So I flicked on the overhead light and read it.
Dear Sam,
It is a shame that we were not able to meet each other. On the telephone, you sounded like a nice young man. I am sure this whole business must affect you deeply, because you are so closely involved. Maybe you are even more scared than I am now and that says a lot. I would therefore like to express my admiration and respect for your strength.
A few things have happened tonight that made it clear I cannot go on living. Not only have I hurt my children—which is unforgivable—but I realize now that what’s happening to me will also happen to them, if I don’t end my life right now. I have been carrying a virus ever since that terrible night on August 18 and my children must absolutely not be infected by it.
There are no words to describe the infinity. It is too dark.
Therefore, I have no choice. I’m terribly sorry that it has to end like this. I had hoped that I would have more time. Possibly then we could have joined forces to fight it. Although I seriously doubt it. What your friend brought down from the mountains cannot be explained by scientific hypothesis. That is what scares me so much and makes me take a somber view of what is in store for you. From my own professional experience, I know that if we cannot explain something, we often cannot cure it either.
I hope I am wrong. It is too late for me, but maybe not for you. I am leaving you my notes. I hope that my insights can be of use to you.
I beg you from the bottom of my heart: end it, Sam. Whatever it is, you have to make it stop. Whatever it takes. Before there are more innocent victims.
I will die in the hope that you, if you survive, will help my children understand one day that I haven’t lost my mind.
万段 Emily Wan
Rain was hitting the windshield. The wind was blowing wet leaves over the street with the roar of an invisible force that seemed to have come from the mountains themselves. It had found me, even here, even here.
And you will also find out what it’s like to fall. To fall . . . and to fall . . . and to fall . . . and to fall.
Emily had fallen too.
Small, fragile Sam.
I leafed through the bundle of notes. Couldn’t resist reading the first lines. When I got to the second paragraph, I moaned, flung the sheets of paper onto the shotgun seat, and pinched my eyelids.
I was shaking. Shivering. From the cold. Because I was soaked. With misery. I was empty. Tired, exhausted, but mostly empty, empty, empty.
I sat like that for a long time, not knowing what to do next. Then I slowly drove home.
The house was quiet. Dead.
I took the covers off our bed and cocooned myself in them. I sat on the couch and started to read.In a Glass Darkly
In a Glass Darkly
Emily Wan’s document
I remember everything about it—with an effort. I see it all, as divers see what is going on above them, through a medium, dense, rippling, but transparent.
—Sheridan Le Fanu
October 16
It started again this morning. I don’t want to work myself up, but I have to take a realistic view of my situation. I am certain now that it was a targeted attack. Sue has forbidden me to call it that, but she hasn’t experienced it. Everyone who has either doesn’t talk about it or is dead. That’s how things stand now.
It happened during the condolence service for Dr. Claire Stein, a colleague from the PMU whom I half knew from our Pilates group class at the gym. Her death affected me deeply, because I know it was not an accident. It may have looked like an accident—her car shot off the overpass on the ring road with such high speed that the impact crushed her body even before it was flooded with the Amsterdam–Rhine Canal’s black water. But I’ve made inquiries and the coroner found an extremely high concentration of Rohypnol in her blood. No psychologist takes seventeen capsules of Rohypnol, then gets behind the wheel without intending the toxicology report to function as a suicide note. The recently widowed Victor Rijneveld knows it too. It was written all over his face. The sudden death of a loved one always leaves deep furrows—mirrors don’t lie, after all—but a violent death such as murder or suicide is so unmistakably, fundamentally harsh on the relatives. Rijneveld barely seemed present when he accepted the condolences. Lost in shock and incomprehension, he kept groping at the empty space beside him with his pale hand, as if he were trying to confirm the absence of his wife. It was all so very sad.
But there’s another reason for why Dr. Stein’s death has had such an impact on me. I suspect that it is in some way I do not yet fully understand, connected to what is going on with me! And she is the one who sowed the seeds of that suspicion, when she came up to me after Pilates, only four days before she died.
I’ll write it all down—but first today.
It hit me when I left the funeral procession and joined the coffee table. I felt it coming, that was the worst part. As if it had kept an eye on me during the ceremony, waiting for the right moment to strike.
It all came back: the acute goose bumps, the air pressing too heavily in my lungs, that sense of increased electricity, as if the nerves running through my spinal cord were literally dilating. In neurology we call it an aura: some epileptics can feel the onset of an attack by a strange taste in the mouth or by certain hallucinations. This was my aura, but there was something else. The sudden certainty that there was someone there, someone I couldn’t see. Right behind me.
I instinctively turned around but saw only the bleak faces of the attendees. Men in suits and women in black jackets or dresses, hospital employees, loved ones, Dr. Stein’s friends. I felt the gazes of those who were nearest to me. And then I understood: They felt it too. As if I was surrounded by a cloud of poison gas. They sensed it, couldn’t place it, and dismissed it as the charged atmosphere of mourning. But when I excused myself and wriggled out of the line, people moved away from me and dispersed, as if I were emanating some sort of negative force.
Because it was following me. I could feel it.
I pushed through the crowd toward the washrooms and got there just in time. The door had barely closed before it happened. My brain switched off the film of my perception and started to absorb reality in photo flashes, the kind that stick in your mind and allow you, even in a state of total panic, to assess situations with extreme clarity. In those flashes I saw myself reflected in the mirrors above the sinks. And I won’t beat around the bush: there was someone there, leaning over me. It is my professional duty to say that it must have been a figment of my imagination, the brain fooling itself into seeing human shapes in shadows that scare the living daylights out of us. But I can’t believe that any longer.
I could see it, right behind me.