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

yet made it such a completely open book at the same time. For Ellen, it was one of nature’s wonders. She held it in awe.

When she had seen Frank naked for the first time some months before their wedding, her wonderment was further enhanced by a new discovery that put every earlier enjoyment in the shade. Frank was the first man she had ever seen without that coy sheath of skin which so vainly masquerades as a cloak of male desire. There was an honesty about this one. So neat. So innocent. For Ellen, this had come as a revelation. But then in Venice, on their wedding night, Ellen found that perhaps there was good reason after all for her adolescent sense of foreboding and anxiety.

Frank’s first instinct had been to take a shower after their journey, while Ellen unpacked their bags, divested herself of her shoes and curled up on the sofa to flick through all the hotel amenities, the Marco Polo tours on offer and the menu of the hotel restaurant. She became so engrossed that she failed to notice Frank when he emerged from the shower, still drying himself, and then lay down on the bed.

When eventually she looked up and saw him lying there, the sight of him cast an instant spell. He was lying face up, eyes shut, head resting on his hands. He had already dozed off. The towel lay on the floor beside the bed. And in repose, nestling in that tousled charm, lay the substance of Ellen’s fascination. Captivating. So unsuspecting. Defenceless and innocent as a sleeping baby. She felt that her excitement was audible as she crept onto the bed and offered up her lingual skills in an act of pure devotion. She was aroused beyond belief in the throes of her worship. And while Frank showed no sign of stirring from his sleep, she caught the soft whispers of his voice as he began to sigh and purr, every so often calling out “pet.” It was a name he had not used for her before. She remembered thinking at the time that she was not too pleased, suspecting that perhaps it was a name he had used for some past lover. But she paid it no further attention, as she savoured every second of Frank and offered a train of reverent kisses in thanksgiving.

Then suddenly from nowhere, Frank let out a piercing scream that startled Ellen. She looked up. Any sense of a smile had gone. In its place a strange, unsettling expression that she found hard to describe. Like a symptom of deep distress. An excruciating agony in his eyes and a look of unmitigated disgust on his lips as he cried out “Scheisse!” She almost had the feeling he was about to throw up.

Ellen knew he could speak German, but she had never heard him utter a single word of the language before. To hear him speak it at that instant in what seemed to be a moment of such distress hinted at some dark history to which she would never be privy.

But slowly the mood calmed again. He started to run his fingers through her hair. Ellen took this to be a mark of appreciation. And, despite that strange German expletive, this gesture enabled her to put the sense of inner conflict she had witnessed to the back of her mind. Yet vestiges of the shock and concern she had felt that afternoon in Venice never entirely went away.

And the memory of that occasion now put her in mind of his incongruous relish for quoting Sophocles as they lay in bed together. To have a penis, he said, was like being chained to a madman. It was a quotation he frequently repeated. This and the reminder of that expression on his face hinted at a deeper side to him that would be closed to her forever.

There had been so many things in retrospect that should have set alarm bells ringing. And now, between the sombre walls of the hotel in Locarno, her memory of the troubling undercurrent to that brief moment of wedding night bliss seemed all the more concerning. The pain. The distress. That look of rank disgust. Even the innocent name he called her. They all suggested a murky aspect to Frank’s history. Some profoundly existential turmoil buried deep in his past.

Was it this, she wondered, this sinister and troubling secret that explained his disappearance?

She let the question sink into the darkness of the room, preferred instead to cling to the memory of their wedding night. It was the reassuring reminiscence of that bliss that eventually caressed her to sleep, allowed her to forget for a time that Frank was no longer with her and that – for some reason she might never understand – he had turned his back on their blissful companionship and chosen to disappear.

Ellen was woken in the morning by a loud knocking sound that drifted up the staircase from the depths of the hotel. In her twilight state of mind, she struggled to get a grip on where she was. Then she recalled Signor Sciarone and his peculiar behaviour the evening before. Rubbing the sleep from her eyes, she wondered what noisy work it was that he felt compelled to do so early in the morning.

She got up and drew back the heavy curtains. The doors onto the balcony were still slightly open. She shivered slightly. But the cool morning air was so refreshing on her skin she felt a new lease of energy. And the morning outside was so inviting that she decided to take a last stroll before leaving the Italian ambience of Locarno behind her and heading back north.

It was quite chilly when Ellen got down to the lake. In the early morning light, the dark mountain facing her looked every bit as menacing as it had the day before. But there was a resonance to the air that promised a warm spring day ahead. It gave