The Hangman’s Daughter thd-1

by Oliver Pötzsch

  He quickly told the hangman of his conversation with Jakob Schreevogl and about what he had discovered in the archives of the Ballenhaus. Jakob Kuisl nodded.

  “In his fear, Ferdinand Schreevogl must have buried his money somewhere shortly before the Swedes arrived,” he mused. “Perhaps he did hide it in the well. Then he had a fight with his son and bequeathed the parcel together with the treasure to the church.”

  Simon interrupted him.

  “Now I also remember what the priest told me back then at confession,” he cried. “Schreevogl supposedly talked about it on his deathbed, saying that the priest could still do much good with the parcel of land. At the time I thought he meant the leper house. Now I think it’s clear that he was speaking of the treasure!”

  “Someone among the moneybags in the council must have gotten wind of it,” growled the hangman. “Probably old Schreevogl told someone when he was drunk or shortly before his death, and that somebody has done everything possible to stop the construction at the site and find that damn treasure.”

  “Obviously burgomaster Semer,” said Simon. “He has the key to the archive, so he was able to get his hands on the map of that piece of land. It’s quite possible that he also knows about the dried-up well by now.”

  “Quite possible indeed,” said Jakob Kuisl. That makes it even more urgent that we take quick action now. The solution to the mystery lies at the bottom of that well. Maybe I’ll also find some clue regarding my little Magdalena…”

  The two men fell silent for a moment. Only the chirping of birds and the occasional laughter of the watchmen could be heard. Simon noticed that he had forgotten Magdalena for a brief moment over all the excitement of the past hour. He was ashamed of himself.

  “Do you think they could have…” he started and noticed how his voice was breaking.

  The hangman shook his head.

  “The devil has abducted her, but he hasn’t killed her. He needs her as a hostage, to make me show him the children’s hiding place. Besides, that wouldn’t be his way. He first wants to have his…fun, before he kills. He likes to play.”

  “It sounds as if you know the devil quite well,” said Simon.

  Jakob Kuisl nodded.

  “I think I know him. Could be that I’ve seen him before.”

  Simon jumped up.

  “Where? Around here? Do you know who he is? If so, why don’t you tell the council so that they can have the scoundrel locked up?”

  Jakob Kuisl dismissed Simon’s questions with a movement of his hand, as if brushing away an annoying insect.

  “Are you crazy? It wasn’t around here! It was earlier. That is to say…a long time ago. But I could also be mistaken.”

  “Then tell me! Maybe it’ll help us!”

  The hangman shook his head with conviction.

  “That won’t do any good.” He settled down on the moss and started sucking on his cold pipe. “Better to rest a little longer, until dusk. It’s going to be a long night.”

  Saying this, the hangman closed his eyes and seemed to fall asleep immediately. Simon looked at him enviously. How could this man stay so calm! As for himself, sleep was out of the question. Nervously and with a trembling heart he waited for night to fall.

  Sophie leaned her head against the wet stone and tried to breathe calmly and evenly. She knew that the two of them would not be able to stay down here much longer. The air was beginning to give out, and she noticed how she was growing more and more tired with every passing hour. Every breath of air tasted stuffy and stale. For days now, she had not been able to go outside. To answer the call of nature, she had had to go in a nearby niche. The air stank of fecal matter and spoiled food.

  Sophie looked over at Clara, who was sleeping. Her breathing was getting weaker and weaker. She looked like a sick animal that had crawled into a cave to await its end. She was pale, her face was drawn, and she had rings under her eyes. Her bones stood out at the shoulders and rib cage. Sophie knew that her little friend needed help. The concoction she had succeeded in making her drink almost four days ago did put her to sleep, but the fever still had not broken. Besides, Clara’s right ankle had swollen up to three times its normal size. Sophie could actually see the pumping and struggling that was going on beneath the skin. Her whole leg had become blue all the way up to the knee. The improvised compresses had not helped much.

  Three times already, Sophie had crawled into the shaft to see if the coast was clear, but each time she checked, she heard men’s voices. Laughter, murmurs, cries, footsteps…something was going on up there. The men no longer left her in peace, neither by day nor at night. But thank God, they had not yet discovered the hiding place. Sophie looked into the darkness. Half a tallow candle was still left. To save light she had not lit the stump since yesterday at noon. When she could no longer stand the blackness she crawled to the shaft and looked up into the sky. But soon the sunlight blinded her and she had to crawl back.

  Clara did not mind the darkness. She was only half awake, and when she woke up for a moment and asked for water, Sophie squeezed her hand and stroked it until she sank back into sleep. At times Sophie sang songs for her that she had learned on the streets. Sometimes she still remembered verses that her parents had sung for her before they died. But they were only scraps, fragments from the past, linked to the hazy memory of a friendly face or laughter.

  Eia beia Wiegele, auf dem Dach sind Ziegele, auf dem Dach sind Schindelein, behuet mir Gott mein Kindelein…Lullaby, my bonny love, our roof is safe above, our roof is finely tiled, God protect my little child.

  Sophie felt her cheeks becoming wet. After all, Clara was better off. She had found a loving family. On the other hand, what good did it do her now? Here she was, breathing her last in a hole in the ground with her loved ones at home so near and yet so far away.

  In time Sophie’s eyes had become accustomed to the dark. Not that she could actually see anything, but she was able to distinguish lighter darkness from darker darkness. She no longer bumped her head when she stumbled through the tunnels, and she could see whether a tunnel branched off to the left or the right. Once, three days ago, she had made a wrong turn without a candle and after only a few steps had run into a wall. For an instant she was seized by an unspeakable fear that she would not be able to find her way back. Her heart beat wildly as she turned around in a circle with her hands reaching into emptiness. But then she heard Clara’s whimpers. She followed the sounds and found her way back.

  After that experience she had opened the seam of her dress and laid out the woolen thread all the way from her niche to the well. She was now always able to feel the rough thread beneath her bare feet when she groped her way to the shaft.

  Thus days and nights passed. Sophie fed Clara, sang her to sleep, stared into the darkness, and became absorbed in thought. From time to time she crawled to the light also to catch a breath of air. She had briefly considered dragging Clara all the way to the shaft so that she, too, could get some fresh air and light. But first of all, the girl was still too heavy to carry, in spite of her frightening weight loss, and secondly Clara’s constant whimpering could have revealed their hiding place to the men above. The loud scream yesterday had almost given them away. And so she had to stay in the niche, deep underground.

  The children had found these tunnels when they were playing together in the woods, and Sophie had often wondered what they had once been used for. Hiding places? Meeting places? Or had they perhaps been built not by human beings, but by dwarves and gnomes? Sometimes she heard whispering, as if tiny, evil beings were mocking her. But then it always turned out to be the wind whistling through some distant crevice in the rock.

  Now, again, there was a sound. It wasn’t whispering this time, but stones falling down the shaft from the rim of the well and hitting the bottom…

  Sophie stopped breathing. She could hear soft voices. Someone cursed. The voices did not come from above, as usual; they were very close, as if coming from the bottom of the well
.

  Instinctively Sophie pulled in the woolen thread until she felt the end of it in her hand. Perhaps they would not be able to find their way out. But right now it was more important that the men she heard not find them. She pulled her legs close to her body and squeezed Clara’s hand. Then she waited.

  When dusk came the hangman rose from his bed of moss and looked through the branches at the two watchmen.

  “We shall have to tie them up. Anything else is too dangerous,” he whispered. “The moon is bright, and the well is exactly in the middle of the clearing, easily visible from every direction. Like a bare ass in a cemetery.”

  “But…how are you going to take them down,” stammered Simon. “After all, there are two of them.”

  The hangman grinned.

  “There are two of us, aren’t there?”

  Simon groaned. “Kuisl, leave me out of this. I didn’t cut such a good figure last time. I’m a physician, not a highwayman. It’s quite possible that I’d mess everything up again.”

  “You could be right,” said Jakob Kuisl as he continued to look toward the watchmen, who had started a small fire next to the church wall and were passing around a bottle of brandy. Finally he turned back to Simon. “All right, stay here and don’t budge. I’ll be right back.”

  He moved out of the bushes and crawled through the high meadow toward the building site.

  “Kuisl!” Simon whispered as he left. “You won’t hurt them, will you?”

  The hangman turned back once more and gave Simon a grim smile. From under his coat he pulled out a little club made of polished larchwood.

  “They’ll have a pretty good headache. But they’ll have one in any case if they continue to guzzle like that. So it amounts to the same thing.”

  He crawled on until he reached the stack of wood that Simon had hidden behind the previous night. There he picked up a fist-size rock and threw it over the church walls. The stone hit the masonry and made a clanging noise.

  Simon watched as the guards stopped drinking and whispered to each other. Then one of them stood up, took his sword, and walked around the foundation. Twenty steps later he was no longer visible to his colleague.

  Like a black shadow, the hangman threw himself on him. Simon heard a dull blow, a brief moan, and then all was quiet.

  In the darkness Simon could only distinguish the hangman’s silhouette. Jakob Kuisl crouched down behind the little wall until the second watchman started to get nervous. After a while the bailiff began calling his missing friend-first softly, then louder and louder. When he got no reply he stood up, grabbed his pike and the lantern, and carefully walked around the church wall. As he walked past one particular bush, Simon saw the lantern flare up briefly and then go out. A short time later the hangman came out from behind the bush and beckoned to Simon.

  “Quick, we have to tie them up and gag them before they come around again,” he whispered when Simon arrived at his side. Jakob Kuisl grinned as if he were a young rascal who had just pulled off a successful prank. From a sack he had brought along he pulled out a ball of rope.

  “I am sure they didn’t recognize me,” he said. “Tomorrow they will tell Lechner about whole hordes of soldiers and how heroically they fought them. Maybe I should hit them a few more times to provide them with proof?”

  He threw Simon a piece of cord. Together they tied up the two unconscious bailiffs. The one whom the hangman had knocked down first was bleeding a little at the back of his head. The other one already had an impressive lump on his forehead. Simon checked their heartbeats and breathing. Both were alive. Relieved, the physician continued his task.

  Finally they gagged the two watchmen with torn-off rags of linen and carried them behind the pile of wood.

  “This way they can’t see us, even if they should wake up,” said Jakob Kuisl, walking right over to the well. Simon hesitated. He rushed back to the watchmen’s post, fetched two warm blankets, and spread them out over the unconscious bailiffs. Then he followed the hangman. This had been necessary violence. If ever they should have to stand trial for it, his compassion would perhaps be counted as a mitigating factor, he hoped.

  The moon had risen by then, throwing a bluish light over the building site. The watchmen’s little fire still smoldered, but silence prevailed everywhere. Even the birds had stopped their chirping. Over the well stood a frail wooden framework from which a chain with a bucket must have hung at one time. A small pile of rocks served as stepping stones, making it easier to climb over the rim. Jakob Kuisl held his torch up to the beam extending across the shaft.

  “Look, here! Fresh scratch marks,” he muttered and ran his finger along the beam. “In some places you can see the light wood is showing underneath the weather-beaten surface.”

  He looked down into the well and nodded.

  “The children threw a rope over the beam and climbed down.”

  “And why isn’t any rope hanging there now, if they are down there?” Simon asked.

  The hangman shrugged. “Sophie probably took the rope down so that nobody would become suspicious. To climb back out she has to throw it over the beam from below. Not exactly easy, but I believe Sophie is capable of it.”

  Simon nodded.

  “That’s probably the way she came out when she looked for me in the woods to tell me about Clara,” he said and looked down. The hole was as black as the night surrounding them. He threw a few pebbles into the well and listened as they hit the bottom.

  “Are you nuts?” cursed the hangman. “Now they know down there for sure that we’re coming!”

  Simon started to stutter: “I…I only wanted to see how deep the well is. The deeper it is, the longer it takes the stone to hit the bottom. And by seeing how long that takes…”

  “You fool,” interrupted the hangman. “The well cannot be more than twenty-five feet deep, or Sophie could never have tossed up the rope in order to come out and visit you in the woods.”

  Once more Simon was impressed by the hangman’s simple and yet compelling logic. In the meantime Jakob Kuisl had fetched yet another rope from his sack and started tying it around the beam.

  “I’ll let myself down first,” he said. “If I see anything down there, I’ll wave the lantern and you follow me.”

  Simon nodded. The hangman checked the beam’s strength by pulling hard on the rope. The beam groaned but held. Kuisl tied the lantern to his belt, grabbed the rope with both hands, and let himself down.

  After a few yards, he was enveloped in darkness. Only a small point of light testified to the fact that a human being was dangling from the rope down there. The point of light descended farther and farther and suddenly stopped. Then the light swung back and forth. The hangman was waving with the lantern.

  Simon took a few deep breaths. Then he too attached his lantern to his belt, grabbed the rope, and climbed down. There was a wet and musty smell down there. Just in front of him, muddy soil trickled to the ground. Like the clay they had found under the children’s fingernails…

  After descending a few more yards he saw that the hangman had been right. About twelve feet below he could see the bottom. A few puddles of water shone in the light of the lantern; otherwise the shaft was dry. When Simon reached the bottom he realized why. On one side of the shaft was a semi-oval hole at knee’s height that reminded Simon of an arch at the entrance to a chapel. It looked as if it had been dug by human hands into the clay. Beyond, there was a low shaft. The hangman was standing next to the hole and grinning. With his lantern he pointed to the entrance. “A dwarf’s hole,” he whispered. “Who would have thought of that? I didn’t know that there even were any in this area.”

  “A what?” asked Simon.

  “A dwarf’s hole. Sometimes people also call it a mandrake cave. I’ve seen many of these in my time during the war. The peasants used to hide in them when soldiers came, and sometimes they didn’t come out for days.” The hangman pushed his torch into the dark tunnel.

  “These tunnels are made by
humans,” he continued in a soft voice. “They are ages old, and nobody knows what they were used for. Some people think that they were built as hiding places. But my grandfather told me that the souls of the dead found their last resting place in them. Others say that the dwarves themselves dug them out.”

  Simon had a closer look at the semi-oval. It really looked like the entrance to some dwarf’s cave.

  Or like the door to hell…

  Simon cleared his throat. “The priest mentioned that witches and sorcerers were said to have met here in olden days. A heathen place for their unholy celebrations. Could that have anything to do with this…dwarf’s hole?”

  “Whatever the case,” said Jakob Kuisl, sinking to his knees, “we must go inside. So let’s go.”

  Simon closed his eyes briefly and sent a whispered prayer to the cloudy skies visible only twenty-five feet above them. Then he crawled behind the hangman into the narrow tunnel.

  Up at the well’s rim, the devil pointed his nose into the wind. He was smelling revenge and retaliation. He waited a few more moments before sliding down the rope into the depths.

  As soon as Simon had crawled through the entrance, he noted that this would not be an easy job. After only a few feet the tunnel narrowed. To make any headway, they almost had to crawl sideways and push themselves forward with their shoulders. Simon felt sharp rocks scraping across his face and body. Then the tunnel widened slightly. Bent over, Simon stumbled forward, yard by yard, holding the lantern in one hand, leaning with the other against the wet clay wall next to him. He tried not to think of how his pants and doublet must look by now. But anyway, in the dark it didn’t show.

  His only point of orientation was the flickering hangman’s lantern in front of him. He could see how Jakob Kuisl was having difficulty squeezing his broad, muscular body through this needle’s eye. Earth kept trickling from the ceiling and fell into his collar. The roof was arched as in a miner’s tunnel. At regular intervals sooty niches the size of a hand appeared in the walls. They looked as if candles or oil lamps had stood in them in the past. The niches enabled Simon to estimate the tunnel’s length. Nevertheless he had lost all sense of time after only a few minutes.