Chapter 1
Hamburg, 12 December – 23:47
Heavy snow was trying to cover the gray gloom that collapsed on Hamburg, but it couldn’t. Although the yellow light of the streetlights showed the snowflakes like tulle, there was a muffled bad luck in the veins of the city. Detective Klara Weiss was sitting on the top floor of the old apartment building number 17 on Rugenstraße, in the apartment left by her mother, with a yellowed notebook in her hand. The house was quiet. Very quiet. Only the ticks of the antique clock on the wall were singing like the remnants of the past. The cover of the notebook seemed to be darkened with coal. Its pages were fragile, some of its edges were curled with burn marks. When she turned the first page of the notebook, there was only one symbol inside: Three eyes in a circle. This sentence written under it made her tremble:
“Die Stimme wird kommen.” The sound will come.
Klara still couldn’t understand why her mother hid this notebook for years. The woman was a nurse; she was a quiet, religious, simple woman. At least Klara thought so. Until she found this notebook under the old music box three days after her funeral. As she turned the pages, the writings became more complicated and older. Some sentences shift to Latin, some pages were written in Arabic letters. One of them caught her attention. It was underlined with ink:
“Five nights. Five signs. Five doors.”
Just then, a muffled hissing sound came from the radiator honeycomb. Klara was startled involuntarily. The heater was old, but this sound... was different. It was like a breathing exchange. A gray smoke filtered through the honeycombs and dispersed into the room. Not smoke — ash.
At that moment, the cover of the notebook closed by itself. A weight was felt on the table. And a voice whispered with a tone too thin for the human ear to perceive:
“The first eye is open.”
Just then the phone rang. The incoming call was coming from Commissioner Wagner. There was tension in his voice:
“Klara. A body was found in the port area. But... this is not an ordinary case. He seems to have gouged out his eyes with his own hand. There is also a sign in his throat. You have to come.”
Klara turned to the window while hanging up the phone. It was still snowing but... There was someone under the street lamp. It wasn’t moving. It had turned its head to Klara’s window. But... that thing had no face. It was faceless. Klara rubbed her eyes. Looking down again, the figure was gone. Was this a hallucination? Or was her mother’s notebook really... a door? While putting on her jacket in a hurry, she threw the notebook into her bag. Just as she was about to close the door, she looked at the notebook out of the corner of her eye. Self-opened:New page, new lines:
“The land will take the first. The tongue will be silenced. Eyes should be closed.”
