The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

really start in the middle of nowhere. When I looked properly I could see brown tufts of foliage sticking up through the kicked-over snow where he had come up the riverbank before he stepped onto the path. Herr Schiller.

I looked at the path ahead, looked back behind me at the bridge and the cars, then back at the path again.

About fifty meters ahead of me there was a rocky outcrop where the hillside met the level ground, slightly obscuring my view of the path. The black skeletons of shrubs stuck out on it like bristles. As I watched, a yellow glow suddenly bloomed behind the bristles, backlighting them with a pulsing corona of dazzling brightness. I was as shocked as if the world had tilted sideways and sent me sliding about like dice in a cup. My brain simply refused to process what my eyes were seeing. Dumbfounded and rooted to the spot, I watched that eerie light flame upward, gilding the snow with its golden radiance, and then I knew: it was the Fiery Man of the Hirnberg.

I think I took a step back, staggering, but I was still unable to run. Wide-eyed and openmouthed, I saw a figure clothed in blinding flame step from behind the outcrop, into the middle of the path, arms outspread as though crucified by the fire that streamed from every limb.

Distantly, I could hear someone screaming. Stefan? I dared not turn my head, as though the blazing thing would swoop upon me with those flaming talons outstretched if I took my horrified eyes off it for an instant. I took another step backward.

The fiery form was coming toward me, it was coming nearer, although each step was halting, as though wading through the inferno that surrounded it. I could not feel the heat yet, but I saw the incandescent figure brush against a broken branch and a bundle of desiccated leaves instantly ignited, shriveling and sparking.

Panic forced its way up inside me. I was aware that I was babbling nonsense, but I seemed to have no control over my own voice. No, no, go away, I didn’t call you, I didn’t, I didn’t. Terror was expanding inside me, but still I could not run.

Paralyzed with dread, I watched Death close in on me with feet that scorched the bare earth under the snow. I thought I could feel the deadly heat of the blazing hands that were held out to me, as though in supplication. I closed my eyes against the searing brilliance of the fire, fists drawn in tight to my body as though I could somehow shrink into myself and escape the branding heat of that fiery touch. Even through closed eyelids I could see the yellow glare. A sound like a creak escaped from a throat too constricted with fear to scream. I could hear it now, the roaring and crackling.

“Go away,” I whispered, and waited, my eyes still screwed tight shut, my whole body trembling. I waited. Nothing happened. Then suddenly I heard a sound that was ponderous but somehow soft, the muffled sound of a burning bonfire falling in on itself. There was warmth on my legs.

I opened my eyes. The burning figure lay outstretched on the melting snow in front of me, the clawlike left hand almost touching my boot. Flames were still licking over something horribly black and charred. I took a step backward, and then another, and then all of a sudden my paralysis had broken and I was turning to run, run for my life. My breath was painful and ragged. The glacial night air seemed to stab my frozen limbs with a thousand tiny knives. My boots skidded on snow and I almost fell, but righted myself like a galloping colt, my heart pounding as though it would burst. Anything to get away, to put as much distance as possible between myself and the thing I had seen.

I turned to look back, staggered, taking in nothing but a dizzying slice of starry sky and black branches against snow, and ran slap into something in my path. For several seconds I clawed at it, desperate to get past, shrieking in frustration, and then suddenly I realized I had run into a person. My flailing arms were being held gently but firmly by gloved hands. I felt the rasp of woolen fabric against my cheek. Words were being spoken; in the confusion born of panic I could not take them in, but the effect was calming, as though I were a terrified animal.

I pulled back a little and took in a jacket of the traditional sort, with a stand-up collar and polished horn buttons. It was probably hunter-green but in the moonlight it looked almost black. My eyes traveled upward: the face was deep in shadow underneath a jaunty Tyrolean hat. I sucked in a deep breath.

“Hans,” I said, and my heart swelled with recognition. “Hans-it’s you.”

“Yes,” he said, and his voice sounded surprised.

I flung my arms around him and clung on. Safe at last. “Unshockable Hans,” I murmured over and over again into the rough wool of his jacket, as though the name itself were a talisman. “Unshockable Hans. At last.”

Chapter Fifty-three

Whatever else one might say about Stefan’s cousin Boris, whose dubious career has probably by now culminated in a custodial sentence somewhere, he did commit at least one public-spirited action in his life. It was Boris who, having let himself out of Herr Duster’s house as easily as he had let himself in, slipped into the little alley, intending to make his exit unseen, and had literally fallen over our bicycles, ripping his jeans and laying open the skin of his calf in the process.

Shielded by the alley, he had taken out his flashlight to inspect the damage. He didn’t recognize my bike, but he knew Stefan’s. It had a stupid hooter on it, a rubber thing shaped like the head of Dracula, with fangs agape. It was quite distinctive-I’ve never seen another like it. Stefan had been given it when he was a lot younger and had become attached to it, although it was so goofy-looking that it probably took his cool rating down another notch every time he took the bike out.

Boris was no Sherlock Holmes, but still he was puzzled about the bike. Perhaps another person, having found it, would have assumed that Stefan had simply left it there for reasons of his own, or that it had been stolen for a prank and dumped. But Boris had just been in Herr Duster’s house, and the reason was this: he thought it was Herr Duster who was plucking girls from the streets like an elderly vampire, and he was determined to find out. Discovering the bicycles only confirmed his worst fears.

He made his way home thoughtfully, mulling the thing over while smoking a series of cigarettes, presumably for their intellect-enhancing qualities. I am still not convinced that he would have gone so far as to notify the police, but when his aunt, Stefan’s mother, called the house an hour later to accuse Boris of harboring her errant son, he put two and two together and for once in his life made four.

Boris, obeying the instincts that would no doubt serve him well in his future encounters with the law, denied any knowledge of Stefan’s whereabouts. Eventually, however, the matter weighed on his mind to the extent that he actually decided to do something about it. Perhaps he could no longer enjoy the bottle of Jagermeister he had filched from his father’s drinks cabinet, or perhaps it was the Jagermeister that did the talking when he rang the police (anonymously, of course) and told them what he had seen.

The police had other things on their minds that evening, but all the same an officer was dispatched to check the scene. As he stood prodding the front wheel of my bicycle (sadly bent under the weight of Boris’s trampling feet) with the toe of his boot, he was summoned by Hilde Koch, who was hovering on her doorstep, terrifying in a hairnet and revolting old Birkenstocks, her nightdress hastily covered by an outdoor coat.

Frau Koch was not interested in abandoned bicycles; she wanted to know what the police were going to do about the noise and nuisance suffered by God-fearing people who were awakened in the middle of the night by a bunch of kids driving a monstrous car with tail fins up and down the street.

The mention of kids might have been the thing that caught someone’s attention. It turned out that two policemen sitting in their patrol car down by the station had also seen a large car with tail fins going past, with passengers both in the front and back, but it was definitely being driven by an elderly man. It was probably nothing (such was the prevailing opinion), but a patrol car was sent to check it out. In the deep snow there were virtually no other cars on the road, so it was relatively easy to track Herr Duster’s Mercedes to the Eschweiler Tal.

The two cops in the patrol car were the genial Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf and a younger man whom I didn’t know; I think his name was Schumacher, like the race driver. Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf wasn’t feeling as genial as usual, being forced to abandon his thermos of coffee to drive up a track in the snow. When they reached Herr