The Devil's Sanctuary (20 page)

DANIEL LAY
on the bed in his care center room, reading for the tenth time through the brochure about Himmelstal he had been given by Gisela Obermann. Someone had finally picked up the box of contact lenses from the cabin for him.

There was a knock at the door. Without waiting for an answer, Karl Fischer walked in and sat down on the edge of Daniel’s bed.

“So, how’s our patient doing, then? You’re mending nicely, I hear. I’m pleased, Daniel. You are still Daniel, aren’t you? Or has another interesting personality popped up that I don’t know about?” he said scornfully, giving Daniel a gentle slap on his burned leg, making it jump with pain.

Karl Fischer had never visited him in his room before. Except for the nurses, Daniel had only had contact with Gisela and a pale, skinny doctor who was an expert in burns.

“Where’s Doctor Obermann?” he asked.

Fischer didn’t reply, looking around the little room as if it were entirely new to him. His pale-blue eyes moved like little fish in a net of wrinkles and somehow seemed several decades younger than the rest of him. Then he caught sight of the brochure resting on Daniel’s chest. He picked it up, slapped it against the palm of his hand with a smile, and said, “Doctor Obermann has been stripped of responsibility for you. That was the unanimous decision at the end of our last meeting.”

“What for?” Daniel asked in surprise. “I got on well with Doctor Obermann.”

Karl Fischer laughed and slapped the brochure back on his chest. Daniel felt an intense dislike of the man.

“I’m sure you did, Daniel. You managed to twist her round your finger wonderfully, didn’t you? But no one else believes this rubbish about a new personality, you need to understand that.”

Daniel sat up in bed a little too abruptly. His side hurt and he had to close his eyes for a moment and take a few deep breaths.

“I haven’t said anything about a new personality,” he snapped. “I’ve simply said that I’m not Max, but his twin brother.”

Doctor Fischer pressed his palms together like a saint, touched his fingertips to his thin lips, and gave Daniel a sly look.

“There is no twin brother, my friend.”

“No? So who was it who came to visit and wrote his name in the ledger in reception?”

Karl Fischer winked secretively with one eye.

“That was your older brother, wasn’t it?”

Daniel groaned in despair.

“Max gave you the wrong date of birth. I don’t know why, but he did. But the staff must have noticed how similar we are. Someone must have noticed that we’re twins!”

Karl Fischer shrugged his shoulders and idly inspected one of his fingernails.

“Don’t ask me. I never saw your brother. As I understand it, you’ve both got dark hair. But you’re the one who’s my patient; your brother doesn’t interest me. He’s gone, and I’m going to be
very
restrictive when it comes to future visitors for you. It only seems to give you peculiar ideas. You’ve ended up here at Himmelstal for very good reasons, and you’re going to be here for the rest of your life. The sooner you accept that, the better you’ll feel.”

Daniel gasped and grabbed hold of the bed as if Doctor Fischer were trying to shove him into a deep pit.

“I want a proper telephone,” he said. He tried to keep his voice steady. “I want to call Sweden.”

He didn’t know whom he wanted to call, he didn’t really have any friends. Someone who could confirm that he was who he said he was. The school where he worked? There would be no one there during the summer. The population registry?

Doctor Fischer tapped the brochure.

“Residents don’t have access to external phone lines,” he said drily.

“I’d like to talk to Doctor Obermann.”

Daniel wished he could stop shaking. He didn’t want to break down in front of Doctor Fischer. In front of Doctor Obermann, maybe, but not Doctor Fischer.

Fischer smiled tolerantly.

“From now on you’re my responsibility. You won’t be seeing Doctor Obermann again. You’ll be staying here for another week. If your injuries carry on healing well and you don’t come up with any more nonsense, you’ll be allowed to move back to your cabin. But I don’t want to hear any more rubbish about twins,” he added in a sharp tone of voice. “Nothing like that.”

He leaned across Daniel’s injured side and whispered close to his face. His breath smelled of ozone, like the air immediately after a thunderstorm.

“The next time you go into Zone Two, you’ll be moved downstairs. Is that understood?”

Daniel didn’t understand. But he thought it best to nod.

A LAMB
among wolves, Daniel thought as he stood in front of the care center with the park laid out before him.

July was turning to August. The grass on the slopes was still improbably green, but there was something in the air that told him that autumn was on its way.

He had been desperate to get out of his room, but now that he was standing here, healed and discharged, he felt as if he had been banished and wanted to go back inside. The short walk to the cabins at the top of the hill suddenly felt like a long and dangerous hike.

He turned toward the care center, and saw the blue sky and racing clouds mirrored in its glass façade.

Then he took a deep breath, grasped the shoulder straps of his rucksack tight—as if it were carrying him and not the other way round—and headed quickly through the park, without looking around, and on up the slope. As on previous occasions, he encountered people on their way to the pool, tennis courts, or cafeteria. But he no longer thought they looked like tourists at a luxury hotel. He now knew that every single person he met who wasn’t dressed in a pale-blue uniform was a predator in human guise. Ravenous beasts longing to set their teeth into a real lamb.

He had intended to walk calmly but couldn’t help running the last fifty feet to the cabin. His neighbor Marko was nowhere in sight, for which he was grateful.

With his hand trembling, he unlocked the door. He went straight over to the alcove containing the bed and drew back the curtain. No one there. No one in the bathroom either. The cabin looked the same as when he had left it. He locked the door firmly from the inside, then sank onto one of the wooden armchairs, panting as if he had been on a march. He was safe. For the time being.

Daniel spent the next few days like a prisoner in his cabin. The cans of baked beans kept him fed, and he drank tap water. He kept the door locked and let the patrols use their own key to open it when they checked on him every morning and evening. The smiling hosts who, according to the information brochure, “should be regarded primarily as staff, at your disposal.” But who, for “safety reasons,” were equipped with Tasers and always went round in pairs. (That was true, Daniel had never seen any host or hostess alone outside the clinic buildings. But he hadn’t seen any sign of the Tasers. He presumed they kept them under their pale-blue jackets.)

He kept the curtains drawn so that the cabin was in a permanent state of semidarkness. Whenever he peered cautiously through them, he saw Marko glued to the outside wall of his cabin each evening. Why was he in Himmelstal?

His neighbor spent most of the day inside, but sometime around seven o’clock his shuffling steps could be heard out on the porch, then a thud as he slumped down. Then he would sit there all evening. Whenever Daniel got up in the night to go to the bathroom, he would nudge the curtain aside and see him sitting there, staring out into the darkness like a large, motionless nocturnal animal. During the day, when he wasn’t there, you could make out a darker patch on the wall where he usually sat.

What did Marko see while he was sitting there? Because even if it was dark and most people were presumably asleep, the clinic grounds weren’t entirely deserted at night. According to the rules, you had to be in your room at twelve o’clock at night and eight o’clock in the morning so you could be checked by the patrol. “What you do in between is up to you,” Max had said.

And, oddly enough, this appeared to be true. The time around half past eleven was always unsettled, with people hurrying through the park and up the hill to get to their cabins and rooms. When everyone was in his or her place, a period of strange calm and quiet descended, only broken by the hum of the approaching electric cart and the hostesses’ knocks and cheery cries in the neighboring cabins.

Then, after another half hour of quiet, the grounds seemed to come to life again. More subdued than during the day. Cabin doors opening slowly, voices whispering in the darkness, shadows scuttling across the lawn. Occasionally you could hear discreet knocks on the doors of other cabins, and once, to his horror, his own door. “Psst!” someone hissed, like a big insect, then slowly and quietly tried the door handle several times. Daniel lay still behind the curtain, hardly daring to breathe. There was an irritated snort followed by silence outside.

Daniel hadn’t noticed this nocturnal activity before because he had slept so soundly. But now he often lay awake long into the small hours, fretting and worrying, and if he did nod off, his sleep was fragile as glass and he would be wide awake at the slightest sound.

One night he got up and lifted the mattress to take out the photograph Max had shown him the night before he left. He was sure it was the same battered woman as in Gisela’s pictures, and that the pictures must have been taken at the same time.

But it was no longer there. He removed the whole mattress. The picture was gone. The clinic staff must have found and removed it.

When he returned from the ward he had four e-mails waiting for him on the computer. One from Father Dennis and three from Corinne. He didn’t open them. Max’s cell phone rang several times, but he didn’t answer it.

One rainy afternoon, when he had been shut inside the cabin for five days, the cell phone rang so persistently that he had to get it out and look at the screen. If it was one of the doctors or staff, he would answer it.

He just missed the call but saw it was from Corinne, and that he had eleven missed calls from her. Just as he was about to switch the phone off altogether, she called again. He pressed the button to answer it, and said, “I don’t want to talk to you.”

“Don’t hang up,” Corinne said. “You don’t have to be scared of me. Do you hear me? You don’t have to be scared of me.”

She was talking calmly and firmly, as though she were talking to a child. He could see her before him. Her animated brown eyes, the sharp tilt of her jaw. So much had happened over the past few weeks that he had almost forgotten that face, but hearing her voice brought it all back to him. He experienced a momentary glow of recognition. Then he said, “I’m hanging up now.”

“No, wait. You have to listen to me. It’s important. I’ve spoken to Gisela Obermann. I know what’s happened to you. It’s good that you’re suspicious. It’s good that you’re staying indoors. It’s the right thing to do. But if you isolate yourself completely you’ll go mad. And at some point you’re going to have to go out and get food.”

He said nothing. She was right. His cabin was like a besieged town, and his food supply had almost run out.

“You should avoid the others,” she went on. “But don’t hide yourself away. Do you understand? You mustn’t show any fear. They can smell your fear through the walls of the cabin. Are you still there?”

“Yes,” he said quietly.

“We have to meet.”

“I don’t want to meet anyone.”

“Good thinking. But in your situation, you won’t survive on your own. Listen, Daniel: You’re new here. You’re a lamb. You’re surrounded by enemies. What you need is a mentor.”

He gulped and said, “You’re a resident of Himmelstal. How can I trust you?”

“You don’t have any choice, Daniel. Without a mentor you’re lost. And believe me, I’m the best you can get here. There are plenty of worse choices. Far, far worse.”

“I’d rather not leave my cabin.”

“You don’t have to. Just open the door. I’m right outside.”

He went over to the window and peered through the curtain.

There she was, dressed in an orange parka with her cell phone pressed to her ear under the hood. She looked small and pathetic in the pouring rain. She was looking straight at him, and through the window he saw her lips move, as the voice on the cell phone half pleaded and half commanded: “Open the door now.”

He opened it. She pulled off her parka and hung it up across two chairs, then sat herself down neatly on one of the wooden armchairs as she shook her wet hair like a dog. Daniel sat down opposite her.

“So you’ve spoken to Gisela Obermann,” he said. “Is she your psychiatrist?”

“Yes.”

“Is it good practice for a doctor to discuss her patients with another patient?”

“Don’t get hung up on silly details. You can’t afford that. Your situation is serious.”

“Did Doctor Obermann tell you I’m suffering from multiple personalities as well?”

Corinne nodded.

“And do you believe that?”

“No. But as a theory it might actually work to your advantage. It’s made her better disposed toward you. She thought she’d discovered something important. All the research staff in Himmelstal dream of discovering something important. But now Gisela has been taken off your case and Karl Fischer has taken over. That’s not good. But you’ll have to make the best of it.” She shuddered as if she were freezing. “A cup of tea would be nice.”

“Sorry. I haven’t got any tea. I’ve got cans of baked beans, and water.”

She stood up and dragged a chair over to the kitchen counter, clambered nimbly up on it, and pulled down a large box of tea bags that Daniel hadn’t noticed before from the top shelf.

“Max didn’t like tea. I bought him this box so he’d be able to make tea for me when I came,” she said as she filled the kettle with water. “Do you want some?”

“Yes please. So you’ve been in this cabin before, then?”

“A few times. But we mostly used to meet at mine.”

She got out two mugs and put a tea bag in each. Daniel waited for her to say something more about her relationship with Max, but she didn’t elaborate.

“I feel like a guest in my own home,” he said as she put the mug of tea down on the table in front of him.

“Isn’t that what you are here in Himmelstal?” She gave him a wry smile. “A guest?”

“Who can’t go home,” he said bitterly.

She took a careful sip of the hot tea, then leaned back and said, “So. Gisela has told you what sort of place this is. Now do you understand why I seemed so uncooperative when you asked for my help to get out of here? I can’t get you out of Himmelstal. I can’t get myself out of here.”

“If Max comes back…”

She waved her hand dismissively.

“He won’t. I know him. You were his chance, and he took it. The doctors make all the decisions, so they’re the ones we have to convince. They have their weaknesses, just like everyone else. They’re vain, desperate to make their careers; they’re competitive and ridiculously fascinated by psychopaths. They see us as exotic animals, and Himmelstal is their very own Serengeti. Anyone doing research into psychopaths dreams of getting a grant to come here as a guest researcher. With the monsters right outside the door.”

“I’m not a psychopath,” Daniel said angrily.

He stood and began to pace around the cabin. Recently he’d been unable to sit still for long.

“Nor me,” Corinne said.

He stopped and looked at her.

“So why are you here, then?”

“It’s a long story, I’ll tell you some other time. Let me just say that someone made a mistake. But this is about you, Daniel.”

“You’re here by mistake, and I’m here by mistake,” Daniel snapped. “How many of us are here by mistake?”

“Not very many. The diagnoses were probably a bit sloppy in plenty of cases. But even if they aren’t all one hundred percent psychopathic, you can probably assume that they are. Just to be on the safe side.”

“I’m going to get out of here!” Daniel roared, banging his fist on one of the beams. It hurt, but he went on thumping it as tears streamed down his face. His sudden fury took him by surprise.

Corinne seemed unconcerned by his outburst. She drank her tea, then, when he had calmed down and sunk back onto his chair, she said, “Obviously you’re going to get out of here. But it might take a while. Until then it’s a matter of survival. I promise to help you, and the only help I’ve got to give is good advice. Don’t frown like that. A bit of good advice could be the difference between life and death for you.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“No, but I saw the look on your face.”

“I’m listening,” Daniel said meekly.

“Okay.” She put her mug down hard, straightened her back, and took hold of her left thumb. “First: Keep to yourself. Don’t let yourself get drawn into any deals, pacts, friendships, or love affairs. But you mustn’t hide away. Go to the cafeteria every day and eat lunch. Sit on your own, but
go.
Do your shopping down in the village. Have a beer in the bierstube. Stand tall. Don’t try to avoid people’s gaze. Reply politely but don’t say much if anyone speaks to you. Don’t start any conversations yourself. Never show that you’re afraid or weak, but keep your distance if there’s ever any trouble. It was brave of you to overpower Tom and save Bonnard’s life, but to be brutally honest I don’t think he was worth it.”

“Isn’t every person’s life worth saving?”

She looked up at the ceiling in despair.

“Dammit, Daniel. André Bonnard raped and murdered little girls; the youngest one was three years old. The value of such people’s lives is worth discussing, and I’ll be happy to have that discussion another day. But you have to be careful. Getting caught up in fights is dangerous. Being a witness to fights can be just as dangerous. See nothing, do nothing. You have to be selfish. Is that clear?”

He kept quiet and simply nodded.

Corinne took hold of her left index finger and said, “Then you have to think about your body. Eat properly. And exercise. Hard. You never know when you might need a strong, agile body. You might end up in a situation where your life depends on your physical condition. But there’s no need to let anyone else know what good shape you’re in. So don’t go to the gym. I never do any exercise there, as you can probably imagine. Women are in short supply here in Himmelstal. You don’t want to stand there in a tank top and hot pants twisting your body this way and that among a crowd of rapists and sadists. The clinic management fully understand my attitude and let me have a little gym in my apartment in the village. It’s not much, mostly weights, but it works well enough for me. You’re welcome to come and exercise there if you like.”

“Thanks.”

His anger had subsided and he was now listening intently to everything she was saying.