The Vanishing of Katharina Linden (36 page)

“Ste-fan …” I thought I might faint or be sick.

“What?”

“There’s something …” I forced myself to turn around.

There in the cellar doorway sat Pluto, regarding us balefully with his great yellow eyes. As I watched, his mouth yawned open, revealing a pink tongue and needle-sharp teeth, and he spat again. Then he turned with sinuous swiftness and disappeared down the spiral stairs.

Stefan exhaled slowly at my shoulder.
“Verdammter
cat.”

I nodded, swallowing.

“Are you all right? Did he scare you?”

“Not really. I just thought …” But I was not sure what I had thought. Useless to try to describe the grotesque ideas that had flitted through my brain when I heard that soft whispering noise and the rasping sound. I had stepped into trolldom that night, and now nothing was too horrible to be true.
The monsters are loose
, I thought, and my mind skidded neatly around the memory of what I had seen in the well.

“That’s how he got into Herr Schiller’s house,” said Stefan suddenly. He touched my arm. “You remember, that time he made us jump?” He had conveniently forgotten that it was
he
who had jumped,
he
who had screamed the place down. Still, I couldn’t be bothered to correct him. I nodded. Stefan was still looking at the doorway where the cat had been. At last he gave a low whistle.

“No wonder Herr Schiller went mad when he saw him. He must have known Pluto came through the cellar. He probably didn’t shut the door properly.” He shook his head disbelievingly. “I bet he thought Pluto had given the whole game away.”

I wasn’t listening. I was thinking of the moment before I fell into the well, of the sounds I had heard and the thing that had brushed against my leg and made me panic so that I sprang forward into nothingness. Pluto. I was thinking that if I ever got hold of him I would like to put my hands around that furry throat and strangle him.

L
ights outside the front door and the low purr of an engine announced the arrival of Herr Düster and the car. I yanked on the zip of my down jacket, trying to ensure maximum protection from the cold, and then Stefan and I stepped outside. It was dark in the street and snowflakes were still falling, whirling down so thickly that it was difficult to make anything out, but still we were impressed when we saw the car.

“Wow,” said Stefan.

Herr Düster leaned over and pushed open the passenger side door a little. “Get in,” he shouted. Stefan slid into the front passenger seat; I had to make do with the backseat. Herr Düster did not wait for Stefan to finish doing up his seat belt; he had already started moving forward.

“We need to get the car warm,” he said, glancing back over his shoulder at me.

“I’m all right,” I said, hugging myself.

“This is an amazing car.” Stefan was looking at the interior as though studying the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. “What is it?”

“A Mercedes 230
Heckflosse,”
said Herr Düster without turning his head. He was peering at the street ahead through a screen of swirling snowflakes.

“Is it really
yours?”

Now Herr Düster did give him a look.
“Natürlich
. I am not in the habit of stealing cars.”

“It’s just … I’ve never seen it before.”

“I don’t take it out very often,” said Herr Düster. He patted the steering wheel. “That is why it took me a little time to fetch it. I had to move a few things, and get the cover off.”

“If I had a car like this,” said Stefan, “I would drive it everywhere.”

“Then you would need a very large bank balance,” said Herr Düster drily.

I stared out of the window at the darkened street. We were turning right, toward the Klosterplatz, where the bonfire had been on St. Martin’s Eve, and where Frau Mahlberg had shaken me until my teeth chattered, screaming for her lost daughter. The muffled white shapes of a few snow-covered cars were visible, snowflakes tumbling down around them. I leaned too close to the glass and the window was suddenly opaque.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“The Eschweiler Tal,” said Herr Düster. His voice was cool and precise.

I sat up. “Why the Eschweiler Tal? How do you know he’s going there?”

Herr Düster did not reply. We had crossed the Klosterplatz and were traveling down the street toward the Protestant church. In a few moments we would have passed underneath the arch in the town walls. Herr Düster was driving as fast as he dared, but the road surface was treacherous. I could feel the old Mercedes gliding on the snow and ice.

“Herr Düster?” I had the uncomfortable feeling that I was being rude, but I couldn’t bear not to ask the question. “How do you
know
he’s going to the Eschweiler Tal?”

“I don’t,” said Herr Düster grimly.

“Then why—?”

“He is my brother,” said Herr Düster, “and I know him.”

I recognized the uncompromising tone in his voice and sat back, not daring to ask any more questions, though my brain was seething with them. How could he say he knew Herr Schiller when he never spoke to him? How could he be so sure where Herr Schiller was going?

Once out of the town walls, Herr Düster turned toward the railway station and the north end of the town. There was no one about. Small Eifel towns like Bad Münstereifel are always pretty dead by midnight, but tonight the cold and snow had driven even the taxi drivers and the bored street-corner youths back indoors.

I saw a police car parked outside the station: at first I thought there was no one in it but then the windshield wipers lurched into life and cleared an arc of snow away. Herr Düster hesitated and I felt the car slow, but then he suddenly accelerated and the car lurched forward. Before I could see who was inside the police car, we had passed it and were heading out of town. The interior of the car was warming up; soon my wet clothes would be steaming.

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

Herr Düster 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 Düster 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 Düster 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 Düster must have jumped, because the car lurched and I bumped my forehead painfully on the window.

“Where?” I said.

He pointed. Herr Düster 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 Düster 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 Düster, 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 Düster 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 Düster 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 Düster 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 Düster 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 Düster, 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 Düster 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 Düster 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.”