The Dark Frontier A. Decker (i like reading TXT) 📖

“I don’t know anyone by that name,” he said.

“She lived here a year ago,” Frank insisted. “In the top flat.”

“I only moved in last week. In the top flat,” the man said with a passing smile that betrayed the kind of smart-aleck sarcasm Frank might have expected from Silverstone.

“Mr Hunkeler?”

“Yes?” the man said, who had already reached the end of the path by now. He was plainly taken aback at being addressed by name, and he turned to face Frank, as if to challenge him.

“Do you know where she went?” Frank asked.

“No idea.”

Impatience had driven M. Hunkeler out onto the pavement by now. And he headed off towards town. He had no further time for interrogation by this intrusive stranger.

Frank was devastated. The last time he had stood on the steps to this house, they had offered him boundless comfort. Today they stood for infinite despair. All at once, he found himself swallowed up in a vast gaping hole of fathomless gloom. Irretrievably lost and adrift. Like tears in the rain. No sense of direction. No ties. No attachment. Ineffably alone. Where could she possibly be?

He was barely aware of what he was doing or where he was going as he followed in the footsteps of M. Hunkeler and made his way back through the back streets to the city centre. Drawn towards the sounds of carnival that filtered through the streets ahead. The drums and pipes. The steady hum of the crowd. Would he find her there, among the milling crowd?

When he came to the steps that ran down to the market square, Frank instantly stopped in his tracks. The stairway below was eerily empty except for one solitary figure. Approaching slowly up the steps came a lone piccolo player, dressed in the costume of a jester. The two horns of the cap swayed to the rhythm of the piccolo. A mask covered the face to the tip of the nose. The piccolo player headed straight towards Frank at the top of the steps, seemingly oblivious to his presence. There was something both sad and sinister about that solitary march. A foreboding sadness that was underlined by the dark inscrutable eyes buried deep behind the mask.

Frank moved aside and let the piccolo player pass. He watched the swaying horns of the cap recede to the incessant tune of the flute. Silhouetted against the far end of the street, the diminishing figure was gradually lost in the shadows. The bleakness of the jester’s lone march into the distance perfectly encapsulated Frank’s own condition.

As the sound of pipes and drums rippled up the steps from the market square, Frank was brought slowly back to earth. The constant hum of people on the streets below reminded him that Silverstone was still out there somewhere in the crowd.

Reckoning that his best move for now would be to get a room at the Kolping house, he decided to make for the other side of the river. It may not be open yet, he told himself, but at least it was not on the route of the parade, so he could lie low outside until it opens. Since the only way there lay through the carnival celebrations, he knew he would have to be on his guard all the while as he let himself be jostled to his goal amid a masquerade of oddly earnest frivolity: the grotesque figures with their yellow hair and huge noses forcing confetti on him with a menace that seemed ironically out of place; piccolo players dressed as ducks parading in newspaper uniforms; and smart city gents beating a solemn rhythm on their drums and led by a vast bloodsucking creature with enormous tentacles that rose out of its head. Snatches of the weird procession seemed strangely familiar. But the heaving mass of bodies that pushed him in all directions at once levered open a gap in Frank’s aching skull. His head began to spin. And his disjointed mind had its work cut out negotiating even the narrowest path through the thicket of people that lined the pavement.

He recalled that Silverstone was given to the use of a flick knife, and it struck Frank that this slow progress, cheek by jowl, through the carnival crowds would be just the kind of situation he would relish. An opportunity to slip the blade quietly into his back and vanish in the throng. The closer they pushed and pummelled against him, the more vulnerable he felt.

The bizarre carnival masks only added to the sense of menace, until suddenly Frank caught sight of him. The burly American figure stood sentry on the step of a corner shop which lifted him head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd. The twilight of the lanterns gave Silverstone’s face a ghostly quality, but he was distressingly real. And although Frank now had him more safely within his line of vision and could measure the danger, this gave him little comfort as the American commanded a view over the whole street. Frank knew he would never get past without being spotted.

He stopped in his tracks and began to edge back the way he had come. But there was no path back. Only a few steps away and moving hungrily in his direction was one of the two sports youth louts together with a familiar figure looking horribly recovered from Frank’s last encounter with him. It was Wolfgang.

Frank sensed his destiny closing in on him. His mind paralysed by a desperate indecision that had him marking time when time was fast running out. It was a wavering that epitomised every twist and turn of his life. Save maybe one. And no prospect of reprieve – until a group of carnival revellers swallowed him up and bundled him through the doors of a tavern that opened onto the pavement behind him. A typical Basel pub.

As the crowd disgorged Frank from its midst to find a table, he saw Wolfgang’s bull neck and head just disappear from view past the