The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

locked in with them was almost too much for me; it felt nothing short of miraculous that I was still on my feet and not writhing in paroxysms of terror on the threadbare runner. I kept staring at Stefan as though concentrating on him rather than the house around me would stave off the thought.

“Come on,” I managed in a weak voice.

He shook his head. “Take your jacket off first.”

“Why?” I was reluctant to emerge from the warm shell of down and expose myself to the house’s atmosphere.

“Because whenever you move it makes that stupid noise.”

I sighed, but he was right. I undid the zip and shrugged out of the jacket.

“Put it in there,” said Stefan, indicating the living room. He didn’t need to add in case anyone sees it. I was already spooked enough. I stuffed the jacket underneath one of Herr Duster’s ancient sideboards.

“Now what?”

“We can go upstairs first, or down into the cellar.”

“You said we didn’t need to go upstairs,” I pointed out. “You said serial killers never leave dead bodies up there.”

“Well, they probably don’t.” Stefan made a face. “I mean, could you go to sleep at night if you knew there was a dead person stuffed in your wardrobe?” He saw my expression and added hurriedly, “Look, we couldn’t have gone up there if Herr Duster had been here, but we can now he’s away. We might as well.”

I looked at the black space at the top of the stairs and then down at the floor under my feet.

“I don’t know,” I said feebly.

“Toss for it, then,” said Stefan briskly, fumbling in his pocket and eventually producing a single ten-pfennig coin. “Which side do you want?”

“The oak leaves.”

Solemnly Stefan tossed the coin into the air, made as if to catch it, fumbled, and dropped it on the floor. We both squatted down. In the flashlight’s beam we could just make out the coin, glinting dully: 10, we both read. I stood up and leaned against the wall. I felt a strange lack of interest in which option Stefan would choose; the whole affair seemed out of my hands.

“The cellar,” he said decisively. He set off down the dark hallway, then turned, his flashlight winking at me. “Come on.”

I trailed unwillingly behind him. The hallway narrowed slightly as it passed the stairs; in the dark it felt oppressively like entering a tunnel. Outside the sickly yellow of the flashlight beam, everything was draped in velvety shadow. Anything could have been lurking in the corners of the hallway and the angles where the walls joined the ceiling: great spiders, snub-nosed bats, chittering rodents. I shuddered.

“Here,” said Stefan.

There was a narrow door under the stairs, the wood worn and battered. There was no lock, only a black metal latch, which Stefan carefully lifted. The door opened easily. “I bet he oils the hinges,” said Stefan. “So nobody hears him going in and out-you know, with the bodies.”

“Shut up.”

“Come right inside,” he said, unabashed, as he stepped into the rectangle of darkness. “Come on,” he added, seeing me hesitate. “I want to shut the door.”

“What?” I could not imagine anything worse than being shut inside that unfamiliar dark space, with the smell of dust and decay and the weak light from the flashlight picking out little night creatures as they scurried away across the walls, their many legs working furiously.

“I want to put the light on.” Stefan sounded impatient. “No one will see it, as long as we shut the door.”

“Oh.”

Reluctantly, I squeezed in beside him, peering down and feeling about with the toe of my boot, afraid of taking a tumble down the stairs. A moment later there was a firm-sounding click and the light came on. Suddenly Stefan was no longer a dim shape highlighted with the yellow flashlight, but a solid figure standing close to me with his fingertips still grasping the old-fashioned switch. I was grateful for the light; a half turn showed me that we were both perilously close to the top of the cellar stairs. A fall down those in the dark would have been disastrous. The little space we were standing in seemed to double as a closet; a row of Herr Duster’s battered-looking jackets hung from pegs.

I nudged Stefan. “Look.” There was an ancient-looking rifle propped up against the wall under the coats.

Stefan shrugged. “Everyone has those. I bet even Hilde Koch has one, to keep off burglars.”

He started down the stairs and I followed him, not without an involuntary glance back at the firmly closed door. It was hard not to think of the cellar as a trap. If we had not been able to break the padlock from the outside, it had to be completely impossible to burst through the cellar hatch from underneath. With no other way out, it felt very uncomfortable to be moving farther and farther from the door. Worse, my entire skin seemed to be one enormous itch, crawling with imaginary spiders and insects. I rubbed my palms together and shivered.

As we descended the stairs we found ourselves in a room a little larger than my bedroom. I supposed it must be directly under the living room. The walls had been thickly coated with whitewash, now a dirty ivory color. I guessed the cellar was very old, older perhaps than the main house. It was clear that Herr Duster did not use it very much. Most of what was in it was lumber. There were broken sticks of furniture, and a few dirty sacks containing salt for wintertime gritting and what looked like very old and very dried-out peat.

Stefan went scuffing his way through the accumulated dust on the floor, peering into the sagging sacks and poking at the broken furniture with the toe of his boot. Under the yellow light of the bare bulb that illuminated the cellar he looked unhealthily sallow. The whole place smelled damp and musty, and I was reluctant to touch anything with my bare hands, as though the filth were somehow infectious.

Trying not to brush against any of the gray-looking furniture, I wandered about the cellar. I supposed I was looking for clues, but nothing suggested itself. Most of the things looked as though they had not been moved or touched for years.

Eventually my meandering path brought me to the far corner, where Herr Duster had abandoned an ugly carved cupboard so large that I could have climbed inside it. There was nothing in it now; one of the front doors was hanging by one hinge, giving a view of an interior inhabited by nothing other than mouse droppings.

I frowned; how had people ever lived with such ugly things? I went to the side of it; it was just as ugly seen end-on. I noticed that it wasn’t actually flush against the wall. There was a gap of perhaps eighty centimeters between its ramrod back and the rough surface of the wall. Enough for a person to pass between them without difficulty, unless it were Hilde Koch with her barrel figure.

I heard a sigh close by my right shoulder; Stefan was standing there.

“Found something?”

“Not really.” I shrugged.

“Let’s look.” He shouldered past me and into the gap.

I stayed where I was; I didn’t relish the idea of gathering black dust and cobwebs on the shoulder of my sweater if I brushed the wall.

“Pia?” came Stefan’s muffled voice. “There’s a sort of door.”

Chapter Forty-five

Sort of?” I repeated slowly. “What do you mean a sort of door?”

“Well, it’s not really a door.” Stefan’s voice was suddenly clearer-I guessed he had turned to face me. “There’s no actual door, but there’s a gap. You can get through into the next room.”

I examined my reaction to this information as calmly and carefully as a surgeon examining a limb for broken bones. I felt neither frightened nor alarmed. There was an inevitability about it. I pictured a hidden room tucked away behind the monstrous cupboard, a secret place with vaulted ceiling and stone floor, the missing girls laid out