by Helen Grant
One word was booming around my brain like the repeated strokes of a hammer, buzzing there like flies on carrion. Bonschariant. Bonschariant. That was whom Michel and I had seen through the stained glass as we clung together in terror. That was who had circled the little church, passing behind each window like a dark shadow, yearning to show us the horror of his face. It could not be, it was impossible – and yet somehow it was.
We had cheated him, I realized now. We had locked the door and we hadn’t looked. He had circled the church, unable to come in, unable to make us look at him through the glass. So he had left us there and in his rage he had flown back through the forest, to the castle and our house, and he had vented his wrath against me on my baby brother as he lay sleeping in his cot. Only by a miracle, only by a few centimetres had he missed killing him.
‘What’s the matter?’ said Polly as I sprinted into the kitchen.
I did not reply; I was too busy hunching over the sink, vomiting and vomiting until my gut ached and there was nothing else to bring up.
It was my fault, I thought. My fault.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
In the early hours of the morning Uncle Karl arrived. My father was upstairs with Tuesday and Ru. Polly and I heard the faint purr of a car engine and then the sound of feet crunching across the courtyard. The knock, when it came, was thunderous. Polly and I were looking at each other, wondering what we should do, when a voice called, ‘Oliver? It’s Karl.’
I unlocked the door and opened it to find the tall angular form of Uncle Karl, looking like a 1940s private eye in a tan-coloured mackintosh with the collar turned up. Uncle Karl had a stern face, all square jaw and razor-sharp cheekbones, but he generally had a twinkle in his eyes which showed that his bark was considerably worse than his bite. Now, however, he looked severe. He wasted no time on the niceties.
‘Lin, where is Oliver?’
‘He’s upstairs with Tuesday and Ru. I’ll show you.’
I stared at him as he stepped inside, aware of an overwhelming sense of relief. Uncle Karl would sort everything out. He knew the area, he knew the system – best of all, he knew the language. He wouldn’t be at a disadvantage, as I was, feeling that I was playing a complicated game in which I was the only person who didn’t know the rules. Uncle Karl would not have to struggle along, doing his best to find the right words in a tongue that was not his own; he could carve out great chunks of irony and insinuation from the living rock face of the language and use them to bludgeon the uncooperative and the malicious.
‘Wait,’ said Uncle Karl, when I began to move towards the stairs. He looked at me narrowly. ‘Did you see what happened?’
‘No. I was out – with a friend,’ I said, not wanting to be too specific.
Under the crust of exhaustion and shock which was enveloping all my thoughts there still ran a hot current of guilt, like molten lava. If I had not been out – if Michel and I had not been poking around in the church… It was still too soon to tell anyone else about the stained-glass windows. I wanted time to think through the possible implications.
‘Polly was there, though,’ I said.
Polly was slumped on her chair as though half-asleep, but she shot me a glance that showed she was wide awake. ‘I didn’t see it happen.’ She sounded defensive.
Uncle Karl looked from me to Polly and back to me again. I did not like the expression which flickered across his face and disappeared almost as quickly as it had appeared. I knew that look; it was suspicion. My feelings of relief at his arrival began to drain away. For the first time it struck me that we might all be in trouble – very serious trouble. Ru had been attacked in his own room – in his own bed – while nearly all of us were in the house. I was the only one who hadn’t been there, and I had not accounted for my whereabouts when it happened.
Uncle Karl was looking at me completely normally now; he appeared concerned, but that other expression had gone. He had dismissed it from his mind; Tuesday was a relative of his – it was ridiculous even to think of suspecting any of us. All the same, the thought had streaked across his mind with lightning speed. It was a look I was to see on many other faces over the following days.
‘Oliver said someone tried to stab Reuben with a –’ Uncle Karl paused, searching for the correct English word.
‘A spear,’ I said. I was amazed how calm my voice sounded, as though it were some other girl altogether who was doing the talking. ‘A long spear. About – as tall as me,’ I added. ‘The police said it might have fallen down…’ I grimaced. ‘There’s stuff stuck up on the walls all over the house, but I don’t think it came from Ru’s room.’
Uncle Karl’s eyebrows went up but I thought I detected a slight look of relief on his face at finding a possible explanation. He opened his mouth to say something and then both of us heard a voice we recognized. The words were inaudible but the complaining tone was unmistakable.
‘Your mother is there,’ said Uncle Karl, looking up towards the landing.
‘She’s not –’ I started to say, but gave up.
It was pointless getting into that argument again, especially with Uncle Karl, who hadn’t been around when Polly and I were tiny. All the same, I couldn’t help feeling a small sad twinge of regret; the real mother, the mother I imagined for myself, would be a tower of strength in situations like this. She’d never desert us in our hour of need. We would all lean on her and she would support us.
Now Tuesday came marching down the stairs, sweeping her mass of blonde hair off her face with one skinny hand, her dress a mass of wrinkles.
‘I thought you were never coming,’ were her first words to Uncle Karl.
He spread his hands in a placatory gesture. ‘Marion is away. I had to find someone to take care of Johann.’
Of course. My father and Tuesday would not have thought of that; it would never even have entered their heads. We had an emergency – we needed Uncle Karl here now – that was all that mattered.
Tuesday was frowning, her face ugly with anxiety and frustration.
‘The police were here,’ she said in an accusatory tone. ‘They said all sorts of horrible things. They implied we had something to do with it.’
‘It happens, you know,’ said Uncle Karl. ‘There was a case last year, a woman in Koblenz who suffocated her two-year-old because he wouldn’t stop crying.’
‘But I –’
Tuesday was too horrified to continue. I could see her visibly crumbling under the idea that she herself might have anything to do with what had happened to Reuben.
Uncle Karl realized his mistake too. ‘Look, I’m sure there is no problem.’ He spoke soothingly, making it sound as though the police enquiries were nothing but a boring bit of bureaucracy. ‘Where is Oliver? Maybe I should speak with him.’
‘He’s with Reuben,’ said Tuesday. She gave a sob. ‘I want to go home,’ she said, sounding like a little girl. ‘I just want to go home, right now, to England.’
Uncle Karl looked at her very seriously. ‘I don’t think you can.’
‘Oh yes, we can,’ said Tuesday, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. Her voice broke. ‘I don’t care about Oliver’s job, about the stupid stained glass. I don’t want to stay in Germany one day longer.’
‘I think you have to,’ said Uncle Karl.
‘Why?’ demanded Tuesday mutinously, glaring at him. ‘I don’t want to stay here. It might not even be safe.’
‘You don’t have to stay in the castle if you are afraid,’ said Uncle Karl. ‘I can find you a hotel. But,’ he added, seeing that she was about to protest, ‘I think you have to stay in Germany. If Reuben was attacked, the police have to investigate it.’
I looked down at the floor, then out of the window. Anything to avoid watching the painful procedure of Uncle Karl trying to communicate the truth of the matter to Tuesday, without coming right out and saying that we couldn’t leave in case we were the ones who had attacked my brother.
‘Lin?’
Pol
ly spoke my name in an undertone. Her eyes were wide, an expression of dumb beseeching in them. It was the first time in days that she had really looked at me, really caught my eye. I went and sat next to her.
‘Dad’ll get a hotel room, won’t he? I don’t want to stay here at the castle either.’ She was shivering, I noticed.
‘I don’t know,’ I said helplessly.
Polly gave a little snort, and for one crazy moment I thought she was laughing, until I realized that she was sobbing, her shoulders shaking. I put an arm round her; she was wearing a thick jumper and a jacket, but still I could feel how thin she was.
‘He could have been killed,’ she choked out.
I squeezed her shoulders more tightly.
‘It’s OK,’ I said. I could not think of anything else to say. ‘It’s OK.’
CHAPTER FORTY
The next morning I didn’t go to school. I had left a note for Michel tacked to the gate, telling him to go without me. I couldn’t face speaking to anyone, but most of all I didn’t want to desert Polly. It was useless leaving her to Tuesday; Tuesday had the fragile elegance of a butterfly, but when it came to sensitivity a rhinoceros sprang to mind.
I woke before the others, as the first rays of autumn sunlight were coming through the crack in the curtains. No one else was stirring; I guessed that they were all still sleeping. I should have been sleeping myself; I could feel fatigue eating away at every cell of my body like some malignant virus. Still I knew that even if I stayed in bed I would never get back to sleep. I had a feeling of immediate and unnatural wakefulness, as though I had had too much caffeine.
There was something I had to know, something which was pulling at my consciousness like a fishhook. The scene flashed through my head again: Tuesday hurrying from the bedroom with Ru in her arms; my father standing by the cot; the stark black line of the spear piercing the mattress. I thought about what I had seen in the orchard in Niederburgheim – the glass glittering on the earth all around the body – and about what Frau Kessel had said about Herr Mahlberg drinking in the bath; everyone had assumed that because of the broken glass on the bathroom floor. I had a strong conviction that were I to go into Ru’s room and approach the bed, were I to crouch on the floor and look underneath it, I would see the tip of the spear protruding from the bottom of the mattress, like a finger pointing at Hades, and underneath it a little pile of broken glass.
The compulsion to look grew stronger and stronger. I knew that the police had sealed Ru’s bedroom; the door was locked and there was a notice pasted to it forbidding entry and threatening legal action to anyone who attempted it. Even if I had defied this threat, the sound of my forcing entry to the room – if I managed it – would wake the rest of the family for sure. That left one option.
I didn’t bother dressing properly; the longer I was in the room, the greater the chance that Polly would wake up. I pulled on my dressing gown and crept out. There was a pair of shoes lying discarded by the door. I slipped my bare feet into them and let myself out as quietly as I could.
The front of the house had a rosy look to it in the early-morning sunlight, marred only by the black smudge of soot on the wall near the cremated remains of the tree. I swiftly turned the corner and gazed up towards Ru’s window.
It was as I had hoped: the castle wall ran right up to the side of the house. It met the wall perhaps a metre and a half below the window. I let my gaze run back along the wall to a worn stone staircase. The stairs were crumbling and broken, and there was no handrail of any kind, but I was pretty sure I could climb them, and then it would be a very easy matter to run along the top of the wall and peep through the window into Ru’s room. I could satisfy my curiosity once and for all.
There was no sense in wasting time; at any moment one of the others might wake up and come looking for me. I trod carefully over to the bottom of the stone steps and began to make my way cautiously up them. It took longer than I expected to get to the top; even a drop of two or three metres was intimidating and there was nothing much to hold on to.
Finally I set my foot on the top of the wall and instantly felt something crunch underneath my shoe. I waited until I had got myself right on to the wall and was no longer in imminent danger of falling off, and then I stood on one foot so that I could look at the sole of my shoe. I was not really surprised to find that there was a large shard of glass protruding from it. I felt a kind of cold satisfaction: the discovery merely confirmed what I had already suspected. I picked the piece of glass out with care and dropped it down the side of the wall. Then I glanced towards the house and Ru’s window. In the warm dawn light the broken glass which lay scattered along the top of the wall glittered and flashed, as though someone had strewn a handful of diamonds there on the rough yellow stone.
Ru’s window was only a few metres away and now I saw that it was open – not wide open, just a few centimetres. Not enough for us to have noticed in the heat of an emergency. I had only noticed it now because there was a little tail of white curtain sticking out under the window frame.
I stood there for perhaps two minutes, staring at the window. I no longer wanted to go over and peer through it; in fact the idea made me feel rather sick. Common sense still tried to reassert itself, telling me that there were no such things as monsters, ghosts or demons; that those who really thought such things influenced our daily lives were about on a par with people who had their pets’ horoscopes read or believed that Elvis had been seen on the moon. And yet… I had seen that shape through the stained glass with my own eyes, had seen it moving slyly past the coloured panes, as though tempting me to look more closely. I had seen the broken glass which sparkled like ice crystals around the body of Werner. And I had seen the deadly pattern in the attacks – the re-creation of scenes devised in the tortured brain of a sixteenth-century genius inspired by demons. Here was the last piece of the puzzle, the last tile which completed the mosaic. Whoever or whatever had attacked Werner and Herr Mahlberg had also attacked my brother. Bonschariant – the Glass Demon.
‘Lin?’
I jumped at the sound of my name and nearly overbalanced. Uncle Karl. He was calling me, probably from the courtyard in front of the house. Panicking, I stumbled back down the stone steps and away from the wall. No thought of laying the matter before Uncle Karl even entered my head; once I had got beyond the first sentence about haunted windows he would be thinking I had gone completely mad. I wasn’t even sure myself that I hadn’t.
I rounded the corner of the house and he was there on the doorstep, already dressed in a neat shirt and trousers with knife-edge creases. He turned at the sound of my footsteps and I saw his expression of recognition fade into one of concern.
‘What’s happened?’ He came over to me, his brows furrowed. ‘Where have you been?’
‘Round there.’ I made a vague gesture behind me. ‘I –’ I struggled for words. ‘I was sick.’
‘You were sick?’
If I had said this to Tuesday she would have made a face and stepped backwards to avoid possible contamination. Uncle Karl, however, clearly shared the time-honoured German preoccupation with health matters. I could see that with very little encouragement he would demand to see the sick in question.
‘In the bushes,’ I said hastily, hoping to head him off. This did not stop him from looking over my shoulder, so I added, ‘I’m coming back in.’
‘Of course.’
He was looking at me curiously. I hoped that it would not occur to him to ask why I had gone outside to throw up instead of using the bathroom. I hurried inside, leaving him standing on the doorstep, peering out into the courtyard with a bemused look on his face. I took the stairs two at a time.
When I went into the bedroom Polly opened her eyes, though she did not venture out from under the duvet which enveloped her like a protective cocoon.
She stared at me, then said, ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
I sank down on the bed. ‘I’m not sure I haven’t.’
‘What’s the matter?’
I raked my hands through my hair. ‘I don’t think you’d believe me, even if I told you.’
I’d intended to speak lightly, as though I was joking, but even I could hear the grimness in my voice.
‘Lin?’
I glanced at Polly. She was still staring at me.
‘Are you OK?’ she asked me, sitting up.
There was warmth in her voice and I had the sense of an unseen barrier between us at last dissolving. Since the moment I had burst into the room and seen her without her sweatshirt on, we hadn’t really talked. She had screamed for my phone when I had come out of the forest that same afternoon, she had wept on my shoulder over what had nearly happened to Ru, and we had had dozens of conversations since then, but we had never really talked.
‘I don’t know,’ I said truthfully.
There was a long silence.
‘I wish I wasn’t going to Italy,’ said Polly suddenly.
‘I wish you weren’t going too,’ I said. ‘But, Polls…’
You’re better off leaving, I wanted to say. It’s too dangerous here. My voice tailed off. I knew what I had seen, I knew what it meant, but I also knew how crazy it would sound to other people.
‘What?’ said Polly instantly.
‘I – guess it’s too late to change it now,’ I finished awkwardly. I tried a smile, but it felt stiff and unnatural. ‘You should go. It’ll be great.’
‘Hmm.’ Polly’s gaze drifted away from me, towards the pale square of the window. ‘It just doesn’t seem…’
Real? I wondered. That was probably because it had never been Polly’s idea. It was not her dream; it was my father’s and Tuesday’s. I wondered how many years of art history she would wander through before realizing that.
