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.”
