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

“Marthe!”

Her companion was nowhere to be found. But by now Frank had seen her. And he was moving in her direction. Yet strangely. He moved in a way that she had never seen in him before. His expression was foreign to her. He wore a hunted look. A crazed desperation widened his eyes.

He began lunging towards Ellen. Dr Zellweger’s warning words that Frank may be suffering a psychosis flashed into Ellen’s mind. And she panicked. Suddenly she was terrified of her own husband. But this was not her Frank. This was not the man she had married.

“Marthe!” she cried again. “Marthe! Frank’s here!”

Frantically, she searched the faces around her. Where was she? And in the corner of Ellen’s eye a glint of metal from Frank’s hand. It was the scream of a woman’s voice beside her that made her spin round…

… just in time to see him fall. His face stared up at Ellen from where he lay, a trickle of blood from his head mingling with the colours of confetti on the pavement around him. So far away. So distant.

The scene that took shape around Ellen as her senses slowly returned told her she was back in her own bed in England. But this was only the cruel kind of trick the mind plays halfway to waking. For a moment, which extended far too long for comfort, it was a scene that was completely alien to her. A room she did not know. A bed she had never slept in before. Wearing bedclothes that were not hers. And a clean smell of sterility in the air. But Marthe was beside her, holding Ellen’s hand, as if there to lead her back to consciousness.

“Where am I?” Ellen asked, and she realised as she uttered those words that she was with the only person who had brought her comfort in the last twelve months.

“You’ve had a terrible shock, Ellen,” Marthe said. “You’re in hospital.”

“But Frank. What about Frank?”

“You need to rest, Ellen. I’ll let the doctor know you’re awake,” was all Marthe said in reply, and the softness of the voice instantly lulled Ellen back to sleep.

How long she slept it was impossible for her to tell. But she suspected it was only a few minutes, because the doctor was just entering the room when she woke again. With his shock of dark brown hair, it could almost have been Frank, and her heart momentarily leapt at the sight. But the white coat quickly brought her down to earth.

The doctor shook Ellen’s hand as she sat up and introduced himself with a name she was unable to understand. But he spoke impeccable English.

“You have suffered a shock, Mrs Goss,” he explained (as if she needed to be told), “but all the vital parameters seem to be in order, so I think we can discharge you into the safe hands of Dr Zellweger’s wife.”

Marthe’s reassuring hand rested on Ellen’s arm.

“Come on, let’s get you home,” she said. But Ellen was far from reassured by either Marthe’s hand or the doctor’s words.

“What about the police?” she asked. “We were supposed to see the Kommissar.”

“The Kommissar will want to speak with you, of course. He will come to the house once we’ve got you home.”

The anxiety that had permeated Ellen’s every thought since she received Marthe’s call was shot through now with a wholesale fear made inconsolably real by her memory of Frank lying at her feet on the pavement. Or had she just dreamt it in the melee of grotesque masks and incessant drums?

She knew the answer, of course, without having to ask. And the knowledge cowed her into a timid silence on the drive back to the Zellwegers’ home.

“Now, you relax in the lounge, while I make you some tea. And I will be with you in a moment,” Marthe said as she disappeared into the kitchen. Ellen retreated to the sofa in the lounge and listened to the boiling of the kettle.

Sitting on the sofa that had been so familiar to her the best part of twelve months ago, she was struck by how little had changed in the intervening months. The same newspaper, the National-Zeitung, lay on the table. And the same magazines. Only the headlines and pictures had changed. And the erotic watercolour still hung there on the wall. Tantalising. Ellen smiled at the sensual scene as the thought occurred to her at that moment – knowing Marthe in the way she now did – that perhaps Marthe herself was one of the women in that naked embrace.

It was a thought that prompted oddly unconnected memories of a day out with some school friends when she was fifteen or sixteen. They were strolling through a narrow, wooded valley carpeted with primroses and bluebells on the southern fringes of Dartmoor one afternoon, when suddenly the idyllic peace was shattered by a thunderous crash. It shook the earth they walked on. They all instantly froze to the spot in trepidation. Ellen had never felt such paralysing fear in her life. When the group finally plucked up the courage to continue on along the valley, they soon came upon a clearing at the foot of a rock that rose above the trees like a monument to the bucolic nature that surrounded them.

There on the ground lay a man. Quite still. Ellen and her friends stood watching the lifeless body. Was this the cause of the thunderous crash? Had he fallen from the rock? Had he thrown himself off? The girls looked uncertainly at each other, immobilized by their fear.

“Feel his pulse,” one screamed. “We need to feel his pulse.”

But nobody moved. Until Ellen stepped up. She gripped the man’s wrist in her hand and felt for the pulse with her thumb. She felt nothing. Not the slightest movement. Not the vaguest hint of life. The man was plainly dead.

Ellen had never before been confronted with death in any form, let alone in such a stark and direct