Wish Me Dead

by Helen Grant

  If it hadn’t been for the precarious-looking stone chimney, it could have been anything: a store, a cowshed. There was no sign of comfort, nothing to show that this had ever been a home. The walls had a scored and pitted appearance. Stones littered the floor, which was blanketed so thickly with the rotten leaves of the previous autumn that it was impossible even to say whether there were boards or flagstones. The moving torch beams picked out the rusting remains of beer cans, the glint of abandoned bottles. Reluctantly I stepped inside.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Izabela asked.

  She was hugging herself against the cold, her dark hair falling over her face. In the torchlight her dark eyes were like pits and her lips almost blue; she might have been mistaken for the witch herself, or some bloodsucking wraith in the sorceress’s pay. Stop it, I thought. Your imagination’s working overtime.

  ‘Hey, Max, don’t we have to take our clothes off or something?’ said Jochen.

  ‘You can forget about that right now,’ said Hanna promptly. ‘It’s freezing and you’re a pervert.’ She listened to Jochen’s complaints for a moment, only a pucker at the corner of her mouth betraying her amusement. Then she said, ‘OK, let’s get on with it, whatever we’re going to do.’

  ‘We’re going to call up Rote Gertrud,’ said Max. I heard the sound of liquid swilling around, followed by a contented sigh. ‘And then … ’ He paused for a moment, seeking inspiration. ‘Then we’re going to tell her to … ’

  ‘Give us more beer,’ suggested Jochen.

  ‘You’re going to summon up a ghost and ask it to give you beer?’ said Hanna under her breath.

  ‘No,’ said Max. ‘I’ll tell you what we’re going to do.’

  His face loomed at us out of the chilly darkness, unnaturally sallow in the torchlight. He no longer looked like the old familiar Max; he looked like a ghoul. Involuntarily I stepped back, stumbling against Hanna in the dark.

  ‘We’re going to kill Klara Klein,’ said Max.

  I looked at him. ‘You’re joking,’ I said.

  Klara Klein – the folk singer – was the local celebrity, or had been, when our grandparents were young; she seemed to have been around forever, and indeed she still drew ageing fans to the town from all over Germany. The idea of wishing her dead was something akin to cursing the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny: faintly sacrilegious and almost certainly ineffective.

  ‘No, no, it’s a great idea,’ cut in Jochen. ‘It’d be a public service,’ he went on in the rapturous tone that meant that he was deep in the clutches of an entirely new idea. ‘I bet there are people in Bad Münstereifel who’d give us a medal for getting rid of her.’

  ‘What about the fans?’ asked Hanna ironically.

  ‘All dead. Or they will be soon,’ said Max airily. ‘They must all be a hundred, at least.’

  This was an exaggeration, but it was certainly true that the ranks of Klara Klein fans were thinning out these days, and most of the surviving ones were in a state of decrepitude. Not that Klara herself – ‘Little Klara’, as she was known – was any spring chicken. The famous folk singer resembled nothing so much as a Gila monster in a blonde wig and dirndl. She lived alone in a very large mansion near the village of Mahlberg. The house was designed to look like an oversized Swiss chalet. I had seen a photograph of it in Freizeit Revue and it had a row of edelweiss flowers the size of car tyres carved on to the wooden facade.

  I wondered if she were there now, hatching some terrible new song about blue gentian flowers and everlasting love, oblivious to the fact that her doom was being plotted in the dark woods on the other side of the town. It should have been funny, but somehow it wasn’t.

  All the same, I said nothing. I listened queasily to Max and Jochen discussing the best way to go about summoning up Gertrud’s ghost. Jochen said that they should say the Lord’s Prayer backwards but Max said no, that was for calling up the Devil. Both of them sounded a little drunk, and the conversation would have roamed back and forth interminably but for the shriek which suddenly froze us all where we stood. I glanced around me wildly and realized that Izabela had vanished.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘Izzi?’ I felt a moment of panic before I heard her voice speaking quietly in the darkness.

  ‘I’m here.’

  I looked down and could just make out the dim shape of Izabela hunched on the mulchy floor. Relief washed over me, but still I wished she would stand up. There was something indefinably sinister about that crouched posture, something that made her look a little less than human.

  ‘There’s a hole in the floor,’ she said. ‘My foot went right into it.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ I glanced around nervously, imagining subsidence, hidden pits awaiting to engulf the unwary.

  ‘Yes. But there’s something here, in the hole. I’m trying to get it out but it’s wedged in.’

  I squatted on the floor, squinting at Izabela in the dark, trying to direct the wavering beam of the torch so that I could see what she was doing. Now that I was close to the ground I could detect the odour of rot. Of decaying leaves and sodden wood, and something appallingly sweetish underneath, the scent of decomposition. I wondered whether some woodland creature had crawled into the space under the floor and died. I marvelled at Izabela’s temerity, rummaging around in there with her bare fingers.

  ‘I’ve got it,’ she said suddenly, and drew something out of the hole. She stood up, clutching it in one hand, brushing the clinging dirt from the legs of her jeans with the other.

  ‘Show Papa,’ said Max, pushing past me.

  He held up his torch and we all looked to see what Izabela had found.

  It was a rectangular object, perhaps twenty centimetres long, and I thought it was all of one colour, although in the dim light it was hard to tell. The surface had a strange pitted texture, which I realized must be carving, though very worn; the thing was clearly very old.

  ‘It’s a box,’ said Izabela. She was running her finger along a join I had not noticed.

  ‘A money box?’ asked Max.

  ‘Be serious,’ said Izabela. ‘There’s something in it, I think, but it’s not money.’

  She shook the box and we heard a faint slithering sound as something light moved back and forth inside it.

  ‘Well, open it, then.’ Max sounded impatient.

  Don’t open it, I thought. Put it back. If there were something inside the box, it was there for a reason. Someone had put it there and wedged the box into the hole in the floor of the deserted house because it was not meant to be found – not meant to be opened.

  Izabela turned the box over in her hands and I saw that her fingers were stained with something dark and sticky. For a sickening moment I imagined that they were slick with blood, before I realized that it must simply be mud from the box’s grave under the floor. Fool, I told myself.

  Eventually Izabela located the catch on the front of the box. It was rusted and stiff and it took her a moment to undo it. As she opened it we all craned forward.

  ‘A piece of paper.’

  I could hear the disappointment in Max’s voice, though what he could have expected to find in this heap of decay and dilapidation it was hard to say. Izabela was unfolding the paper.

  ‘Give me the torch, Max,’ she said.

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Well?’ said Hanna eventually. ‘Is there anything on it? What does it say?’

  ‘It says … ’ Izabela paused. ‘J.M., die before 12.11.’

  ‘J.M.? Who’s J.M.?’

  ‘It doesn’t say, Max,’ said Izabela quietly. ‘There’s nothing else on the paper, just that.’

  I shivered. The effect of the fig vodka seemed to have worn off; all of a sudden I felt stone-cold sober and slightly sick. ‘And “12.11”?’ I said, though I thought I knew the answer.

  ‘December eleventh,’ said Hanna at my shoulder. ‘Or maybe December 2011, or November 2012.’

  We all considered.

  ‘Let’s go
home,’ said Izabela suddenly. ‘Let’s put this back and go home.’

  ‘Come on, Izzi –’

  ‘Max, it gives me the creeps. I don’t want to stay here, OK?’ She stuffed the paper back into the box and closed the lid. Her hands moved swiftly, as though she could not wait to replace the box in the hole, and in the torchlight her face had a tight, strained expression that made her seem much older than her years. The look of someone holding back the floodgates of fear or grief.

  ‘It’s just someone’s idea of a joke,’ said Max.

  ‘It’s not funny.’

  ‘Don’t be a spoilsport, Iz.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Look.’ Max’s voice became silky, persuasive. ‘We didn’t come all the way up here for nothing. We’re going to hex Little Klara.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Max, I just want to go home,’ said Izabela tremulously.

  ‘She’s right, Max. It was a crap idea anyway, coming up here,’ said Timo.

  I noticed he had an arm around Izabela’s shoulders.

  ‘Timo!’ Now Max was starting to look nettled.

  Next to me, Hanna gave a heavy sigh. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘if it’s such a big deal, let’s just do it and go. OK?’ She glanced at the rest of us. ‘I’m not stripping off and dancing round a fire, though, you can forget that.’

  ‘No need,’ said Max. His good humour was returning now that it looked as though he might get his own way. ‘We can do the same as whoever. The person who wrote that note in the box.’

  ‘The stripping off sounded better,’ said Jochen.

  ‘Later, Jochen, later, if you can persuade anyone to watch you,’ said Max, patting him on the shoulder like a benevolent uncle. ‘Look, this is the real thing, right? Someone’s been up here already and put a hex on this J.M., whoever they are.’ He ran a hand through his untidy dark hair. ‘Let’s put one on Little Klara.’ He flashed us a grin, and not for the first time I thought what large white teeth he had, great slabs like polished tombstones. When Max smiled you found yourself wondering if he wanted to bite you.

  ‘Fine,’ said Hanna in a flat voice, a voice that said let’s get this over with. ‘Who’s got paper?’

  All of us started to say that we hadn’t got any paper with us, obviously, because who takes a notebook on a drunken night-time ramble through the woods? But then I slid my hand into the back pocket of my jeans and discovered that I had a flyer for an evening of live music in a local bistro, and scrawled across the bottom of it in an enthusiastic but unruly script was a message that was meant for me only. Hastily I folded the bottom couple of centimetres back and tore them off. Then I handed the rest to Max. ‘Here.’

  ‘Pen?’ said Max in the self-assured tone of a brain surgeon asking for a scalpel.

  This time it was Izabela who silently held out the required item.

  ‘Who’s going to write it?’ asked Max.

  Izabela simply shook her head.

  ‘No point in my doing it,’ said Max. ‘Rote Gertrud wouldn’t be able to read it. Here, Steffi, you do it.’ He saw me put up a hand as if to ward him off. ‘Come on, don’t be wet.’

  Unwillingly I took the pen and paper from him, tucking my torch under my arm. I knew he had asked me to do it because he thought I was the least likely to say no, even if I didn’t want anything to do with the whole scheme. For the thousandth time I found myself wondering why other people found things easy to say, when I seemed unable to speak my mind. It was as though the words were all there, ready inside my head, like a group of jostling kids on the high diving board, daring each other to jump; but at the last minute they just couldn’t do it.

  I put one foot up on a piece of broken stonework so that I could use my knee as a surface to write on. I spread the paper out and uncapped the pen.

  Max stepped close to me, so close that I could smell onions on his breath. He trained the wavering torchlight on the paper. ‘Go on,’ he said.

  I wrote: Klara Klein, die by 5.10.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I held up the piece of paper so that they could all see what I had written by the light of Max’s torch. Then I folded it twice, carefully. Max had taken the box from Izabela, who relinquished it with obvious relief, as though it contained fishing maggots or a dead creature starting to decompose. He raised the lid.

  I looked at the note already inside the box, the one wishing death upon the unknown J.M. For a moment I thought about removing it, but really I was reluctant to touch it at all. In the end I just dropped my own piece into the box. There was a click as Max closed the lid.

  ‘Is that it?’ asked Jochen. He sounded disappointed.

  ‘You should say something, Max,’ said Hanna, but she didn’t sound particularly enthusiastic.

  Even though tomorrow was the first of May, the night was still surprisingly chilly. I guessed Hanna was thinking about going home and warming up. It was an attractive idea, even if in my case the cost of sitting by the living-room fire was probably a monologue about baking from my father.

  ‘Steffi?’

  Izabela was nudging me. She held out a hand; on my other side Timo was also fumbling for my hand with cold fingers. When all six of us were holding hands in a ragged circle, I looked down and saw that Max had placed the box in the middle. There was something so ludicrous about this that I smiled to myself in the dark, but the smile curdled on my lips as I thought about the message I had scrawled on the paper inside.

  I suppose I mostly imagined someone coming to the ruined house, finding my note and recognizing the handwriting. Common sense said that this was highly unlikely – impossible, even – but if they did I could imagine the fuss that would ensue. I was not even sure that there wasn’t some law against putting a wish for someone’s death into writing. Did it count as a threat, I wondered?

  It never occurred to me to think that the writing itself might do anything, that it might cause the ancient and wealthy Klara Klein to collapse over her late-night mug of cocoa, or make her aged heart burst the next time she hit the top note in ‘Geh’ aus mein Herz’. It was a piece of paper in a tatty old box. It was harmless – or so I thought.

  Max cleared his throat. ‘Rote Gertrud,’ he began in a sonorous tone. Someone smothered a snigger. ‘Hear our … ’ He paused. I suspected he had been about to say prayer, but had thought better of it. ‘Request,’ he finished eventually.

  Izabela’s fingers felt cold in mine. I felt her move restlessly, shifting her weight from foot to foot, and guessed that she liked this entertainment as little as I did. But we both knew it was useless arguing with Max. The sooner he put the hex on Klara Klein, the sooner we could leave the ruined house and make our way back to somewhere warmer and drier.

  ‘Rote Gertrud,’ intoned Max again.

  ‘Are you there?’ cut in Jochen in a spectral voice.

  It was intended to make us laugh, but this time nobody did. Then there was silence, and we could hear the movement of the wind through the branches of the trees surrounding the house. I strained to listen for a voice, even a faint one, whispering a reply, but all I could hear was the creaking of timber.

  Nervously I glanced towards the nearest of the empty window frames, but there was nothing to see outside. Beyond the limited range of the torchlight everything was inky black. Even if someone had been standing right there outside the window, just a couple of metres away from where we stood, I doubt I could have seen them. But who would be there on such a dark night, here in the woods?

  The witch.

  As soon as the thought occurred to me I tried to stifle it, but it was too late. Already in my imagination she was there, silently watching us. Rote Gertrud. I thought of pale skin, as white and translucent as the inside of an oyster shell; two eyes blazing with dark fire; a great fall of hair the colour of copper, of fox fur. But Gertrud had burned. Perhaps the thing which lurked there was dreadful to see, a burnt stump with a withered tuft of hair sprouting like poisoned weed from the charred scalp, the eyeholes dark pits.

 
My mouth was dry. I tightened my grip on Izabela’s hand.

  Max appeared to be oblivious to the dark and decay. ‘Rote Gertrud, strike down Klara Klein,’ he said, and laughed. Then he glanced quickly round at the rest of us, his eyes glittering. ‘Come on, say it.’

  ‘Rote Gertrud,’ we mumbled unconvincingly.

  ‘Strike down Klara Klein,’ insisted Max.

  ‘Strike down Klara Klein,’ we parroted.

  Timo was a beat later than the rest of us and he was still speaking when we heard a rustle in the bushes outside, followed by a snap. Izabela gave a little scream.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Calm down,’ said Max. He let go of the others’ hands. ‘Just a fox or something.’

  We listened. There was another sharp snap and then the sound of something moving away heavily through the undergrowth, the bushes springing back behind it.

  ‘It’s bigger than a fox,’ said Izabela in a thin voice.

  ‘A deer,’ said Max, but he made no move to go and look. ‘Or a wild pig.’

  ‘Or Rote Gertrud,’ said Jochen. His voice was mocking but there was no real humour in it.

  ‘Crap,’ said Max shortly. He ran both hands through his hair so that it stuck up in untidy clumps. ‘This was a stupid idea.’

  None of us pointed out that it was he who had suggested it.

  ‘Now we’re all agreed about that, can we go please?’ said Hanna, shifting restlessly.

  For just a moment I saw Max cock his head to one side. I could have sworn he was listening, trying to tell whether the thing which had moved so noisily through the bushes outside had gone or not. It was then that I realized he was as rattled as the rest of us.