One Eye On The Darkness

Chapter Fourteen

Frieda awoke to the sound of rain lashing the window. The glow of a street lamp cut a shaft of amber light across her otherwise darkened bedroom, bisecting it cleanly and accentuating the shadows beyond its touch.

She checked the time. The clock at her bedside read a little after two-thirty a.m. in exaggerated blood red digits.

Frieda had slept fitfully, her dreams troubled, dark, disturbing. Elsa Lemmermann's leering grin of torment still hovered in her vision, and some residual scream of desolation echoed in her mind like the reverberation of a cannon shot. Several times she had been dragged into an unconsciousness hemmed in by stark walls smeared in blood and excrement, with the butchered corpse of the Maass boy hanging in the doorway to her nightmarish prison, blocking her exit and hollering accusations and profanity.

And each time she had awoken, breathless, sweating, the peace that Father Derrick had seemingly won for her already a distant memory.

White light played in one corner of the room, illuminating her IKEA wardrobe before gliding smoothly across the wall as the car to which the headlamps belonged sped past her apartment building.

Frieda froze, her eyes glued unblinkingly to the spot by the door where the headlight glow had terminated, and where the outline of a figure she could swear had been standing was now once more shrouded in shadows.

Sweat trickled down Frieda's spine as she struggled for control. She fought to steady her breathing and clutched at her reason as tightly as she was holding on to her duvet. She told herself not to be stupid, that she was tired and that in all probability her burning eyes were deceiving her. All the things she had been telling herself for weeks. And all things that had proven to be untrue.

The air in the room felt suddenly rarified, as though something had sucked the atmosphere from it, replacing it with a chilled emptiness that made Frieda's lungs heave for oxygen. She gasped and climbed awkwardly out of bed, staggering to the window. She twisted the handle and hauled the window open, a swirl of rain and wind buffeting her face but failing to relieve her discomfort.

"Eins, zwei, drei."

The words rode on the stiff breeze gusting into her room. They might have been a part of it, some auditory equivalent of making sense out of inkblots. But there was a clarity and an insistence about them that caused Frieda to spin round, almost falling in the process. Her eyes scanned the shadows. She saw nothing, but there was rage there.

The air was thick with fury. The viscocity dragged her own senses down into its heart, overwhelmed and swamped them until it felt as if her self-control was lost to her. Then some strange impetus, a force like a charging bull that seemed both external to her and part of her found her thrown physically across the room. She clawed the air but there was nothing to prevent her slamming into the wall, pinned to it a metre above the floor. As much distance separated her from the ceiling and she hung there limply, every bone in her body numb from the impact. Blood poured from her nose, and she gulped helplessly for air.

"Bitch! Fucking bitch! That bastard? Here?"

She was horrified when she realised the staccato and profane accusation was spewing from her own mouth. Her mind was awash with blind panic. She could not think. She did not have the capacity to formulate the smallest rational thought, to make even a token attempt at taking control.

She heard herself scream, a hoarse, blood-curdling expression of the emotional storm raging within. A storm so intense that it raked the depths of her being, tearing at it with howls of rage, billows of violence and waves of sorrow that crashed over the wreckage made of her soul.

"Torment me? Rid of me? Burn me? Why? Bitch!"

Her fists began to pound the walls without her consent, against her will, until the knuckles were a bloody pulp. The cacophanous emotional tempest was unbearable. Images flickered through her fevered brain, memories that were not hers. Disjointed scenes that she tried to process but could not retain. The momentary, fleeting scenes filled her with despair, and reduced her to racking sobs, and a grief that endured beyond the images which ended as though someone had pressed a pause button in her brain.

The glare of car headlamps once more played over the wall, and Frieda heard the roar of an engine that some boy racer had clearly modified, and was now putting through its paces on the deserted Weseler Strasse. It was a touch of the rational world that still existed beyond this preternatural mayhem, and Frieda attempted to focus on it, use it as an emotional anchor. Like a salmon struggling upstream against the current, she fought to centre herself, to resist the relentless psychic maelstrom that had engulfed her so viciously. At first her effort seemed in vain; the opposing emotional surge seemed set to sweep her on and on until as such time as it relinquished its hold. If it ever would.

Something gave. Frieda felt it, the fist in which her mind was clenched slackening, allowing her to sieze back a fraction of control. It was nominal, minimal, a hairline crack in an otherwise impervious adamantine wall. But Frieda probed it, digging into it with the last of her emotional reserve; hacking at it desperately, not daring to ease the assault for as much as a millisecond for fear that her assailant would regain total domination.

The internal war began to swing in her favour. She had dug and gouged and tore at the sliver and it gaped now, a way out. She poured her essence into it, her consciousness merging little by little with the silent darkness beyond. The rage that had engulfed her receded, and as Frieda made her escape from its failing grip, she felt the tone change. No longer rage now, but fear. Terrible fear. It tried to articulate itself through her one final time, but Frieda had severed the connection sufficiently to disallow another invasion, another involuntary use of her body, another psychic rape. She could hear the scream, the awful holler of a desolate spirit, but that was all. Deeper into the hole she crawled, the cry dissolving into nothing as finally Frieda reached safety.

As the nighttime peace on the deserted street outside was once again shattered by the returning boy racer, Frieda's body slid down the wall, her bloodied nose and mouth trailing a dark streak down the white woodchip wallpaper. A long sigh like a departing soul parted her broken lips before she crumpled into a bruised and beaten heap, and lay as still as death.