The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

“Ach, Wolfgang!” Frau Kessel shook her head. “And when Kristel was so close to poor Heinrich-Heinrich Schiller, I mean. We always thought it was so charming that she took Pia to visit him-since he lost his own daughter, of course.” She heaved a theatrical sigh, and then, perhaps noticing that her whole audience was still looking unsatisfactorily bewildered, she decided to put her cards on the table. “We all knew Herr Duster was responsible.”

“You mean for…?” began my father, his brows furrowed.

“For taking Gertrud,” finished Frau Kessel. She shook her head. “I don’t know why he wasn’t put away then. That poor little thing-no older than Pia, and such a beautiful child. Poor Heinrich was never the same afterward-and how should he be? With Herr Duster living a few meters away, and nobody doing anything about it.”

“That’s a terrible accusation.” My mother sounded shocked.

Frau Kessel shot her a narrow glance; had she overreached?

“I’m not making an accusation,” she retorted, tossing her head. “I’m repeating what is common knowledge in the town. Ask anyone.”

“How did they know it was him?” I asked.

Frau Kessel looked suddenly uncomfortable, as though she had only just remembered that I was there. She reached out one of her jewelencrusted claws and would have patted me on the head like a small dog if I had not ducked out of her way.

“Never mind, Schatzchen,” she told me. “Just remember that you should never, ever go anywhere with a stranger.”

I remembered something. “But isn’t Herr Duster Herr Schiller’s brother? Then he wasn’t a stranger, was he? He was her uncle. It’s OK to go with someone if they’re your family.”

“Doch,” said Frau Kessel curtly, irritated at being contradicted. “But how poor Heinrich came to have a brother like that, I cannot imagine.” She sniffed. “No wonder he changed his name.”

So it was Herr Schiller who had changed his name? I was opening my mouth to ask another question when my mother cut me off. “I don’t think this is a suitable topic for Pia,” she said firmly. Before I could protest, she said, “Can you go into the kitchen and make sure Sebastian is all right, please, Pia?”

I slouched off reluctantly to find that Sebastian had got into one of the food cupboards and torn open a packet of asparagus soup; he was now sitting in the middle of a little snowdrift of the stuff, drawing squiggles in it with a wet finger, which he occasionally inserted into his mouth. By the time I had extricated him I could hear my mother talking to Frau Kessel in the hall, and then the front door closed firmly behind the old woman.

“Thank God for that,” said my mother with a sigh. I was disappointed, however. There was so much more I would have liked to ask Frau Kessel, but now she had sailed off like a little ship laden with Pandora’s boxes of other people’s secrets. My mother saw me looking wistfully at the door.

“Pia,” she said sternly, “I don’t want to hear you repeating any of that to anyone, understand?”

“Why not?”

“Because we don’t know if any of it is true.”

“Do you think Frau Kessel was lying?” I asked doubtfully.

“Not exactly,” said my mother, and I had to be content with that.

Chapter Seventeen

On Monday morning I was up before the alarm sounded. Ignoring my father’s suggestion that I eat more slowly and with my mouth closed, I bolted breakfast, slung my Ranzen onto my back, and by eight o’clock sharp I was outside the school gate. I was not disappointed; at two minutes past, Stefan appeared. He looked a little pale, but otherwise perfectly all right.

“Where were you? Did you go up to the Quecken hill? Why didn’t you come over on Saturday like you promised?” Impatiently, I bombarded him with questions.

“I was sick.” He shook his head. “We can’t talk about it here.”

He was right; little groups of children were starting to flow through the entrance to the school courtyard. We adjourned to the girls’ bathroom on the ground floor; Stefan said the boys’ was a better bet, as it was much less often visited, but I absolutely refused to go in there.

Barricaded into a cubicle in the girls’, I immediately demanded, “So? Did you go? Did you see anything?”

Stefan nodded, his face sober.

“Well, what did you see? Was it the huntsman?” In my eagerness to know what had happened, I was almost jumping up and down.

“I’ll tell you,” said Stefan slowly. “But when I’ve told you, I don’t want to talk about it anymore. OK?”

Why not? I nearly blurted out, but with an effort I restrained myself. “All right.”

There was a pause that stretched out for such a long time I started to think Stefan was never going to utter a word. Then suddenly he said, “It was dark up there, very dark.” He folded his arms, rubbing them as though he were chilly. “And cold.”

He looked at me, and I had the eerie sensation that he was not seeing me at all, but looking right through me into another time and place.

“There was something up there, but I don’t know what it was. I went up to the castle just after half past eleven-I know it was then because I heard the bell in the church clock strike twice as I went up the track through the woods.

“The moon was out, so I could just about see where I was going. I didn’t want to put my flashlight on unless I really had to, in case someone saw it. I didn’t see anybody, though. It was dead quiet.

“When I got to that bit where you have to leave the track and go up through the bushes, I did switch the light on. I wanted to go up to the turret because it’s the highest bit, but I was afraid of falling in.”

I knew the place he meant. The turret was the only thing that looked in any way like a proper castle, but even so what was left of it was sunk into the ground, rather than standing out of it, forming a circular pit about four meters deep. I understood Stefan’s cautiousness; if you fell into it you would never get out on your own, not to mention the fact that you would be at the mercy of whoever-or whatever-came along.

“It was horrible going through the bushes-the brambles kept sticking to me like little claws and there was all sorts of stuff underfoot that I couldn’t see, squashy things and dry, hard sticks. It was like walking over a carpet of bones. I could feel them snapping under my feet. I started thinking that maybe it was the bones of the knight who lived there, him and his hounds, and when the clock struck midnight they would somehow gather themselves up in the dark, and make themselves back into the shapes they’d been when they were alive.

“I kept looking around, afraid that I would see the knight suddenly stand up in the undergrowth, with the moonlight shining on his armor, and a clicking sound from all the little pieces knitting together, and underneath the helmet nothing but a skull.”

He shuddered. “Well, I got to where the turret is, and I had to go up that bit on my hands and knees. The mud was all slippery. I got to the top somehow and sat down behind the little tree that grows there, and then the first thing I did was switch the flashlight off. I heard the church clock strike a quarter to midnight. I thought I’d wait until it struck twelve and then I’d come down again.

“I sat there for what seemed like ages. It was cold, and once some stupid bird hooted up in a tree and I nearly jumped out of my skin. But after a while it wasn’t so scary anymore. I didn’t think anything was going to happen.

“Then all of a sudden I heard this noise, a little crackling noise, and I thought my heart was going to leap out of my chest. I had this really clear picture in my head, just as clear as if I’d really seen it, of the bones of a hand lying on the ground among the weeds, and then gathering themselves up, just like someone pulling on the strings of a puppet.”

Stefan stretched out a hand toward me, palm upward, and slowly curled it into a fist. Involuntarily I stepped back.

“I just stayed where I was. I wanted to get down, to run, but I didn’t dare. So I just sat there, with my arm