The Gateway

In the heart of Europe lies an ancient portal. It is situated at a juncture, at the point where two ley lines -- invisible avenues of energy -- cross.

For ten thousand years, this doorway has connected the worlds of man and myth. But now the old energies are fading, and tomorrow the ancient gateway will close.

For ever.

***

Not for the first time, Bruno was running.

He careered mindlessly along a snow-covered Gardeschützenweg, his feet struggling to find purchase as he veered sharply across the icy cobbled street and ploughed calf-deep through a banked drift on the opposite side. Behind him, somewhere, he could hear the distant sirens of the Polizei.

He tried to ignore the sound, tried to push it to the back of his mind. But it was getting progressively harder to do so. The shrill scream and flashing lights had been a part of his life for as long as he could remember, so much so that they even haunted his dreams. He could not remember how long it had been since he had slept -- really slept. Pure unadulterated slumber.

The sirens were getting closer, he was sure. Struggling through the freezing bank of snow, he snapped his head round to see an approaching white glare of headlamps fused with pulsing blue. They were nearer than he had thought, and bore down on his position relentlessly. He ducked low as the car slowed and two wide and powerful torchbeams shone from the front windows, sweeping the verges. Bruno could feel his heart racing wildly. He had nowehere else to run.

The low burr of the squad car sounded deafening in the still January air as it drew alongside his hiding place and loitered interminably. The torchbeam cut through the shadows like a laser and Bruno's chest began to burn. He could not afford a single breath, which would steam like a hot spring in the beam and betray him in an instant.

Please God, he thought desperately.

The car had stopped, and the torchbeam lingered. Bruno felt the adrenalin rush to his legs, and felt the rising compulsion to spring from cover, make a second run for it.

Do it! It's your only chance!

No!

The schizoid exchange ensured his liberty. The car idled for just a second longer, then its engine growled into life and carried it off into the frigid darkness.

***

Bruno had waited a full five minutes before he clawed his way out of the snow drift where he had successfully hidden himself. His clothes were wet through, and he had started to shiver uncontrollably as he had retraced his steps and took a right off Gardeschützenweg towards the S-bahn station at Botanischer Garten. He staggered down the ice-coated steps there and on to the platform where he slumped against the ticket machine, drew his knees up and hugged them to his body.

He wished that some of the others were here: Dieter, Florian, Annett. But they had not shared his same strange compulsion. Only little Franziska had been willing to accompany him, but the others had forbidden it.

Bruno rubbed hard at his jeans, trying to elicit some warmth from the sodden fabric as he remembered the morning he had first shared his recurring dream with the others. They had stared at him as though he had smoked one two many of the joints they used to numb them to their already meaningless existences. The End of the World? Dieter had snorted in derision. That day had arrived long ago for them all, didn't he realise?

Bruno had tried to make them understand, had sought to impress the urgency of the situation upon them with an almost evangelical zeal. He couldn't explain it. If he thought about it, then it made absolutely no sense to him either. He just knew what he felt. And what he had seen in his dream.

The huge ticking clock which haunted his sleep was even more disturbing then the lights and sirens of the Polizei.

***

The familiar whine of the train jolted Bruno from the fitful sleep that he had somehow drifted into. He opened his eyes to see the line of lighted windows resolving slowly out of the blur into which they had initially merged themselves. The train came to a halt and Bruno lumbered awkwardly towards the carriage in his cloying wet clothes. The doors slid shut behind him after a moment, and he dropped into a seat, revelling in the cocoon of relative warmth. He looked at his watch: 12.27a.m.

Tick-tock... tick-tock....

Time was running out. He didn't have long now. If only he knew where it was that he was supposed to be!

The ignorance gnawed at his mind and threatened his sanity. He had spent the last three nights wandering aimlessly around the city; compelled to look for something that he was not even sure he would recognise when he found it. It was the same strange compulsion he had known all his life. The sense of unbelonging that was not just due to his life in the children's home. If it had been, then the others would have felt what he did too. This was something else....

He felt himself drifting into semi-consciousness, lulled by the motion of the deserted train. Flames licked around the edges of his vision, as though his mind were catching fire, and the sudden ignition framed the huge clock which again loomed out of the blackness. It's persistent ticking, so soft at first, increased in volume until it filled the whole universe. Ticking, ticking, always ticking.... The hand on the clock crept closer to midnight -- every night, one minute more. It quivered now, straining towards twelve, and Bruno felt as though all the air were being sucked out of his lungs....

He jerked wildly in his seat and lurched back into wakefulness. How long had he been asleep? He glanced up at the overhead display which announced the stations ahead and saw that they were still only between Rathaus-Steglitz and Feuerbachstraße. It was only minutes since he had climbed aboard.

He fought against the weariness tugging at his eyelids. He could not afford to sleep. Time was short.

Too short....

***

He had slept restlessly for almost twenty minutes, stirring providentially as the train drew in to another station. He had blinked hard to clear his vision, saw the name Anhalter-Bahnof on the wall of the deserted platform.

Then the doors had slid open, and the two uniformed police officers had stepped onboard.

Had they been looking for him? He did not know for sure, but the brief look that they had exchanged convinced him that he was their target....

And so again he was running. The freezing night air penetrated the thick scarf drawn around his face and bit deeply into the flesh beneath as he scaled the escalator two steps at a time and plunged into the dark streets outside the train station. Behind him, the police officers were shouting, and Bruno heard an unnerving crack which might just have been the ice breaking under his feet. Or it could have been something more.

A gunshot?

They know who you are! Who you really are! They will not let you escape!

Bruno shook his head. Who he really was? Maybe the look which the others had given him had been justified after all. Maybe he really was crazy. Maybe that's what the Polizei knew.

Maybe....

He ran on, blindly, through Hafenplaz, and doubled back along Dessauer Straße in a desperate attempt to throw the policemen off his trail. He almost fell on several occasions as his feet skated on ice polished as smooth as glass.

He slowed only when he was sure that he had lost his pursuers, when he could no longer hear their angry shouts. His thighs were burning with cold and the exertion of the chase, and he staggered into the mouth of Niederkirchnerstraße, walking only half-consciously along the avenue. He looked at the luminous fingers on his watch: 1.15a.m. The time meant nothing, but the sense of urgency was overwhelming now. As though he were already in danger of being late for an appointment which had been arranged for him before he was even born.

He almost fell with fatigue. Nothing made sense. Even the austere walls of the children's home had been preferable to this madness. Why hadn't he listened to the others? Even misery was relative. Like Dante's hero, he felt as though he were plumbing the deepest circles of hell.

The minutes ticked by. The huge clock which had this far only dominated his dreams began to shimmer before his waking eyes.

Almost midnight.

***

He found her lying on the Unter den Linden. At first he thought that she was dead -- she just lay unmoving, covered in a light dusting of snow which had started to fall steadily again. But as he stooped beside her, she moaned softly, and he turned her over, feeling a slight but consistent heat emanating from her freezing body.

"Tick-tock, tick-tock," she whispered, almost inaudibly.

He had stared for a long moment into her pleading eyes, sharing a moment of empathy.

"Help me," she whispered again.

He had lifted her to her feet. She could have been little more than ten years old -- even more of a child than he was. And she seemed so frail. Even in the darkness, he could see that she was deathly pale.

At first she leaned on him, trying to use him for support as she walked. But she was so weak, that she could barely string a half-dozen steps together before falling again. Consumed part with pity, and part with increasing impatience, Bruno had finally scooped the little girl into his arms and had pressed on, amazed at how light she felt. He could feel her bones sticking into him through the thick layers of clothing.

At the far end of the Unter den Linden, he could see a strange golden glow, and Bruno felt a surge of energy in his tired limbs which drove him resolutely towards it.

***

In the famous square known as Pariser Platz, they waited. Dozens of them. All classes, all backgrounds. The openly destitute rubbed shoulders with the patently affluent. They had only one thing in common.

Their singular voice.

"Tick-tock, tick-tock." The strange repetition drifted into the night air like a mantra. A unified whisper, growing in urgency with each utterance.

In Bruno's arms, the little girl, barely conscious, joined in the chorus as he entered the square. He lifted his gaze towards the huge monument which dominated the western end of Pariser Platz -- the Brandenburger Tor, its imposing, classically inspired architecture holding his attention. The strange light he had noticed from further down the Unter den Linden he saw again now, like an aura around the statue of the Goddess of Victory riding her four-horse chariot atop the Tor.

"Tick-tock, tick-tock."

Bruno joined in the chant, feeling some magnetic attraction drawing him inexorably towards the awesome monument. As one, the whole assembly began to move, and Bruno did too, bearing himself and the little girl ever nearer the Tor, his footsteps magically vanishing in his wake, leaving the snow as virgin and untouched as if he had never been.

The first of them were just metres from the Tor now, and they broke into a desperate charge, throwing themselves into the arches of the ancient gate which were alight with the same inexplicable glow which had coloured the chariot on its summit. More of them plunged into the light, and despite its irresistible allure, Bruno was suddenly touched by a deep sense of foreboding.

"Tick-tock, tick-tock."

He tried to stop, but his legs carried him on as though he had lost all control of his faculties. Ten metres from the Tor, he had a clear view of the alluring glow. Of each person who stepped into the light and simply vanished into thin air.

Of the haunting, lupine eyes which permeated the glow, just for an instant!

Bruno panicked, fighting against the overwhelming desire of his body to commit itself to this fate. The little girl struggled in his arms as she sensed his unwillingness, kicking and screaming with renewed vigour.

"Let me go!" she shrieked. "Let me go!"

He was five years older than she, and stronger, but her flailing limbs forced him to drop her. She scrambled to her feet, and Bruno reached for her in vain, his fingers closing over nothing but air as she evaded his grasp.

"No!" he cried. But it was too late. She ran like a greyhound out of the traps, fairly flying into an arch of the gate where she disappeared in a fragment of time.

Too late to help her now, Bruno concentrated on his own survival, willing his legs to stop. They would not, but his resistance had at least slowed his advance so that others were passing him by and leaving him at the rear of the assembly. The clock hovered clearly in his vision, the hand trembling as it edged nearer and nearer and nearer to midnight.....

Ahead of him, six more people plunged heedlessly into the light which filled every arch of the Tor. Another six, then three, and another three. And now just two more were left before his own fate was similarly sealed....

Tick-tock...tick-tock...tick-tock....

Only his voice remained to continue the chant. The words had earned a new meaning for themselves. No longer the harbinger of a race against time. They embodied Bruno's desperate desire for midnight to come at last!

Six metres. Five. Four. Three.

The light beckoned him, and for a fleeting instant he wondered why he had not simply surrendered like the others. It wasn't as though his own world hadn't ended long ago, just as Dieter had reminded him. What had he got to lose?

Too late. Midnight came at last. The clock faded from his vision, and darkness enveloped the Brandenburger Tor once again.

***

Bruno scaled a garden wall and crouched low, taking a moment to catch his breath and stuff the bundle of food he had just stolen deeper into his backpack. He rewarded himself with a chocolate bar, closing his eyes as he relished the caramel washing over his tastebuds. For a moment he was in heaven, oblivious to the world and its hardship.

He heard the Polizei lumber unwittingly past his hiding place, and he swallowed the last of the bar too quickly, as though afraid that his chewing would be heard in the still night air. He clapped a hand over his mouth and stifled a cough until he was sure the officers were out of earshot.

Only then did he clear his throat.

Only then did he hear it again. The sound. So familiar. So terrifying.

Tick-tock.

He felt his heart began to race and reacted on instinct. Without a thought, he leapt the wall and bellowed as loudly as he could after the receding policemen.

"Here! I'm here!"

The officers had turned and were staring at him in disbelief as he just stood there flapping his arms wildly. He could not have done more to attract their attention.

Bruno could tell they thought he was crazy. But he didn't care.

There were things out there worse than a prison cell.

©️Ivan Latham