The Glass Demon

by Helen Grant

  Logic said that there could not possibly be any lingering smell of decay hanging about my clothes – I would have died rather than touch that brown and loathsome thing – but all the same I felt dirty, as though simply being near it had somehow contaminated me. I could not wait to change into something else. I wondered whether Tuesday would really want her clothes back. I had no intention of ever touching them again.

  I went upstairs into the chilly but well-equipped bathroom and spent ten minutes under the shower. Then I put Tuesday’s clothes into the hamper and pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. After a moment’s consideration I put on a hooded sweatshirt too; I was shivering, and it wasn’t just from the cold bathroom.

  I sat on my bed in the room I shared with Polly. I could not stop myself rubbing my hands together. I felt restless and rather sick. I did not think I could face any dinner, though judging by the state of the table when my father and I had come home, the rest of the family had already eaten. It would probably not occur to Tuesday to worry about whether I had had anything.

  ‘Lin?’ Polly appeared in the doorway. ‘Ru’s asleep.’

  I looked at her. ‘Why do you do all that stuff, Polly? Tuesday ought to put him to bed.’ My heart wasn’t in it, though, and when Polly didn’t reply I didn’t push it.

  Polly came and sat on the other bed. She looked tired, almost a little grey, but I noticed the fact without curiosity. My mind kept skipping back to that scene in the cemetery, like a worn recording with a jump in it. I had been standing there, with the afternoon sun hot on the side of my neck, and I had been looking at the flowers which were strewn over Herr Roggendorf’s grave like vivid splotches of paint, and I had looked up and seen –

  ‘. . . OK?’

  ‘What?’ I said stupidly.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Polly repeated patiently.

  She was huddled inside an enormous knitted jumper which was too warm even for the evening. Dimly I wondered whether the chill which seemed to have crept into my bones was leaching itself into Polly too.

  I gave her a smile which sagged limply across my face; even I could tell what a failure it was.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Do you want to – you know, talk about it?’

  This was a generous offer from Polly, who recoiled from unpleasantness of any kind, who hated to face such things the way other people would hate to touch the warty back of a toad or a tumour. Polly’s ideal world was one in which all nastiness had been covered over, like a snow plough smoothing out a ski run, shunting all the untidiness away and tamping it down until nothing remained but a smooth surface, absolutely clean and pure white and glistening.

  ‘Not really,’ I said.

  It didn’t occur to me to ask her how she was, why she looked so tired, why she was swaddled up in a heavy pullover on a warm early-autumn evening. I was still too preoccupied with what I had seen earlier; I was thinking about that moment when I had realized that the person peeping at me over the tombstone was not a live person at all. And I was thinking about what Michel had said, about there being broken glass on the ground. Was he telling the truth? I had not noticed the glass – if it was really there – and nothing would have induced me to go back and look.

  I remembered how Michel had seemed so alien when he had come out of the cemetery and spoken to me with his heavily accented English. I had tried to keep my distance from the start, but that moment had opened a gulf between us. If he had been lying about the glass, he was part of the monstrous thing that was already taking shape in some dark corner of my mind. And even if he were not, if he were simply reporting the truth, that once again a body had been found with glittering shards of glass littered all about it – what then?

  I couldn’t help it. My mind kept jumping back to that long-ago day in my father’s study at home, when I had been so terrified by the woodcut of Bonschariant climbing out of the window. It was ridiculous – it was impossible – clearly if there were any connection between the deaths and my father’s hunt for the Allerheiligen glass it was because someone wanted us to make that connection. Human hands had strewn the broken glass around, like the dragon’s teeth of legend, which once sown would grow into warriors – only these warriors were Rumour and Fear.

  That was what I told myself, and yet dark imaginings gnawed at the edges of my rational mind. Long after Polly had gone downstairs I stayed on my bed, hugging my knees and gazing into the sunlight which streamed through the bedroom window. The sun was low in the sky and its rays seemed to blaze through the panes, gilding every reflective surface in the room – the oval mirror standing on top of a chest of drawers and the glazed pictures on every wall.

  So much glass, I thought. It was everywhere. It’s not something I had ever thought about before; I had just taken it for granted, though a thousand years ago it would have been a rarity. Even five hundred years ago, when Gerhard Remsich had designed his masterpiece for the cloister of the Allerheiligen Abbey, glass was a rare and costly thing. Small wonder that legends had sprung up about it among the poor, for whom it represented a glimpse of magic in their drab lives. For those who had seen the lives of the saints and the miracles of God portrayed in brilliant and glowing colours, it was a short step to imagining that something more than human might step right out of the glass and into their own reality. Could they have imagined that centuries later there would be glass everywhere? That every home, every shop, every school would be glazed with it, not just the houses of the rich?

  It was a strangely chilling thought. Logically, I knew that there could be no such creature as Bonschariant, yet I couldn’t help thinking that if there were, he would have an infinite number of passages into our world.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The next day Michel picked me up again at the same time. I was waiting for him outside the green gate. Tuesday had evidently heard the honk of the horn the morning before. ‘I hope he’s not going to do that every morning,’ she had said severely, as though there were a dying person in the house whose comfort required that straw be laid outside and the hooves of passing horses be muffled. It was not Tuesday’s comfort I was thinking of, though. I felt the need to be prepared for Michel’s inevitable curiosity about my father’s comment of the day before. I thought that if I got in first with a question of my own I might be able to head him off altogether, at least until we got to school and I could escape.

  I opened the car door with brisk smartness and slid into the passenger seat. ‘Morgen,’ I said in a determinedly cheerful voice.

  ‘Morgen.’

  My heart sank; Michel seemed in no hurry to drive off. He had turned in his seat and was studying me with those mud-coloured eyes as though he were somehow assessing me. I had a horrible feeling that that was exactly what he was doing. I dumped my bag on the floor at my feet and ducked my head for a moment, as though I was checking I had everything with me; anything rather than sit there staring into Michel’s eyes.

  ‘Shouldn’t we get going?’ I said in German.

  After a second’s pause, during which I still had the uncomfortable feeling that I was being appraised, Michel put the car into gear and we moved off.

  ‘Your father –’ began Michel, but I was determined not to let him get the question out.

  ‘Your brother,’ I cut in smartly, ‘does he go to the same school as we do?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I just wondered, because your dad –’ I glanced at Michel and faltered. He was clearly nonplussed at my sudden fictitious interest in his brother. ‘Your dad said he didn’t drive you – but he didn’t say what your brother does.’

  Michel didn’t say anything for a moment and I had the impression that he was trying to decide how to reply.

  ‘Has he got his own car too?’ I asked eventually, when it became apparent that I was not going to get an answer.

  ‘Jörg’s finished school,’ said Michel shortly.

  ‘Oh.’ I was checked for a moment, but I dared not let the silence stretch out in case Michel r
everted to the subject of my father’s remark. ‘Is he away studying or does he still live here?’

  A memory flashed across my mind; seeing an upstairs window at the farm suddenly closed by unseen hands.

  ‘He’s not studying.’ Michel didn’t say what his brother did instead.

  I began to feel vaguely irritated at his reluctance to speak. I wasn’t really interested in Jörg; I had only asked in an attempt to steer the conversation away from my habit of stumbling over corpses. Now, however, I had the distinct feeling that Michel was keeping something from me and out of sheer pique I persisted.

  ‘Well, what does he do, then?’

  A tightening of Michel’s jawline showed that he was irritated too.

  ‘He just helps Dad,’ he said in an uncompromising, ask-me-no-more tone.

  With what? I wondered. Did the two of them patrol the woods night and day, accompanied by that monster of a dog?

  ‘But, Lin…’

  I could see the question coming. I cast around for some other topic to thrust like a stick into the spokes of the conversation, but it was no use.

  ‘Your dad – when we were outside the police station yesterday, he said something about corpses. Not one corpse, but corpses.’

  ‘Did he?’

  Michel took his eyes off the track ahead for long enough to give me a very pointed look.

  ‘What did he mean?’

  ‘He was just…’ I searched vainly for the German expression for figure of speech, and finally gave up. ‘It was just a silly joke. It doesn’t mean anything.’

  ‘Then why –’

  ‘Look,’ I said irritably, ‘it didn’t mean anything, OK?’

  I had inadvertently raised my voice. I saw Michel’s eyebrows go up and regretted it; this was hardly going to smooth the topic over.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said hastily. ‘It’s just – I’m still upset about yesterday. I don’t really want to talk about it.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Michel, so promptly and with such a contrite look that I almost felt guilty.

  I squashed the feeling. I still didn’t know whether he had been telling me the truth about what he had seen in the cemetery. I suspected that a struggle was taking place here, only half-seen and half-understood – a struggle between my father, with Herr Mahlberg’s shade at his shoulder, desperate to lay hands on the lost glass, and a person or persons unseen who were determined that he shouldn’t. Michel might look at me with the yearning expression of a dieter at a patisserie window, but that didn’t mean he was on my side.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  If I had hoped that dressing down for my second day at school would allow me to slip under the radar of class attention, I was doomed to disappointment. Evidently the tale of the grisly discovery in the Baumgarten town cemetery had spread with the deadly swiftness of an airborne disease. As Michel and I walked across the foyer of the school I was already aware of heads turning in our direction and a few elbows working like pistons as their owners alerted their friends to our presence. I tried not to look their way, but I couldn’t resist scanning the foyer briefly for a glimpse of Father Engels.

  He was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he was only ever at the school on certain days of the week. Perhaps he would be in later, or tomorrow. For a few moments I allowed myself to drift off into an interesting reverie in which, despite my parents’ religion being registered as ‘none’ on all the official forms, I somehow ended up in the Catholic religion class and was able to sit in the front row, where Father Engels would notice me (in spite of the nondescript clothes I had on today) and be strangely struck by my appearance (although he dared not show it). The interminable monologues my father used to deliver over the dinner table about various staggeringly uninteresting medieval saints would finally come in handy, as Father Engels would ask the class which order St Bernard of Clairvaux had belonged to, and I would be the only one to reply correctly that it was the Cistercians. And then Father Engels would turn to me and say…

  ‘Is it true, then?’ said a loud voice in German.

  The owner of the voice was barring our way. Jerked gracelessly out of my pleasing daydream, I found myself looking at a boy of mountainous proportions, a solid mass of adipose stuffed into sagging jeans and a distinctly grubby sweatshirt with BAP stencilled on the front of it. Porcine eyes stared down at me over the bulging slabs of his cheeks.

  ‘Is what true, Hendrich?’ said Michel. His voice sounded terse and somehow rougher than before; I guessed he was sliding into Platt, the local dialect.

  ‘What you and she –’ he nodded at me – ‘found in the cemetery.’

  ‘And what was that?’ asked Michel calmly.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Reinartz. So?’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So is it true?’

  ‘Yes, it’s true,’ said Michel. He looked the boy in the eyes. ‘Now can you get out of my way?’

  ‘You,’ said Hendrich to me, giving up on Michel. He leaned over me and I caught a whiff of whatever sugary thing he had stuffed himself with for breakfast, a waffle or a doughnut. ‘You speak German?’

  ‘Of course she does,’ interjected Michel.

  He grabbed me by the arm and began to manoeuvre me past the boy. I shook my dark hair out of my eyes and gave Hendrich a good glare but I didn’t say anything. Let him think I couldn’t speak German, if he would only leave me alone.

  In the classroom it was no better. I tried to slide around the door frame and into the room without being noticed, but I was wasting my time. The bell rang and Frau Schäfer bustled into the room before anyone could come and ask me about what had happened the day before, but about ten minutes into the first lesson, when I was struggling to work out what part of German grammar the Prädikat was, I felt a dig in my ribs. The next second a small piece of paper, carefully folded, was slipped on to the open pages of my book. I looked up and caught the eye of Johanna, the red-haired girl who sat next to me. She looked away, ostentatiously facing the front. I looked down at the piece of paper and then I very carefully unfolded it and read the message scrawled on it in German with pink fineliner.

  Is it true?

  I folded the piece of paper back into a tiny square and slid it into my pocket, doing my best to ignore the surreptitious dig Johanna gave me with her elbow. At the front of the class, Frau Schäfer was holding forth about Schiller’s Don Carlos with the dogged look of Polly trying to feed spinach to a recalcitrant Ru. I did my best to maintain an expression of earnest interest, but my mind was elsewhere, skittering all over the events of the past twenty-four hours like the fingers of a climber trying to find a purchase on an impossible rock face.

  That I was once again the unwilling centre of attention was clear. I marvelled at the speed with which the tale of yesterday’s horror had spread, and wondered how it had got out so quickly. Perhaps it didn’t get out, said a niggling voice at the back of my brain as I let my gaze wander over my fellow pupils, over the rows of studiously bent backs. Perhaps they were expecting it. Perhaps they knew it would happen.

  The thought chilled me. Did everyone except me know what was going on? I sneaked a glance at Johanna, whose face was resolutely turned towards the front of the class, so that all I could see was her profile, the straight nose and slight overbite, the sprinkling of freckles on her cheekbones. Was she trying to be friendly, with her little scrawled note, or was she fishing, to see whether I had got the message, whatever that message was – go home, stop looking for the glass, stop now or it’ll be the worse for you?

  The boy two rows in front who kept turning round to look back towards my desk, was he a friend or would-be friend of Johanna’s? Was the smirk for me or for her? And the two blonde girls sitting together near the window, what were they whispering to each other? I very much doubted that they were discussing Schiller’s contribution to Weimar Classicism.

  I bit my lip, wondering whether I should try to brush off the inevitable questions as Michel had brushed off the objectionable Hendrich; on the o
ther hand, I reflected, it might be an opportunity to ask some questions of my own.

  When the bell rang, Johanna got to her feet without looking at me and began to stuff books into her bag. I guessed that she was slightly offended that I had not replied to her note.

  ‘Johanna?’ I said, conscious of the pairs of ears twitching on every side. I felt in my pocket for the folded piece of paper. ‘This… did you mean what happened in the cemetery yesterday?’

  I had kept my voice down as much as I could, but all the same I saw a boy at the next desk pause in the action of packing his bag; when he resumed it was much more slowly. Clearly he was not keen to get away if there was the prospect of some revelation in view.

  Johanna nodded. ‘Is it true, then? That there was a dead guy? Did you see it?’

  ‘Mmm-hmm.’

  ‘Was it – I mean, was he – was it yucky?’

  I felt a retort rising to my lips at that: No, he looked as though he’d just fallen asleep. His relatives would’ve been touched.

  ‘Not so bad,’ I said. ‘More of a skeleton than anything.’

  ‘Wow. Did you scream? I would’ve.’

  ‘Like a pig.’

  ‘Really?’

  Now I regretted saying it. By lunchtime the whole school would think that that weird new English girl had not only seen the body in the cemetery, but she had screamed so loudly that she could be heard in Nordkirchen. I pushed on anyway. I had to know whether Michel had been lying about the glass or not, and I couldn’t think of anyone else I could ask. It meant taking a risk – I was still not sure whether the note Johanna had passed me was an overture of friendship or a sly taunt – but it had to be a thousand times better than asking someone like Hendrich.

  ‘Look, Johanna – this is a bit strange, but… in the cemetery, Michel said there was glass all round the body.’

  Johanna had been sliding the last of her belongings into her bag as we spoke. Abruptly she froze and turned a wide-eyed face to me.

  ‘What?’ I said instantly.