Sun and Shadow by Åke Edwardson Page B

again.
    Angela stood behind the door. She peered out through the peep-hole and could see the landing in a grotesque wide-angled perspective, but there was no sign of anybody outside. The light was still on. She opened the door, and immediately outside were some grains of black gravel, and a shallow pool of water glittering in the light.
    That could be from me, she thought. It takes some time for water to evaporate in the stairwell when there’s a constant cold draft coming from below. Persecution mania. I’ll be wandering around checking for pools of water and grains of gravel all over the building next. She gave a little snort and closed the door.
    The alarm clock on the bedside table said twelve-fifteen. She’d have to be up again in six hours, ready for the hospital corridors. The lumps of plaster that had fallen out of the green examination-room walls. Did they always have to be green? Doors with the paint peeling off. Patients must lose hope as they sit waiting and see how the hospital is slowly falling apart. If they couldn’t repair a wall, how the hell could they heal a body that had—
    The telephone rang. Angela gave a start. It rang again, seemed to be moving across the table. It’ll be Erik, she thought as she lifted the receiver. It’s happened.
    “Yes? Angela here.”
    Not a word, just the sound of static.
    “Hello? Erik?”
    A rustling. Another sound that she couldn’t identify. Was that a voice in the background? Perhaps, very faint. Calls were finding it difficult to make their way across Europe tonight.
    “I can’t hear anything. Maybe you should redial? Can you hear me? I can’t hear you.”
    Now she could hear the echo of voices, but that was normal: fragments of conversation from anywhere in the world could be picked up by different lines and transformed into a sort of Esperanto. It could be any language at all, a conversation on a mountain peak millions of miles away.
    Now she could hear breathing. That wasn’t from a distant mountain peak. It sounded nearby.
    “Hello? Is anybody there?”
    Breathing again, clear, intentional. It had taken over from the distant babble.
    She suddenly felt scared to death. She wanted the babble to return. That had been reassuring. She thought about the images she’d seen in her mind’s eye. The footsteps, the images again, the pool of water ...
    More breathing.
    “Say something! I can hear that there’s somebody there.” She made her voice sound as threatening as she could, but it came over as tiny, frightened. “Who is it?” And then she thought she could hear something else, something more ... and she dropped the receiver. It hit the edge of the table and fell to the floor and lay there, the earpiece pointing upward. She stared at it for a few seconds, then lifted it up.
    It was silent now. The silence was broken by a click, then came the familiar dial tone.
    For Chrissakes, Angela! Keep calm. There are idiots who dial a wrong number but can’t bring themselves to admit it. There are also madmen who ring numbers haphazardly in the hope of somebody answering.
    But she wanted to talk to Erik, hear his voice, be reassured.
    His mobile was switched off. She left a message. What was going on? He promised he would never switch it off while he was away.
    She looked at the receiver in her hand. Should she leave it off for the rest of the night? That would be stupid. Erik might need to phone. No doubt there was some temporary fault affecting his mobile. She dialed his number again.
     
    “Erik here.”
    “Why the hell don’t you answer the phone?”
    “Eh? What are you talking about?”
    “You haven’t been answering. Your phone was switched off.”
    He looked at it, as if half-expecting to see some fault or other.
    “When was this?”
    “Just now. A couple of minutes ago.”
    “Really? Well, it’s working okay now.”
    “I can hear that, for God’s sake.”
    “What’s the matter, Angela?” He looked at his watch. Nearly one. “You seem