by Helen Grant
“Other stuff?”
“You know.” Stefan rolled his eyes at me; why did I have to be such an innocent? “Stuff like Boris smokes.”
“Oh.” We looked at each other. Suddenly I couldn’t stop myself; a giggle came bubbling up inside me. “Do you think the eternal huntsman smoked it?”
“Idiot,” said Stefan, but he was laughing too. He mimed someone taking a long drag at a joint, then intoned, “Mensch, when I smoke this stuff I feel like I could ride forever.” We clutched our sides and shrieked with laughter.
“Do the hounds smoke it too?”
“Sicher, and the horse as well.”
We laughed ourselves hoarse. At last, when I was beginning to think I would actually be sick from laughing, Stefan suddenly said, “It was a black mass.”
I stopped giggling. “That’s not funny.”
“I wasn’t trying to be funny.” He pointed at the little heap of burned stuff. “That would be the-you know, the table, like in church.”
“The altar,” I supplied.
“Yes, and the stuff on it, that’s the offering.”
“The offering?”
“The sacrifice.”
I didn’t like the sound of that; it made me think of religion classes with Frau Eichen, and bearded patriarchs dragging their sons up hills to slaughter them because God told them to do it. And everyone else thinking it showed what wonderful trust in God the old man had, and not thinking how the little boy might have viewed the situation, Daddy waving a carving knife around and only just deciding at the last minute to kill a ram instead.
“That’s creepy,” I said, ever the mistress of understatement.
“That’s what I saw,” said Stefan, thinking aloud. “It wasn’t the huntsman and his men, it was a black mass. The light was the fire when they burned the stuff, whatever it was.” He turned to look at me, his face serious. “The voices… that was them saying the black mass.”
“And the hoofbeats?” I asked.
Stefan looked at me, and I could almost see his mind working as he ran through the possibilities. Then his eyes widened and his lips parted; I could actually see it, the moment that the idea dawned on him.
“Cloven hooves,” he said.
We stared at each other. “Let’s get out of here,” I said hastily. Stefan did not need to be told twice; we both turned and set off over the uneven ground, clambering over the tumbled mounds of earth and broken stones, with as much haste as we could manage without breaking into an undignified scramble for safety. We reached the path and set off downhill without looking back once. Stefan was striding so fast that I had to trot to keep up.
“Are we going to tell anyone?” I asked him, panting with exertion.
“No way.”
“Not even Herr Schiller?”
“Well, maybe him.” We both knew Herr Schiller was different; he was a grown-up, but he wouldn’t assume that we were making it all up; and he would know what to do. If, that is, there was anything we could do. Perhaps, like stepping into the stone circle, it was a thing best left undone.
I left Stefan near the cemetery at the foot of the Quecken hill and hurried home, my mind fizzing like a wasps’ nest with toxic thoughts: whispers at midnight and unseen presences calling up the Devil, and burned sacrifices. Little girls who vanished without trace. Witches and spectral huntsmen and cats who were not really cats.
When I let myself into the house my thoughts were so saturated with these eldritch horrors that it was hardly a surprise to see my mother looking as white and shocked as I did myself. It was not until she threw her arms around me and began hugging and shaking me in turns that I realized anything was wrong.
“Where have you been? I’ve been sick with worry.”
My father came out of the kitchen, and as I registered the fact that he was home from work early I saw that his face, too, was pale and drawn. I looked from one to the other in confusion. What on earth was going on? It was several minutes before I worked out what must have happened.
Another child had vanished.
Chapter Nineteen
That Wednesday, when it happened, it was clear and bright; not hot, but sunny. It was the middle of the day, a time when the town was relatively full, with little knots of schoolchildren wending their way to the bus stop, staff from the shops popping in and out of the bakeries for lunch, working mothers hurrying home to be there when their children arrived. Little groups of those powerful German citizens known as Senioren stood about putting the world to rights. An ordinary, cheerful weekday.
Of course, even at busy times of day there were dark and quiet parts of the town; the little backstreets where the overhanging houses leaned toward each other overhead, and the high walls threw deep, damp shadows. But even in these quiet places, you would not have felt particularly threatened. Aside from a brief moment of excitement in 1940 when Hitler used a bunker in nearby Rodert, the last big event had been the flood of 1416. Nothing ever happened here-and nothing is precisely what seemed to have happened to Marion Voss. In fact, nothing is what she vanished into, what she became.
A few people remembered seeing a little figure, Ranzen on back, pigtails bobbing as it progressed down the street that day; but was it her? She was of average height, she had light brown hair, she was carrying the same galloping-horse-patterned Ranzen as thirty other little girls her age. Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf helped someone who might have been her to cross the road on the way to the Klosterplatz, where the school buses were parked. Frau Nett from the Café am Fluss saw a child who might have been her stumble outside the bakery and be helped up by an older girl. Hilde Koch claimed to have seen a little girl who was certainly her outside the kiosk at the Orchheimer Tor, clutching a bag of candy. But no one saw where she went.
It seemed that somewhere along her way through the town she had stepped off her path, turned up an alley or gone into a building, and vanished into thin air, dissolved into the ether. It was like one of those magic tricks where you see the magician put something into a box, and then he opens it, and you can see that it is empty. One moment she was there, skipping along the street, and the next she had gone. All that remained were glimpses, fragmentary memories that hung on the air reproachfully, like the echo of a cry. Marion Voss had become-nothing.
To me, the vanished child, Marion Voss, was even more of an unknown quantity than Katharina Linden had been. Not only was she not in my year at school-she was in the third grade-but she lived out in the village of Iversheim, a few kilometers north of Bad Münstereifel. I must have passed her in the school corridors or seen her in the playground, but I have no memory of it.
She was a very ordinary-looking little girl, with her long hair usually done up in two braids, as on the day she disappeared; she wore glasses with thin silver-colored rims, and studs in her ears; she had nondescript but pleasant features and a dark mole on her left cheek close to her mouth.
All this I learned from the photographs that appeared in the local and regional newspapers-front-page news, the second girl to disappear in the Town of Terror. My parents kept the papers out of my way at home, but still, whenever I passed a tobacconist’s shop, Marion Voss’s face would be staring out from the newsstand, repeated endlessly in grainy detail. So I knew what she looked like.
I also discovered that she was an only child, although she had a big circle of grieving cousins. She had a dog, a Labrador cross called Barky, and two rabbits (the newspapers did not say what the rabbits were called). She liked to dance, to sing; she was learning to play the recorder. She had a scar on one knee from an accident with her bicycle two years before. She had had meningitis when she was at kindergarten but had recovered. Her parents couldn’t believe how lucky she had been at the time; now they couldn’t believe what had happened to her. Her grandmother had promised to light a candle in Sts. Chrysostom and Daria every day until Marion was found.
All this the newspapers told us, and more. What they could not tell us was what had become of her.
No one could decide
, in fact, exactly when and where Marion Voss had disappeared. Her mother, who worked in the mornings as a receptionist in a doctor’s office, had not been expecting her daughter to come straight home after school; she thought Marion was going home with a schoolfriend who lived in the town.
The schoolfriend’s mother, however, had not been expecting Marion, or so she said; she had an appointment herself that afternoon and couldn’t entertain extra children.
The schoolfriend, when questioned, lost her head completely, thinking that she was being blamed for the disappearance, and became quite unable to give a coherent account of the situation. It was eventually surmised that she had invited Marion over without telling her mother, and then the two of them had quarreled and she had told Marion not to bother coming after all. It was never established at what point the quarrel had occurred, but Marion did not get on her usual school bus with her classmates, nor did she get on the later bus for Iversheim.
Since her mother was not expecting to see Marion until she picked her up that evening, the girl’s disappearance would have been undiscovered for at least six hours, were it not for the fact that Frau Voss had suddenly remembered that Marion had a dentist’s appointment at three. She had telephoned the schoolfriend’s mother, and suddenly the two of them had realized that they did not know where Marion was at all.
There were more meetings, and this time when Frau Redemann called the school together to announce tighter security measures and remind us all not to go with strangers, she was flanked by Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf and another policeman we did not know, with knife-edge creases in his trousers and a face that looked as though it had been carved out of granite.
“If anyone knows anything about Marion Voss, or if any of you saw her on Wednesday afternoon, you must come and tell me,” Frau Redemann announced, her voice sounding higher and less steadfast than usual. She was fidgeting, her long hands fiddling with the pendant on her bosom; there was an air of badly suppressed desperation about her. She was used to dealing with difficult parents, children who brought their family problems into the classroom and disrupted everyone else, fourth-grade boys trading cigarettes in the bathrooms. But this was something that was most definitely not in the job description.
You could see it on her face every time she looked around the crowded hall at the hundreds of children entrusted to her care, or glanced at the grim faces of the policemen. This is not fair, said her expression. I didn’t sign up for this.
“Or you can tell the police,” she added nervously, as though she could shovel the entire situation onto their plate. Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf shuffled his feet and raised his chin; the other policeman continued to look over our heads, his expression so neutral that it was impossible to tell whether he was bored or simply saving his energy for pouncing upon criminals.
The assembly was dismissed. Back in the classroom Frau Eichen was distracted, and kept popping out of the room to hold whispered conversations in the corridor, presumably with other teachers. The gaps in our educational program were enthusiastically filled by Thilo Koch, who expounded his lurid theories of what had happened to Marion Voss and Katharina Linden.
“My brother Jörg,” he would begin, “my brother Jörg says they were eaten by a cannibal. That’s why they haven’t found the bodies. He’s eaten them.”
Repulsive though this was, it was better than Thilo’s other line of argument, that both girls had exploded.
“Don’t sit next to Pia Kolvenbach; you’ll be next.”
It was during one of these sallies that he revealed another unpleasant rumor of which I had previously been blissfully ignorant.
“My grandmother says that it was a sign.” It was Oma Kristel’s death.
“A sign of what?” I asked indignantly.
“A sign that Evil is at work in the town,” announced Thilo, clearly quoting his grandmother; Good and Evil as concepts were not foremost in his perception of the world, which mostly revolved around getting his own way as often as possible.
I could almost hear Frau Kessel’s words ringing in my ears: it was Evil in Action again. It did not seem to occur to anyone that Oma Kristel, who went to Mass faithfully every single week, was unlikely to be selected as the instrument of announcing all our Dooms.
“What absolute Quatsch,” declared Stefan loyally, but it was too late: the others were already staring at me as though I had personally set off my own grandmother like a Roman candle and then abducted two children as an encore.
Frau Eichen’s tardy return and terse injunction to open our math books was almost a relief. Twenty-three heads, some sleekly braided, some aggressively bristly like Thilo Koch’s, were suddenly bent studiously over their books.
I sneaked a look at Thilo; at precisely the same moment he looked up and caught my eye. He shot me a look of mock horror, and made a swift cross sign out of his two nail-bitten thumbs, as though warding off a vampire. But before Frau Eichen had time to notice what he was doing, he had whisked his hands back into his lap and was perusing with apparent absorption.
I did the same, but the figures didn’t make any sense to me; I might as well have been trying to read Mandarin Chinese. My whole body seemed to be seething. When was the teasing going to stop? Was anyone in the town ever going to forget that I was the girl whose grandmother had exploded?
Chapter Twenty
When I got home that day and let myself into the house, my father was already there. Very occasionally, if he had a meeting out of the office, he would make it home for lunch on his way back. But just at that precise moment it did not sound as though he was eating lunch, nor was my mother busying herself in the kitchen making anything. In fact, they were both carrying on an argument at the tops of their voices, my father in stentorian German, my mother mostly in German but with snatches of English thrown in whenever words failed her. As I closed the door, she was just finishing a sentence with “… this complete arse of a bloody town!”
My heart sank. I hated hearing my parents arguing; and arguing about whether to continue living in Germany was not only unsettling, it was pointless. Where did my mother think we would go? In the heat of the moment she sometimes said she wanted us all to move to England, but she might as well have suggested moving to the moon.
My father would counter, as he always did, by pointing out the difficulties of his finding a comparable job in Britain, the impossibility of buying a house anything like the one we had in Bad Münstereifel. It didn’t make sense, anyway; when my mother wasn’t having what she called one of her Down with Deutschland moods, she used to complain about Britain, the ludicrously high cost of living, the traffic that congested the whole of the south of England, the poor state of the schools, the hospitals… the only things she missed, she said, were British tea and Tesco. German supermarkets were never properly organized; whoever thought of putting the Christmas Stollen next to the soap powder aisle?
As for me, I knew quite firmly that I didn’t want to go and live in England. Even the things that my mother spoke about with affection, such as British tea-with milk in it!-sounded awful. And then, as I well knew from hearing her describe it a hundred times, the school system was totally different; children started school at the age of five, and had to stay there all day. They had lunch in the school, and it always tasted terrible, according to my mother, who seemed to find this very amusing. Puréed potatoes and chunks of meat, without any cream sauce or anything.
I remember once we had to do a school project about where our families came from. I drew a wobbly map of Britain with my mother’s hometown on it. We had to include some information about the major products of the area, so I asked my mother what Middlesex had lots of, and she said, “Roads.”
I put my Ranzen carefully down on the floor of the hallway and was preparing to escape up the stairs without interrupting my parents, when the kitchen door opened and my mother stomped out. She was twisting a dishcloth between her hands as though she were wringing a chicken’s neck.
“Pia, I’m
glad you’re home.”
Uh-oh, I thought. My father appeared in the doorway behind my mother; he had composed his features into a mask of placidity, but the florid hue of his complexion gave him away.
“Kate…” he said in a warning tone.
“Shut up, Wolfgang,” was my mother’s conciliatory reply. She bent toward me, strands of dark hair flopping untidily over her eyes. “How would you like to go and visit Oma Warner, Pia?”
“She’s not going,” cut in my father over her shoulder.
“Yes, she is.” My mother’s voice was steely.
“She cannot go,” announced my father. “She has things booked already for the summer holidays. The summer camp in the Schleidtal, the art course.”
“I’ll unbook them,” said my mother.
“Thomas and Britta are also coming,” persisted my father. “Pia should spend some time with her cousins.”
I shot him a mutinous glance at this; spending time with Michel and Simon was akin to falling into a snake pit.
“What about my family?” demanded my mother, shaking the hair out of her eyes. “She hardly ever sees them. She should spend some time with them for once.”
“We invited your mother for the summer, but she would not come,” my father pointed out. This was perfectly true; Oma Warner could rarely be lured over the Channel to visit us in Bad Münstereifel. She claimed that both flying and sailing brought on her “funny turns,” and she couldn’t stand either German sausages or German bread, which she said tasted soggy.
“That’s beside the point,” snapped my mother.
“What is the point, then?” barked my father back at her.
“The point is…” began my mother, and stopped. “The point is…” She put her hands up as though to clutch her brow. “I don’t want Pia staying here all summer. It’s not…”
“Yes?” said my father in a loaded voice.
“It’s not safe,” said my mother eventually.
