The Asylum (22 page)

31

WITH EACH AUTUMN
evening that passes, St Patricia’s grey façade seems a little colder and darker to Jan. As he cycles past the wall on this particular evening, the hospital behind the wall looks like a great fortress. Pale, shimmering lights are visible in many of the windows, but they do not convey a welcoming atmosphere. Shadows seem to be moving inside the rooms, gazing out with longing from behind the bars.

Is one of the windows ajar up there?

Is that guitar music he can hear in the night?

No. Just his imagination.

Jan quickly cycles on past the hospital and down to the pre-school, away from the wall. It is Sunday, and only two months to go until Christmas. He is free this weekend but has come down anyway; he and Hanna parted company four days earlier with a kind of promise to help each other. Or at least not to give each other away.

‘You can’t get into the hospital through the sally port,’ Hanna had said in Jan’s kitchen. ‘Nobody gets in that way … I’ve never got past the visitors’ room.’

‘So your friend Carl … he lets you and Rössel meet up there?’

‘No, Ivan stays in his room. I send him letters.’

More secret letters
, Jan thought. But he merely asked, ‘So how
do
I get in, then?’

‘Through the basement,’ Hanna said. ‘I can show you the entrance, if you like.’

Jan definitely liked the idea. He remembered that Högsmed had talked about a way from the hospital to the pre-school through the basement.
But it’s not a very pleasant route
, the doctor had said.

What does that mean? Are there rats in the basement? Or people?

He arrives at the Dell and cautiously opens the door, knowing perfectly well that he’s not supposed to be there tonight.

‘Hello?’ he says quietly. ‘Hanna?’

There’s a brief silence, then he hears her voice from the kitchen: ‘Come in … everything’s fine.’

Jan steps inside and closes the door. ‘All quiet?’

‘Yes – I managed to get them off. But they were like little monsters this evening, running around and screaming, just pushing me to the limit all the time.’

Jan says nothing; he knows that Hanna isn’t particularly fond of the children.

As he takes off his jacket he notices that it is almost half past nine. He keeps his shoes on and takes a couple of steps towards the kitchen and the drawer where the keys are kept, but Hanna holds out her hand.

‘Here.’ She has already taken out one of the key cards, and passes it to Jan.

‘Thanks.’

‘You haven’t changed your mind?’

Jan shakes his head and goes over to the door leading to the basement. It feels a little odd to enter the code and open the door in front of someone else at this late hour.

He turns around. ‘See you later.’

‘No,’ she says. ‘I’m coming down with you.’

He has no time to object; she switches on the light and sets off down the stairs, and all Jan can do is follow her.

He uses the underground corridor every day to deliver and collect the children, and by this stage Jan is heartily sick of the pictures on the walls. The smiling mice seem to be sneering at him.

They won’t be using the lift tonight. Hanna leads the way to the safe room. Jan hasn’t been here for more than two weeks – not since he stood there and heard someone coming down in the lift in the middle of the night. Someone who turned out to be Hanna.

‘So there’s a secret passageway here?’ Jan wants to know.

‘Secret … Well, it’s hidden.’ She presses down on the handle and opens the steel door. Then she turns around and looks at Jan. ‘Are you sure about this?’

Jan nods.

‘Come on, then.’

When Hanna switches on the light and Jan steps into the safe room, he suddenly has a picture in his mind’s eye of a frightened little five-year-old boy sitting on a mattress in there. His heart skips a beat – but the light comes on to reveal a completely empty room.

The mattress and the pillows are still there, just as he remembered them. And the steel door at the far end of the room is still closed.

Hanna walks over to the door. ‘Here it is.’

‘That door is locked,’ Jan says. ‘I’ve already tried it.’

‘I mean the floor.’ She is pointing downwards.

‘The floor?’

Jan walks forward – and feels something uneven beneath his feet. He looks down at the blue fitted carpet, but he is standing on something underneath it, something small and narrow.

The carpet covers the entire floor, but it isn’t stuck down. Hanna goes over to one corner and lifts it up. Together they pull the carpet back towards the middle of the room. It comes away easily, and Jan can see grey concrete.

‘A bit further,’ Hanna says. ‘Nearly there.’

She seems eager now, urging him on. They carry on pulling at the carpet, and suddenly Jan sees a hatch in the floor, half a metre wide and made of corrugated metal.

‘That’s the way in,’ Hanna says.

Jan looks at the hatch, then at her. ‘The way into the hospital?’

Hanna nods. ‘It goes right under the wall.’

‘Where does it come out?’

‘Haven’t a clue.’

Jan pulls the carpet back so that the whole of the hatch is exposed, and notices that there is an iron handle. ‘How did you find it?’

‘I did the same as you down here, looking around, checking things out … and I’ve had more time than you.’

‘Has Rössel been helping you?’ asks Jan.

She shakes her head.

Jan bends down, grabs hold of the iron handle and lifts off the hatch cover. He puts it to one side and gazes down into a big, square hole. But this isn’t a drain; it’s some kind of electrical conduit with thick cables running beneath the basement floor. It isn’t very deep, perhaps a metre, but it seems to be the beginning of a narrow passage under the concrete, leading towards the locked door. Everything is pitch black down there.

‘Are you going down?’ Hanna asks.

‘Maybe.’

Jan hesitates. He kneels and peers into the passageway. The hole is so dark that he can’t see how far it goes. There are some old water pipes next to the cables, and swirling balls of dust. There is a faint smell of mould, or perhaps mud, but the concrete in the tunnel looks dry.

Dry, and wide enough for him. There should be room to climb in and crawl under the floor.

Are there rats’ nests down there? Maybe. He listens, his ear cocked towards the underworld, but all is silent. ‘Hello?’ he whispers.

There is no reply, not even an echo.

Jan gets to his feet. He carefully replaces the cover, but leaves the carpet as it is, and looks at Hanna. ‘I’m just going back upstairs … I need more light.’

‘From what?’ she asks.

‘From an Angel.’

32

HANNA STARES AT
the equipment Jan has just taken out of his locker.

‘What’s that?’ she asks.

‘An electronic baby monitor. Have you never seen one before?’

‘No.’ She shakes her head as she contemplates the two plastic boxes. ‘What are they for?’

Jan looks at her. ‘It’s obvious you haven’t got kids … They enable you to keep a check on the children while they’re asleep.’

‘But why can’t you just go and see if they’re OK?’

‘Not everybody has time … or it’s a question of security, I suppose. If the children are safe, the parents feel secure.’ He thinks about William Halevi, and adds, ‘If the parents don’t feel secure, they’re unhappy.’

Hanna takes one Angel, but doesn’t look convinced. ‘So what are you going to do with them now?’

‘I’m going to use one as a torch,’ he says. ‘And if I leave the other one with you, you’ll be able to hear me.’

‘And that will somehow make you feel more secure?’

‘A bit.’

Hanna weighs the Angel in her hand and says, ‘I can listen, but I can’t do any more. I mean, if you need any help down there, I can’t—’

‘It’s enough if you can hear me,’ Jan interrupts her.

It would be a lifeline. A bit like going into a cave with a rope around your ankle.

‘Are you afraid?’ she asks.

‘No. I left the fear in the pocket of my other trousers,’ he says. He smiles, but doesn’t relax. He doesn’t know what is going to happen, he doesn’t know if the guards patrol regularly, but if he meets anyone down there he had better hope it is Lars Rettig, or some friend of his. If they are to be trusted.

Five minutes later he is standing beside the hole in the basement floor. It is almost half past ten now, but down here there is a feeling of timelessness. In the underworld it is always night.

He holds up the Angel and switches on the lamp. ‘OK,’ he says into the microphone. ‘I’m going in.’ His voice echoes in the safe room, but he doesn’t know whether Hanna can hear him or not.

Supporting himself with his hands, he lowers his legs to the bottom of the electrical conduit, just about a metre below the floor of the basement. Once he is in, it is easier to bend down and point the lamp into the passageway; he can see that it carries on straight ahead, into the darkness.

He kneels down, breathing in the dry, dusty air. ‘I’m going in.’

He makes his upper body as flat and narrow as possible, bends his head and creeps along on his hands and knees. He manages it without banging his head. It’s like crawling into a crypt, with immovable blocks of stone on all sides, and the thick ceiling pressing against his back.

Claustrophobia? He has to keep the fear away, not think about coffins and locked sauna doors. He can breathe, he can move. The passageway is wide enough for him to move forward without too much difficulty – he just can’t turn around. All he can do if anything happens is to shuffle backwards.

But what could possibly happen?

Jan coughs, feeling a sudden desire for water. It’s dusty, but he keeps on going. His shadow dances jerkily over the concrete in the glow of the lamp.

When he shines the light ahead of him, he can see that the passageway ends in a grey concrete wall some ten metres away – or perhaps it just bends to one side.

He speaks into the Angel again: ‘I think … I think I’m underneath the door of the safe room now.’

He feels slightly ridiculous, talking to himself. And how certain is he that the security guards up at the hospital don’t have the right sort of technical equipment to pick up every word he is saying? Not certain at all.

He lowers the Angel, grits his teeth and keeps on moving forward. He listens for scrabbling noises or squeaks, but he can’t see any rats. Not yet, anyway. There are little black lumps on the floor that could be droppings – or dead flies. He doesn’t want to look too closely.

First one leg, then the other. Crawl, just crawl.

Suddenly Jan notices something on the roof of the passageway, perhaps five metres away. He lifts up the lamp again and sees that there is another hatch cover up ahead, made of corrugated metal, just like the one behind him.

The sight makes him crawl faster, as best he can. His head and shoulders keep banging against the concrete, his hands and knees are growing numb as they press against the floor – but at last he makes it.

He puts down the Angel in front of him and reaches up, almost convinced that the cover will be locked or screwed down.

But it isn’t. It is loose, and he places the palms of his hands against the metal and pushes upwards. There is a scraping sound, and the heavy cover moves. He is able to push it to one side, slowly and carefully. To his ears the screech of the metal is deafeningly loud as it moves across the concrete floor, bit by bit, but he keeps on going.

A black hole opens up above him; there is no light. The room above is pitch dark, and when he has finished shifting the cover, there is absolute silence.

Jan slowly gets to his feet with the Angel in his hand. He is now standing upright in a square hole in a concrete floor, an opening which is an exact copy of the one he climbed into – but behind him, by the light of the Angel, he can see what must be the other side of the locked door of the safe room.

He clambers laboriously out of the hole. ‘It’s worked,’ he whispers into the Angel. ‘I got through, I’m in … some kind of cellar.’ Then he switches off the transmitter; it feels wrong to be talking out loud, or even whispering, down here in the silence. He raises the lamp, sweeping it around him like a sabre. But the Angel is not a weapon; Jan has nothing with which he could defend himself, and he feels a bit like a four-year-old who has been left all alone in a big, dark house.

The air is stale here. There are no carpets on the floor, no colourful drawings on the walls. Still, having got out of the cramped tunnel, he ought to be feeling better than he actually does.

He is standing in an empty corridor which leads straight ahead, then disappears into the darkness around a corner. When he moves forward and looks around the corner, he sees a dark doorway seven or eight metres further ahead, on the left-hand side.

Jan hesitates, then begins to edge silently and cautiously towards the open doorway. He is in a completely unfamiliar environment now, and he is totally alone. But he blinks into the darkness and manages to summon up Alice Rami’s face – not as she looked when they met as teenagers, but as he has imagined she will look as an adult, the way he has imagined her during all those lonely nights. Beautiful, intelligent, experienced. Perhaps a little weary, bearing the marks of the years that have passed, but strong and smiling.

Rami, his first love, his only girlfriend
.

He gropes for a light switch along the walls, but fails to find one. Without the light of the Angel he would be in total darkness down here, but the beam has grown noticeably less bright over the past couple of minutes, and he has no spare batteries.

At the end of the corridor he raises the Angel and peers into the room beyond. It is an enormous cellar which appears to go on for ever. Jan can see white tiles on both the floor and the walls. The floor is grey with dirt and dust, and black mould has spread over every pale surface.

Is it a shower room? No, he can see decrepit bookshelves and steel tables along the walls. Further away there are some yellow plastic curtains, half closed around rusting beds and low washstands.