The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

by Helen Grant

  “Pia?” Stefan’s disembodied voice drifted down the well shaft. I didn’t reply. “Pia?” There was a note of panic in it this time. Voices murmured at the top of the well. Then I heard something whisper down the shaft and hit the water with a soft splash. Someone had thrown down a rope.

  “Pia! Pia, are you all right?”

  “Yes,” I croaked faintly.

  More conferring at the top of the well. Then light pierced the darkness. It would have been comical in other circumstances; Stefan had let down his flashlight on a string. It hung there like a visitor from another world, the light of a submarine deep in a black ocean. I concentrated on the light, not wanting to look at anything else in the well. My neck felt stiff from turning. With one hand I let go of the stone. Hesitantly, I reached for the rope.

  “Can you hold on?” shouted Stefan.

  “No,” I said. I wasn’t sure I had spoken loudly enough for him to hear me. I felt too tired to care. I watched with little interest as the rope vanished upward and there were more voices. It sounded as though Stefan were arguing with someone.

  I closed my eyes. It was like listening to a radio playing in another room. I tried to imagine that I was in Oma Kristel’s kitchen, sitting at the table waiting for her to finish making me a mug of cocoa, the radio playing in the background. There were scuffling noises, and then another splash as something hit the water, somewhat louder than the first time.

  “Pia,” said Stefan’s voice, very close by. I felt something touch my shoulder. Then: “Oh, Scheisse.” I guessed Stefan had seen the other things that were in the well. I squeezed my eyes more tightly shut. “Oh, Scheisse, Pia. Oh-”

  I wished he would shut up. I didn’t want to be reminded of what was in the water. But the feeling of his arms around me, his hands gripping me, felt reassuring. Rope slid around me and then I was going upward. I let myself be lifted like a rag doll. There was light above me and I was moving toward it in painful jerks. I thought, Perhaps I have died. I had not expected it to hurt so much afterward. Then I was at the top of the well, lying like an enormous fish on a fishmonger’s slab, my mouth opening and closing wetly. Water was streaming down the side of my face from my hair. Someone was turning me over. I looked up and in the lamplight I saw who it was and screamed.

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Shut up, Pia!” shouted Stefan. He was standing over me, water dripping from the bottom half of his jeans and his boots. As I paused to draw breath, I heard him say, “Shall I slap her?”

  With a superhuman effort I stifled my screams. My lips worked uselessly; no coherent words came out. Still I pointed with a shaking hand at the person who stood next to Stefan, watching me silently: Herr Düster, his starved features even craggier than usual in the lantern light. If his thin upper lip had drawn back to reveal the long, gleaming canines of a vampire I couldn’t have been more hysterically terrified.

  Uppermost in the boiling cataract of my brain was the conviction that at any moment Herr Düster would throw both of us back into the well. Without a rescuer we would both drown there in the dark, with the atrocious things that wallowed in the black waters.

  Stefan kneeled by me and took my shoulders in his two hands. “Calm down, Pia. You’re OK now. You’re out of the well.”

  “He-” I gibbered, trying to point at Herr Düster again. Stefan had his back to him-couldn’t he see what danger he was in?

  “It’s OK,” Stefan said, as though talking to a kindergarten child. “Herr Düster helped us. I couldn’t have got the stone off the top of the well without him.”

  Doggedly, I shook my head. Didn’t you see what was in the well? I wanted to scream. I struggled to get up from the floor but my limbs were stiff with cold and damp and I simply succeeded in floundering about like a pig in mud.

  “She will get hypothermia,” said someone. With a shock I realized it was Herr Düster. I had so rarely heard him speak before. His voice sounded calm and measured. This was a surprise too; somehow I had imagined him having a wild, insane voice like an animal, or being like the girl in the fairy tale who dropped a toad out of her mouth every time she opened it to speak. On the contrary, he actually sounded quite sane.

  “Put this around her,” said Herr Düster. He was holding out my down jacket. Either he or Stefan had retrieved it from underneath the sideboard.

  Stefan pulled me toward him and for a sickening moment I thought they were both in league; he was going to roll me over the edge of the well again and the pair of them would listen to me drown. But I realized that he was pulling off my sodden sweater. Icy water ran down my back. The T-shirt he left on for modesty’s sake; the down jacket went over it.

  While Stefan was struggling with the zip at the front, I stared mistrustfully at Herr Düster over his shoulder. Why was he helping us?

  “What did you see in the well, Pia?” he asked. His eyes were sunk in pools of shadow. I could not tell what he was thinking.

  “Nothing,” I stuttered.

  Stefan pulled back from me and shot me a look of astonishment. “Pia, tell him.”

  “Nothing,” I managed again. I was not about to let Herr Düster know that I had seen the bodies of his victims down there in the inky waters. I had a vague conviction that if he did not know that we knew what he had done, we might still get away. But before I could stop him, Stefan had blurted it out.

  “Herr Düster-there are dead people.”

  Herr Düster must have seen my face.

  “Do you think that I put them in the well, Fräulein Pia?” he asked.

  Frantically, I shook my head. Stefan had finished zipping up the jacket. I made another attempt to get up, and this time I was more successful. I managed to rise until I was on one knee, as though I were about to propose to someone. I wondered if my cramped legs could carry me if I tried to make a run for it.

  “You told him,” I accused Stefan through cold lips.

  “Of course I did,” he answered impatiently. For a sickening moment Stefan strode through my imagination in the role of murderer’s accomplice. Perhaps he felt me stiffen. He said, “Pia, he didn’t do it. Someone else did.”

  Involuntarily I glanced upward. This was Herr Düster’s house. Somewhere above our heads was the living room where he sat among the fading photographs of friends and family long dead. How could the well under his house be full of-those things-and it wasn’t him who had put them there?

  “What did you see, Pia? How many?”

  “Nothing.”

  There was a pregnant silence during which we regarded each other in the yellow lantern light. Herr Düster opened his mouth to say something else, and in that moment we all heard it. A muffled sound, but very definite. The sound of a door closing.

  Herr Düster raised a bony finger to his lips. In the silence, the shuddering of my breath sounded enormous. With a great effort I made myself breathe more deeply and quietly, pressing my hands to my face as though to stop my teeth chattering.

  Herr Düster picked up the lantern, and mimed a twisting motion: I’m going to turn it off. Don’t panic. A moment later we were in darkness. I hunched forward, trying to curl myself into a protective ball. The arms and body of the jacket whispered together and instantly I froze.

  Thump. Thump-thump.

  My body cringed at every muffled sound as though it were a blow. Run! screamed the most primitive part of my brain, howling and ranting like a caged animal. The only thing that prevented me from trying it was the knowledge that the well was still uncovered, waiting for the unwary to plunge into its black waters.

  As my eyes adjusted to the darkness I stared with horrid fascination at the long gray oblong that was the door to the first room of the cellar. Again I had the dizzying feeling that the sounds were not coming from there at all. I felt a light touch on my shoulder: Stefan. I turned, gazing into the dark.

  To my astonishment, I realized that where there had been absolute blackness at the other side of the room, now there was a jagged patch of faint gray-yellow light.
As I struggled to make sense of what I was seeing-could it be some sort of reflection of the doorway?-it became stronger and brighter, and I realized that the light patch was another entrance to the room, a narrow ragged-edged hole, just large enough for a man to step through. Where it led to I could not imagine. Thoughts seethed in my brain like a swarm of darting fish. Terror and cold had banished rational thought, but even an animal, unable to reason, knows when it is in danger. Someone with a light had come through that entrance once before and shut me in the well to die; that someone was coming back.

  In blind panic I scrabbled at the flagstones, struggling to get to my feet, and my boot struck something on the floor: the lantern. With a clatter that sounded alarmingly loud in the chill darkness, it rolled over the edge of the well. There was a loud clank followed by a splash.

  A split second later the approaching light went out. There was a silence so pregnant that involuntarily I held my breath. Then we heard the sound of someone stumbling in the hole, turning around in a limited space with difficulty, moving heavily, perhaps burdened with something that made it hard to move easily. We heard ragged footsteps, the sound of someone moving as fast as possible over uneven ground in the dark.

  There was a muffled exclamation from Herr Düster, and a click. As light bloomed I saw that he had Stefan’s flashlight in his hand. He nodded at Stefan. “Come.” He glanced at me. “Stay here, Pia.”

  “No!” I couldn’t think of anything worse than being left there alone in the dark.

  Staggering to my feet, I tottered stiffly as a scarecrow. Herr Düster had not waited to see whether I had obeyed his injunction: he was already at the mouth of the hole, Stefan close behind him. In savage determination I limped across the flagstones, although every movement seemed to jar painfully through my whole body, and stumbled after them into the hole.

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Entering the jagged hole in the wall, I could see little more than the black shapes of Stefan and Herr Düster, backlit by the flashlight. Still, I could make out a little of the tunnel we were in, from the weak yellow light and the feel of the walls under my hands. They felt surprisingly regular: I thought I could feel the shape of bricks, as neatly fitted together as a garden path.

  Somehow I had imagined the hole as an organic thing, a tunnel burrowed crudely through the earth as though by a monstrous mole. It had no right to be there, after all. But this tunnel was meant. Someone had taken the trouble to build a secret pathway underneath the Orchheimer Strasse, though what their motive might be I could not begin to guess.

  It was long: we must be out from under Herr Düster’s house by now. The movement was bringing some sort of life back into my frozen limbs, though my legs felt as cold as a butcher’s slab, my sodden trousers sticking uncomfortably to my skin. I felt as though I had returned to myself; fear and excitement had sobered me up as smartly as a slap to the face.

  Abruptly, Stefan stopped and I suddenly found myself pressed up against his back.

  “What?” I asked excitedly. I could see absolutely nothing apart from the halo of the flashlight around his head.

  “It is a room.” Herr Düster’s voice sounded oddly flat. I shoved at Stefan’s back.

  “Go on.”

  Stefan stepped forward, moving warily: I guessed that he was thinking of my fall into the well. Now that he was out of the way I could see a little of the room we were in.

  “It’s someone’s cellar.” I could not keep the disappointment out of my voice. I had been expecting something more dramatic: a vampire’s crypt, or a mad scientist’s laboratory. Not this smugly dull room with its contents so neatly stored away.

  Shelves filled one side of the cellar, stacked with boxes and crates. On the other side old furniture stood in a prim line, backs to the wall like old maids at a tea dance. A selection of garden tools had been hung up on hooks, spaced at exactly equal intervals, like a display in a museum. The only thing that was at all out of place was right at my feet: a pile of bricks, still with ragged chunks of mortar attached.

  Herr Düster was standing in the center of the room, moving the beam of the flashlight slowly over the stacked shelves. He did not seem disposed to continue his pursuit of whomever or whatever it was we had heard escaping through the tunnel.

  “Herr Düster, we have to go,” said Stefan, urgently.

  The old man raised his head and looked at him.

  “He’s getting away!” Stefan sounded beside himself. “We have to move.”

  Herr Düster moved his head. I think he meant to shake it, but the movement was so slight that it looked as though he had simply turned his neck, as if there were something he didn’t wish to hear. The beam of light wavered along the line of shelves.

  “We have to-” began Stefan.

  “I think,” said Herr Düster, and his voice sounded curiously sad, “I think that we must call the police.”

  “No,” said Stefan instantly. He gave a great sigh of exasperation. “If-if we go back now and call them, he’ll get away.”

  Herr Düster said something in such a low voice that neither of us could hear what it was. Then he said, more loudly, “It is for the police. Not for-children.”

  “Verdammt!” snapped Stefan. He actually stamped his foot, like a small child. His hands clutched the air in frustration, as though trying to tear something down. “We’re not babies.” He glared at Herr Düster. “We’ll go. Give me my flashlight back.”

  Herr Düster didn’t move. Stefan took a step toward him, and Herr Düster involuntarily stepped back. The beam swung in a wide arc. Perhaps they would actually have come to a hand-to-hand struggle for the flashlight. However, as the beam swept across the cellar floor, I saw something.

  “Look.”

  They both followed the direction of my outstretched finger. Something lay on the stone floor, close by the claw feet of an ugly escritoire. A single boot. A girl’s boot made of pale pink suede with a fussy-looking fake-fur trim. The side zip was undone and the boot yawned open, exposing its furry throat.

  “What is that?” said Herr Düster in a voice rimed with dread.

  “It’s a boot,” said Stefan in the tone of someone stating an obvious fact. The real import of Herr Düster’s question, What in God’s name is that doing here? had passed him by. He stooped and picked it up. As he turned back to us, Herr Düster flinched. He looked at the boot as though it were some repulsive thing, a great spider or a decomposing rat. In the sickly light his seamed face looked more wrinkled than ever. The myriad lines on his ancient features seemed to shiver and reform under the influence of a powerful emotion, but what it was I could not tell.

  “It’s probably from one of the girls, the ones-” I began, and stopped. I had been about to say the ones who went missing. But those girls were no longer missing; we knew where they were.

  “Maybe,” murmured Stefan, turning the boot over in his hands. He looked at me. “Or maybe it’s a new one.”

  I stared at him, my mouth open. Suddenly an image flashed across my mind: my father standing in the kitchen with the telephone in his hand, saying, “Kolvenbach” and “Mein Gott.” If my mother had not told him to just go, he would have said, “Another girl is missing.”

  “Lieber Gott,” said Herr Düster quietly.

  “Herr Düster-?” started Stefan.

  The old man regarded him, an unfathomable expression on his face. Then, slowly, he nodded. “We will go. But,” he added somberly, before Stefan could take off like a greyhound, “as soon as it is possible, we will call the police. Verstanden?”

  “Yes,” agreed Stefan instantly. He held the boot out to Herr Düster, but the old man shuddered and declined to touch it, so he stuffed it inside his own jacket.

  Cautiously, we picked our way to the other end of the cellar. In the far right corner was an opening the size of a doorway but with no door across it. Stone stairs spiraled up out of sight. Stefan found a light switch on the wall by the staircase and tried it, but nothing happened. Either the b
ulb had blown or the power had been switched off.

  Stefan made as if to start up the stairs, but Herr Düster laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.

  “I will go first,” he said firmly. There was a challenging note in his voice that made me think of Oma Kristel’s reaction whenever my father or Onkel Thomas had told her to take things easy and think of her age. He began to climb the stone stairs, Stefan and I following as closely as we could.

  Inevitably the stairs, having curled back on themselves, reached an abrupt end at a narrow and very firmly locked door. Herr Düster applied his shoulder to it and it jumped a little but did not open. However, the very fact that it had moved was encouraging; if it had been bolted in place from the other side I doubted it would have moved at all.

  Stefan pushed past Herr Düster and hurled himself at the door, thumping it with his shoulder like an American football player so that it rattled in the frame. But still nothing happened. Herr Düster and I crowded onto the lower steps to give him more room.

  This time Stefan aimed a mighty kick at the lock. I listened in frank amazement to wood splintering. More and more I had the impression that Stefan lived his life in some sort of imaginative action movie. He launched another kick and with a mighty crack! the door gave way and swung open, almost precipitating him on the other side. He steadied himself and would have started through the doorframe, but Herr raised a finger to his lips to indicate that we should stay silent and listen first.

  I could see very little of what was on the other side of the door, since both Stefan and Herr Düster were now crowded into the frame. I could make out a wall papered with a rather old-fashioned design, and the side of a light-brown lampshade lit from within by a low-wattage bulb. The lamp was nondescript but the wallpaper pattern gave me pause: it was somehow familiar. Wreaths of stylized foliage, faded green and brown against an ivory background. Every so often there was a curling leaf shape faintly reminiscent of a fish.