The Dark Frontier by A. Decker (best books to read non fiction .txt) 📕

was his mother lying there, her body covered in confetti, laid prostrate and dead by a faceless gunman who could have been prevented filled him with an unspeakable terror.

Exhausted and fearful, Frank lay there for some time not knowing what it all meant or what he should do. His eyes remained firmly shut. He felt a deep, dull throb in the back of his head. Awkwardly he reached out an arm and let his fingers grope their way over the smooth cold marble surface – until they found what they were looking for. Through the streams of wet that still poured over his face he gingerly blinked open an eye and focused it in the direction of his hand. Nearly four. His head ached, the pillow was drenched with sweat, and a peculiar smell filled the room.

He dragged himself up. Reluctant to move an inch, but letting the edge of the bed take the bulk of his weight as he rose, he managed to stumble through the narrow bedroom to the window. His head pounded with every step. Rubbing the remnants of that troubled sleep from his eyes, he parted the net curtains and peered down onto the street. It was dry, and there was no hint of rain in the clouds. The net curtains fell back into place as he turned around and caught a strong smell of time waft from their folds. He wondered how many refugees might have sought asylum here. Was it perhaps the smell of fear and persecution he detected? Or just the pheromones from innumerable steamy encounters on the worn-out springs of the bed? Whatever it was, he had to take a walk and clear his head before his dinner date with Rösti. Tucking the envelope in his wallet and his notebook in his pocket, he ventured out of the hotel.

The street outside the entrance to the railway station was full of activity, people who appeared to have somewhere to go or something important to do. He felt out of place. These were people who categorically belonged. To this extent they gave the street a definition. But the impression he had of the city now was no different from the one he had had when he arrived a few hours ago. It was still plastered with referendum posters, and it occurred to Frank that maybe all the bustle was a reflection of their excitement about the vote next day. But he sensed a profound disquiet. Perhaps it was his throbbing head compounded by the noises of city life in a foreign country. A garbled tongue that bore little relation to the German he knew and the sound of tram wheels meshing with steel track to create a persistent, whining sensation in his head. As the noise swelled, confusion and dizziness threatened to overwhelm him.

In an effort to escape, he dived down some steps outside the railway station and into an underpass that led beneath the tracks. He could hear the dull rumble of a train above him and the muffled voice of an announcer making a vain attempt to communicate. Although it seemed initially safer in this subway, Frank quickly came to realise it was the wrong place to be: his mind became disjointed, spinning with scales of noise he had never encountered before. Everything around him was bedlam. A group of oversized adolescents pushing and shoving each other to shrieks of laughter. A passenger wheeling his screeching trolley of baggage past them in the opposite direction. The cacophony was unbearable and had Frank yelping like a frightened dog. He heard the loud adolescents behind him now turn and laugh mockingly behind him. Still yelping he started to run, almost in panic, and kept going – away from the echoes of the tube he had plunged himself into – until he emerged from the subway on the other side of the station.

The fresh air helped to restore some calm. Standing at the mouth of the underpass he looked about. An utterly normal street. Foreign, but normal. And dull. A typical back-of-the-station area that owed all its character to the appearance of having been ignored for the last fifty years.

Still panting from his panic run, he waited for a tram to pass, then crossed the road. It was at that moment – as he set foot on the opposite pavement – that his sense of confusion finally lifted, as if he had suddenly emerged from a cloud of dense fog. An excited sense of discovery and a secure feeling of familiarity at one and the same time. And this was the curious thing: the shop window that seemed to smile at him as he stepped onto the pavement. It was known to him in a way he could not define. He paused at the window to examine its display of second-hand and antiquarian books in the hope he might find a clue. To his surprise many of the wares on offer were in English – middle to late Victorian illustrated books on exotic fauna and flora. On plants, birds, butterflies and other wonders of nature in far-flung corners of the Earth. But the book which attracted his attention above all others was a German book on physiognomy, whose author was as obscure to him as the subject matter. And yet it caught his eye. No, more than that. It was known to him in an intimate way that had him tingling with a warm yet strange excitement. It put him in mind of Ellen’s sister Beth. But he could not remember for the life of him why that should be.

The compulsion to enter the shop, to embrace this knowledge with all the unspent passion usually reserved for an unrequited love in some distant past, was overwhelming. Breathless with expectation, he climbed the two short steps to the door, pushed it open and was briefly startled from his trance by the insistent jangle of the bell.

An elderly lady sat at a desk in a far corner