by Alex Bell
‘Please, Toby,’ I said, desperately, barely managing to resist the urge to shake him, ‘please tell me who gave you those notes to deliver.’
The boy bit his lip, brown eyes troubled, before at last giving me the answer: ‘You did.’
My thoughts collapsed in on themselves, leaving in their wake a deafeningly loud silence as I stood there staring at the kid.
‘Are you sure?’ I croaked at last.
‘There are some more in my bedroom,’ Toby said uncertainly. ‘You said I had to put them under the door on the sixth of every month starting from October, and that you mustn’t see me doing it or the deal would be off.’
‘Deal?’ I repeated blankly.
‘Start from the beginning,’ Casey ordered. ‘When did Gabriel ask you to do this?’
‘I dunno exactly when,’ Toby replied. ‘Some time in July. He said that if I delivered these notes when he said, without being seen, then he’d give me a thousand dollars.’
‘He said what?’ Casey repeated, looking horrified.
‘And a thousand more when he found out I was the sender.’
‘You mean I anticipated discovering your identity?’ I asked, staring at him.
Toby shrugged.
‘Toby, how could you accept money from a stranger? And that much? Where is it now? How have you been hiding it from me?’
‘It’s under my mattress,’ Toby said, slightly sulkily, obviously realising that he was going to be in trouble over this.
‘Go and fetch it right now,’ Casey ordered.
‘But Casey, you said we needed more money and—’
‘Toby! Fetch the money now. I won’t ask you again.’
With a scowl, Toby turned and stalked to his room.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, turning to her after her brother had gone off. ‘I . . . I don’t know what to say to you. I don’t remember any of it.’
Casey flashed me a brief, worried smile. ‘It’s okay. We’ll get to the bottom of it.’
When Toby returned, he was holding two black bags. The larger of the two he handed to his sister, who tipped the contents out onto the kitchen table and gasped involuntarily at the stacks of crisp, new dollar bills that piled up before us. There certainly looked like there was a thousand dollars’ worth there. Thrusting the money back into the bag, Casey handed it over to me.
‘You’d better take this.’
‘But, if I promised, Toby—’ I began, but Casey shook her head and cut me off.
‘Look, I don’t want to offend you, Gabriel, but we don’t know where that money came from. It . . . it could be stolen.’
I nodded bleakly and glanced apologetically at Toby. ‘I can give you the same in florints,’ I began, but again Casey rejected the offer firmly.
‘Toby should know better than ever to take money in the first place,’ she said. ‘You’re helping me out while I’m not working. I think you’re doing more than enough for us already. What’s in the other bag, Toby?’
‘Gabriel said he wouldn’t remember asking me to do this and, er . . . he wasn’t sure how long it would take for him to work it out, so he gave me copies and said to give whatever was left back to him when he found out. And you wanted this back too,’ Toby said, drawing a computer disc in a plastic case from the second bag.
The other A4 pages Toby gave me all carried copies of the two messages I had already received. There were five copies of each message, making ten pages altogether. I must have been overly cautious, for there was no way that the anonymous letter sending would have gone on for ten months without my finding out who the sender was. It had been obvious and easy enough to fix a surveillance camera above the apartment door.
I gazed at the computer disc in its protective plastic packaging, clasped between my thumb and forefinger. It had been a complete dead end. As soon as the programme loaded up, I was presented with a black screen with one small central box requiring a password. There was only room for eight digits, and I had already spent hours and hours typing in all manner of words in an effort to crack the code. I was on the verge of losing my temper with it. Why bother to go to all the trouble of hiding the disc in such a manner if it wasn’t important? What the bloody hell was the point of a disc I couldn’t access?
Had I really been trying to torment myself with those notes? What kind of twisted and depraved man had I been before that I would spend time planning such madness? Had I also been responsible for the photos hidden in my deliveries? There had to be more than one person involved. I couldn’t be responsible for all that had happened. For one thing, I couldn’t have been the photographer who took the picture of Stephomi and me in Paris, because I was in the picture myself. Nor could I have possibly moved Anna Sovànak’s body, unless I have taken to vast nocturnal journeys that I then have no recollection of in the morning.
In the end, I took all these things with me to the Hilton and confronted Stephomi with them when we met for a drink in the Faust wine cellar beneath the hotel that afternoon.
‘You told me you thought you knew who was sending these,’ I said, spreading the notes out on the table. ‘I need you to tell me.’
Stephomi picked up the two handwritten notes he had not seen, and glanced at them in distaste before dropping them back on the table. Then he leaned back in his chair with a sigh.
‘Tell me,’ I repeated. ‘Please, Stephomi. I think I already know but I’ll confirm it on my own somehow if I have to.’
‘All right,’ he said, setting his wine glass back on the table. ‘You sent them all yourself.’
‘All of them?’
‘Yes. I don’t know about these notes but I expect you had the photos hidden in packages addressed to you, and then asked the sender to post them to your new address on a certain date, using some pretext or other.’
‘And who is the photographer in this?’ I asked, holding up the photo of Stephomi and I.
‘You,’ my friend replied. ‘The camera was hidden and on a timer.’
‘And why would I send myself a photo warning against you?’
The scholar smiled wryly. ‘Because you know me too well, Gabriel. You wanted me to leave you alone and not try to befriend you after you lost your memory. You wanted to be alone. I didn’t much care for the idea. You know the rest. I suppose you were trying to instil a wariness against me if I should happen to turn up.’
‘Then what about Anna Sovànak? Did I know that her body would be left beneath the Weeping Willow?’
‘How could you?’ Stephomi asked, watching me carefully. ‘Indeed, as I understand it, you hardly knew the woman.’
‘Then why—?’
‘Coincidence, Gabriel,’ Stephomi said sharply. ‘You couldn’t have known that her killer would leave her body beneath the monument. I presume your reference to it on the back of the photo was simply because you knew she was Jewish. Take my advice, don’t waste time looking for logic in what you have done.’ He gestured at the things spread out on the table before us. ‘You wanted to torment yourself. Nothing more.’
We were silent for a moment. Yes, surely Stephomi was right. I could not possibly have known where Anna Sovànak’s body would appear. It was nothing more than a coincidence.
‘My memory loss was a stupid accident,’ I said at last, ‘How could I possibly have known it was going to happen? How could I possibly have planned for it?’
Stephomi shrugged. ‘I don’t know, Gabriel. When I questioned you about it before, you told me to back off. You said you knew what you were doing.’
‘Was I losing my mind?’ I almost whispered. ‘Was I different before? Was I this strange, twisted person?’
This was something that had been bothering me for a while. Was I really me? Or had my amnesia caused the reset button to be pushed so that I was just this blank slate once again? Starting from scratch . . . having to rebuild my personality again through my experiences . . . my environment . . .
‘No, you were much the same before,’ Stephomi replied. ‘But . . .’
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‘But what?’ I asked, latching on to his hesitation immediately.
Stephomi sighed. ‘Well, Nicky phoned me about a week before she died. She was . . . she said she was worried about you. She wanted to see me but I was in Japan at the time and couldn’t get back.’
‘Why was she worried?’
‘She wouldn’t tell me on the phone. I would’ve been in England within the next couple of weeks and I was going to go see her then.’ He shrugged. ‘To be honest, I expect it was just that you told her you could see devils and it freaked her out.’
‘You mean she didn’t already know?’ I asked.
‘No. It’s not an easy thing to tell someone. But whatever your state of mind beforehand, you certainly weren’t at all balanced after they died. So don’t try to make sense of what you did. You won’t find any. You wouldn’t listen to reason and you wouldn’t listen to me. To be honest, I really don’t know the true extent of what you did and why.’
He sounded tired and I realised when I looked at him that there were bags of weariness beneath his eyes that he had not been able to disguise. When I asked him about it, he replied with an uncharacteristic impatience. ‘It’s starting, Gabriel. It’s all about to begin. Can’t you feel it? As a person of the In Between, I’m surprised you can’t sense it. Have you not been having dreams? Mirror visions? Things like that?’
‘I’ve had those from the beginning,’ I replied, thinking of the recent appearance of Lilith in my dreams but not wanting to discuss it with my inclined-to-mockery friend.
‘It’s building like static,’ he went on. ‘It’s been itching away at me, like nails on a blackboard, keeping me awake and filling my mind with . . . disturbing images that I can’t block out.’
I gazed at him in the dim snugness of the ancient cellar and knew that he was right. Perhaps it was my imagination, but even as we sat there I thought I felt power-surged currents brushing the hairs of my arms as they swept by. Rubbing my arm absently, I asked, ‘What do you think will happen? Is there anything we can do that will make any kind of difference at all?’
I had expected Stephomi to give his usual brusque answer that, of course, as mere humans, there was nothing we could do to influence the centuries-old War that had for so long been raging between Satan’s angels and God’s. But for some time, Stephomi simply gazed thoughtfully at me, tapping the tips of his slender fingers on the edge of the wood-polished table.
‘Shall we go for a walk?’ Stephomi asked at last, standing up abruptly.
‘I . . . what? Where?’
‘Anywhere.’
‘But . . . it’s below freezing outside!’
‘I need some fresh air,’ Stephomi said. ‘And I’d rather not have this conversation inside. There aren’t so many people outside on a day like this.’
Feeling perplexed, I got up and followed Stephomi from the hotel and out into the savagely cold air. I was glad of the ankle-length black coat I had brought with me, and did the buttons up all the way to my neck. Still the cold chafed my fingers and face. How strange to think that warm autumn had been so short a time ago. The sudden descent into winter seemed unnaturally fast.
‘It’s colder than it should be for this time of year,’ Stephomi remarked as we walked. ‘Have you noticed?’
I nodded wordlessly. It was a strange kind of chill that seemed to settle over the city at night and couldn’t be shaken off during the day. Several castle spires were visible as we walked further, the striking outline of the Hilton at our back. Our feet crunched on the frozen gravel path we were walking down. I noticed as we went on that the pressure of my weight was actually snapping the frozen pebbles in two, like brittle lengths of glass. The coating of frost over the buildings and the cobbled roads was only paper-thin, and yet still it had not melted in the slightly brighter warmth of day. And although there was neither rain nor snow on the ground itself, the air seemed thick with a kind of softened ice that blew into our faces and wetted our clothes.
‘Feels like the air itself is freezing, doesn’t it?’ Stephomi said, echoing my own thoughts.
We soon reached the Fisherman’s Bastion. It’s so beautiful that if I lived closer I would go there every single night before returning to my apartment. It’s basically something between a castle and a city wall, sprawling along the top of the hill overlooking the Danube, with great glassless windows and hollow towers you can climb into, each having open arched doors and the same windows carved into the rock. There are covered walkways with cobbled paths, and curved, sweeping wide staircases with white knights set into the walls and stone lions perched on top of pillars. It would have looked beautiful at any time of year, but when it’s sparkling with glass beads of frost that cling to every spire and turret; every frozen knight and lion coated in pale blue ice, it is even more breathtaking and I really could sit there for hours. I love this city; I truly think it must be the most beautiful in the whole world, and I’m so thankful that I live here. If I had to live anywhere other than Budapest, I know I would be miserable.
We stopped in one of the covered towers and stood at an arched window overlooking the icy Danube. The view before us was incredible. Spires and towers rose up from the smaller buildings, and the whole city glittered in its winter coat of frost, like a vast enchanted ice palace straight from the pages of a fairytale. The Hungarians seem to revel in their adeptness at capturing elusive Beauty in their churches, their monuments, and the angel-graced bridges that arch gracefully over the Danube.
‘We have a little problem,’ Stephomi said softly.
I glanced at him, eyebrow raised. ‘Little problem as in “The Antichrist is coming” or little problem as in you can’t find your house keys?’
‘The first one, I’m afraid. I, er . . . had assumed that all this fuss about the Antichrist was because he would soon be coming into a position of power where he would be able to do real damage . . . You know, start wreaking havoc and so on. But . . . apparently the dates Nostradamus refers to aren’t to do with anything the Antichrist himself does as such.’
‘Get to the point,’ I said, aware that he was stalling.
‘You won’t like it,’ Stephomi sighed. ‘The dates refer to his birth. And Raphael told me last night that you know the mother.’
The vivid image of the conflicting aura surrounding Casey flew to the forefront of my mind at once. The aura that could at one moment be coloured in the most visually stunning shades of sparkling gold, and the next dripping with a wickedness so vile that all the senses screamed at the sight of it. It should have occurred to me before. I should have known. In all honesty, perhaps I did.
‘So who is she?’ Stephomi persisted.
‘Casey March,’ I said. ‘She’s my neighbour. I’ve been trying to help her. She’s just a teenager and she hasn’t got anyone. She says it’s a virgin pregnancy.’
‘Well, that’s another point in favour of it being Jesus number two, I guess,’ Stephomi said with a shrug. ‘Poor little brat. He can be a Hitler or a Schindler but nothing in between.’
‘Well, then, extra care must simply be taken with the raising of the child,’ I said firmly.
Stephomi remained silent for a moment, gazing at the city before us, an expression of doubt on his face. ‘Ah, well, that’s the problematic thing, isn’t it? People disagree about raising children as it is. Who’s best fit to decide?’
‘The mother, of course! It’s Casey’s baby, isn’t it? She loves it already!’
‘Yes, and I understand Clara Hitler was quite fond of her own little dictator,’ Stephomi said impatiently. ‘Come on, what has love got to do with it, Gabriel? If only she’d been one of those mothers who had starved and beaten her child. So many deaths might have been averted—’
‘I’ll help Casey,’ I said, interrupting him.
‘Oh, you will, will you?’
‘Yes,’ I said, nodding. ‘I will.’
Stephomi glanced at me then, a wry smile twisting his lips. ‘How nice to know that there is a hero
here among us! I’m sure my dreams will no longer be plagued by visions of the Apocalypse now that I know you have put your name down for nappy-changing duty, Gabriel.’
