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

much resolve as the ill-reason and woolly wisdom born of a restless night that drove him onto those unsafe streets. It was a sleepy, bleary-eyed city. Sleepier even than he was feeling. But unpredictable. This had always been plain to him. And on this particular morning, the air seemed thick with its perfidy.

The mediaeval streets and the half-timbered houses – so spotlessly maintained – boasted a certain homely charm and suggested the place felt smugly comfortable with its history. It was an irritating comfort, caressed by the occasional aroma of roast chestnuts that still clung to the odd street corner from the night before. Yet no one smiled in the streets this morning. An odd disquiet hung in the air.

After breakfast in one of the town’s sleazier restaurants, where he imagined his unshaven unslept appearance might be less conspicuous, he decided it was time for his confrontation with Achim. His recollection of how to get to Achim’s place was hazy, but he was able to recall Silverstone leading him along a tired street behind the station. And a search in this area quickly brought him to that strange shop, where the sour, suspicious shopkeeper had stood sentry for Achim. Only today it appeared to be closed. The door was locked, and the place was in darkness. Yet he caught a hint of movement in the shadows through the door. He knocked, and knocked again. But the place remained stubbornly quiet.

He was not a curious person – Patricia had put that on record – so perhaps it was his determination to confront Achim that drove him. At all events, a certain curiosity had been aroused, and an alley to the side of the block obligingly led round to a back entrance, which he found to be open. A dead silence filled the house. The movement must have been the reflection of traffic in the window. But it was not simply the silence that told him there was no one here. A fetid stench filled the dark passageway, which smothered the lungs and threatened to suffocate him with its rancid miasma. Cautiously he made his way up through the half-light of the stairwell to Achim’s attic flat. He knocked on the door. But there was no response. And the door was firmly locked.

He recalled that, when Silverstone had brought him here, Gertrude had been in the basement below, that this was where Achim had made his workshop. The basement steps brought him back into the noxious reek that had confronted him when he first entered. An acrid smell of ammonia mingled with decay. It clawed at the back of his throat. He covered his face with a handkerchief and eased open the basement door with a calmness and steadiness that surprised him in view of his fear as to what he might find there.

He let the door go, and it swung slowly back, allowing the stench to blast a way into every pore of his face. He caught the sound of rats scurrying for cover, and ran his hand down the wall beside the doorframe groping for the light switch. The grim horror of the scene lit by a single naked lightbulb was too repulsive to be real. A solitary surviving rat – perhaps the dimwit of the community, or just plain hungry – remained unimpressed by the intrusion and continued to gnaw at the heap of meat that lay draped over the two smaller cadavers. The clothes of each body had been torn away and hung now in sporadic tatters from the congealed crevices of flesh, which in places had been chewed right down to the bone. The bodies had been devoured away beyond any hope of recognition, but he knew instinctively that he was looking at Gertrude and her two baby boys. He remembered the vivacious beauty that he had met in Berlin all those years back. Recalled the pale anxious creature he had seen with Achim just a short time ago. And the two little faces, so full of future, so precious to their mother. Three once fragile souls now nothing more than rat fodder.

Light from the solitary naked bulb was reflected in the twisting bodies of the maggots which breathed ironic life into a nightmare that would stay with him for as long as he lived.

Frank sobbed into the handkerchief over his face. He could stay there no longer. He needed to breathe. But the fresh sweetness of the cold outdoor air was not enough to prevent him throwing up – it seemed to hurry the event – as he came out onto the steps of the back entrance. And as he watched the last mucous remnants of breakfast swim into the gutter, his thoughts began to spin. What was going on? Who could have let this happen? And where was Achim?

His mind was a mess, teeming with unanswered questions. And nowhere to go for an answer. Frank thought of the note from Lutz – the unsafe streets – he must have known about the nightmare that lay here. But the truth of his warning did not make the man any more trustworthy for him – on the contrary. So, rather than return to the Kolping house, he decided to take refuge out of town. Somewhere he could think and consider his next move without trouble breathing down his neck. But he was not prepared for the new shock that was waiting for him round the corner.

The cloth cap, the beard and the unkempt appearance were unmistakable. The last time Frank had seen him was in Cologne. Now here he was keeping vigil at the newsstand of another station entrance, ostensibly buying his morning newspaper. By a stroke of good fortune, a tram obscured the cloth cap’s view of Frank on the other side of the street, opened its doors for his escape and obligingly carried him away under cover of the passengers standing on the station side of the tram.

‘Did he see me?’ Frank asked himself. It