The Child Read Online Free PDF Page B

words:
    ‘Do you believe in a life after death, Herr Stern?’
    Although it was coming from the loudspeakers, the metallic voice possessed such weird immediacy that Stern was fleetingly tempted to turn round and see if its owner was standing just behind him, clothed in flesh and blood.
    After a moment’s shocked immobility he slid off the soda and crawled towards the television on his hands and knees. Incredulous, he touched the electrostatically charged screen and ran his fingers over the digital time-and-date line like a blind man reading Braille.
    But even without that information he would have been in no doubt as to when and where the film had been made: ten years ago, in the hospital where Felix had come rosy-cheeked into the world and left it only forty-eight hours later, blue-lipped and cold.
    Stern’s fingers groped their way to the centre of the screen, where his newborn son was lying in a perspex cocoon surrounded by several other babies in cots.
And Felix was alive!
He was waving his puny little arms as if trying to touch the cloud mobile that Sophie and Robert Stern had made for him out of cotton-wool balls, long before his birth, and suspended above his cot.
    ‘Do you believe in the transmigration of souls? In reincarnation?’
    Stern shrank away from the television set as though the ghost of his son had just addressed him personally. The blurred image of the infant in the pale-blue sleepsuit had monopolized his senses to such an extent he’d almost forgotten about the voice.
    ‘You have no idea what you’ve got yourself involved in, have you?’
    He shook his head like a man in a trance, as if he could genuinely communicate with the anonymous speaker whose voice resembled that of a glottic cancer patient condemned to speak through a throat microphone.
    ‘Unfortunately, I cannot reveal my identity for reasons that will soon become apparent to you. That’s why I considered this the most sensible way of getting in touch. You’ve transformed your home into a fortress, Herr Stern. With one exception: your mailbox. I trust you won’t resent my having disrupted your Friday night ritual by substituting this DVD. Believe me, though, what you are about to see will prove far more gripping than the wild-life documentary you actually ordered.’
    A tear detached itself from Stern’s eye as he continued to stare at Felix.
    ‘However, I must now ask you to concentrate with particular intensity.’
    As the camera zoomed in on the baby’s face, Stern felt he’d been kicked in the stomach.
    Who filmed this? And why?
    An instant later he was beyond formulating any more questions in his mind. He wanted to turn away and dash to the bathroom – to bring up his meagre lunch and all his memories with it – but an invisible vice held him fast. So he was compelled to endure the sight of the grainy images that showed his son opening his eyes. Wide, staring and incredulous, they seemed to convey a presentiment that his tiny body would soon lose all its vital functions. Felix gasped for breath, started to tremble, looked as if he had choked on far too big a morsel, and suddenly turned blue.
    At this point Stern couldn’t stop himself any longer. He vomited on the parquet floor. A few moments later, when he turned back and stared at the screen with one trembling hand over his mouth, it was all over. His son was gazing at the camera with eyes blank and lips parted. The whole of the neonatal ward was once more in shot: four cots with four occupants, but one of them unbearably still.
    ‘I’m very sorry. I realize that these last pictures of Felix must be very distressing for you.’
    The grating voice was as sharp as a razor blade.
    ‘But it was unavoidable, Herr Stern. I’ve something important to tell you, and I want you to take me seriously. I assume I can now rely on having gained your full attention?’

8
    Robert Stern felt he would never regain the ability to think clearly. It was a while before he grasped that the