The Glass Demon

by Helen Grant

  ‘Is it habitable?’ asked Tuesday, echoing my thoughts.

  ‘How are we going to keep Ru out of the lake?’ said Polly.

  ‘What the hell was Karl thinking of?’ said my father.

  I could imagine the complaints, the recriminations and the downright hysterics on Tuesday’s part which were going to erupt. I felt something close to panic myself when I looked at the ruinous state of the castle, and the forest closing in on every side. Spend a whole year here? We might as well have moved to the Gobi Desert.

  I thought that if I had to listen to Tuesday making a scene I would lose control completely. I left them all to it and wandered off by myself. There was a dirt path which appeared to run right round the Kreuzburg. On the inside of the path there was moat; on the outside there were woods. There was nothing else to be seen at all. I stood at the side of the path and stared into the woods. It was dark under the towering pine trees. There would be animals in there, foxes and badgers and deer and wild boar. When night fell it would be utterly dark and the only sounds would be the surreptitious rustling of night creatures moving about in the undergrowth. My mind skipped back to the old man in the orchard and I wondered if he would still be lying there when the darkness came. Hastily I tried to push the thought away – instead I tried to think about my hometown, about the cinema and the cafes and the brightly lit streets. My friends would be sitting in one of those cafes, eking out a coffee or Coke each, texting their boyfriends, discussing plans for the last week of the holidays. At this very moment someone might be saying, ‘I wonder what Lin is doing.’

  I groaned inwardly. The thought of being confined in a castle in the middle of the German Eifel, with nothing to look at but trees, was terrible. Ten times worse was the thought of being shut up there with Tuesday, who would have nothing to do but look at trees either.

  I turned to go back to the others and almost jumped out of my skin. Someone was standing behind me, only a metre away. The shock was so great that for a moment I could not even scream. Then he beat me to it.

  ‘I’m sorry – I’m sorry – don’t scream!’ he said in hurried German.

  I felt like telling him that there was no chance anyway, because I was having a heart attack. Then I felt like thumping him. It wasn’t the Ghoul of the Woods, or the Mad Axeman of Niederburgheim, it was just a boy, about my age or a little older, dressed in jeans and a faded sweatshirt, dark hair flopping untidily over his eyes. Nothing scary there. Just a boy. A boy who any minute now was going to start laughing his head off and pointing at the stupid English girl who’d just made a total idiot of herself. I tried to catch my breath and let my heartbeat slow to a gallop. In the meantime I glared at him, just to let him know that if he started smirking I would blow my top.

  ‘You understand German?’ he said suddenly in English. Perhaps he had seen our car, with the British number plates.

  ‘Of course I do, Vollidiot,’ I snapped back in German. I put my hands on my hips. ‘I suppose you think that was funny, sneaking up on me like that?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said for the third time, reverting to German.

  I wasn’t mollified.

  ‘What are you doing here anyway?’ I demanded.

  ‘I live here,’ he said.

  ‘What, here?’ I said, turning round to glance at the crumbling castle walls.

  ‘Well, over there, at the farm,’ he said, gesturing vaguely.

  I was reluctant to show too much interest, but I looked anyway and could see absolutely nothing apart from more pine trees.

  ‘Really?’ I said as coolly as I could. ‘Well, you still haven’t said what you’re doing here.’

  ‘It’s not forbidden to come here,’ he replied, starting to sound a little defensive. ‘The ruined part of the castle is open to the public.’

  ‘We’re not in the castle,’ I pointed out. ‘And I don’t like people sneaking up on me.’

  ‘Are you English?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘No,’ I said with heavy sarcasm. ‘I’m Swedish.’

  ‘Really?’

  I gave a sigh of exasperation. ‘No, I’m English.’

  ‘Is your father the professor?’

  ‘Sort of,’ I said.

  ‘Is it true that he is going to find the Allerheiligen glass?’

  I racked my brains but could not come up with the German for Mind your own business. In the end I settled for, ‘Who said that?’

  ‘My friend’s next-door neighbour’s aunt, Frau Kessel.’

  I looked at him incredulously. He was staring at me with an expression of avid interest which I found faintly irritating. His eyes were the colour of mud, I noticed.

  ‘I have to go,’ I said.

  ‘I’m Michel,’ he said, as though he had not heard me.

  ‘OK,’ I said, not proffering my own name. ‘Michel, I have to go.’

  ‘Your father – he won’t find the Allerheiligen glass,’ said Michel suddenly. ‘Not on his own.’

  ‘I have to go,’ I said again, and walked off, leaving him standing there. It didn’t occur to me at the time to wonder what he meant by that: Not on his own.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Allerheiligen glass, I thought in disgust, as I walked back to the castle. Was everyone obsessed with it? I was sick of the sound of it already. This was unfair; if it had not been for the glass, my father would have found some other reason for escaping from our hometown. I wished he had taken it into his head to research something which was not hidden in the obscurest part of the back of beyond. But that was the point, wasn’t it? The odious Goodwin Lyle could be made President of the United States and Supreme Commander of the Galactic Empire to boot, and we wouldn’t hear about it, marooned out here in the sticks.

  If I hadn’t been so cross it might have been intriguing. Even as a medievalist’s daughter I knew that most people weren’t remotely interested in ancient stained-glass windows, yet the first two people we had spoken to since arriving clearly knew what it was and why we were here.

  I knew what the Allerheiligen glass was, of course; I had heard my father talking about it ever since I was tiny. It was a lost series of stained-glass windows, nearly five hundred years old, that had come from the abbey of the same name. Unlike Polly, who gallantly tried to take an interest in everything my father told us about his studies, I was determined to turn my back on it, I, who was going to study earth sciences and confound the entire family tradition of studying the arts. All the same, the Allerheiligen glass was one of those topics which you were not likely to forget, even if you had absolutely no interest in medieval art, for two very simple reasons: first, that if the glass were still in existence it would be worth a fortune, and second, the windows were haunted by a demon.

  I didn’t believe in demons; I ranked them with ghosts and vampires and werewolves, as products of a fevered imagination, or phenomena with a perfectly rational explanation. I did not realize yet, that summer when I was seventeen, and my sister Polly was still alive, when the sun was shining and even the wind was warm, and my whole body was restless, that there are worse things than being stuck in a small town for a year. There are demons, and they are more terrible than we can imagine.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ‘There you are,’ said Tuesday in a reproving voice when I reappeared. ‘We’ve found the way in.’ She gestured towards the castle. ‘There’s a bridge. They’ve left us some food, though I don’t know what it is.’

  I followed her over the bridge and through a large green wooden gate set into the stone wall. Inside was a little courtyard and – I was relieved to see – a stone-built house with small white-framed windows, obviously of a much more recent date than the rest of the castle buildings. There was even a kitchen garden, though it was terribly overgrown, and a tumbledown outhouse with a peeling door fastened with a simple latch. I peeped inside but there was nothing of any interest: simply piles of old agricultural tools and what looked like a mixture of rusting pikes and wooden staves propped up in the far corne
r. Everything had an abandoned look and I guessed that the house had been empty for some time. Tuesday did not give me any more time to look around; she shepherded me into the house. The front door led directly into a large, shabby-looking room decorated in an outmoded style and dominated by a big scrubbed-pine dining table. On the table were a collection of jars and packages and a note. I picked up the note. ‘Welcome to the Kreuzburg,’ I read aloud. I picked up one of the jars and studied the label: ‘Eifeler Bärlauchschmalz’. It was lard.

  ‘Well, what is it?’ asked Tuesday.

  ‘Low-fat spread,’ I said, putting the jar down. I opened one of the paper packages and looked inside. ‘And here’s some bread.’

  ‘Good,’ said my father, who had just come in with his arms full of books and papers. ‘Has anyone found the fuse box yet?’

  There was no light; I flicked the switch up and down but nothing happened. None of us could find the fuse box so that night we settled down to eat by the light of some of Tuesday’s scented candles. The smell of vanilla was overpowering. I would have taken my supper outside but it was dark now. As I stood at the door I could hardly make out the bulk of the castle walls and the forest beyond. When I came back to the table, Polly had taken Ru upstairs to bed, though I wondered how he would sleep if he had to lie there in a miasma of French vanilla. My father had found a little bottle of herb liqueur among the groceries and he and Tuesday were sipping glasses of it rather tentatively.

  ‘So,’ said my father, ‘what do you think of the castle, Lin?’

  ‘It’s very dark,’ I said. ‘I can’t see anything at all out there. There’s not a single light anywhere. There is a farm around here somewhere, though,’ I added. ‘I met someone from it.’

  ‘Really?’ said Tuesday in a bored voice.

  ‘Yes. He asked if I was the professor’s daughter,’ I said, looking sideways at my father.

  ‘I suppose you said no?’ said my father. There was a slight edge of bitterness to his voice.

  ‘I said, sort of.’ I thought about it. ‘He seemed to know all about us. He wanted to know if you were really looking for the Allerheiligen stained-glass windows. He said you’d never find them.’

  ‘He did, did he?’ said my father. Now he sounded rather interested in spite of himself. ‘That’s intriguing.’ He took another mouthful of the liqueur and grimaced. ‘He probably means he doesn’t want me to find them. There are all sorts of superstitions about those windows. Who was he, this person you met?’

  ‘Just a boy.’

  Tuesday raised her eyebrows. I ignored her.

  ‘What are the superstitions?’ I asked, hoping to draw attention away from myself.

  My father put down the glass on the pine table. ‘The demon Bonschariant,’ he said.

  ‘Bonschariant?’ repeated Tuesday in the faintly complaining tone she used when she suspected that everyone else was in on the joke. ‘What sort of a name is that?’

  I didn’t listen to the rest. It meant nothing to Tuesday, but for me hearing the name again for the first time in years was like raising my head to the breeze and scenting smoke on the air, the sulphurous smoke of a distant conflagration. I remembered very clearly the first time I heard it.

  I suppose I was about seven or eight at the time; at any rate I remember having to look up at the big arched window on the upstairs landing of our house, a window I can now look through without having to stand on tiptoes. It was raining so heavily that the water was running down the glass in sheets, turning the world outside into a greyish blur. I think it had been raining like that for days; the memory is tinged with a feeling of restlessness and disappointment.

  I turned from the window and wandered along the landing to my father’s study. If the door was closed, none of us was allowed to disturb him, but now the door was open a little way. I supposed that I might look inside without a telling-off.

  ‘Dad?’

  I stood on the threshold, peering in. When there was no reply, I pushed the door gently, and it swung back until I had a clear view of the whole room. My father was not there. Cautiously I entered the study, taking care not to tread on the second floorboard from the door, the creaky one which squealed like an angry sow if you trod on it.

  The study was littered with items which would have given most children sleepless nights, such as the tortured St Sebastian statue on the corner of the desk, looking like a pincushion, so stuck full of arrows was he, and the print of St Lucy with her eyes on a plate which hung over the fireplace. For a child of my age I had considerable nerve, being used to the gruesome examples of medieval art dotted around the house, so they were not the reason I was being cautious; it was more the fear of detection. There was no actual rule that we children were not allowed in the study when my father was not there, but I was old enough to know that this was unlikely to be a sufficient defence if I were caught poking about.

  The lamp on my father’s desk was on, creating a pool of golden light in the gloom caused by the rain lashing the windows. It was natural that I should gravitate towards it, and, as I did so, I saw the book sitting in the middle of the desk, as though under a spotlight. Treading carefully, I went round the desk until I was standing in front of my father’s big oak chair, and peered at the book.

  It was a large, thick, hardback volume, the corners a little worn with age. I don’t think there was a title on the front cover – it had probably been printed on the dust cover, long since tattered to pieces – and I didn’t think to look on the spine. I simply opened the book.

  The first thing I saw was a rather rough and simplistic black-and-white illustration – woodcut, I think they call it – showing what appeared to be the frame of a large arched window, the sort you see in very old churches, with a cluster of smaller diamond-shaped spaces in the top part of the arch. But there was no glass to be seen; instead the frame was filled with a figure who appeared to be climbing out of the window, a figure so grotesque that it gave me nightmares afterwards. It corresponded more or less to the shape of a man; it had four limbs and a head, and stood upright, but there the resemblance ended. It had a thick, muscular, scaly body studded with nodules or crusts which gave it a foul, diseased look, and the hands which clutched the window frame looked more like talons. The nails were long and curving and wickedly sharp. But it was the face that frightened me most. It was something between a dragon and a wild boar, bristling all over with rough scales, and with jagged tusks protruding from the slobbering mouth. The eyes, which were set deep within the ridged brows, showed no white at all, seeming to be nothing but gleaming black pupil. The thing was grimacing and the misshapen jaws were open, as though it would have liked to step right out of the picture and sink its fangs into me.

  I might have been used to gruesome medieval art, but something about that crude illustration struck me with a dumb horror. I looked at the picture steadily for about a minute while my skin crept and the thumping of my heart seemed to fill my ears, and then I slammed the book shut so violently that it slid to the floor, and ran from the room, careless of the thunder of my feet on the floorboards.

  My father met me at the head of the stairs; he was carrying a large cup of coffee that he had brought up from the kitchen.

  ‘Whoa,’ he said, smiling at me. ‘Where are you going in such a hurry?’

  To my shame I burst into tears. After that it was impossible not to tell him the whole story. At first I was afraid he would be angry with me for poking about in his study without permission, but in fact he seemed more amused than anything. He took me by the hand and led me back to the study. If anyone else had tried to make me go, I would have refused, but I idolized my father. All the same, I clung to his hand as he opened the book at the page with the illustration and tried to make me look at it again.

  ‘It’s a legend, quite an interesting legend,’ he said. ‘Look.’

  I didn’t look.

  ‘His name is Bonschariant,’ said my father.

  ‘Why’s he climbing out of that window?’ I
asked, trying to keep the tremble from my voice.

  ‘He’s supposed to haunt the glass,’ said my father. He turned the book back to himself and studied the picture.

  ‘He’s broken it, though,’ I objected.

  ‘He’s not really broken it,’ said my father. ‘He’s supposed to appear through it, but I don’t think the artist could think of a better way of showing that. He’s done it this way to make Bonschariant look more threatening – see?’ The annoyance about my treatment of the book had subsided, and now he was enjoying telling me about it. Medieval studies was the one topic he would talk to us children about for hours, if we could be induced to listen; I suspect he was practising for future audiences of non-academics.

  ‘But why?’ I asked him.

  ‘It’s a sort of warning. The window is supposed to represent one of the windows of the Allerheiligen Abbey in Germany. The man who designed the windows – his name was Gerhard Remsich – did such an astonishing job, and the pictures were so realistic, especially the ones of the Devil, that people said he had been helped by a demon.’

  ‘And was he?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘Of course not. But in those days people thought it was a bad thing to take too much praise for yourself if you created something like that. They thought everything came from God –’

  I don’t remember the rest of the discussion. When my father drifted off into the field of medieval theology, he lost my interest at once. I remembered the picture, though, and although I occasionally looked at one or other of my father’s books over the years if there was really no other amusement available, I took care not to open that one again.

  Of course, all that seemed rather pitiable now. It was surprising to think that superstitions surrounding the glass could still have any weight with the local population. I reflected dismally that there must be even less to do in this part of Germany than I had hitherto suspected if they amused themselves by scaring each other with tales like that. Or perhaps they reserved such stories for outsiders like us. I imagined them sitting in the local Kneipe, the German version of a pub, clad in lederhosen and those funny little green hats with a thing like a shaving brush on one side, slapping their hefty knees and laughing themselves hoarse over the things they had told the credulous foreigners.