CHAPTER I

I awoke, and when I abruptly opened my eyes a darkness entered, occupying my entire soul…

I lay on my back on the wide bed and above me hung the ceiling, just one shade of grey lighter than the walls of the room. Fragments of a dream, which I couldn’t remember but which had left me with a gnawing sense of anxiety, slowly began to fade and I realized that I was at home in my flat in Pankrac. I listened to my own breathing, which tore the silence like a blunt knife, and I could also hear, from the giddy height of the thirteenth floor, the distant hum of the night-time motorway. From the railway yard came the metallic clanging of the goods trucks and the clinking of the tracks, which found their way into my room despite the locked window. It must have been well after midnight – pitch dark outside and not a trace of morning. Whilst part of me was trying to figure out what had woken me up, another part was succumbing to drowsiness and I slowly began to fall asleep. Then I heard it again:

A scratching in the hallway.

What could be scratching in the hallway at three in the morning? All thoughts of sleep quickly left me. The room had frozen into immobility. There was the ticking of the clock on the wall beside the door. Dust settled on the clothes horse, whose struts stretched out like the legs of a daddy-long-legs. Moonlight pushed its way through a gap in the curtains, falling onto a pile of magazines on the bedside table, with a three-month-old copy of Reflex on top. On the wall beside the display cabinet hung the skin of a monitor lizard, a pointless souvenir from a trip to India. The lizard stared at me with his dried-out eyeballs, which seemed to say: knock, knock, you have a visitor, my friend.

Then it occurred to me that perhaps the girl I lived with had gone to the toilet. This had almost reassured me when I turned over and saw the blanket outlining her body. She lay next to me, silently and without moving. Before I had time to think, the sounds from the hallway came again, more clearly than before. The shuffling of feet.

I held my breath and didn’t utter a sound. I fixed my gaze on the closed bedroom door, afraid to move. Someone was prowling around in my flat. It was like a nightmare I had had many times before, except this time it was real. There was a stranger here and I was lying on my back in my bed, defenceless, frozen with fear. The steps came to a halt in front of the bedroom door. Terror pushed me down into the bed. My heart was pounding like crazy.

It flashed through my head that I might have some kind of weapon to hand, perhaps I could use the clothes horse, or maybe I had left a knife on the bedside table after supper… I was hypnotized by the door handle; I couldn’t tear my gaze away from it. Was it just my imagination or was it slowly moving downwards? My fingers trembled uncontrollably. The handle reached all the way down, and between the door and the dark space of the hallway a crack began to widen. With a certainty known only from dreams, I knew that there was something terrible behind the door…

I turned towards the woman… I wanted to wake her up, warn her, shake her, rouse her…but I couldn’t. It was too late.

The door was open and behind it awaited the darkness. I screwed up my eyes and tried to look through it, but I couldn’t, and when I heard those scratchy steps, that shuffling, careful treading, moving towards me, I couldn’t stand it any longer and I cried out. I leapt out of the bed and reached for the lamp, which I clasped onto like a mace. I threw myself at the unknown assailant, but I didn’t notice a cable running just above the floor. I tripped and collided with a chair, falling headfirst. I instinctively put out my arms, but my hands just hit the clothes horse, which gave way under the weight, and I crashed into the wall, stars spinning in front of my eyes.

Perhaps I lost consciousness for a moment. When I finally got to my feet again, I felt a huge bump on my forehead. I turned on the light, which flashed painfully into my eyes. The bedroom looked as though a bomb had hit it. The clothes horse was overturned and twisted, the lamp was broken, and the cable to the computer was ripped out from the wall, taking with it the plug point, which was giving off a few sparks. The night visitor was nowhere to be seen.

The light gave me enough courage to creep into the kitchen for a knife. I gripped it tightly as I went through each room one by one. I put on all the lights and even opened up the wardrobe. I checked the front door – all the locks were intact and the safety chain was in place.

(Translated by Graeme Dibble)