One Eye On The Darkness

Chapter Four

It was a little after nine and the rush hour traffic had started to thin when Frieda left her apartment on Weseler Strasse. She filled up her small Fiat at the nearby Westfalen tankstelle, and although it was far too early grabbed a burger and fries from the drive-through Burgerking next door to the gas station. Then she took the A43 autobahn and headed out of the city.

The road ahead was clear. Most of the traffic was on the opposite carriageway, heading into Münster at this start of another typical work day. She pressed her foot to the accelerator and the Fiat growled reluctantly at her eagerness to leave the city behind.

Frieda was a child of the German countryside, having been raised among the farms, forests and fields of rural Nordrhein-Westfalen. In her teens she had grown to hate the silence and solitude, and had yearned for the hustle and bustle and excitement of the city. University had beckoned the bright Gymnasium student, and this had been just the excuse she had needed to make her escape. She had found an affordable flatshare, and for a time the usual round of gigs and parties that comprise student life outside the lecture halls had given her a much-needed shot of excitement. But then it all seemed to change overnight.

One night, or to be more precise, one very early morning she and a group of friends had been heading home after a particularly protracted bar crawl. The streets were teeming with fellow revellers pouring out of clubs and takeaways, making it seem more like Saturday afternoon than early Sunday morning. Police officers were always a regular feature to keep the rowdiness in check, so at first Frieda and her friends thought little of the flashing police car lights outside the theatre on the corner of Neubruckenstrasse. It was a common enough sight.

It was only when they were within several metres of the scene that it became clear that the police presence signified something more serious than just the usual drunken misbehaviour. A cordon had been set up, and a uniformed officer shepherded them around the area. By the pulsing blue lights of the police car, a body could be seen lying inert beneath a white sheet on the blood-spattered pavement.

And then it had happened for the first time.

Frieda had stumbled as what felt like a huge weight, an emotional boulder, unexpectedly crashed down onto her. More than that, the burden seemed to penetrate her and explode inside her chest, her stomach her head. Billows of rage, confusion and ultimately hysteria flooded her, deluged her self-control and swamped her consciousness. She had heard a piercing shriek that froze her blood. She only discovered later that it had emerged from her own throat.

That was how her gift, her curse, had manifested itself. The echo of the deceased young theatre-goer, stabbed in the street for a few Euros and his iPhone, whose final moments had been somehow recorded in the fabric of his surroundings, had hit her in all its raw power, literally knocking her from her feet. In the years since, she had learned to brace herself against this initial blow, and to filter the emotional onslaught. But back then she'd had neither the understanding nor the emotional strength to do this. The episode had simply hospitalised her.

It was as a result of that first incident that she had encountered Schluter and Fr Derrick. The latter, as chaplain at the St Franziskus Krankenhaus on Hohenzollernring, had been interested in her spiritual welfare; while Schluter had been understandably keen to interview the crazy girl who had screamed disjointed threats and accusations into the air at a murder scene.

She had been discharged from the hospital after a week, and a battery of tests that confirmed her excellent health and state of mind. But that first terrifying experience took its toll and Frieda had slipped into a morass of anxiety and depression. Her studies suffered, one by one her friends stopped calling, and eventually only the peace and quiet of the countryside she had once so despised could offer her soul the balm it required. She had returned to the family home and gradually recovered.

Her mother had arranged a twenty-four session round of therapy, stretching over the course of a year, with a local and respected psychologist. But although Dr Bloemberg was pleasant enough, and cordial, and made her feel at ease, his psycho-babble ultimately meant and achieved little. His insistence that she summarise her life pictorially -- seated at a desk in one corner of his consulting room with wax crayons and paper like a child in Kindergarten -- seemed particularly pointless.

But Frieda had played along. Mostly she would just zone out during each fortnightly appointment, giving the appropriate responses to the doctor's satisfaction. And afterwards she would cycle off into the woods and bask in their restfulness.

Of course nature was cruel. The survival of the fittest and the law of tooth and claw meant that in the countryside death was all around her. The natural world was no idyllic paradise. In all truth, the peace she enjoyed there was a sham, a facade, a blanket thrown over reality that obscured it from her senses. If there was any place redolent with death, it was there. It should have screamed at her, made her recoil. But she heard nothing, for it was Frieda's curse to hear only the human tragedy. She did not know if this revealed more about her, or the essence of man in general. That of all creatures he alone had been made a living soul, and thus he alone created ripples in reality when that soul was ripped from the earth.

And as a result, the city she had craved had become to her a spiritual megaphone, a cacophany. This conglomeration of human beings did not just disturb the every day peace with their loud music, loud cars, loud arguments. For Frieda, the disturbance was greatest when the music and arguments stopped. When the body fell silent, the soul screamed, and no matter how hard she stopped her ears, Frieda heard every sickening decibel of that departure. And in a city of a quarter million souls, the noise never ceased.

She had occasionally wondered why she could not share in the joy of birth, of newborn souls gurgling with delight in the arms of devoted parents. But she was deaf to the delirium of life's beginning. Again it spoke to her that the passing of a soul is the greatest horror in the universe. Even in the presence of those who died in their beds and not at the hands of a psychopath, the fear cut so deeply into the ether that it tore into Frieda too. It was no mere scratch. It dug in, sliced the soul and gouged out hope.

Frieda exited the autobahn and took the road towards the village of Senden, speeding past the familiar forests of her childhood. From Senden it was only a few kilometres farther on to Ottmarsbocholt and the family home, but this was not her destination today.

Instead she turned towards Venner Moor, a popular local destination for dog-walkers and amateur naturalists. Frieda parked her Fiat on the rough patch of ground beside the beauty spot and set off through the trees. She felt raw, worn out somehow, reminiscent of the effects of that night in Neubruckenstrasse ten years before.

She breathed in the sweet damp smell of the trees and earth that surrounded her, cocooned her. For once there was no background noise, no interference. Just blissful calm.

Had Frieda known the horrors that were to come, she may have thought twice about leaving that place of sanctuary