with ill-fitting dentures. Whenever my grandmother opened the door to me, I was assailed by that ‘death perfume’, as I secretly called it: an
amalgam of sweat, urine, advocaat and warmed-up leftovers mingled with the sweet-and-sour aroma of greasy hair and cold farts. I always pictured it in a bottle with a death’s head on the
label.

If that concentrate actually existed
, I thought as my eyes became accustomed to the gloom,
someone had spilt a vast quantity of it inside this bungalow
.

‘Pooh,’ said Alina, ‘this place needs airing badly.’

‘Hello?’ I called for at least the fourth time. ‘Anyone at home?’

The fact that so little of the glare outside penetrated the venetian blinds made me feel unpleasantly claustrophobic. All there was to guide me was the faint light from the door, which was ajar.
I felt for a switch on the wall, but nothing happened when I turned it on. I swore beneath my breath.

‘What’s that?’ said Alina, who had made her way past me and was groping her way round a table in the middle of the room. She could hardly be puzzled by the absence of light in
there, so I guessed it must be the cold that surprised her.

‘There’s no power. Presumably that’s why the heating isn’t on.’

‘I don’t mean that.’

‘What, then?’

‘That hissing sound. Can’t you hear it?’

I held my breath and cocked my head without knowing exactly what had caught Alina’s attention and where it was coming from. I heard...
nothing.

‘It sounds like a spraycan,’ she whispered.

TomTom had also pricked up his ears, which usually hung limp. With the dog close beside her, Alina was making for the far end of the room. The darkest end, in other words. I was amazed yet again
by the self-assurance with which she advanced across unfamiliar terrain.

Perhaps we become more fearless if we can’t see the dangers the world has in store for us,
I thought. Perhaps that was the sole benefit of her disability. What we don’t know
doesn’t worry us. Did that mean that what we can’t see doesn’t
exist
?

The living-room floor was covered with badly-laid parquet or laminate that creaked faintly beneath Alina’s feet. Following her more by ear than by eye, I stumbled over something that was
too low for a table and too heavy for a flower vase, possibly a work of art: a small sculpture or one of those ugly china dogs whose open mouths catch dust in the homes of the wealthy. Then, to my
right, I saw a faint finger of light that showed me the way out of the living room and into an adjoining passage.

Heavens.
My sense of direction was poor enough at the best of times – I was capable of going astray in a deserted car park.
And now this!

The dim yellowish glow was coming from the far end of the passage, as I saw when I emerged from the black hole behind me. My pupils must have been the size of coins, so the night light plugged
into the skirting board seemed to dazzle me like a halogen spotlight.

I couldn’t help thinking of Charlie, and my stomach turned over again.

Charlie... Headstrong, sex-starved, big-hearted Charlie, murdered by the madman who had chosen me to be, willy-nilly, a participant in his game and the finder of her children. There had been a
so-called ‘darkroom’ at our usual rendezvous, the Hothouse: an unlit room in which total strangers could copulate on latex mattresses. Anonymous sex with invisible partners was a form
of self-gratification I’d never been attracted to, unlike Charlie. She had been so desperate, she wanted to sample all life had to offer.

I had once followed her into the darkroom, only to leave it as soon as I felt a stranger’s hands on my body. I couldn’t even tell their owner’s sex, although total darkness
never prevailed in there. As soon as someone drew aside the heavy baize curtain covering the doorway, a handful of weary photons descended on the entwined forms, producing as vague a memory of
daylight as the night light plugged into the wall at Alina’s feet.

She had already reached the end of the passage and was standing immediately outside a heavy metal fire door, which was slightly ajar. TomTom had planted himself directly in front of her with his
shaggy body up against her legs, preventing her from going any further.

‘Wait,’ I said, catching her up. I quickly saw that the retriever had good reason to bar his mistress‘s path. Beyond the door, a steep flight of steps led down into the
bungalow’s cellar.

‘Hear that?’ Alina whispered, and I detected a trace of fear in her voice for the first time.

‘Yes!’

I not only heard it, I could smell it as well. The rhythmical hiss of the spraycan had become louder, the ‘death perfume’ stronger.

‘TomTom can sense danger,’ Alina said. Superfluously. One didn’t need an animal’s sense of smell to know that something here was badly wrong.

No, you’re mistaken. There can’t be anything here. We’re merely pursuing the hallucinations of a blind visionary.

I pulled the door open.

I was naturally familiar with movies in which some idiot ventures barefoot into a cellar instead of listening to the audience’s advice and running a mile from the mad axeman who’s
lurking down there. It was, therefore, completely out of the question for me to set foot on those stone steps – even though I felt impelled to do so by professional curiosity, and even though
Lea and Toby might be desperately waiting for us in the Eye Collector’s hideaway only a few metres below.

TomTom’s instincts were sound. We shouldn’t court danger, I fully realized that. At least for the first few moments. At least until I heard those frightful, inhuman sounds that could
only be coming from a creature that needed my help
at once,
not half an hour from now.

‘Jesus, what’s that?’ Alina asked, sounding a trifle more apprehensive than before.

Somebody’s dying down there,
I thought. I opened my mobile and texted our location to Stoya.

It happened just after I’d sent the text and was about halfway down the flight of steps: a motion sensor activated an overhead light. Down here in the cellar, immediately below the living
room, it was suddenly as bright as day.

More’s the pity.

When my eyes had recovered from the dazzling glare, I looked down into the little chamber with the rough-hewn walls – its vaulted ceiling was reminiscent of a wine cellar – and
started to tremble.

How dearly I yearned for the darkness I’d just left.

What wouldn’t I have given to be spared the sight that met my eyes.

When light penetrates our cornea, passes through the pupil and finally hits the retina’s sensitive photoreceptors, an image results, at least on a very small part of the
retina: the macula lutea or ‘yellow spot’. What really results is more than one image, because our optic muscles ensure that the eyes never remain still but scan an object for fractions
of a second, building up an overall picture out of countless details. Thus, our brains process a flood of neural stimuli into visual patterns by comparing what is seen with what is already familiar
to us. Strictly speaking, the eye is merely a tool or extension of our true organ of sight: the brain, which never permits us to see reality, only an interpretation of the same.

But the sight that bludgeoned its way into my skull in the bungalow’s cellar was without precedent. My brain had no recollection of anything comparable with such a horrific spectacle. I
had never seen anything so appalling.

The woman looked like an exhibit in an anatomical collection, the only difference being that her spatchcocked body was still alive. At first I assumed that the hissing ventilator beside the
couch was solely responsible for the fact that her bisected chest continued to rise and fall. Sadly, though (I wished so ardently she were dead, God forgive me), the mouth beneath the mask with the
laryn-geal intubator was open and breathing heavily. Moreover, her eyes were rolling. I clutched my mouth.

This can’t be true. It isn’t real – it’s just an optical illusion. We’re merely acting on a blind girl’s hallucinations...

I blinked, but I couldn’t blot out the frightful images. Neither the couch, nor the ventilator, nor the...

... telephone? What on earth is a telephone doing on the instrument table beside this dying woman?

I could only infer the victim’s sex from her long hair and breasts, whose nipples had already rotted away. She certainly wasn’t a kidnapped girl of nine, but her age was impossible
to guess, the more so since all her teeth and several fingers and toes were missing.

‘What’s going on down there?’ Alina’s voice broke in on my thoughts. She had evidently defied TomTom and was now standing where I had triggered the motion sensor, halfway
down the steps. TomTom was waiting one step below her, panting and trembling with agitation.

‘I can’t tell you,’ I said in a choking voice, at pains not to contaminate the crime scene by an unguarded movement.

I don’t know what to do. God in heaven, this is more than I can endure.

The image of the woman who was no more than a living, breathing wound refused to disappear, even when I briefly shut my eyes.

She was done up in a way I’d never seen before. Her entire body was sheathed in transparent film like an outsize joint of meat in a freezer bag. The madman responsible for this perversion
must have sucked out all the air, with the result that the plastic film clung tightly to the flesh beneath the shredded skin.

When the purpose of this dawned on me I started to retch.

Because of the neighbours. So that her animate corpse doesn’t smell as much as it rots away.

She had been sealed up in transparent film like some kind of vacuum-packed foodstuff.

‘Need any help?’ asked Alina.

‘No, I...’

Help? Yes, of course I need help.

I looked at my mobile and groaned.

Naturally not. We’re in a cellar. No reception.

Worse still, the connection must have been severed in the entrance because my phone was displaying a text message in the outgoing mail. My attempt to send it had failed. Stoya didn’t know
where we were.

Swiftly, I turned my back on the scene of martyrdom in front of me and went back to the foot of the steps.

‘We must get out of here and call—’

Bang!

‘Alina?’

I almost bellowed her name, the unexpected noise had given me such a shock. She was now trembling as noticeably as TomTom.

‘What was that?’

No, please not. Don’t let it be that!

I had noticed the current of fresh air at the top of the steps, before I had started down.

Damn it!

We had left all the doors open on our route from the front door and along the passage to the cellar. The wind had got up since our arrival. It was still moderate, still not a winter gale, but
strong enough to send a draught whistling through the house and...

‘Shit!’

Hurrying up the steps past Alina and TomTom, I aimed a furious, despairing kick at the cellar door, which had just slammed shut.

I rattled the handle, then threw my weight against the door, but my shoulder was no match for the expanse of metal that barred our way out. The mobile in my hand displayed no reception bars,
even up here, so I squeezed past Alina and the dog and went back down the steps.

‘What are you going to do? Come on, tell me!’

I ignored Alina’s impatient question and checked to see if the telephone on the instrument table was working.

Well I’ll be... It’s connected!

I hadn’t seen such an ancient phone since the eighties. It still boasted a rotary dial.

Like Grandma’s. Everything reminds me of Grandma, not just the smell of death.

Even the dialling lock was there, a relic of the days when long-distance calls still cost the earth and you automatically secured your telephone against uninvited callers before going away on
holiday. The tiny lock permitted only two numbers to be dialled: the 1 and the 2.

But they’re enough for me. I don’t need more than two numbers to call the emergency services.

I inserted my forefinger in the finger plate.

1... 1... 2.

In some strange way, the dial’s old-fashioned purr seemed to harmonize with the hiss of the ventilator beside me. I held my breath and strove with all my might to avoid looking at the
living corpse on my right.

The phone rang.

Once. Twice.

The third time, darkness enveloped us.

(6 HOURS 11 MINUTES TO THE DEADLINE)

FRANK LAHMANN (TRAINEE JOURNALIST)

‘Where is he?’

Thea Bergdorf must have snuck up behind him. He wondered how long she’d been watching him.

‘I know you keep in touch with him, laddie, so don’t mess me about!’

The editor-in-chief was now confronting Frank like a goalkeeper intent on defending his penalty area by any available means, physical violence included. She made a point of wearing
tight-fitting, cream-coloured trouser suits that suited her about as well as a shrunk pinstripe suit would have suited a bouncer. She was quite frank about the fact that she set no store by outward
appearances.

‘I’ve got where I am
because
of my fat backside, not in spite of it,’ she’d informed a dumbstruck business tycoon at her paper’s New Year’s party.
‘If I were young, pretty and anorexic I’d waste too much of my time screwing the wrong men.’ She obviously possessed a sense of humour, but Frank couldn’t detect a trace of
it in her current demeanour and the peremptory tone of voice.

‘For the last time: Where is Zorbach at this moment?’

Frank uttered a weary groan and ran his fingers through his hair. ‘He asked me not to tell anyone.’

‘I’m his boss, in case you’d forgotten.’

‘I know, but he’s my mentor.’