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

husband discharged himself early this morning without informing anyone. We have no idea where he is at the moment.”

“What?!”

Ellen stared at the two men in disbelief.

“How is that possible? He’s injured, he’s confused. How can he just walk out without anyone even noticing?”

Her voice rose in impetuous anger. But it was a temper born of despair. She felt suddenly cast adrift in a vast, empty ocean. Nowhere to go. Nothing to guide her. In her desperation, she still clung to the conviction that this could not be Frank they were talking about.

But then she asked herself: if this was not Frank, then where was he?

1 A present not quite palpable

is long since past;

leaves only a misty hint of that legend,

while our life becomes a slow drift

through the Dardanelles.

Yet it was always thus,

only the legend was different

Now let us forge a legend of our own,

breathe our own faint mist

on the mirror and rewrite this story

with the tallows of our fingers on the glass

2 And among the ruins

the wind whispers its message without a word

over the first two leaves of an oak

unfolding already from what remains.

Chapter 4

Frank stood on the bridge over the Rhine. It put him in mind of Ellen and Putney Bridge. He recalled the day they stood there watching the seagulls. Enthralled by the dense green of the trees around Fulham Palace with a hint already of colours changing. Intimations of the autumn to come that were carried by the westerly breeze down the Thames. It was the day they decided to get married.

But here on this day, on this bridge, it was a chill northerly breeze that blew off the river. It carried with it a hint of chemicals from the industry downstream that lined the border districts of the city. He shivered. And gazed down at eddies of water as they emerged from under the bridge on their slow journey to the North Sea. The water level was low. The river sluggish. It would not revive until the spring, when the mountains released their snow and ice. But for now, winter still held the river in its grip.

The wind. The water. The drift beneath his feet. This bridge seemed to be all that separated him from oblivion. The way it balanced him precariously on the arch of its back made his head swim. The river skyline began to spin. He sensed himself losing control. And looked about for a marker to latch onto. A secure peg to steady him. He found it in the gleam of a statue. A bronze Amazon that stood at the head of the bridge, leading her horse proudly into the city. It seemed almost as if she was offering her support – inviting him to join her, to escape the dullness that hung over the river beneath the louring sky.

The flatness of the scene was matched by a drab Baroque-style edifice that was trying to be something it was not as it abutted the grand hotel Les Trois Rois. The diffident lettering above the doors – Basler Kantonalbank – that coyly advertised its quintessential Swissness seemed no less out of place. An aloof end-of-terrace loner that no one was inclined to invite to the party. Meanwhile, the sumptuous lights of the hotel next door still flickered out across the water. They spoke of cosy conviviality. And came to him like sharp pinpricks of warmth and comfort that gnawed at his own solitude on that bridge.

Just below him a sudden cacophony of seagulls ripped through his quiet reflection. A momentary shard of pain shot through his left temple. He winced. Instinctively putting his left hand to the side of his head, he looked down at the landing stage by the waterside. A vast squawking flurry of white gulls wheeled erratically around the water. A dense inflating mass that enveloped everything around it and eventually encompassed even the grumbling bowels of the bank that loomed above the landing stage. So dense that he failed to see the focus of their menacing encirclement: a man lost amid the screeching mass. A solitary, slightly hunched figure in a long dark coat and black homburg hat by the water’s edge. Rooted to the spot, undismayed, the man paid no attention to the gulls around him. Seemed oblivious to the commotion.

Frank’s heart missed a beat. This figure was so familiar to him. The homburg hat, the coat, the posture. He shouted out.

“Achim!” But his voice was instantly drowned by the squawking of the gulls. In a sudden feverish excitement, he turned and dashed to the end of the bridge as best he could with the bruises from his accident. It was a good hundred metres to the strutting Amazon with her horse. Breathless with anticipation, his heart in his throat, he skirted around the bronze statue. Headed for the steps down to the landing stage. And stopped.

As he stood there looking down the steps to the river, his excitement instantly washed away. The sound of a tram navigating the bend onto the bridge behind him squeezed out the squawking of the gulls. The birds had vanished. The landing stage was bereft of life. There was no one there. No Achim. No anyone.

Had he imagined it?

He wandered the streets nagged by this thought for much of the morning. Plagued by the image of his friend. The image of quarry caught like a fish in a dense white net of gulls. A phantom cast adrift at the foot of the bridge.

It was Frank’s aching feet that eventually urged him through the doors of a quiet-looking restaurant just off the marketplace in the centre of town. It defied the outwardly quiet impression the moment he opened the door and pushed through the heavy curtain that was keeping out the cold. He recognised it instantly as just the kind of place for him in his present state of mind. It had character ground into the floor by decades of