Most people think that sleep is death’s little brother, whereas in fact it is his arch enemy. Not sleep, but tiredness, is the vanguard of eternal darkness. It is the arrow the man in the black hood shoots unerringly at us every evening, and which sleep endeavours with all its might to pull out of us every night. Unfortunately, however, it is poisoned, and however much the flow of our dreams tries to wash the poison away, a residue always remains. The older we get, the more difficult it becomes to climb out of bed feeling recovered and rested. Like a once-clean sponge, the capillaries of our existence soak up a black ink, and the sponge becomes ever more saturated. The dream images that were once happy and colourful turn into nightmarish distortions until sleep finally loses its battle against tiredness and one day, exhausted, we pass over into a dreamless oblivion.
Emma loved sleep.
Only she didn’t like the dreams that the poison of exhaustion had transformed into horrific visions. Horrific because they were so real, and this reflected what had actually happened to her.
As every time when she was unconscious, it began with a sound.
Bzzzzzz.
Not with the violent penetration, the heavy breathing in her ear or the fitful coughing that thrust waves of peppermint-smelling breath into her face while the Hairdresser pinched her nipples as he came inside his condom. She couldn’t be certain if these visions were real memories or the excruciating attempt by her brain to fill with nightmares the lost hours between the attack in the hotel and waking up at the bus stop.
It always began with the buzzing of the razor, which grew shriller and sharper when the vibrating blades touched hair.
Hair.
Symbol of sexuality and fertility since the dawn of time. The reason why women in many cultures cover their heads to avoid arousing the devil inside men. The devil, who otherwise…
… would overwhelm, rape and then scalp me…
The Scalper, an awkward but far more accurate term for the attacker than the Hairdresser, because he didn’t style his victims’ hair, he tore their lives from their heads.
As ever, Emma was unable to distinguish between dream and reality when she felt the cool blade on her head, paralysed as she was either by exhaustion or an anaesthetic in her bloodstream. She felt the electric blade vibrating on her forehead, and it didn’t hurt when it moved upwards and to the back of her head. It didn’t hurt and yet it felt like dying.
Why does he do it?
A question to which Emma thought she’d found the answer.
The attacker had raped her and he felt ashamed. An intelligent man, well aware of what he’d done, he wasn’t trying to undo the crime, but to shift the responsibility to the victim.
Emma hadn’t covered herself; her plainly visible, abundant locks of hair had enticed the male animal from his lair. For this she didn’t have to be punished, but made to look respectable so that no man gazing at her could possibly get wrong idea.
That’s why he shaved my head.
Not to humiliate me.
But to drive out the devil that led him into temptation.
Emma heard a crackling whenever the blades hit a crown, felt her head being turned to the side so he could get at her temples, felt a burning when the foil went in too deep and caught a bit of skin, felt a latex glove on her mouth, smelled the rubber covering her lips which would have probably opened to scream, and it dawned on her…
… that he waited for me…
He’d sought her out. He knew her!
He’d been watching her beforehand. Her hair when she twisted a strand around her finger. Her locks that danced on her shoulder blade when she turned around.
He knows me. Do I know him too?
At the very moment she asked herself this question, Emma felt the tongue. Long, rough, full of spittle. It was licking her face. Slobbering over her nose, closed eyes and forehead. This was new.
This had never happened before.
Emma felt a damp pressure on her cheek, opened her eyes and saw Samson above her head.
It took a while for her to realise that she was lying on the living-room floor beside her desk.
She was awake. But the arrow of tiredness had buried itself deeper than before. Her body felt as if it were full of lead, and she wouldn’t have been surprised if her own weight had dragged her down into the basement, if she’d crashed straight through the parquet floor into the laundry room or into the study that Philipp had set up down there so he didn’t have to keep on going to the office at weekends.
But of course she didn’t crash through the robust parquet; she stayed where she was, lying on the ground floor, a couple of metres away from the sizzling fireplace, its flames flickering with unusual vigour.
They were being stirred, as if by the wind. Immediately Emma felt a breath of cold on her face, then on the whole of her body.
A draught.
The fire dancing in the cold draught could only mean one thing.
The front door!
It was open.