Craig Russell - A fear of dark water

Niels watched as a woman pulled up behind the convertible in an equally new, boxy, ugly Alfa-Romeo Giulietta. Everything about her, her look, her clothes, her hair, told Niels that she was a female equivalent of Merc-Man. She greeted the Mercedes driver with a kiss and a laugh and they both went into the cafe together.

This was it. The next phase. Until now, the group had restricted itself to torching cars like this at night. But it was almost a tradition for the cars of the rich to be sporadically targeted in the Schanzenviertel and it was never clear which group was responsible. Often it was down to individuals simply protesting about the gentrification of the Schanzenviertel and the erosion of its edgy, individualistic character. But that was not what Niels was about, what the group was about. They were the Guardians of Gaia. Protectors of the Earth. Soldiers in a war to defend the air, the sea, the soil.

He looked up again towards the end of the street where Harald waited, ready with the motorbike they had stolen the night before. That too would be torched. Afterwards. Harald, on the Commander’s orders, knew nothing about the automatic in Niels’s pocket, nor that this daylight arson attack was, in fact, an execution.

Niels put the holdall on the ground and unzipped it. He didn’t take anything out; he was just getting it ready. He picked it up again and walked purposefully across the street. As he approached the Mercedes, he stayed on the road side of it, pulling a hammer with a spiked head from his combat jacket with his free hand. As he passed the car, he heard the angry buzz of the motorcycle engine as Harald gunned it up the street behind him. Niels smashed the driver’s window with the hammer and the car’s alarm exploded into an urgent whine. Pushing the holdall through the window, he walked on, repocketing the hammer. Once he was a few metres clear of the car he turned to see Harald, his face hidden by his helmet, pull up alongside the Mercedes and toss in the lighted Molotov cocktail before accelerating away and screeching to a halt alongside Niels.

‘Get on!’ Harald shouted at Niels and held out an arm.

The couple were now out on the street, having rushed from the cafe on hearing the Mercedes’s alarm. Niels could see the flames inside the car increase in intensity, but it was still just the Molotov cocktail that burned: the five litres of plastic-bagged accelerant hadn’t ignited yet.

‘Get on! ’ Harald shouted even more urgently. But Niels was hypnotised by the flames licking at the inside of the windshield. The fabric of the soft-top now burned and flapped. Merc-Man and his girlfriend were now out at the car, but were too focused on what was happening to the Mercedes to look in Niels’s direction. Merc-Man looked distraught and tugged at his hair, doing a little dance of decision/indecision, towards the car and back from it. He hadn’t a clue what to do. Niels guessed that there was something he wanted to rescue from inside the car.

Niels closed his hand around the butt of the pistol still hidden in his pocket. But for some reason he hesitated. There was something about this situation, this environment, this event, that suddenly seemed overpoweringly familiar. Niels felt himself enter a fugue of deja vu. He felt he had taken the pistol out of his pocket but knew he had not.

But then, Niels realised he knew what was going to happen before it did happen, and that this realisation had nothing to do with deja vu. Merc-Man pulled the sleeve of his jacket down over the palm of his hand in an improvised glove and snatched at the handle of the car. The door swung open and the man stepped forward. It was at that exact moment that the five litres of accelerant that Niels had dropped in through the shattered window ignited. It was like watching a flower blossom: a huge, curved, beautiful ball of flame burst out through the open door and up through the burning soft top. For a couple of seconds, Merc-Man disappeared into the flame, was consumed by it. Then Niels heard screaming. The girlfriend screaming. Onlookers screaming. He even heard a strangled, guttural cry, helmet-muffled, come from Harald behind him. But above it all, shrill and inhuman, he heard the screams of Merc-Man. The ball of flame surged up into the sky and Merc-Man was revealed again. His entire body was burning. All of him. A single walking, screaming flame. He staggered forward and fell onto the paving. A couple of onlookers ran forward and threw their coats over the burning man. Two men in the crowd suddenly noticed Niels and Harald and pointed at them.

Niels remained static, staring at the burning man and trying to remember if he really had seen him burn before, so many times that Niels couldn’t count them. In that moment, he realised that none of what he was seeing was real. That everything they had tried to convince him of at the hospital had been lies. This was not reality. This was a fiction; an imitation. He did not really exist and what he had just witnessed had not really happened.

‘For Christ’s sake, Niels…’ He heard Harald’s voice urgent behind him. ‘Get on the fucking bike. Now!’

It took the men in the crowd a second or two to work out the chronology of events, to apportion the blame for what they had witnessed. By the time they had started to run towards Niels, he was already on the back of the stolen bike. Harald accelerated away, not stopping at give-ways and causing a couple of cars to come to a screeching halt.

Sitting on the pillion seat, Niels still had the image of the screaming, burning man bright in his mind as they made their escape through the Schanzenviertel’s narrow streets. And he heard the strangest sound. Laughter.

His own laughter.

‘Where are you now?’

‘In the car. Hands-free.’

‘I’m impressed,’ said Susanne. ‘Welcome to the twenty-first century.’

‘This isn’t the twenty-first century,’ said Fabel. ‘I distinctly remember on TV back in the 1970s they promised that by now we’d all be scooting about on hovercars, wearing silver jumpsuits and taking our holidays on the moon. How’s Wiesbaden?’

‘Bourgeois. More bourgeois than Hamburg, if you can imagine that. Where are you going? Are you taking advantage of my absence to have a tryst with some lithe blonde?’

‘Hardly. I’m off to see Berthold Muller-Voigt. At his domicile, don’t you know?’

‘Since when did you hobnob with the Schickeria? What do you have to see him about?’

‘Don’t know yet. He asked me. Funny thing…’

‘In what way funny?’

‘Just that he’s usually so cool and in control. Something’s shaken him up. What, I think I’m about to find out. You missing me?’

‘Terribly, but the young Italian waiter from the restaurant is keeping my mind off it. I’ll be back the day after tomorrow.’

‘By the way, what did you mean, “ Poppenbutteler Schleuse ”?’

‘What?’

‘The text you sent me. Enigmatic, I’ll give you that.’

‘Jan, I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Earlier today,’ he sighed. ‘I was having lunch at the Fahrhaus cafe and I got a text from you. It said “ Poppenbutteler Schleuse ”. Nothing else.’

‘And I thought you never drank at lunchtimes.’

‘I’m not joking, Susanne. It came from your number.’

‘Well, I didn’t send it. Definitely. Maybe you do have a blonde stashed away somewhere and she’s telling you where to meet for that tryst. I believe there’s a really good restaurant there.’

‘I’m being serious, Susanne.’

‘So am I,’ she said emphatically. ‘I didn’t send you that text. Oh, Jan, you know what you’re like with technology. It took me ages to show you how to work an mp3 player and now you’d be lost without it. That message can’t have come from me. You better check with work. Maybe it was Anna Wolff. You know something? I sometimes get the feeling that Anna would like a little tryst with you up at Poppenbutteler Schleuse herself.’