The Glass Demon

by Helen Grant

  Sticking straight up from the tangled bedclothes was what appeared to be a great metal spear, fixed as firmly as if it had been planted there. It must have been fully two metres long and it was black and corroded with age. It had been thrust into the cot with such savage force that it had gone right through the mattress and the base. The blunt end rose up from the cot like a grotesque flagpole and I glimpsed the sharp end underneath, the tip almost touching the floor. I looked at that, and thought my legs might give way under me.

  ‘Ru…’ I whispered.

  I stumbled over to my father on unsteady legs, like a seafarer trying to struggle up a pitching deck in a storm. My eyes would not leave the obscenity of that spear sticking straight up out of the centre of the cot, thrust there by hands whose brutal strength was born of rage or insanity. I found it hard to imagine how Ru could still be alive if that wicked sharpness had pierced his flesh. Still, I had to know.

  ‘Tuesday took him,’ said my father. ‘He’s –’ He covered his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘He’s not hurt.’

  ‘Dad?’ My voice sounded strange in my own ears; every word was like spitting out a pebble. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  His voice was wretched, not a trace remaining of his normal bonhomie. The great Oliver Fox, would-be professor and media darling, had quite vanished. In his place was a shocked and frightened and somehow diminished man.

  ‘How did that spear get in? Who –’

  ‘I said I don’t know.’ My father’s voice tightened, as though he was gratefully moving on to the familiar territory of irritation. He ran a shaking hand through his thick dark hair. ‘Tuesday thinks she heard something.’

  ‘Something?’

  ‘A thump. We were downstairs – I didn’t see anything. Tuesday thought maybe Ru had tried to climb out of the cot and had fallen on the floor. So she came up and…’ His voice trailed off. ‘How could this happen?’ he said.

  ‘Dad?’ I went closer to him and touched his arm. ‘Are you sure he’s – I mean, is Ru really all right?’

  ‘Tuesday took him,’ said my father. I remembered the bundle she had been clutching to herself. ‘I told her she should leave him where he was – the police –’ He turned a haggard face to me. ‘They ought to see how it was.’

  I said nothing. Even when I was looking at my father, the black stripe of the spear was at the edge of my vision, as dark and ominous as the shadow of a gibbet. I could not blame Tuesday for snatching her infant son out of his bed; letting him lie there would be like leaving him naked on a butcher’s block.

  ‘He’s really not hurt,’ said my father in a distant voice. ‘The spear didn’t touch him. There was… there was about three inches between him and it. It didn’t touch him at all.’

  Three inches? I thought sickly. That was like saying you had decided at the last minute not to take the flight which plunged flaming into the sea, or you had walked out of a building seconds before a gas explosion. You were unhurt, but you’d spend the next year surreptitiously feeling your own arms and legs, wondering whether you were really in one piece.

  ‘Polly…’ said my father. He sounded distracted.

  I knew what he was thinking. ‘It’s OK. Michel’s gone to call the police.’

  My father didn’t ask how Michel came to be involved; nor did he ask me where the two of us had been while Ru’s attacker was creeping into the house. He looked at me as I was speaking, but his gaze seemed to drift past me like smoke.

  I looked at Ru’s cot, at the spear sticking up out of it, at the rumpled bedclothes. I had the most peculiar feeling when I did – not just shock, but a feeling of déjà vu. As though I had seen the scene somewhere before – or as though I had somehow expected it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  The police, when they arrived, turned out to be Herr Esch and Frau Axer. Herr Esch’s flourishing moustache did little to conceal the expression of resigned disapproval on his lean face; Frau Axer simply looked bored. She manoeuvred her vast haunches on to one of the wooden chairs, which trembled alarmingly under her weight, and opened her laptop on the dining table. She listened without apparent emotion while my father explained that someone had broken into the house and attacked his son in his bed. Polly and I sat huddled together on the sofa, silently listening. Tuesday was still upstairs with Ru.

  At first my father still sounded as though he were numb with shock. His description of how he had found Ru, of seeing the spear sticking up from the middle of the cot and thinking for one terrible moment that it had pierced his son’s body, was halting and riddled with repetition. He stumbled through it like a man in a maze, taking wrong turns and going up blind alleys. Herr Esch listened, every so often repeating what my father had said, in a bland tone which somehow suggested incredulity.

  After a while my father began to sense that the mood of the audience was subtly against him and then his voice became terse and finally irritable. When Herr Esch stopped him in mid-flow to ask what it was exactly that had been thrust through the bed, a pike, a javelin or a lance, my father lost his temper. He thumped the table with his fist, making the unwashed lunchtime plates jump on the wooden surface.

  ‘What does it matter what it was? It’s six feet long and someone tried to kill my son with it.’

  ‘Is the child injured?’ asked Herr Esch in that infuriatingly mild tone.

  ‘No,’ snapped my father.

  ‘Has he been checked by a doctor?’ Herr Esch must have known that he hadn’t been; there was no ambulance.

  ‘He’s not hurt,’ said my father defensively.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ said Herr Esch. He raised his eyebrows. The inference of parental neglect hung in the air between them like an ugly spectre. ‘The child should see a doctor.’

  ‘Of course,’ said my father angrily.

  ‘We can direct you to the hospital.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said my father, spitting out the words as though they had a foul taste in his mouth. He leaned forward across the table, his face flushed with anger. ‘But before you start telling me my responsibility as a parent –’

  I winced, seeing the expression on Herr Esch’s face.

  ‘– how about you carry out yours and arrest the person who did this, like you should have done the first time?’

  ‘Herr Fox –’ began Herr Esch.

  I noticed that he had dropped the Herr Professor.

  ‘We all know who it was,’ interrupted my father.

  Frau Axer looked up from her laptop and exchanged a glance with Herr Esch.

  ‘Did you see the person you say broke into the house?’ asked Herr Esch.

  ‘No,’ snapped my father. The silence which ensued was heavy with insinuation. ‘It’s obvious,’ said my father eventually.

  Herr Esch stared at him coolly. ‘We should look at your son’s room now,’ he said, ignoring my father’s accusation. He got to his feet and my father was obliged to stand up too.

  They were upstairs for some minutes. When they came down again, Herr Esch was still wearing the same neutral expression. My father was close behind him, his face a mask of suppressed fury.

  ‘It’s not possible,’ he was saying.

  ‘We have to consider everything,’ said Herr Esch calmly.

  ‘It can’t have been an accident,’ said my father. His fists were clenching and unclenching, as though he would have dearly loved to take a swing at the policeman. ‘How could it be?’

  Herr Esch made a vague gesture encompassing the whole room. ‘There are things on all these walls. It’s possible for them to fall down.’

  ‘You think we’d let our son sleep under a spear?’ My father sounded as though he were on the brink of a cataclysmic eruption of temper.

  ‘I cannot say,’ said Herr Esch.

  ‘Someone attacked my son,’ said my father, making a visible effort to keep his temper under control. ‘Are you going to do something about it, or do I have to –’ he cast about him wildly – ‘contact m
y embassy?’

  There was a silence. I doubted that my father even knew where the nearest British embassy was, but Herr Esch got the message: he wasn’t giving up. He studied my father for a few moments, his mouth a tight line. Then he looked at Frau Axer.

  ‘Kripo,’ said Frau Axer succinctly, shaking her head.

  Herr Esch’s mouth twisted, but his shoulders slumped in resignation.

  ‘We will contact the Kriminalpolizei in Bonn,’ he told my father.

  ‘The Kriminalpolizei?’ repeated my father belligerently, suspecting that he was being fobbed off.

  ‘It is normal for the Kripo to handle cases of this type,’ said Herr Esch stolidly. ‘Assuming that there has been an attack, as you say.’

  ‘Assuming?’ For a moment I thought that my father might actually seize the policeman and shake him, but he managed to hold himself back, although I saw his fists clench.

  ‘When will they come, these Kriminalpolizei?’ he enquired in a voice that was taut with suppressed anger.

  ‘As soon as possible.’

  ‘And while we’re waiting?’ retorted my father. ‘What about the lunatic who did this? How are you going to protect us?’

  ‘Herr Fox,’ said Herr Esch deliberately, ‘in cases of this type, police protection is not normally recommended.’

  ‘Cases of this type?’ repeated my father incredulously. ‘What do you mean, cases of this type?’

  ‘Statistics show that in seventy per cent of murders or attempted murders of children, the perpetrator is related to the victim,’ said Herr Esch.

  Frau Axer looked up. ‘Seventy point two per cent,’ she said.

  ‘The Jugendamt, the children’s department, will want to visit you,’ added Herr Esch.

  Open-mouthed, my father looked from Frau Axer to Herr Esch. Then his face flushed and he said nothing more.

  Herr Esch was on his feet. He nodded at Frau Axer, who was shutting down the laptop, and then glanced back at my father.

  ‘Make sure the child sees a doctor as soon as possible,’ he said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  It was not until very much later that evening that it came to me. None of us felt like going to bed, even though we were drunk with exhaustion. The police had closed Ru’s room, but even if they hadn’t, it was unthinkable that Ru should sleep there again. Tuesday had settled him on her own bed and was curled up next to him. Generally Tuesday acted as though she had not a maternal bone in her body, but even she knew how close we had come to losing him. She clung to him and wouldn’t even let Polly take over. She made a pretence of reading a novel, but whenever any of us went into the room to see how she was, she was always staring into space or out of the window, her eyes blank and scared.

  My father had gone out to call Uncle Karl, then he had gone around the entire house checking all the doors and windows. He had also checked the outbuilding, but if it held any secrets it was keeping them to itself. The stack of rusting pikes was still leaning against the wall and there were a few scuff marks on the dusty floor which might have indicated that someone had been inside the tumbledown building, or might mean nothing at all.

  Now my father was sitting over a pile of books, one hand pressed to his brow and the other one clutching a pen which moved with lightning speed as he made notes. I think he had gone to work out of sheer habit, or perhaps to shut out thoughts of what might have happened, but now it had drawn him in and he had forgotten the rest of us completely.

  Polly was huddled in an armchair, her ears plugged with an MP3 player. I thought I was the only one who had noticed that she had eaten nothing at dinner. I supposed that if anyone had noticed, they would have put it down to shock – only I knew better. From time to time I looked her way, but she never caught my eye. The question of what to do about Polly was like a constant nagging ache.

  I had settled myself in a corner of the living room where I could rest my head on the wall, but every time I closed my eyes I kept reliving the terrible scene in the bedroom. The sleeping child, the spear piercing the mattress, the bunched bedlinen. I still had that vertiginous feeling of déjà vu.

  Outside it had started to rain, a squally downpour which pattered spasmodically on the window like a handful of gravel thrown at the glass. I stared at the darkness outside and tried to empty my mind, to make space for the elusive memory to pop back into it, if it really was a memory and not some strange side-effect of shock I was experiencing. I let my eyes drift out of focus. I was walking… walking out of bright light and into darkness. A dark place – the ground hard beneath my feet, my footsteps echoing. Sudden light breaking into the blackness; shapes and colours etched on to the air. The church in the wood.

  Frowning, I envisaged myself walking down the aisle of the church, gazing up at the brilliance of the windows. I counted them in my mind: four windows on each side. The Garden of Eden; the Fall of the Angels; Naaman washing in the River Jordan; Moses and the burning bush; Abraham and Isaac. What were the others? The Raising of Lazarus, that was one of them – it was pretty unmistakable, with Lazarus’s friends turning away from the open grave with their hands clamped to their noses in disgust. Pentecost – that was another: tongues of vivid fire hanging over the heads of the assembled disciples. But what was the last scene? I thought the missing one, the one I could not remember, was in the furthermost window on the left-hand side.

  Like a thunderclap it came to me. The Slaughter of the Innocents. A horrific scene in which the armour-clad soldiers of King Herod tore babies from their mothers’ arms and spitted them on swords. To the right of the picture one of Herod’s men, his bearded face grim under his helmet, was holding a child by its feet and taking a swing at it with a wickedly sharp blade. And to the left of the picture a second man stood with his sturdy legs apart, as though bracing himself, his hands gripping the long spear which pierced the swaddled child at his feet, running right through it and into the ground below.

  Instinctively I rose from my seat, the chair legs scraping on the floor. Tell someone, was my first thought, and the second one, But who? Who was going to listen to me? They’d think I’d gone mad, raving about stained-glass windows and soldiers with spears. I sank back on to the chair. They’d be right – it did sound mad, not to mention the fact that it would mean telling people – other people – about the church in the wood. I didn’t like to contemplate the fallout from that. Michel would be furious with me for betraying him, but that I could live with; I was more worried about what Michel Reinartz Senior would do.

  I rested my elbows on my knees and put my head in my hands. What was the meaning of the attack on Ru? And why copy that window? There had to be so many other ways of trying to kill someone which did not involve anything as arcane as an antique spear. You could smother them. You could cut their throat, as Abraham was threatening to do to Isaac in another one of the windows. You could drown them…

  I sat up straight with a dizzying intake of breath. Drown them… why hadn’t I seen it before? The scene showing Naaman submerged in the River Jordan. Some might have depicted Naaman discreetly taking a dip, perhaps standing modestly waist-deep in the water and pouring cupfuls over himself. But Gerhard Remsich had shown Naaman completely submerged in the water, as if he were a Baptist undergoing full immersion. His reclining shape appeared through the cornflower blue of the flowing waters like the body of a drowned man frozen under ice. Much, I supposed, as Herr Mahlberg had looked when the bathroom door yielded to the knocking of the unfortunate cleaning lady and she had seen him lying there, his dead face glimpsed through the distorting medium of the water.

  No. It was completely insane. Herr Mahlberg had had a drink too many and fallen asleep in the bath. There couldn’t possibly be any connection to the scene in the glass. All the same, now that the germ of an idea had sprouted there seemed to be nothing I could do to stop it growing into a vast and baroque rhododendron of suspicion. There was the tree in the courtyard, the one which had caught fire so mysteriously and left the ghostly trace of
its immolation as a sooty shadow on the wall of the house. The Burning Bush. And there was the body I had seen in the cemetery in Baumgarten, poised in the act of climbing from its grave. Lazarus.

  I got up again and began to roam the room like a zoo animal in a compound too small for it. The ideas swelling monstrously in my brain made me want to be outside in the open air, where I could feel space all around me, where I could scream at the top of my voice, where I could run and run until I had left my fears behind me. Energy seemed to fizz through my body, down to my fingertips. Again my mind’s eye ran through the sequence of windows in the little church. I could see all the scenes on the right-hand side – the Fall of the Angels, Naaman in the River Jordan, the Slaughter of the Innocents, the Garden of Eden and in the centre of it an apple tree.

  The last piece of the puzzle fell into place. Werner, lying under the apple tree, with that single apple a few centimetres from his outstretched hand. The mark of one single, fatal bite standing out white on the red skin of the fruit. All around him, the ground glittering with glass.

  ‘Lin?’ Polly had taken her earphones out and was peering at me uncertainly. ‘What’s wrong?’

  I looked at her dully, like a person woken from a dream. I supposed I must have made some sound out loud, a gasp or cry. My father had looked up too, although he hardly seemed to notice that I was there; his gaze was distant, as though he were peering down the corridor of centuries to the time when Gerhard Remsich was still crafting his masterpiece.

  ‘I’m – I just –’

  My voice trailed off. What could I say? That there was a building out in the dark forest by the castle, a building that hardly anyone knew existed, and in it was an art treasure worth the best part of a million pounds? That I suspected it was haunted by something savage and unholy, which had long ago killed a beautiful young girl at the Allerheiligen Abbey and given the abbot a fatal heart attack? That someone – or something – was stalking people here and now, taking the inspiration for these murderous attacks from the stained-glass windows it haunted?