Reckless (Free Preview) Read Free Page B

it.   Nothing
for weeks, and then this stranger on the phone who wouldn’t really say why he
had called.
    The streets seemed even more congested than usual, and the
trip was endless, until she finally stood in front of the old apartment
building where he and his brother had grown up.   Stone faces stared down from the gray facade,
their contorted features eroded by exhaust fumes.   Clara couldn’t help but look up at them as the
doorman held the door for her.   She was
still wearing the pale green surgical gown under her coat.   She had not taken the time to change.   She had just run out of the hospital.
    Will.
    He had sounded so lost.   Like someone who was drowning.   Or someone who was saying
farewell.
    Clara pulled the grilled doors of the elevator shut behind
her.   She’d worn the same gown the first
time she’d met Will, in front of the room where his mother had lain.   Clara often worked weekends at the hospital,
not only because she needed the money.   Textbooks
and universities made you forget all too easily that flesh and blood were
actually very real.
    Seventh floor.
    The copper nameplate next to the door was so tarnished that
Clara involuntarily wiped it with her sleeve.
    RECKLESS.   Will had
often made fun of how that name did not suit him at all.
    Unopened mail was piled up behind the door, but there was
light in the hall.
    “Will?”
    She opened the door to his room.
    Nothing.
    He wasn’t in the kitchen, either.
    The apartment looked as if he hadn’t been there in weeks.   But Will had told her he was calling from
here.   Where was he?
    Clara walked past his mother’s empty room, and that of his
brother, whom she had never met.   “Jacob
is traveling.”   Jacob was always
traveling.   Sometimes she wasn’t sure
whether he actually existed.
    She stopped.
    The door to his father’s study was open . Will
never entered that room . He ignored anything that had
to do with his father.
    Clara entered hesitantly.   Bookshelves, a glass
cabinet, a desk.   The model planes
above it wore dust on their wings, like dirty snow.   The whole room was dusty, and so cold that she
could see her breath.
    A mirror hung between the shelves.
    Clara stepped in front of it and let her fingers run over the
silver roses that covered the frame.   She
had never seen anything so beautiful.   The glass they surrounded was dark, as if the
night had spilled onto it.   It was misted
up, and right where she saw the reflection of her face was the imprint of a
hand.
           

5
    Schwanstein
     
    The light of the lanterns filled Schwanstein’s streets like
spilled milk.   Gaslight, wooden wheels
bumping over cobblestones, women in long skirts, their hems soaked from the rain.   The damp
autumn air smelled of smoke, and soot blackened the laundry that hung between
the pointy gables.   There was a railway
station right opposite the old coach station, a telegraph office, and a
photographer who fixed stiff hats and ruffled skirts onto silver plates.   Bicycles leaned against walls on which posters
warned of Gold-Ravens and Watermen.   Nowhere
did the Mirrorworld emulate the other side as eagerly as in Schwanstein, and
Jacob, of course, asked himself many times how much of it all had come through
the mirror that hung in his father’s study.   The town’s museum had many items on display
that looked suspiciously like objects from the other world.   A compass and a camera seemed so familiar to
Jacob that he thought he recognized them as his father’s, though nobody had
been able to tell him where the stranger who had left them behind had vanished
to.
    The bells of the town were ringing in the evening as Jacob
walked down the street that led to the market square.   A Dwarf woman was selling roasted chestnuts in
front of a bakery.   Their sweet aroma
mixed with the smell of the horse manure that was scattered all over the
cobblestones.   The idea of the combustion
engine had not yet made it through the