The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

by Helen Grant

  “I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to say anything wrong,” I ventured at last. “I didn’t know…”

  The words sounded lame to me; in Bad Münstereifel everyone knew everyone else’s business, so ignorance was no defense.

  “Of course not,” said Herr Schiller, a little sadly, it seemed to me. “You are a good child, Pia, a kind child.”

  A little encouraged, I tried to explain myself: “I only asked you about-you know-because you know so much about the town… and about all the funny stuff that’s happened here in the past.”

  “The past?” repeated Herr Schiller. He frowned slightly, and my heart seemed to lurch-did he think I was referring to his own past again?

  “The miller and the cats… and the treasure in the well… and the one about the huntsman-all the strange things like that. So I thought you might have some clues…”

  Herr Schiller stared at me for several seconds. Then, very carefully, he lowered himself back into my father’s armchair, his hands clutching the armrests for support. When he had settled himself, he said, “So, Fräulein Pia, you think that the witches took the little girl away, or something like that?”

  I eyed him; it did not look as though he was making fun of me, as a lot of adults would have. It looked as though he was taking me seriously, actually considering the idea as a real possibility. Still, I replied rather carefully, “I don’t know.”

  “But you think… maybe…?”

  “Well, everyone-I mean, all the grown-ups-keeps saying to look out for anything seltsam,” I told him.

  “Etwas seltsam,” he repeated thoughtfully, tapping the fingers of one hand on the arm of the chair. Then he fell silent again, as though drifting away on a tide of his own thoughts.

  “Herr Schiller?” I said tentatively.

  “Yes, Pia?”

  “You’re not angry with me anymore?”

  Herr Schiller made a noise that was something between a snort and a chuckle. “Of course I’m not angry with you, my dear. And you have some very interesting ideas.”

  “Really?” I was both flattered and astounded.

  “Yes, really,” said Herr Schiller. “You see patterns where other people see nothing.”

  I was not sure what to say to this. If I had seen a connection between the disappearance of a little girl and the stories of hidden secrets, terrible fates, and eternal hauntings that Herr Schiller poured into my fascinated ears, it was not a pattern that any adult other than Herr Schiller was likely to take seriously. I was not even sure it made sense myself; and my mother would treat it as the domestic equivalent of wasting police time.

  “Herr Schiller? Are there really any such things as ghosts?”

  The old man did not even show surprise at the question. He heaved a sigh. “Yes, Pia, there are. But never the ones you expect.”

  I pondered this. He had the answer down pat; but did it really mean anything? I had heard my mother with my own ears telling Sebastian that St. Nicholas was going to fill his shoes with presents on December 6, and up until fairly recently she had still maintained the pretense of the tooth fairy. I was reluctant to categorize my old friend with the mendacious majority of adults, but was he just humoring me?

  “No, I mean really?” I persisted.

  Herr Schiller smiled. “Pia, have you ever seen a ghost?”

  “No…”

  “Does that mean there aren’t any?”

  “I don’t know…”

  “Na, have you ever seen the great pyramid of Cheops?”

  “No,” I said.

  “And does that mean there isn’t one?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well then.” Herr Schiller sat back in my father’s armchair with the look of one who has proved his case.

  “I don’t think my parents believe in them,” I pointed out.

  “Probably not,” agreed Herr Schiller equably.

  “I just thought…” I paused. Would I be putting my foot in it again if I mentioned Katharina Linden? “I really want to help find Katharina,” I ventured.

  Herr Schiller followed this somewhat crooked line of logic perfectly. “And you think, Fräulein Pia, that there is something unholy going on? And that is why the little girl disappeared?”

  “She was weggezaubert,” I said; spirited away.

  “Ach, so,” said Herr Schiller thoughtfully. He didn’t laugh at me, or tell me to stop talking nonsense.

  Emboldened, I went on: “I want to see if I can find out what happened, that’s why I wanted to ask you about the weird things that have happened in the town, in case there was a clue.”

  We looked at each other.

  “What do you think?” I asked him cautiously.

  “I think, Fräulein Pia, that you have discovered an angle that the police will not be covering in their investigation,” said Herr Schiller drily.

  “Do you think so?” I asked eagerly.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Then will you help me?”

  Herr Schiller studied me for a few moments; his expression was unreadable, but his eyes twinkled. Then he lifted his gnarled hands. “I am a very old man, Pia. Too old for running all over this town looking for clues-or ghosts.”

  “Oh, you needn’t do any of that,” I assured him enthusiastically. “I’ll do that-and Stefan,” I added as an afterthought.

  “Then how can I help you?” inquired Herr Schiller.

  “Well, can you keep telling us the old stories?”

  “Sicher.”

  “And we’ll come and tell you what we find, and you can help us work it out.”

  “I should be delighted.”

  There was no time for further dialogue because my mother put her head around the living-room door, and said, “I’m terribly sorry, Herr Schiller, would you like a cup of coffee?”

  “No, thank you, Frau Kolvenbach,” said Herr Schiller. He rose from the armchair and stood there for a moment, his hat in his hand, beaming down at me. “And thank you, Fräulein Pia.”

  My mother looked at him quizzically; what was there to thank me for? She was somewhat mollified on the subject of the offense I had given Herr Schiller, since he had obviously come to offer an olive branch, but she was still not convinced that I was not “bothering that poor old man.” In the end she settled for, “I hope you thanked Herr Schiller for the flowers, Pia.”

  “Thank you, Herr Schiller,” I parroted obediently.

  Herr Schiller extended one wrinkled hand toward me, and for once in my life I was happy to shake hands with an adult: it was not like being nagged into it by Oma Kristel; it felt more like we were co-conspirators.

  “Auf Wiedersehen, Pia.”

  “Wiedersehen, Herr Schiller.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The end of the spring term that year was a relief; three whole months of being the class pariah and unwilling consort of StinkStefan had worn me down. As March turned into April, the parental curfews slackened a little, and we were allowed to go off to the big park in the Schleidtal, or to the swimming pool, or even to take a train and go to the cinema in Euskirchen. In between, we went to Herr Schiller’s.

  We listened to his tales with a renewed interest, now that the town seemed to have passed into a story all of its own-the story of the little girl dressed as Snow White, who stepped out of her life and into nothingness right in the middle of a Karneval parade. I puzzled over the details of what Herr Schiller told us, trying to fit the events of the past few months into the pattern, as though I were trying to complete a huge and complicated jigsaw puzzle without being able to see the picture on the lid of the box. Judging by Herr Schiller’s stories, Bad Münstereifel had to be one of the most haunted places in Germany, if not the whole world; monsters and ghosts and skeletons seemed to pop up in every corner.

  Stefan, whose parents did not police his television viewing as strictly as mine did, had seen numerous horror films, and not just the ancient version of Nosferatu that periodically appeared on television; he had
even seen Poltergeist and The Shining. As a result, his views on the subject were more developed than mine; he thought there was some evil influence working out its purpose in the town. He postulated all sorts of theories: the Lindens’ house was built on an old graveyard where the bodies of plague victims had been buried; Katharina had meddled with occult powers she did not understand, and had been carried off by them; the Linden family were under some sort of terrible curse, which led to the early demise of the eldest child in every generation.

  “Herr Linden is an oldest child,” I pointed out when Stefan expounded the last of those theories. “He’s the oldest of two; Frau Holzheim is his sister. So how come he didn’t disappear when he was a kid?”

  “Maybe the curse skips a generation,” suggested Stefan, undaunted.

  I was not convinced, and appealed to Herr Schiller on our next visit.

  “Are there any stories about curses on people?”

  Herr Schiller pondered this, taking slow sips of coffee from a delicate-looking cup with yellow and gray roses on it.

  “There was the knight who lived in the Alte Burg on the Quecken hill,” he suggested eventually.

  “I’ve heard that one,” I said, disappointed.

  “I haven’t,” Stefan pointed out. He looked eagerly at Herr Schiller; really, for someone who seemed to make himself so objectionable to his classmates, he could look wonderfully appealing to adults. Herr Schiller could not help but retell the story, in spite of my discontented expression.

  “The old castle on the Quecken hill was built before the castle in the town, over one thousand years ago,” began Herr Schiller. “In the castle there lived a knight, with his wife and only son. The old knight was an avid hunter and his son shared his love of hunting; there was nothing he loved more than to ride with his hounds through the woods.

  “In due course the old knight died, and without his father’s guidance the young man began to neglect his other duties in order to indulge his lust for the chase. Every day he rode forth from the castle, mounted on a fine black stallion, with his hounds baying as they streamed through the gates, and spent many hours hunting. At last, he even usurped the Lord’s Day for his pursuits.

  “His mother, the old knight’s Lady, was a devout woman, and her son’s behavior wounded her very deeply. At first she tried to remonstrate with him, pointing out that if he would only fulfill his duty to God first by attending church on Sunday morning, there would still be plenty of time left for hunting afterward. But her prayers fell on deaf ears.

  “At last, one Sunday morning the mother could contain herself no longer. As soon as the sun was up, her son was out in the castle courtyard preparing for the hunt. A young squire was holding on to the reins of the black stallion, who pawed the ground and blew out hard through his nose, with almost as much eagerness for the chase as his master. The hunting dogs were already baying and straining at the iron chains that held them. The young man was stalking about the courtyard impatiently, berating his servants for their tardiness.

  “As he did so, a window opened above him, and his mother leaned out, to beg her son one more time to come to church. ‘The day is long enough for hunting afterward,’ she cried. But once again her son refused to listen. Swinging himself into the saddle of his great black horse, he signaled to the gatekeeper to open the gates. The hounds were loosed, and with a cacophony of howls and the strident note of a hunting horn the hunt sallied forth. The Lady, her heart overflowing with the bitterest pain, cried out after him, ‘I wish you may hunt forever!’

  “The day passed, evening came, and at last night fell, and there was neither sight nor sound of the young man, nor of his great stallion and his pack of savage hunting dogs. A week passed, then a month, and at last a year had turned around, and still the young man did not come back.

  “When the old mother died, the castle fell into ruins, and in the course of time it became as it is now, a heap of moss-covered stones, overgrown with weeds, with trees thrusting up through its former courts and halls. But the huntsman’s soul knew no rest; it was condemned to roam forevermore in the woods and chases where it rode to hounds in life.”

  Herr Schiller leaned a little closer. “They say that he still rides out of the old castle on moonlit nights. Poor tattered soul, not knowing or remembering why he is there or what he seeks, restlessly roaming the forests-forever-”

  “He’s still there?” interrupted Stefan. “Has anyone seen him?”

  “In some of those lonely houses at the edge of the forest, people have lain in bed at night shivering, listening to the sound of hoofbeats and the howling of dogs as the hunt passes by,” said Herr Schiller. “But none would dare go out to meet him.”

  “They didn’t look?” interrupted Stefan. He shook his head. “Angsthasen. I would’ve looked.”

  I could see what he was thinking, and what my mother would have to say about it: No, you may not sit up until midnight on the Quecken hill; what are you thinking of, when we still don’t know what happened to poor Katharina Linden? And you’d be fit for nothing in the morning…

  With a sigh I picked up my cup and took a sip of cold coffee. The spectral huntsman was cursed to roam the woods for all eternity; it seemed I was cursed to be haunted by StinkStefan for at least as long. And much though I enjoyed Herr Schiller’s storytelling, it did not seem as though we were getting any closer to the truth about Katharina’s disappearance.

  I looked at Stefan and Herr Schiller, who were deep in a discussion about the likely route the eternal huntsman would have taken, Stefan drawing it out on the coffee table with his finger. They seemed to have temporarily forgotten me, which only added to the sum of my woes. Summer seemed a long, long time away.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Of course, it was Stefan who broached the idea of going up to the Quecken hill at night; knowing my mother’s probable response, I would as soon have thought of asking to ride the train into Köln to go nightclubbing.

  I thought it might be possible to visit the castle ruins in the daytime; we might even tell my mother it was for a school project. But Stefan was adamant that there would be no point in going up there if we couldn’t go at night.

  “You know,” he said suddenly, “we should go up there on Walpurgis eve.”

  “Stefan…” I began reluctantly; the entire concept was so unrealistic as to be not worth considering. But he was already caught up on a wave of his own enthusiasm.

  “No, really. We must.” His eyes were shining; a lock of his dirty blond hair fell over his face and he brushed it back impatiently. “It’s the witches’ night, right? If there’s anything to see, it has to happen then.”

  This made sense to me, but still did not get over the fact that it would take some genuine magic to get me out of the house and up the Quecken hill at night.

  “My mother is never going to let me go up there after dark,” I pointed out.

  “Can’t you make up some excuse?”

  “Like what?” I could not think of any possible circumstances under which it would be allowed.

  “We’ll-we’ll say we’re going to put up a Maibaum.”

  “A Maibaum?” I had to admit this was a stroke of genius.

  A Maibaum-or May tree-was a tree, usually a young silver birch, chopped off at the base, the branches decorated with long streamers of colored crêpe paper. Every village in the Eifel had one on May Day, but it was also a tradition that young men would put a Maibaum up outside the house of their girlfriend on the night before May Day, so that she would see it when she got up in the morning. This meant that the last night of April had to be the only night of the year when half the youth of the town could be creeping about in the small hours with legitimate cause. All the same…

  “Who would we be putting a Maibaum up for?” I asked. “And, anyway, girls don’t usually put them up at all.”

  “Easy,” said Stefan, who was obviously developing the plan at breakneck pace. “We’ll say we’re helping my cousin Boris.”

 
; “Hmmm.” I still had my doubts.

  Boris was a hulking monster of an eighteen-year-old, with long hair that looked as though it had been styled with motor oil, and mean little eyes so deep-set that they seemed to be peering at you through slits in a helmet. As far as I knew he had no girlfriend and, even if he had, he did not give the impression that he would be the sort who offers flowers and opens doors and puts up May trees. Certainly, I couldn’t imagine him asking two ten-year-olds to accompany him on a romantic mission of that kind. Still, in the absence of any more inspired idea, I agreed to suggest the plan to my mother.

  “Schön,” said Stefan airily, as though it were already fixed. He got to his feet. “Come on, let’s go and ask her now.”

  “Absolutely not,” said my mother, predictably. Both Stefan and I stood before her in the kitchen, like two kindergarten kids getting a ticking-off from the teacher. My mother had been in the process of frying some meat for a casserole, and the neglected pan sizzled alarmingly behind her as she faced us.

  “But, Frau Kolvenbach,” said Stefan in the polite voice he used with such good effect upon susceptible adults, “we’d be going with my cousin Boris.”

  His efforts were wasted, however; my mother was flint-hearted. “I don’t care, Stefan. Pia isn’t going out God-knows-where after dark.”

  “Boris is-” began Stefan, but my mother cut him off.

  “Boris is going to have to put up his May tree by himself,” she retorted. She eyed Stefan skeptically. “Is Boris that tall boy from the Hauptschule, the one with the long hair and the biker jacket?”

  “Yes, but-” began Stefan again, but in vain.

  “Then he looks quite big and hefty enough to carry his own Maibaum,” said my mother with finality. I opened my mouth to say something, but she raised her hand warningly. “No, Pia. The answer is no. Now, I don’t want to discuss it anymore,” she added, turning back to the stove. She prodded the meat with a frying fork, shaking her head. “I’m surprised your mother is letting you go out after dark, even with your cousin, Stefan.”