The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

I closed my eyes. It was like listening to a radio playing in another room. I tried to imagine that I was in Oma Kristel’s kitchen, sitting at the table waiting for her to finish making me a mug of cocoa, the radio playing in the background. There were scuffling noises, and then another splash as something hit the water, somewhat louder than the first time.

“Pia,” said Stefan’s voice, very close by. I felt something touch my shoulder. Then: “Oh, Scheisse.” I guessed Stefan had seen the other things that were in the well. I squeezed my eyes more tightly shut. “Oh, Scheisse, Pia. Oh-”

I wished he would shut up. I didn’t want to be reminded of what was in the water. But the feeling of his arms around me, his hands gripping me, felt reassuring. Rope slid around me and then I was going upward. I let myself be lifted like a rag doll. There was light above me and I was moving toward it in painful jerks. I thought, Perhaps I have died. I had not expected it to hurt so much afterward. Then I was at the top of the well, lying like an enormous fish on a fishmonger’s slab, my mouth opening and closing wetly. Water was streaming down the side of my face from my hair. Someone was turning me over. I looked up and in the lamplight I saw who it was and screamed.

Chapter Forty-eight

Shut up, Pia!” shouted Stefan. He was standing over me, water dripping from the bottom half of his jeans and his boots. As I paused to draw breath, I heard him say, “Shall I slap her?”

With a superhuman effort I stifled my screams. My lips worked uselessly; no coherent words came out. Still I pointed with a shaking hand at the person who stood next to Stefan, watching me silently: Herr Duster, his starved features even craggier than usual in the lantern light. If his thin upper lip had drawn back to reveal the long, gleaming canines of a vampire I couldn’t have been more hysterically terrified.

Uppermost in the boiling cataract of my brain was the conviction that at any moment Herr Duster would throw both of us back into the well. Without a rescuer we would both drown there in the dark, with the atrocious things that wallowed in the black waters.

Stefan kneeled by me and took my shoulders in his two hands. “Calm down, Pia. You’re OK now. You’re out of the well.”

“He-” I gibbered, trying to point at Herr Duster again. Stefan had his back to him-couldn’t he see what danger he was in?

“It’s OK,” Stefan said, as though talking to a kindergarten child. “Herr Duster helped us. I couldn’t have got the stone off the top of the well without him.”

Doggedly, I shook my head. Didn’t you see what was in the well? I wanted to scream. I struggled to get up from the floor but my limbs were stiff with cold and damp and I simply succeeded in floundering about like a pig in mud.

“She will get hypothermia,” said someone. With a shock I realized it was Herr Duster. I had so rarely heard him speak before. His voice sounded calm and measured. This was a surprise too; somehow I had imagined him having a wild, insane voice like an animal, or being like the girl in the fairy tale who dropped a toad out of her mouth every time she opened it to speak. On the contrary, he actually sounded quite sane.

“Put this around her,” said Herr Duster. He was holding out my down jacket. Either he or Stefan had retrieved it from underneath the sideboard.

Stefan pulled me toward him and for a sickening moment I thought they were both in league; he was going to roll me over the edge of the well again and the pair of them would listen to me drown. But I realized that he was pulling off my sodden sweater. Icy water ran down my back. The T-shirt he left on for modesty’s sake; the down jacket went over it.

While Stefan was struggling with the zip at the front, I stared mistrustfully at Herr Duster over his shoulder. Why was he helping us?

“What did you see in the well, Pia?” he asked. His eyes were sunk in pools of shadow. I could not tell what he was thinking.

“Nothing,” I stuttered.

Stefan pulled back from me and shot me a look of astonishment. “Pia, tell him.”

“Nothing,” I managed again. I was not about to let Herr Duster know that I had seen the bodies of his victims down there in the inky waters. I had a vague conviction that if he did not know that we knew what he had done, we might still get away. But before I could stop him, Stefan had blurted it out.

“Herr Duster-there are dead people.”

Herr Duster must have seen my face.

“Do you think that I put them in the well, Fraulein Pia?” he asked.

Frantically, I shook my head. Stefan had finished zipping up the jacket. I made another attempt to get up, and this time I was more successful. I managed to rise until I was on one knee, as though I were about to propose to someone. I wondered if my cramped legs could carry me if I tried to make a run for it.

“You told him,” I accused Stefan through cold lips.

“Of course I did,” he answered impatiently. For a sickening moment Stefan strode through my imagination in the role of murderer’s accomplice. Perhaps he felt me stiffen. He said, “Pia, he didn’t do it. Someone else did.”

Involuntarily I glanced upward. This was Herr Duster’s house. Somewhere above our heads was the living room where he sat among the fading photographs of friends and family long dead. How could the well under his house be full of-those things-and it wasn’t him who had put them there?

“What did you see, Pia? How many?”

“Nothing.”

There was a pregnant silence during which we regarded each other in the yellow lantern light. Herr Duster opened his mouth to say something else, and in that moment we all heard it. A muffled sound, but very definite. The sound of a door closing.

Herr Duster raised a bony finger to his lips. In the silence, the shuddering of my breath sounded enormous. With a great effort I made myself breathe more deeply and quietly, pressing my hands to my face as though to stop my teeth chattering.

Herr Duster picked up the lantern, and mimed a twisting motion: I’m going to turn it off. Don’t panic. A moment later we were in darkness. I hunched forward, trying to curl myself into a protective ball. The arms and body of the jacket whispered together and instantly I froze.

Thump. Thump-thump.

My body cringed at every muffled sound as though it were a blow. Run! screamed the most primitive part of my brain, howling and ranting like a caged animal. The only thing that prevented me from trying it was the knowledge that the well was still uncovered, waiting for the unwary to plunge into its black waters.

As my eyes adjusted to the darkness I stared with horrid fascination at the long gray oblong that was the door to the first room of the cellar. Again I had the dizzying feeling that the sounds were not coming from there at all. I felt a light touch on my shoulder: Stefan. I turned, gazing into the dark.

To my astonishment, I realized that where there had been absolute blackness at the other side of the room, now there was a jagged patch of faint gray-yellow light. As I struggled to make sense of what I was seeing-could it be some sort of reflection of the doorway?-it became stronger and brighter, and I realized that the light patch was another entrance to the room, a narrow ragged-edged hole, just large enough for a man to step through. Where it led to I could not imagine. Thoughts seethed in my brain like a swarm of darting fish. Terror and cold had banished rational thought, but even an animal, unable to reason, knows when it is in danger. Someone with a light had come through that entrance once before and shut me in the well to die; that someone was coming back.

In blind panic I scrabbled at the flagstones, struggling to get to my feet, and my boot struck something on the floor: the lantern. With a clatter that sounded alarmingly loud in the chill darkness, it rolled over the edge of the well. There was a loud clank followed by a splash.

A split second later the approaching light went out. There was a silence so pregnant that involuntarily I held my