The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

When I let myself into the house my thoughts were so saturated with these eldritch horrors that it was hardly a surprise to see my mother looking as white and shocked as I did myself. It was not until she threw her arms around me and began hugging and shaking me in turns that I realized anything was wrong.

“Where have you been? I’ve been sick with worry.”

My father came out of the kitchen, and as I registered the fact that he was home from work early I saw that his face, too, was pale and drawn. I looked from one to the other in confusion. What on earth was going on? It was several minutes before I worked out what must have happened.

Another child had vanished.

Chapter Nineteen

That Wednesday, when it happened, it was clear and bright; not hot, but sunny. It was the middle of the day, a time when the town was relatively full, with little knots of schoolchildren wending their way to the bus stop, staff from the shops popping in and out of the bakeries for lunch, working mothers hurrying home to be there when their children arrived. Little groups of those powerful German citizens known as Senioren stood about putting the world to rights. An ordinary, cheerful weekday.

Of course, even at busy times of day there were dark and quiet parts of the town; the little backstreets where the overhanging houses leaned toward each other overhead, and the high walls threw deep, damp shadows. But even in these quiet places, you would not have felt particularly threatened. Aside from a brief moment of excitement in 1940 when Hitler used a bunker in nearby Rodert, the last big event had been the flood of 1416. Nothing ever happened here-and nothing is precisely what seemed to have happened to Marion Voss. In fact, nothing is what she vanished into, what she became.

A few people remembered seeing a little figure, Ranzen on back, pigtails bobbing as it progressed down the street that day; but was it her? She was of average height, she had light brown hair, she was carrying the same galloping-horse-patterned Ranzen as thirty other little girls her age. Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf helped someone who might have been her to cross the road on the way to the Klosterplatz, where the school buses were parked. Frau Nett from the Cafe am Fluss saw a child who might have been her stumble outside the bakery and be helped up by an older girl. Hilde Koch claimed to have seen a little girl who was certainly her outside the kiosk at the Orchheimer Tor, clutching a bag of candy. But no one saw where she went.

It seemed that somewhere along her way through the town she had stepped off her path, turned up an alley or gone into a building, and vanished into thin air, dissolved into the ether. It was like one of those magic tricks where you see the magician put something into a box, and then he opens it, and you can see that it is empty. One moment she was there, skipping along the street, and the next she had gone. All that remained were glimpses, fragmentary memories that hung on the air reproachfully, like the echo of a cry. Marion Voss had become-nothing.

To me, the vanished child, Marion Voss, was even more of an unknown quantity than Katharina Linden had been. Not only was she not in my year at school-she was in the third grade-but she lived out in the village of Iversheim, a few kilometers north of Bad Munstereifel. I must have passed her in the school corridors or seen her in the playground, but I have no memory of it.

She was a very ordinary-looking little girl, with her long hair usually done up in two braids, as on the day she disappeared; she wore glasses with thin silver-colored rims, and studs in her ears; she had nondescript but pleasant features and a dark mole on her left cheek close to her mouth.

All this I learned from the photographs that appeared in the local and regional newspapers-front-page news, the second girl to disappear in the Town of Terror. My parents kept the papers out of my way at home, but still, whenever I passed a tobacconist’s shop, Marion Voss’s face would be staring out from the newsstand, repeated endlessly in grainy detail. So I knew what she looked like.

I also discovered that she was an only child, although she had a big circle of grieving cousins. She had a dog, a Labrador cross called Barky, and two rabbits (the newspapers did not say what the rabbits were called). She liked to dance, to sing; she was learning to play the recorder. She had a scar on one knee from an accident with her bicycle two years before. She had had meningitis when she was at kindergarten but had recovered. Her parents couldn’t believe how lucky she had been at the time; now they couldn’t believe what had happened to her. Her grandmother had promised to light a candle in Sts. Chrysostom and Daria every day until Marion was found.

All this the newspapers told us, and more. What they could not tell us was what had become of her.

No one could decide, in fact, exactly when and where Marion Voss had disappeared. Her mother, who worked in the mornings as a receptionist in a doctor’s office, had not been expecting her daughter to come straight home after school; she thought Marion was going home with a schoolfriend who lived in the town.

The schoolfriend’s mother, however, had not been expecting Marion, or so she said; she had an appointment herself that afternoon and couldn’t entertain extra children.

The schoolfriend, when questioned, lost her head completely, thinking that she was being blamed for the disappearance, and became quite unable to give a coherent account of the situation. It was eventually surmised that she had invited Marion over without telling her mother, and then the two of them had quarreled and she had told Marion not to bother coming after all. It was never established at what point the quarrel had occurred, but Marion did not get on her usual school bus with her classmates, nor did she get on the later bus for Iversheim.

Since her mother was not expecting to see Marion until she picked her up that evening, the girl’s disappearance would have been undiscovered for at least six hours, were it not for the fact that Frau Voss had suddenly remembered that Marion had a dentist’s appointment at three. She had telephoned the schoolfriend’s mother, and suddenly the two of them had realized that they did not know where Marion was at all.

There were more meetings, and this time when Frau Redemann called the school together to announce tighter security measures and remind us all not to go with strangers, she was flanked by Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf and another policeman we did not know, with knife-edge creases in his trousers and a face that looked as though it had been carved out of granite.

“If anyone knows anything about Marion Voss, or if any of you saw her on Wednesday afternoon, you must come and tell me,” Frau Redemann announced, her voice sounding higher and less steadfast than usual. She was fidgeting, her long hands fiddling with the pendant on her bosom; there was an air of badly suppressed desperation about her. She was used to dealing with difficult parents, children who brought their family problems into the classroom and disrupted everyone else, fourth-grade boys trading cigarettes in the bathrooms. But this was something that was most definitely not in the job description.

You could see it on her face every time she looked around the crowded hall at the hundreds of children entrusted to her care, or glanced at the grim faces of the policemen. This is not fair, said her expression. I didn’t sign up for this.

“Or you can tell the police,” she added nervously, as though she could shovel the entire situation onto their plate. Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf shuffled his feet and raised his chin; the other policeman continued to look over our heads, his expression so neutral that it was impossible to tell whether he was bored or simply saving his energy for pouncing upon criminals.

The assembly was dismissed. Back in the classroom Frau Eichen was distracted, and kept popping out of the room to hold whispered conversations in the corridor, presumably with other teachers. The gaps in our educational program were enthusiastically filled by Thilo Koch, who expounded his lurid theories of what had happened to Marion Voss and Katharina Linden.

“My brother Jorg,” he would begin, “my brother Jorg says they were eaten by a cannibal. That’s why they haven’t found the bodies. He’s eaten them.”

Repulsive though this was, it was better than Thilo’s other line of argument, that both girls had exploded.

“Don’t sit next to Pia Kolvenbach; you’ll be next.”

It was during one of these sallies that he revealed another unpleasant rumor of which I had previously been blissfully ignorant.

“My grandmother says that it was a sign.” It was Oma Kristel’s death.

“A sign of what?” I asked indignantly.