Krysalis: Krysalis by John Tranhaile

was running. He had almost reached the hallway when, to his horror, someone rang the front doorbell.
    He went rigid. Then hasty footsteps sounded overhead and almost without realizing what he was doing he sped to the back of the house.
    The cellar.
    Gerhard slithered down the back stairs and made his way through the utility room, past the boiler, and so into the scullery, where he tiptoed carefully around the remains of the pane of glass, shattered during his recent break-in.
    What was happening up above? Gerhard slipped the outside door open and listened. A delivery man, David having to sign …
    “‘Ere, guv,” he heard the man say.” ‘Scuse me.”
    “What?” David’s voice.
    “Did you know you’d ‘ad a burglar, then? Broken glass, and that.”
    Gerhard closed his eyes. Now he was done for.
“Shit!”
David said.
    “Thought you’d like to know. Ta-ra, then.”
    Wait for David to come down the street steps, knock him out,
you can’t do that…
    But then the front door slammed, no one clattered down to the cellar, Gerhard opened his eyes,
Go!
    Anna was in the driver’s seat. She had the engine started. Gerhard flung himself into the car beside her. Then they were being borne along by the tide of traffic and there was no going back.

CHAPTER
7
    As David threw his raincoat onto the bed he heard a noise downstairs. “Anna?” he shouted.
    Something terrible had happened to her. He just knew it. But he couldn’t imagine what. It was driving him mad.
    He called again, “Anna? Is that you?” The sound of a door closing somewhere below made his tense expression soften a little; that meant she was at home. Sounded like the study … but when he found no one there, he began to panic.
    He was interrupted by a delivery. Wine. He signed the chit while his eyes scanned the square. There was Anna’s red BMW; wherever she’d gone, she hadn’t taken the car, she hadn’t been involved in a car crash, thank God, thank God….
    The delivery man pointed out a break-in. David’s first impulse was to run down and look. Then he thought again. Disaster hovered somewhere on thefringes of his consciousness. Don’t do
anything
on impulse, he ordered himself. Think first.
    Phone the police. No, wait. Search the house. Start at the top.
    He raced up the stairs two at a time. As soon as he entered the master bedroom, something seemed not quite right, something that he had sensed earlier but been unable to identify. His eyes darted into every corner. Anna’s suitcase no longer sat in its usual place on top of the wardrobe. He dashed across to the bed. Her nightgown had gone from under the pillow.
    The sheets were soft, and still redolent of Anna’s night scent, a mélange of warm aromas, full of associations he loved, that made him want to cry. He flung the duvet back and turned away. As he did so, his eyes lighted on two images of himself, giving him a shock.
    A black-and-white photograph of a much younger David stood on the stripped pine chest of drawers between the bedroom windows; it showed his face three-quarters toward the camera, with a narrow tie and white shirt. In those days his hair had been lighter—the photo was fifteen years old—and there was more of it, but the preoccupied smile was the same. Not quite … above the chest of drawers hung a mirror, disclosing David’s contemporary face, and he was startled to see how extensive a network of lines had eaten into his skin. He was forty-two, but looked five years older, a reversal of the state of affairs disclosed by the photograph, which was of a man in fact aged twenty-seven who appeared to be scarcely out of his teens. The new-style David was sallow, etched with the tension that comes from long, midnight-oil-soaked hours of labor in the service of his country. And today there could be nomistaking his haggard expression of dread mixed with exhaustion.
    What next? The hospitals, the neighbors … phone somebody,
anybody.
    Call the police.
    Not yet, not yet.
    Why