One Eye On The Darkness

Chapter Twenty-One

Frieda stared blindly out of the rain-lashed window as Schluter exited the autobahn. The weather reflected her mood, a blanket of grey, unrelenting misery spread over her soul and finding its external expression. Grave misgivings weighed heavily upon her, a sense of guilt at the violation she was about to commit for the sake of preventing a greater crime.

Schluter seemed to share her mood, although their drive was punctuated by bursts of his attempted smalltalk, as though he was occasionally encouraged by the thought of getting the breakthrough he desperately needed. Bhe conversation would inevitably die after a few minutes as Schluter descended from his momentary mountaintop.

Fifteen minutes after leaving the autobahn, they were in the heart of the Westfalian countryside, and pulling on to the unpaved parking ground at Venner Moor. The rain had stopped as they left the car and followed a narrow track into the trees that bowed as though in mourning under the leaden sky. Their boughs wept as they passed beneath, as though they understood the impending violation and grieved

The trail ran out, swamped beyond a fallen branch where it plunged beneath a pool of dark water. Frieda halted and turned to Schluter who had followed her wordlessly until now.

Her face was pale, accentuated by the strands of her wet red hair that snaked out from beneath her hood.

She held out her hand and Schluter took the bracelet from his pocket. He pressed it almost gingerly into her palm as if he expected the contact to knock him off his feet.

But the bracelet lay curled in Frieda's palm as benign as anyone would expect an inanimate object to be. Anyone apart from a jumpy psychic empath, and a seasoned detective who felt like he had lived too long and seen too much. Frieda stared down at the coil of delicate silver filigree set with vivid aquamarine stones that seemed to glow with some strange internal fire, defiant of the gloomy glade in which they stood. The stones captured Frieda's attention, held it, drawing her in with the unspoken promise of secrets yet to be revealed. The allure was as irresistible as a siren's song and took Frieda to a place where her own thoughts faded into a singularity at the very core of her being. A  singularity around which new thoughts began to circle and form. Moths to a flame.

"The view from the window is surprisingly clear. I can see all the way to the river today."

Schluter took a few seconds to absorb what Frieda had said, then shook his head nonplussed.

"What?"

"Usually the leaves are in the way."

"Frieda, what do you mean?"

The rain had started again, beating an irregular rhythm on the canopy above. The already grey light dimmed, and a sigh of wind chilled Schluter and forced him to dig his hands deeper into his pockets.

Despite the inclemency, and despite her earlier mood, now a small smile played at the corners of Frieda's lips. Her eyes were wide, still locked on the bracelet which she held with a reverence usually reserved for a communion wafer.

She could hear Schluter, but only distantly, as a noise she could easily dismiss from within the reverie that the fire burning in the bracelet had drawn her into. She retained the capacity, the wherewithal to respond, but lacked the will.

The connection she had established was vivid. Thoughts that were not her own, which she was not generating, and memories which had no source in her own experience flickered through her mind with a clarity that affected all her senses. The imprints were so strong as to be palpable, immersive. There was no coherency, and she sought to find some, to control the rush of information. It was as though someone had plugged in a CD player and set it to random, with the tracks racing at a hundred kilometres an hour. But her quest for order and structure was hindered by a beatific aura she had not expected and could not resist. It was an inertia that sapped her will, her motivation to do anything except just be.