by Helen Grant
I could hear Hanna calling me. I dodged to the right and cut away through the trees, stooping low. In my dark jacket and jeans I would be hard to spot, or so I hoped. My breath was ragged, my heart thumping wildly. The overhanging branches seemed to loom at me, trying to grab me with jagged talons of twigs. I skidded to avoid them, then stumbled onwards, swiping at them with my arms.
I was not following any particular course, driven simply by the blind desire to put space between myself and the others, but all of a sudden I burst out of the undergrowth on to a narrow path. At the same moment I realized that there was someone standing on the path with their back to me: a tall, lean figure in black.
My crashing exit from the undergrowth did not go unmarked. A second before I would have thundered into it, the figure turned and I saw a face I knew. I was practically in his arms before I could stop myself.
‘Oh, my God,’ I said. ‘Julius.’
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Our faces were ten centimetres apart. I stared into Julius’s brown eyes, saw him blink, surprised. No time to think about what it meant, meeting him here. Already I was struggling to get away, pushing him away from me.
‘Let me go,’ I panted, though in truth he wasn’t holding me back at all.
‘Steffi, what –’ he began, and then we both heard it.
Someone was crashing down the hill after me; perhaps more than one of them. I panicked, looking wildly about me for a means of escape. By the sound of it, I would be in their sights in less than half a minute.
‘I’ve got to get away,’ I choked out, but I was deluding myself. I was shuddering with the exertion of my headlong flight and the ankle I had hurt before was aching alarmingly. I had no hope of outrunning four determined pursuers, two of them much taller and more powerful than I was.
Julius didn’t waste time asking me what was going on. He could hear the others’ approach as clearly as I could. He looked at my anguished face and made a snap decision.
‘Come with me,’ he said, and grabbed my wrist.
For an instant I almost resisted, but I was at the end of my strength. I let him lead me off the path, stumbling as I tried to keep up with him. About three metres away from the track was a fallen tree. It had crashed down, tearing itself right out of the ground as it did so, leaving a hollow shielded by the earth-clogged roots. Julius half dragged me into the hollow and threw himself down beside me.
While we cowered in the hole I heard someone panting as they fought their way through the undergrowth on to the path.
‘Steffi?’ said a voice. It was Jochen.
I cringed. Out of all of them, Jochen was the one I really didn’t want to face. He had been angry with me before, so how would he be now, when he knew that I had made another wish for myself and that it had come true again? I realized that I was actually afraid.
‘Steffi?’ he said again, dropping his voice in an attempt to sound coaxing. Something rustled underfoot and I guessed that he was moving about, peering into the thick vegetation that covered the ground, hoping to catch a glimpse of me, or a sign of the route I had taken. ‘Steff-ee … ’
Now there was definite menace in his tone. I pressed my hands over my mouth, as though words might leak out unbidden and reveal our position. I felt my strength draining out of me, running out of every limb and vanishing down some dark sinkhole. I guessed the colour was vanishing from my face, because I saw Julius telegraph his concern to me, his eyebrows drawn together, his gaze pregnant with warning. I could not even shake my head. I just stared back at him, my eyes wide with horror.
‘Ste-ff-ee … ’ called Jochen again.
After a moment’s silence I heard him cursing. A little later the bushes rustled as he went back the way he had come.
I had been rigid with tension; now I was faint with relief. I slumped there in the earthy hollow and felt the hot tears begin to come.
Julius looked at me and then leaned towards me. When he put a hand on my shoulder, his grip held both comfort and a warning. He raised the other hand, putting a finger to his lips. Once he saw that I had understood, he risked raising himself up and looking over the top of the fallen tree.
A few seconds later he was back at my side. ‘I think they’ve gone,’ he said, ‘but we should wait.’
‘I can’t run anyway,’ I said in a hoarse whisper. ‘I’m going to be sick if I do.’
‘Hmm.’ He put his head on one side. ‘What’s going on? Was that Jochen Meyer?’
I nodded.
‘I thought he was a friend of yours.’
‘He is,’ I managed, and then wondered if that was actually true – if it had ever been true.
‘OK,’ said Julius patiently. ‘Do you want to tell me why he’s chasing you around the woods?’
‘It’s not just him,’ I said. ‘There are others. Hanna and Timo and Max.’
Julius looked at me for a moment. ‘All of them were chasing you?’
I nodded, rubbing my face with the back of my hand.
‘Why?’
He kept coming back to that simple question.
‘It’s complicated,’ I said, and then surprised myself with a shaky laugh. Complicated. That was the understatement of the year. Of the decade. Of the century maybe.
Julius didn’t say anything. He just waited for me to go on.
‘We went up to – well, there’s this place – up there, up the hill in the trees.’
‘You mean Rote Gertrud’s house?’
‘Yes.’ I shouldn’t have been surprised. Gerd’s house was hardly a secret. Half the town had been up there at one time or another, judging by the extensive hieroglyphics on the battered walls.
‘And?’ persisted Julius.
‘And … they think – the others, I mean – that …’
I faltered to a stop. It was going to sound so stupid if I put it into words. They think I have the power to do magic. It sounded ridiculous, even to me.
Julius was looking at me with his eyebrows raised, his brown eyes quizzical.
‘It was Max’s idea,’ I blurted out eventually, and instantly felt even sillier. I was admitting that Max had led me by the nose.
‘What was?’
‘Cursing people,’ I said.
‘Ah.’ Julius looked reflective, and I guessed he was wondering how this piece of infantile foolishness had translated itself into my four friends hunting me down the hill like a frightened deer. ‘Whom did you curse?’ he asked.
‘Klara Klein.’
Julius gave a low whistle.
‘Don’t,’ I said crossly.
‘How long before …’ he asked me.
‘Right before,’ I said.
There was a silence. ‘So why are the others chasing you?’
I gave a heavy sigh. ‘They think I’m the one who’s doing it. Making it come true.’
He looked at me incredulously. ‘So what were they doing? Trying to lynch the witch or something?’
‘Don’t call me that,’ I said. I shook my head. ‘They weren’t trying to lynch me.’ I wasn’t so sure that was true of Jochen, but I let that go. ‘They wanted me to wish stuff for them.’
‘That’s crazy, you know,’ said Julius.
I shrugged. I knew it was crazy too, but it worked.
‘Klara Klein was ancient,’ he said. ‘She probably would have bitten the dust some time soon anyway.’
‘I know, but …’
‘Other stuff came true?’ said Julius, marvelling. ‘What did you wish for?’
I could see an absorbed look in his eyes. He was already imagining what it might have been, what he would have wished for in my place. A terrible certainty gripped me: if I let him pursue his train of thought he would realize that I had wished for Kai von Jülich.
‘Money,’ I said firmly. I didn’t say how much.
‘And it worked?’
I nodded.
‘And they think you’re the one who’s doing it?’
I sighed. ‘It only works when it’s me
who wishes.’
‘That’s insane.’
‘I know. Julius, we didn’t take it seriously at the beginning … we were just messing around. But then it worked. It actually worked … Well, it does if I do it.’
We looked at each other.
‘But Steffi …’
I could see where this was going. If I didn’t put a stop to it now, Julius wouldn’t rest until he had the whole sorry story out of me. I felt a distinct thrill of fear at the thought. It was bad enough that my five friends knew about Klara Klein and Frau Kessel; if people outside our circle came to know about it, where would it end? I imagined what would happen if it got out that I had cursed Kai von Jülich. His mother would be back again and this time she wouldn’t be nice about it. I imagined her putting those beautifully manicured fingers around my throat and trying to choke the truth out of me. What have you done with my son?
I shuddered.
‘Julius.’ I looked him levelly in the eyes. ‘OK. You’re right. It’s insane. It was probably just a coincidence, Klara Klein dying like that, and the other stuff too. It just got out of hand. Max is an idiot.’
I struggled to get to my feet. My jacket and jeans were covered in earth, but I didn’t care. I wanted to end this conversation before the pair of us strayed into areas that were best fenced off – better still, not just fenced off but surrounded by razor wire and KEEP OUT signs. I tested my ankle. I could put my weight on it, but that deep warning ache was still there in the joint. I didn’t think I should attempt to walk home on it.
There was no sign of the others now. The shouting had ceased. Perhaps they had calmed down. They might have gone down to the car, to see if I was there. There was probably time to follow them. I could try yelling, in case anyone was still within earshot. But then I thought of sitting inside Max’s Opel, crushed up against Hanna and Timo, with Max in front of me and Jochen glaring at me from the almost feel the atmosphere, the choking pressure of it, like hanging over the rim of a smoking volcano. How long would it be before they lost control again, before someone grabbed me by the lapels and shook me like a terrier shaking a rat? Before all of them tried to grab me? Do this for me – just do this for me – just this one thing –
I turned reluctantly back to Julius. ‘I don’t think I can get home on my own.’
‘Do you want me to find your friends?’ He sounded dubious.
‘No!’ I said immediately. ‘Just … can’t you take me?’
‘I suppose so.’ He was staring at me appraisingly. ‘Steffi, this thing up at Rote Gertrud’s house …’
‘It was just some stupid game,’ I said swiftly. ‘Forget I said anything.’
‘But your friends were trying to hunt you.’
‘I told you,’ I said. ‘Max is an idiot.’ I shook back my hair. ‘Now, can we go?’
We made slow progress down the hill, with me trying not to put too much strain on my aching ankle in spite of the steep gradient, and afraid to make too much noise in case any of the others were still lurking there in the shadows under the trees.
Julius came over and offered me his arm. After a while he put his arm right around me. I stiffened, thinking that perhaps he was going to try something, but he simply carried on walking with me, supporting me as we made our way over the rough ground and through the tangled undergrowth.
I began to relax. Julius said very little as we went along and I hoped that the subject of our visits to Rote Gertrud’s house had been dropped. It all sounded ridiculously childish when you thought about it in the light of day, the sort of thing a bunch of fifth-graders would do. Perhaps he had decided that I was joking. Perhaps he despised me for such a stupid escapade. I shot a glance at his face, those angular features with their sprinkling of freckles. As far as I could tell, Julius was deep in thought. Were it not for the warmth of his arm around me, I would have said he had forgotten I was there.
And why were you there? I asked myself suddenly. Everyone in the town knew about the house in the woods. The messages scratched on to the walls proved that it had been visited countless times. Even so, I could hardly believe it was coincidence that Julius of all people was there on the same day as we were, at the same time.
Are you following me? I wondered with dismay. I did not want to contemplate the idea that in addition to my other woes I had someone following me around, checking to see where I went, stalking me … The thought chilled me. If I had not needed the support of Julius’s arm I would have pushed him away.
I began to feel very weary, too weary to think straight. When we finally emerged from the woods on to the track which led through the Eschweiler Tal, I barely had the energy to put one foot in front of another. There was no sign of Max’s Opel. I could pick out the spot where he always parked; there was nothing there. Clearly the others had given up and left me. Nor was there any sign of another car. How had Julius got here?
He was already disengaging himself from me. ‘Stay there,’ he said, striding on his long legs towards a clump of bushes.
I stood in the middle of the track, keeping my weight on my good leg, and watched as he came out from behind the bushes, wheeling his ancient bicycle.
‘Oh, crap,’ I said.
CHAPTER FIFTY
If my flight down the hill had been ignominious, it was a thousand times worse riding back to Bad Münstereifel on the back of Julius’s boneshaker. I had to sit sideways on the rack at the back, hanging on to Julius to stop myself falling off whenever the bike went over a bump. At the Werther Tor I had to dismount, as two of us riding over the cobblestones would have been too much for the aged machine. I walked the last few hundred metres, muttered my thanks to Julius and vanished into the bakery before he could say anything.
The light on the answering machine was blinking. I pressed the button and listened to my mother’s exasperated voice asking where I was. At least she sounded irritated and not upset, I thought; that boded well for my father. I slipped my mobile out of my pocket and realized that it was turned off. No wonder she sounded annoyed. I went slowly upstairs, hanging on to the banister.
The very first thing I did when I got inside the flat was call my mother, willing the news to be good. She told me that my father was a little better, that the doctors were cautiously optimistic that he would pull through after all. ‘No thanks to you,’ she added tartly. ‘Disappearing like that.’
I remembered my wish, written out carefully under the others’ watchful eyes, and thought that perhaps she was wrong, but I did not react. Instead I said that I would take the bus to the hospital as soon as I could and rang off.
Then I went into my room and looked for somewhere to hide the torn envelope with its precious contents. In the end I stuffed it under my pillow. After that I went into the kitchen and poured myself a tall glass of mineral water. My flight down the hill and the uncomfortable ride home had left me hot and thirsty.
I raised the glass to my lips and, as I savoured the coolness of the water, my mind slid back to the ruin in the woods, to the urgent, distorted faces of my friends, to the moment I had burst out of the undergrowth on to the path and almost run right into the figure standing there. Julius. I stopped drinking, almost choking on the water. Drops ran down my chin. My stomach seemed to do a lazy roll, as though I were in an aircraft that had banked suddenly.
Why hadn’t I seen it before? In that moment, when I had recognized Julius, all I had had on my mind was the driving need to push past him, to escape. I hadn’t thought about what I was seeing. A tall, dark figure with a shock of flaming red hair.
I recalled the day Hanna and I had visited the witch’s house – the panic we had felt at the glimpse of someone moving among the distant trees, someone with that unmistakable bright coppery hair like the flame at the end of a torch. Panic, that was the word. We had looked, we had assumed, we hadn’t waited for a chance to see the figure more closely. We had run for it, as though the Devil himself had been at our heels. Now I put a new interpretation on what we had glimpsed. We had se
en Julius that day, not Rote Gertrud. Which meant …
It really wasn’t coincidence I ran into him. He goes up there a lot.
It made sense, in a horrible kind of way. What else was there to see on that side of the valley? Walkers kept to the main track. The diehard local-history freaks might seek out the Teufelsloch, the cave they called the Devil’s Hole, but that was on the other side of the river. I knew from talk in the town that there was even a gruesome kind of tourism associated with the cave, thrill-seekers wanting to see the place where the last victim of the town’s one and only serial killer had been found. But there was no reason for anyone to go into the woods on the other side of the valley, not unless they were looking for Gertrud’s house. Ergo, Julius had been on a similar mission to our own, and it was simply down to luck that we had not met each other at the ruins themselves.
There’s only one reason anyone goes there, I thought, and then came a second thought hard on the heels of the first: Unless … he hasn’t been making his own wishes at all, he’s been reading mine.
I put the glass down on the draining board, not trusting myself to hold it for another moment. In the two seconds it took me to cross the kitchen my legs felt as though I were walking on spindly stilts and my injured ankle threatened to buckle. I dropped into a chair and put my head in my hands, as though trying to ward off a fainting fit.
No, I thought. Not possible. But already my imagination was streaking ahead like a greyhound pursuing a hare. I saw Julius walking through the forest – perhaps the first time he really had just been out for a walk – and coming on the ruined house. I saw him stepping inside, over the jumble of broken stones and rusting beer cans and mossy branches. Surveying the scarred walls. His gaze falling upon something half concealed in the drift of leaves on the floor. The carved box. I saw him pick it up, his face creased with curiosity, and open the lid.
OK, I told myself. It’s possible that he has read every one of your wishes. I clenched my fingers in my hair, grimacing at the thought. It’s even possible that he was the one who took your wishes out of the box … assuming he recognized your handwriting. But – and this was the nub of it – he can’t have made them all come true. It’s impossible.
