This Thing of Darkness, page 10
Evi tried to swallow, but her mouth was dry. “You were an actor, that’s all. An actor making films.”
Bela looked across at her, the semblance of a smile touching the corners of his mouth. “And do actors not have souls to be lost? I faced the same questions any man must ask. Who was to be my master? Whom would I serve?”
Evi shuffled in her seat. She almost regretted coming back for more of this. “I see,” she said.
“No, you do not. You have no notion of the struggle that commenced in me. The question that would not leave me alone. I seemed to hear a soft, ancient voice interrogating me, a voice I already knew. It was urgent, unnervingly so. But when I did run, it was not fear that made me flee the studio.”
“So you did run?”
Bela was avoiding her gaze again, almost as though he thought he had lost control of the interview somewhere along the line. “You remember when I spoke about walking through the streets of Budapest by night?” She nodded. “It was not unlike that time. I walked for hours—through busy streets this time—knowing that I had to resolve this existential crisis that had come upon me. The question posed remained even when I was lost in the crowds. A decision had to be made.”
Bela’s head rested in his hands. Evi sensed that it would not be long before he was too exhausted to continue. “What choice? What decision?”
He hardly seemed to notice the interruption. “I sat upon a park bench and tried to collect my thoughts. There were children playing nearby, and all I felt was envy for the innocence they enjoyed without knowing it. My paranoia was so great that when I saw clouds gathering overhead, I felt that they were gathering for me, and for me alone. I rose and walked on through this gathering gloom to my rooms.”
“I thought you wanted to be possessed?” This was madness, a crazy old man rambling about dark voices calling out to him, and creepy clouds in the sky like something from one of his lousy films. “Never mind, it’s not important. You chose.” “I chose.”
There was a finality about the statement that echoed around the room like a death knell. “It was all too intoxicating. Somehow I knew that submission would bring with it everything I had always dreamed of; I have no idea how, but I just knew. I flung myself headlong onto my bed and cried out for sleep, for any respite at all from the turmoil I was in.”
“I know that feeling,” remarked Evi. “My grandmother used to say that more sins are committed by night than by day. The darkness hides so much.”
“The darkness is more than that—it is a tempter and a tormentor,” Bela replied, “and yes, a hiding place for unwelcome visitors.”
Evi felt a shiver run down her spine. “Someone’s walking on my grave,” she said absently.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing, I’m sorry. Please continue.”
Bela looked steadily at her until she was forced to look away. “Would you believe me if I said I had a visitor that night? A familiar presence, perhaps one that had accompanied me from the dark and lonely forests in my far-off homeland. It was as if an icy claw were scratching outside the window, demanding entry, demanding possession. I seemed to be watching it all from afar, watching myself rise as if in a trance and walk toward the window. In a trancelike state, my will obedient to the summons, I allowed It entry.”
“It was a nightmare,” Evi burst out, unable to listen to any more of these ramblings. She felt the pain creeping across her neck as her every muscle tightened with the effort of sitting still. “Perhaps you had a fever. Your description fits well with the symptoms of delirium.”
“You may call it that if it pleases you,” said Bela without emotion. “It is of no consequence. In any case, I cannot remember much of what happened afterwards, only the feeling of strangeness when I woke up.”
“There, a dream,” she said, but she knew without looking at him that she should not pursue the argument. He clearly did not want an innocent explanation.
“Some dream it would have had to be,” Bela continued. “When I glanced at the clock, I had been unconscious for nearly twenty-four hours. If I had suffered some feverish attack, it had passed. The agitation was gone; my mind felt inexplicably at rest. My body felt stronger than before the war. And that was the truly strange thing. I looked in the mirror at my reflection, and my face looked different to how I remembered it. My eyes were brighter and redder, my skin paler. I thought that perhaps I had been ill after all, but when I peered closer into the mirror, I saw the evidence. . .”
8
Evi’s hands rested against the locked door. In spite of the blistering heat, the hard, unyielding metal felt icy cold beneath her fingers, as though the life locked away behind it had already been taken. She had some sense that she had been standing at that door for a long time, waiting patiently for it to open, but now she clenched her fists and began to hammer at the barrier before her; she would force it open. Somehow or other, she would find a way into the chamber if it took every ounce of her strength; she knew Christy was trapped in there, separated from her by just a few inches of steel. She hammered and hammered at the door until her wrists seared with pain; then, almost in a frenzy of desperation, she began hurling herself bodily at the door. She heard the thud of her own body hitting metal over and over again, as though she were listening to the actions of another person. She could not remember how she came to be in this accursed place; she knew only that she had to open the door. . .
Evi opened her eyes to the familiar sight of the long, jagged crack across the ceiling directly above her head. She was in her own bed, her temples throbbing, whilst very near to her she could hear the repeated thud of someone knocking on a door. Her door. She staggered out of bed, the room lurching as though she had just fallen off a carousel. The knocking was getting louder and more urgent. Somehow or other, she pulled down her dressing gown from the hook at the back of her bedroom door and threw it on, tying the cord untidily around her waist as she made her way out of the room.
Evi heard Hugo’s voice calling her name as she heaved open the front door, narrowly avoiding his fist in the process. He took a step back at the sight of her dishevelled figure still in her nightclothes. “Dear God, Evi,” he exclaimed without a thought, “you look awful. Are you ill?”
Evi felt her face growing hot and suspected she would have blushed if she had had enough blood in her veins. “It’s nothing, I must have overslept. What time is it?”
“It’s half past ten.”
Not too bad, then, thought Evi, hardly reason for him to come hammering on her door like that. “There was no need to fuss; I must have slept through my alarm. I was. . . I think I was up very late writing last night.”
Hugo looked anxiously at her. “Evi, what day of the week is it?”
“Is that a trick question?”
“Could you tell me?”
Evi narrowed her eyes. “It’s Wednesday.”
“Evi, it’s Thursday. You didn’t return to the shop on Monday afternoon after your appointment. I thought something must have come up, but then you did not appear all day yesterday. You’ve been out for the count for twenty-four hours.”
Evi’s knees buckled under her; she clutched at the door frame, but there was nothing for her to hold on to, and the room was still lurching. She was aware of Hugo’s abandoning propriety to pick her up off the floor and carry her inside, away from the prying eyes of her neighbours. She noted him hesitating for a moment, getting his bearings in a strange home; then he strode into the sitting room and laid her down gently on the tattered sofa. “It’s nothing,” she protested. “It’s a touch of fever, that’s all. I’m all right now.”
“You are most certainly not all right; you’re shaking like a jelly,” said Hugo. “The last time I saw anybody in a state like that, I was in Korea.”
Evi covered her eyes, willing the room to stop spinning so she would not throw up with the turmoil. “I can’t remember a thing since I arrived home on Monday afternoon. I wasn’t feeling well, so I put myself to bed.”
Hugo was comfortingly businesslike. “If you’ve been sweating out a fever all this time, you’ll be hungry and dehydrated,” he said. “Are you still running a temperature?”
Evi shook her head mechanically. “I don’t think so. I suppose a raging temperature would explain the bizarre dreams I was having. I must have been delirious.”
“Let me get you a glass of water.”
Evi lay very still whilst Hugo blundered about in the kitchen. Shades of her nighttime adventures were starting to come back to her: a locked door that would never be opened, the door that would lead her to Christy. Other images had slipped out of her mind as she woke up: the lonely road to a prison camp, or what she must have imagined a prison camp would look like; an endless tangle of barbed wire spirals; men in uniform. . . a body not quite dead, not fully alive; a face she would have recognised if she lost her memory of everyone else. A face disfigured so horribly she wanted to believe it did not belong to the man for whom she was searching.
Hugo helped her to sit up and placed a glass of water in her hand. “Drink it,” he said, waiting a second to see whether she held on to the glass firmly enough before he let go. “All of it. You’ll notice the difference immediately.” He drew up a nearby chair and sat down. “I’m afraid I couldn’t find much to eat in your kitchen, and the tea caddy is empty.”
“No tea?” enquired Evi between gulps; she was indeed feeling a great deal better already. “I must be letting myself go.”
“Do you feel strong enough to take some gentle exercise?”
Evi gulped down the rest of the water. “I feel perfectly well,” she said, “much better than I really ought, I suspect. Just a little drained, but I suppose that’s perfectly normal.”
“Well, I shouldn’t overdo it today if I were you,” Hugo cautioned, standing up to take the glass from her. “Why don’t I call back for you in half an hour, and we can get a cup of coffee somewhere? I daresay you still have a deadline to meet this afternoon.”
Evi groaned. “It’s on the desk; I think it’s finished.” She sat up, planting her feet purposefully on the floor. “That’s a point; I can’t have put myself straight to bed. I remember typing for hours before the fever took over. It was like writing in a trance or something.”
Hugo smiled. There on the desk were several typed pages. A half-filled page was still in the teeth of the typewriter. He noticed that two of the keys had locked together; it was probably the hassle of unjamming them for the hundredth time that had caused Evi to admit defeat. “Well, it should make for interesting reading, then.”
“Hugo, you never talk about Korea.”
Hugo busied himself unjamming the keys of the typewriter as carefully as possible. “That’s because there’s nothing to say. It happened, I came home.”
Evi knew, with the sensitivity of an army wife, that she was on dangerous ground. “I’m just saying, if you knew anything about my husband, you would have said so, wouldn’t you?”
It was a rather good typewriter, Hugo thought, as he gently pulled out the page; Christopher must have bought it for her before he went away. It was one of the few objects in the room that she had looked after. The rest of the desk was a chaotic mess of papers never filed away, rubbish that somehow had not made its way down to the mwastepaper basket located a few feet away, and a blotting paper sheet splattered in ink that desperately needed changing. “Are you left-handed?” asked Hugo, noting the position of pens and ink.
Evi stood up. The room had stopped spinning, and she was aware only of Hugo’s turned back. “I’m not supposed to be,” she answered tersely, “but there’s no one standing over me here to stop me from writing the way I find most comfortable.” She paused, waiting for him to get the hint that she had noticed the clumsy change of subject.
He did get the hint but replied, “I’ll take the article with me, to read before we meet for coffee.” Then he folded her article and put it away in his bag.
For some reason, his heavy leather satchel reminded Evi of a doctor’s bag. “I hope my untidiness does not offend your military sensibilities too much,” she added.
Hugo turned to her with an awkward attempt at cheeriness. “Well, I’m a civilian now, thank heavens. I should let you get on.” He walked to the door. “You know, there were thousands of men in Korea.”
“I know. See you in half an hour.”
“Well, you’ve had a field day, by the looks of things,” said Hugo, helping Evi off with her jacket. In the end, he had thought it easier to bring her to his shop for breakfast, partly because he could not get into the habit of closing the shop during business hours, and partly because he thought she would be more relaxed in a familiar setting. Without blowing his own trumpet, Hugo also knew that the tea he made would be infinitely more to Evi’s liking than anything they purchased at a coffee bar. “Why don’t you make yourself at home? There’s some reading matter for you on the coffee table.”
Evi walked over to the table, smiling at the orderly fashion with which Hugo had presented his material. There were several piles of newspaper cuttings and foolscap pages, neatly stacked so that the top right corners of all the papers were perfectly aligned. The large, faded poster—too large to fit comfortably with everything else—formed the centrepiece of the whole display, with the bundles of paper on either side in perfect symmetry. “I thought you said you were a civilian now?” Evi demanded, hardly daring to touch anything in case she spoiled the effect. “Even your paperwork looks as though it’s standing to attention.”
“Would you like some toast?” he called. “You need to eat something.”
“That would be lovely.” Evi flinched at the sight of the black-and-white poster. A man’s head was sketched in profile, his features grotesquely out of proportion, leering in the direction of the spindly figure of a young woman drawn from behind. The two characters—that bloated male face and the tiny, fragile female—were set against an unnerving background of harsh lines and distorted angles, suggestive of a dark, narrow street into which a victim might be lured and quickly trapped. Evi had felt so much better since Hugo had come to wake her. In fact, she felt so much back to normal that she had hoped against all hope that her latest instalment was as thin on detail as she remembered. But the poster dragged her back to Germany’s horror film industry and Bela Lugosi’s nightmare descriptions of being seduced by dark forces. “What. . . what does the title mean?” she asked weakly.
Hugo was at her side. “The Head of Janus,” he said, “a 1920 film based on the story of Jekyll and Hyde. Are you familiar with the story?”
“Naturally,” answered Evi. “Dr Jekyll is a respectable doctor by day and a hideous murderer by night. The Victorian obsession with monsters again. Was this a Bela Lugosi picture?”
“I’d hardly call it that, but he did get to play Jekyll’s butler. Veidt was the star. Bela remained close to Freund and Murnau for the rest of his time in Germany, and they were useful friends to have.” Hugo touched her hand. “You know, you’re still a bit trembly. Why don’t you sit down and eat?”
Evi sat down on the lumpy sofa as Hugo placed the tea tray on the coffee table in front of her. The tea was very sugary, almost unbearably so to a palate used to wartime rations of thick, boiled, unsweetened tea, but she drank gratefully. She noticed a plateful of thick buttered toast. “You’re very kind to me, you know,” she said awkwardly. “I do appreciate it.”
“Not at all,” said Hugo, perching himself on the arm of the sofa. “Tuck in. You’re ever so pale.”
“I feel much better. Have you watched all these films?”
“Not The Head of Janus, unfortunately. It was made more or less by the same team that made The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.”
Evi used the fact that her mouth was full of toast to avoid the humiliating admission that she had never heard of a film that was clearly very famous. She nodded in acknowledgement.
“Some say those films were a terrifyingly prophetic vision of where Germany was going. Others say that the films influenced the way things went. Films can be highly influential, of course. Look at the way they were used during the war by both sides.”
“Was it popular? Janus, I mean.”
“Oh yes, very much so.”
Evi put down her plate and picked up a newspaper film review. She could not read German, but she recognised one word in the title: Todes. Death. She picked it up and noted a signed photograph underneath, one of those typical photographs of the time of a young actress pouting into the camera. She had a sweet, doll-like face that looked a little incongruous with the pose of a worldly inhabitant of horror films. “Ought I to know who she is too?” asked Evi sheepishly, lifting the photograph with her other hand. “Was she a friend of Bela’s?”
“That’s Dora Gerson,” said Hugo. “She was a cabaret singer and actress. Made a couple of pictures with Bela Lugosi: On the Brink of Paradise and Caravan of Death.”
“I thought I recognised that word,” said Evi, nodding at the headline. “A pity it is almost the only word I know in German: Tod. That, and Führer and Luftwaffe. If Goethe wrote in it, it must be quite a beautiful language at heart.”
“I’m afraid the title Caravan of Death turned out to be rather tragic. Dora was Jewish, married to Veit Harlan, a man who made Nazi films for Goebbels. The irony’s almost unbearable.”
“What happened to her?”
Hugo took the photograph from Evi, looking at it with the affection he might have shown a relative. “The inevitable, I’m afraid. She was deported to Auschwitz and died there with what remained of her family.”
“With her husband making films for her killers?”
“Ex-husband. They divorced.”
“So?” Evi sunk into the back of the sofa, clutching her head with the effort of holding all the facts together. “It’s all so twisted! The man might as well have dragged his own wife into the gas chambers himself!” Evi looked up at Hugo; she was almost pleading. “It’s not my imagination, is it? There is something so sordid about all this.”
