The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

steaming.

“Can we get into the Eschweiler Tal in the snow?” asked Stefan.

Herr Duster said nothing.

It took another five minutes to reach the track leading into the Eschweiler Tal, during which time we saw not one other car. On the last stretch of asphalt road the tracks of another vehicle stood out like ruts in the deepening snow. There was a factory there at the end of the road, with a parking lot in front of it and a security gate at the side, but the tracks went straight past it and into the Tal. My skin prickled as I saw them, leaning over Stefan’s shoulder to peer through the windshield.

There are a couple of houses in the Eschweiler Tal, but I knew whoever had driven through here before us was not an honest householder on his way home. It was far too dark, too cold, and too late for that.

The road rose very slightly where the asphalt ran out and the track began. For a moment I thought the old Mercedes wouldn’t manage the slope, but Herr Duster knew what he was doing. He accelerated just enough to get the right momentum without skidding. Whoever had been before us had not been so lucky, judging by the wild sweeps of the tracks in the snow ahead of us.

“Where is he?” hissed Stefan.

Herr Duster said nothing. We traveled in silence along the valley. He dropped a gear and the car successfully crested the slight rise by the old quarry. There is a right turn there uphill toward the village of Eschweiler, where the young men were supposed to have been sitting when they saw the unholy light of the Fiery Man of the Hirnberg coming toward them, but it must have been impassable in the snow. In any event, the fishtailing tracks ahead of us went right past it and deeper into the Tal.

“He can’t have got away,” said Stefan, but it was a question, not a statement. Still we had not seen any sign of the vehicle ahead, only the tracks. If we failed to catch up with the car ahead, they were about as much use to us as archaeological relics. I racked my brains to think where the track ended. I had been in the Tal dozens of times, either with the school or with my parents, but we had always entered it from the end by the factory or from the footpath leading down from the Hirnberg. I wasn’t sure where the main track itself ended. If it came out on a main road somewhere, then the car we were following would have vanished untraceably by the time we reached the end of the Tal.

“There,” said Stefan suddenly, and Herr Duster must have jumped, because the car lurched and I bumped my forehead painfully on the window.

“Where?” I said.

He pointed. Herr Duster brought the car to a careful standstill as we all gazed out through windshield. Less than a hundred meters ahead of us was an intersection where the track went straight ahead up the Tal or sharply left over a stone bridge toward the tree-covered hillside. Parked by the bridge was a dark-colored car with the driver’s door open. I say parked, but it looked as though the tail end of the car had slewed around and struck the stone wall of the bridge. The yawning door gave the car an abandoned look. There was no sign of anyone near it.

There was a creak as Herr Duster applied the hand brake. He turned the ignition off and as the purr of the engine died he leaned forward as though he were praying, until his forehead was almost touching the steering wheel. He was motionless for a few moments, thinking. Stefan began fumbling at the passenger door, but a gnarled hand reached out and grasped him firmly but gently by the shoulder.

“No,” said Herr Duster, turning his face to him. There was a weariness about the gesture that made me think of Sebastian when he had cried himself out. “Stay here. I’ll go.”

“I want to come too,” said Stefan stubbornly.

“No.” Herr Duster shook his head. “This is for me.” He paused. “You have to stay here and take care of Pia.”

I was outraged by that, and started to say that I wasn’t a baby, and didn’t need taking care of by anyone, but Herr Duster simply said, “If anyone comes… it’s safer with two.” He opened the door of the Mercedes and climbed out. The sound of the car door shutting was immediately echoed by the thump of Stefan’s clenched fist on the upholstery.

“Scheisse-Mist-!” His rage filled the inside of the car like a fly buzzing inside a bottle.

“Calm down.” I watched through the window as the dark shape of Herr Duster went to the back of the Mercedes and opened the trunk. He retrieved something, a coat, I thought, and closed it again. As he moved away from the car I said in a low voice, “Wait till he’s gone.”

We watched Herr Duster trudging off into the snow, lifting the coat so that he could thread his arms into it and pull it tightly around himself.

“Stefan?”

“Yes?” Stefan sounded distracted.

“What’s going on? With Herr Duster, I mean. What’s he helping us for?” Helping was not exactly the right word; taking over was more like it, but I couldn’t think of a better way to put the question. “Wasn’t he furious when he found you in the house?”

Now that I started to think about it, questions were sprouting up everywhere like weeds. “Wasn’t he supposed to be away, anyway?”

“Mensch, Pia! I don’t know.” Stefan’s voice was irritable. “Look, he just came home. I don’t know where he was and I didn’t get time to ask him. When you and I heard someone coming in the cellar, I just ran and hid. I heard you fall into the well but I couldn’t do anything about it until he-whoever it was-had gone. Then I couldn’t get the stone off the well so I had to get help. I went upstairs and Herr Duster was just coming in.”

“Was he angry when he saw you?”

“No-yes-I mean, he was shocked, but he wasn’t angry. He was cool. But he did say we’d have a lot of explaining to do later.”

“Scheisse.”

“What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t get the stone up by myself.”

“Weren’t you scared? Supposing it really was him who put the stone on?”

“But it couldn’t have been,” Stefan pointed out. “He was upstairs. He couldn’t have been up there and down in the cellar at the same time.”

“Hmmmm.” I wondered at Stefan’s composure. If it had been me, I doubted I could have thought things through so clearly. “Stefan?”

“Yes?”

“Did you see those-things-in the well?” I knew that he had.

“Mmm-hmm.” He seemed reluctant to say more.

“Well… how do you know it wasn’t him who put them there?”

“It couldn’t have been him, Pia. He wouldn’t have helped me get you out of the well. He would probably have…” His voice trailed off.

I guessed that he was thinking the same as I was, that if it had been Herr Duster who had put those things in the well, there would have been nothing easier in the whole world than to just go down to the cellar, with Stefan unsuspecting, and tip him in after me. I felt cold thinking of the risk he had run. With an effort I tried to wrench myself back to the business at hand.

“Do you think he knew about the tunnel?”

“No…” Stefan shook his head. “I think he hardly even knew about the room with the well in it. I mean, he must have known it was there, but he’d practically forgotten about it. I don’t think he goes into the cellar much.”

I thought of the disarray, the dusty sticks of furniture, the halfhearted attempts to hang a few things from the walls. “I guess not.”

“He wouldn’t have gone in there if I hadn’t gone in first,” said Stefan. “He said something funny, you know, like ‘I see you have been busy, young man’ or something like that.”

I raised my eyebrows, forgetting that Stefan could hardly make out my face in the dark. It was almost impossible to imagine Herr Duster saying anything like that. Before tonight he had seemed the most taciturn man on the planet. Discovering that he owned an enormous Mercedes with chrome fenders and tail fins had been enough of a surprise. If he had ripped open his shabby old checked shirt to reveal a superhero’s costume