The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

once been a defensive castle. A mulch of last year’s leaves squelched underfoot, but new green shoots were everywhere.

Stefan wasn’t listening. He had paused, and was looking from side to side as though trying to orient himself. Then he pointed.

“Let’s go up to the turret. Then I can work out which way the light was coming from.”

We scrambled up the steep bank to the edge of the ruined turret. Stefan went around the side and squatted on the mossy hump that had once been part of the battlements. I scrambled up and sat beside him, and for a while we sat there in silence like a pair of owls on a branch.

“That way,” said Stefan eventually, pointing. He got up and started following the line of the wall. I trailed behind, picking my way over the broken chunks of masonry that stuck up from the earth like a ragged line of teeth.

Glancing around, it was hard to imagine what the castle must have been like when its battlements and turrets were still intact. All that could be seen now were the crumbling traces of walls, worn almost down to ground level, the stones picked out in vivid green moss.

It was a scene not only of desolation but of desolation wreaked long ago. It was impossible to imagine the castle ever having been inhabited. Even the ghost of the eternal huntsman should have worn away to nothingness after ten centuries.

We came to the vague outline of a corner and stopped. “Around here somewhere,” said Stefan, looking about him. We climbed down onto the mulchy ground. I glanced at him expectantly. I wondered if he would suddenly be struck with a strong sense of an uncanny presence, whether he would go horribly pale or sick or faint.

Disappointingly, he actually looked relaxed, relieved even; daylight seemed to have vanquished his fears. He kicked his way through the tangle of undergrowth with apparent nonchalance, and I followed dispiritedly behind him. I wished I had been allowed out the night Stefan had kept watch at the turret; I wished I had seen the mysterious light and heard the insistent whispering. It would have been good to be the girl who helped solve the Katharina Linden case, instead of the girl whose grandmother had exploded at the family Advent dinner. I wasn’t greedy; it needn’t have been Katharina’s actual corpse that we found; a severed hand-a finger-or even a piece of her clothing would have been enough; the little red bow from her hair, perhaps.

I imagined being thanked by the police; receiving some sort of prize from Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf; Frau Redemann calling the whole school together and telling them that Pia Kolvenbach (with some assistance from Stefan Breuer, I conceded generously) had been instrumental in solving the mystery; Thilo Koch nearly dying of jealousy because it wasn’t him who did it; me retelling the story to an enthralled circle of my classmates while Thilo jumped up and down at the back, trying in vain to hear what I was saying. It was a pleasing image. So pleasing, in fact, that when Stefan stopped short I ran straight into the back of him.

“Look.”

I looked, and at first I was not sure what I was seeing. Chunks of masonry, just like all the other ones littering the site. But then the shattered stones coalesced into a shape, and I realized that I was looking at a circle. A perfect ring of stones, arranged with precise order and neatness.

We approached it carefully and stood looking down at the stones.

“Na, und?” I said. “It’s just a circle. It’s probably the bottom of another turret, or maybe it was a fireplace or something.”

“No, it wasn’t,” said Stefan with conviction. “Look: there’s no moss on any of the stones.” He was right; there wasn’t. “If it had been there since who knows when, there would be moss all over it, right?”

“Right,” I conceded, impressed with his deductive skills. I moved to step into the circle, but he put out an arm to stop me.

“I don’t think we should go in.”

“Why not?”

“It might be-you know, black magic.”

I stepped back hastily. “What’s that thing in the middle?” I asked. We both craned forward, trying to look more closely without actually entering the circle. It was a little pile of stones, with a larger, flat stone balanced on top of them. On top of the flat stone was a little heap of something burned.

“Hair,” I said, shuddering with disgust.

“It’s not hair,” said Stefan. “Look, it’s sort of crumbly. It looks like herbs or something. Maybe tobacco-or other stuff.”

“Other stuff?”

“You know.” Stefan rolled his eyes at me; why did I have to be such an innocent? “Stuff like Boris smokes.”

“Oh.” We looked at each other. Suddenly I couldn’t stop myself; a giggle came bubbling up inside me. “Do you think the eternal huntsman smoked it?”

“Idiot,” said Stefan, but he was laughing too. He mimed someone taking a long drag at a joint, then intoned, “Mensch, when I smoke this stuff I feel like I could ride forever.” We clutched our sides and shrieked with laughter.

“Do the hounds smoke it too?”

“Sicher, and the horse as well.”

We laughed ourselves hoarse. At last, when I was beginning to think I would actually be sick from laughing, Stefan suddenly said, “It was a black mass.”

I stopped giggling. “That’s not funny.”

“I wasn’t trying to be funny.” He pointed at the little heap of burned stuff. “That would be the-you know, the table, like in church.”

“The altar,” I supplied.

“Yes, and the stuff on it, that’s the offering.”

“The offering?”

“The sacrifice.”

I didn’t like the sound of that; it made me think of religion classes with Frau Eichen, and bearded patriarchs dragging their sons up hills to slaughter them because God told them to do it. And everyone else thinking it showed what wonderful trust in God the old man had, and not thinking how the little boy might have viewed the situation, Daddy waving a carving knife around and only just deciding at the last minute to kill a ram instead.

“That’s creepy,” I said, ever the mistress of understatement.

“That’s what I saw,” said Stefan, thinking aloud. “It wasn’t the huntsman and his men, it was a black mass. The light was the fire when they burned the stuff, whatever it was.” He turned to look at me, his face serious. “The voices… that was them saying the black mass.”

“And the hoofbeats?” I asked.

Stefan looked at me, and I could almost see his mind working as he ran through the possibilities. Then his eyes widened and his lips parted; I could actually see it, the moment that the idea dawned on him.

“Cloven hooves,” he said.

We stared at each other. “Let’s get out of here,” I said hastily. Stefan did not need to be told twice; we both turned and set off over the uneven ground, clambering over the tumbled mounds of earth and broken stones, with as much haste as we could manage without breaking into an undignified scramble for safety. We reached the path and set off downhill without looking back once. Stefan was striding so fast that I had to trot to keep up.

“Are we going to tell anyone?” I asked him, panting with exertion.

“No way.”

“Not even Herr Schiller?”

“Well, maybe him.” We both knew Herr Schiller was different; he was a grown-up, but he wouldn’t assume that we were making it all up; and he would know what to do. If, that is, there was anything we could do. Perhaps, like stepping into the stone circle, it was a thing best left undone.

I left Stefan near the cemetery at the foot of the Quecken hill and hurried home, my mind fizzing like a wasps’ nest with toxic thoughts: whispers at midnight and unseen presences calling up the Devil, and burned sacrifices. Little girls who vanished without trace. Witches and spectral huntsmen and cats who were not really cats.