© by author (Alfred Bekker, writing as Henry Rohmer)

Cover: Werner Öckl

© of the digital edition 2019 by AlfredBekker/CassiopeiaPress, Lengerich (Westf.)

www.alfredbekker.de

postmaster@alfredbekker.de

The cone of the spotlight caught Carlo Carisi when he entered the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. His face was pale as a dead man's, his mouth like a thin line. The eyes were bloodshot and gave the impression of fatal exhaustion.

Fingers reminiscent of a skeleton clasped the neck of the violin and the bow. They trembled so much that it was hard to believe that this man was capable of producing a single clean tone on his instrument.

The audience held its breath.

At that moment one could have literally heard a falling pin at the Met.

Carlo Carisi, perhaps the greatest violin virtuoso of all time, had returned to the stage. Years of abstinence lay between his last performance and today. Dozens of critics sat in the audience with sharpened pencils to tear up the game of Carisis. Most of them believed that the great maestro had his best times long past.

Like a living corpse, trembling and insecure, Carisi stepped into the middle of the stage, while the accompanying pianist now also took his place.

The first tone penetrated the dome of the great hall with a plaintive sound.

Carisi's face was changing into a mask.

The bloodshot eyes flickered and around the thin lips a smile played as cold as death.

All of a sudden, the skinny, mummylike old man on stage seemed to be filled with new life. Maybe it was just a light effect caused by the spotlights, but one could almost get the impression that the parchment-like skin of his cheeks had regained some colour and suppleness.

There was a flash of lightning in his eyes.

New life force obviously flooded through him - a force he mysteriously drew directly from his game. With breakneck speed his skinny fingers now sped over the sides, grabbed at them with almost somnambulistic certainty and provided one sparkling cascade of sound after the other.

The piano accompaniment stayed in the background, playing only restrained, dull-sounding chords that sounded like a threat.

For minutes the audience listened in devout silence to this virtuoso, whose art was now probably beyond all doubt. The tears formulated in advance would turn into praise.

An almost hypnotic fascination emanated from the game Carisis. And he obviously enjoyed this performance. But it was not only his game that captivated the audience. A look into his cold grey eyes was almost disturbing. So much hatred, so much sheer rage and so much cynical contempt lay in Cari's gaze... One could almost believe to hear a hoarse, gruesome laughter from the background that mingled with the breakneck tone cascades. Dancing and without any uncertainty the bow made the sides sound.

Ever new and more unusual clay figures lined up next to each other.

The virtuoso played himself into an almost intoxicating state.

He shut his eyes.

The devilish grin remained, widened.

The deathly pale white of his face changed visibly into a rosier shade.

As if his withered skin was filled with new life the more intensively he devoted himself to his game.

Carisi seemed to be in a trance.

Then suddenly a croaking sound came from the first row of the audience.

A man in evening dress slipped from his chair.

A murmur went through the crowd. Someone rushed to help, a woman called: "A doctor!"

"I'm a doctor," replied a broad-shouldered, gray-haired man with a dark complexion, who had his place a few rows further back.

"Come on.

Undeterred, the virtuoso continued with his playing.

His eyes remained closed. He didn't seem to notice what was happening to the audience, he had gotten himself into a completely enraptured state.

"My God! Richard!" cried a woman's voice. "He wasn't even 40 and now he looks like..."

"He's dead, ma'am," the doctor said, leaning over the man lying on the floor.

In the meantime such a tumult had broken out in the audience that the virtuoso's tones hardly penetrated.

"My hair!" cried one man's voice. "You've turned all grey!"

A woman started screaming loudly and piercingly.

Excited voices were talking in disarray.

The crowd was on the move.

"I've got to get out of here!" someone shouted in a panic. Marshals were desperately trying to keep the emerging unrest under control.

A man in a tuxedo went on stage, stepped up to the microphone and spoke incantatory to the crowd.

"Please remain calm," he cried hoarsely.

No one listened to him.

The virtuoso meanwhile took the violin from his neck. His smile was broad, almost as if he was mockingly amusing himself about what had happened and quietly sniggering at himself. Carisi took a deep breath.

Yeah, he thought so. The power that flows through all living things and is so damned precious... She's back!

There are days when nothing works out - and this evening at the Met was definitely one of them. The general chaos that had broken out inside the opera building had flushed me out into the open and I was glad to have escaped with reasonably healthy skin. Only my tuxedo was a bit battered, because somebody had absolutely meant to hold on to it.

My car was in a side street. It was cold and fine drizzle was falling. My coat was still in the cloakroom, but I didn't feel like beating my ears half the night with it now, to line up there in an endless queue. It was enough if I repeated it over the next few days.

I turned up the battered collar of the tuxedo and buried my hands in the pockets.

My car was on the side of the road.

I hadn't reached him yet, when a noise made me drive around.

Quick steps.

A young woman ran towards me in panic. According to her clothing, she had also belonged to the audience that had wanted to witness Carlo Carisi's comeback before a kind of mass hysteria prevented the concert from continuing.

The young woman ran barefoot.

She held the high-heeled shoes in her hands. The nut brown hair fell far over her shoulders. She turned around, panting, looking back at her pursuers who were now coming around the corner.

There were four people.

They seemed to be quite sure of their cause, at least they were not in the slightest hurry. When the pursuers stepped into the flickering light spread by the neon advertisement of a boutique, I saw their faces.

Cold shivers involuntarily seized me.

Like skulls, it went right through me.

There was something mummylike about the faces of the pursuers. The skin looked like parchment. Pale and wrinkled she stretched over her bones. The eyes were fixed and...

...dead!, I immediately thought, although of course it was absurd. Only now did I see that a woman was also among the pursuers. According to their clothing, the chasing group also consisted of people who had just finished an opera visit. The woman wore an evening dress that reached to her ankles, the men wore tuxedos.

I stared at them spellbound.

The young woman had reached me by now. She stopped, gasped for breath. The long evening dress made it quite difficult for her to walk.

She turned back briefly once more, looking at the pursuers who followed her with strange mechanical movements.

Like puppets, I thought.

Or like zombies...

You've seen too many lousy movies! I'll make a fool of myself in a minute.

"You are in trouble, ma'am?" I asked.

She did not answer.

Panic lit up in the eyes of the young woman. She stared past me down the street. Also from there some shadowy figures approached now. They were only recognizable as dark outlines, but the puppet-like manner of their movements spoke for itself.

The young woman pointed at my car.

"Is this yours?"

"Yes."

"Take me with you! Please!"

"Whatever..."

"Quickly! Or it'll be too late!"

Her voice vibrated. She was half cold, half scared. I unlocked the passenger door of the Chrysler and she got in. I circled the bonnet, stopped for a moment and took another look at the pursuers who were approaching from all sides.

Then I got in the car as well and took the wheel.

"What's your trouble with them?" I asked.

"Get on with it!" she shouted at me.

"Sure - I just like to know what I'm getting into!"

I started the car, turned it left into the road.

The pale shadow figures positioned themselves in the middle of the street.

I honked at her. But that did not impress them in the least.

"Just drive! Go on!" cried the woman, beside herself with fear.

"Are you crazy?"

I braked. May the young woman next to me also be in great distress - I had no intention of committing cold-blooded murder for her. Especially not until I knew what it was all about and who was right.

The tires squealed.

The Chrysler slipped a bit over the wet asphalt and stopped only a few meters away from the shady figures.

"It would be really nice if you could give me a faint idea of what's actually going on here," I whispered to my passenger. "Who knows, maybe they're out there in the law, looking for you to bring you to justice!"

"Do they look like cops?" she shouted. "They'll kill you and me!"

"We'll see," I said and reached under my jacket, where a large-caliber automatic was holstered.

The young woman looked at me with big eyes.

"I'm a private detective," I told her.

"Put that thing away! They won't do anything with it!"

"Oh - but I should have just run those people over, huh?"

I opened the door, the gun pointed.

"Get out of the way!" I shouted.

Throaty, almost animal sounds came towards me. The pale shadow figures continued to approach. They were completely unimpressed!

"Freeze!" I shouted again. But I wasn't seriously thinking of shooting. Not to unarmed men and women - and these men and women obviously were.

"You can't do anything with your gun!" cried the young woman from the passenger seat. "Get back in the car..."

That was when the first of these zombie-like creatures had reached me. I looked into an ashen, wrinkled face, a mummy-like grimace of death... I was overcome by icy shivers and I began to suspect that my counterpart had hardly anything human about him...

Dry fingers - little more than bones covered with parchment-like skin - gripped me with a strength I had never thought they could handle. A violent impact caught me, threw me a few meters further. Hard I got on the asphalt, rolled off and tried to get back on my feet as fast as possible.

An almost inhuman strength had been in the skinny arms of my counterpart.

The young woman screamed.

Glass clanked.

One of the zombies had smashed the window of the passenger door with a simple punch. The young woman fought back desperately while hands of bone were wrapped around her neck, choking her. I lifted the automatic and fired. My shot swept closely over the roof of the Chrysler and hit the shrike in the shoulder. The force with which the projectile went through his tuxedo tore him back.

His deathly pale face seemed irritated. The empty eyes were looking for me. Her color changed. They turned glowing red. A grunting sound came over the chapped, bloodless lips. An angry roar, not a cry of pain.

With his hands he touched the spot where he had been hit. The wound did not bleed. And it didn't seem to affect the man any further.

The ghostly glow in his eyes began to pulsate. The young woman opened the door, slammed it with full force against the strangler's body, who wanted to reach for it again. Before he could do that, I gave him another shot in the upper body, which made him stagger back about a meter. He stood there swaying while the young woman ran for her life.

Even though their pursuers had an almost uncanny power, their movements were relatively slow.

The woman skillfully dodged one of the zombies, then she reached me.

"Didn't I tell you?" she gasped.

I noticed the dark red stone set in silver that she wore around her neck. For a moment I thought I could see a glimmer in it. A glimmer that reminded me of the ghostly glow in the eyes of that mummy-like shrike I had shot.

But maybe it was my imagination...

"Look out!" she shouted.