HS04 - Unholy Awakening (9 page)

‘What did she see or do in the house of the Rimmeles?’ I asked.

‘She didn’t do nothing, sir. Nothing wrong, I mean. Not
her
…’

‘Who, then?’

‘Fraulein Rimmele, sir.’

I felt like a man who is obliged to listen to an interminable joke.

‘If Angela Enke told you something, I want to know what it is,’ I said.

The girl nodded, but still she did not speak.

‘Fraulein Rimmele?’ I prompted.

‘And her father,’ the girl added in a hushed whisper.

I thought of the infirm old man that I had carried from the cemetery that morning, recalling the cruel words that he had whispered in my ear regarding his daughter. Emma was a changeling, a vampire. It was a ridiculous accusation. Had he said something of the same sort to Angela Enke? And had the girl believed him? Was this the gossip that she had passed on to Kitti Raubel?

The girl pulled out a rag and blew her nose.

‘It isn’t nice, sir,’ she warned me.

‘Let me be the judge of that,’ I replied.

‘The first time that she went there, she said she’d spent the morning fixing up the clothes that had to be altered. They were in a bit of a state what with bulging seams and buttons half-hanging off. If you have to alter clothes, sir, you need to mend them proper first. So, that was what she did.’

I listened carefully, doubting that this preamble would take me far.

‘What happened then?’ I encouraged her.

‘Next thing, sir, you need to take the sitter’s measurements, and make a note of what needs doing. An inch here, two inches there, snip this, cut that. By the time she’d finished working on the lady’s clothes, it was late afternoon, she said. She knew what she would have to buy on Monday morn, and what she’d have to do that day. Well, it was the gentleman’s turn to be fitted. She’d been working on her own down there in the kitchen, so she took her yardstick up, and went out into the hall. She looked around, but there wasn’t no-one there. She called for Fraulein Rimmele, but the lady did not hear her. That is, she did not answer her. As Angela said, she may have been too busy…’

‘Doing what?’ I asked, unable to stem my impatience.

‘The lady’d said her father had a room up on the first floor, so Angela went up there. The fraulein said she spent a lot of time with him, so Angela put her ear to one of the doors. Once she heard the voices, she thought, she’d knock and ask the young lady if she could take the old man’s measurements. And that’s exactly what she did, sir.’

She crossed her arms, and stared at me with a determined nod of the head.

‘I don’t follow you,’ I said. ‘Angela Enke listened at a door, heard a voice, knocked, and went in. What’s so strange about that?’

Kitti Raubel pursed her lips and blew a hoarse whistle.

‘The voice she heard was an old man’s voice, sir. A moaning sound…Angela thought he might be ill, so in she went. That young lady was down on her knees, sir. She heard the door behind her open, tried to get up, and she couldn’t. Her hand was caught inside his flap…’

Again she fixed me with that stare.

‘His
trouser
flap. You know.
There
.’

She glanced down below my waist.

I was tempted to smile. I could think of a dozen reasons why a caring daughter might be found with her hands inside her ancient father’s trousers. Two possibilities came to mind immediately: incontinence, or some physical discomfort. In either case, it would be a mercy to set the old man at his ease. Yet Angela Enke had put a malicious interpretation on the scene. And so had the friend in whom she had confided.

‘What did Angela say about that?’ I asked.

‘What could she say?’ Kitti shot back. ‘She saw what she saw. Then, bold as brass that woman pulled her hand away, and said not a word.’

She blew out a loud sigh.

‘And next thing, Angela’s dead, sir! You know what all the town is saying about her, sir. That Fraulein Rimmele! They say that she’s a
beast
, sir. One of them
creatures
that preys on folks at night…’

‘Listen to me, Kitti Raubel,’ I snapped. ‘If you go telling stories like this, you’ll get yourself into serious trouble. If the lady were to make a complaint to me, I’d be forced to hear it in the courtroom. You might get a whipping.’

Kitti Raubel’s lips began to tremble, her shoulders began to heave.

‘Pull yourself together,’ I told her. ‘Angela certainly exaggerated what she thinks she saw. Tell no-one what you have just told me. Do you under stand?’

She wiped her nose with the rag, then sniffled. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Go back inside and do your work,’ I said. ‘I’ve taken up enough of your time.’

As I began to walk away, she called after me: ‘I hope that I’ve been useful, sir.’

‘Most helpful,’ I replied, thinking that she had just put horns on the devil’s head.

I turned in to the narrow lane behind the market-square.

It was the quickest way to reach my house. I had not slept, nor had I eaten in twenty-four hours, and Helena needed to know more than the little that I had instructed Knutzen to tell her the night before.

The sound of snarling stopped me dead in my tracks.

Two black dogs, their pelts a mass of sores, were facing off in the centre of the cobbled alley. They were as high as my waist with blunt square heads. They might have been Irish hunters. Between them lay a bone so large it could have been the hind leg of a cow. It was red, raw, knotted with gristle. The curs growled and snapped at one another, hackles raised, fangs gaping, exposing mottled gums.

As they heard my boots on the stones, their bloodshot eyes turned in my direction.

I pressed my back against the stone wall.

Should I retreat, wait for the battle to end, or should I try to pass them?

That alley was notorious. Butchers, bakers, sausage-makers, fish-vendors, and just about everybody else in Lotingen dumped offal and innards there, hoping that scavengers – animal, or human – would clean up after them. Other bones and scraps were scattered on the ground, stripped clean of meat. Other battles had been fought and won that day, but I had chanced upon the rearguard.

At that moment, Helena turned the corner at the far end of the alley.

She was walking quickly, head down. A bunch of white flowers stood out starkly against her black clothes. The wind was blowing in her face, flattening her skirt against her thighs. She might have had the winged feet of a messenger of the gods. She went so swiftly that I thought she ought to have taken flight above the carpet of rubbish which had been abandoned there that day. That filthy lane was the quickest way from our home to the cemetery.

She had not seen the dogs. Nor had she seen me. But the hounds had spotted her. One began to bark, advancing on her, and she looked up. She saw the dogs, she saw me. Her lips formed my name, but no sound issued from her mouth.

‘Stand hard against the wall!’ I shouted, then did what I had hesitated to do just a moment before. I jumped into the middle of the alley, waving to attract the attention of the animals, rushing at them, arms out to make myself seem bigger, shouting at the top of my voice.

The hounds pulled up sharp, and turned to face me.

‘Go back, Helena,’ I shouted, pointing. ‘Remember the old school.’

The Pietist schoolhouse had been abandoned for a year or more. The French had used it as a mapping-office, but the stench of the street by day, and the rats which nibbled at their maps by night, had taken them quickly elsewhere. It was the one Prussian victory of any substance in a long time.

Helena nodded, ran to the iron gate that was set in the wall. I saw her push it open, enter, disappear from sight.

I faced the hounds. But only for an instant.

To my surprise, seeing the road that Helena had opened up for them, the pair ran off in the direction from which my wife had come, rushing past the schoolhouse gate, howling, providing me with the opportunity to take refuge in the same walled garden where my wife had hidden.

I dashed to reach her.

As I laid my hands on the bars to push, Helena pulled hard, then pushed the gate closed behind me with a clang.

Relief spluttered out of me. ‘You should know better than to come this way,’ I said, sounding angrier than I intended.

‘You should know better yourself,’ she replied, and looked away. Her head was covered by a black woollen shawl, but curls had fallen loose on her forehead and in the hollows of her cheeks.

‘Knutzen told you, I suppose?’ I said awkwardly, by way of explanation for my absence the night before. My voice was gruff. I could only hope that she would attribute it to the agitation of the moment.

‘Knutzen told me that a body had been found…’

Her voice seemed to fade away like an invalid’s. As she spoke, she rested her head upon her shoulder and let the scarf slide into her waiting hand. She had tied her curls up with a black velvet ribbon, but it had only half done the job. The locks had broken free on the left, clustering around her ear and covering her neck in great disorder. The fullness of her hair made a startling contrast with her pale complexion and drawn expression. While her hair seemed to thrive, my wife seemed to be fading away. Her cheeks, once full, were thin and hollow. Her mourning clothes enclosed her like constricting sorrow. Every nerve and muscle pushed and worked beneath her pale skin; blue veins pulsed along the edge of her temples; her lips were split and dry, white in colour, ridged with vertical lines the colour of blood.

My heart clenched at the sight.

Another face reared up suddenly in my thoughts. It was out of place, ungenerous, beside the harrowed figure of my wife.

Suddenly, there was a wolf-like howl from beyond the gate.

Helena folded her arms across her breasts as if to stop herself from quaking.

‘They made such dreadful noises during the epidemic. The night that…’

She did not finish what she was saying. In truth, there was no need. We both recalled too well. We were sitting by candlelight at the bedside of our baby son, watching as the fever wore Anders down to the bone, waiting as it consumed him. And outside in the moonlight, stray dogs howled like wolves.

‘Can animals sense that something’s wrong?’ she whispered, clinging to my arm.

All sorts of reasons had been given to explain the number of dogs on the loose in Lotingen. Their masters had died, the dogs were starving. They had eaten whatever they could and been driven wild by the taste of human blood. The devil had got into them, Pastor Röhl informed his bishop from the pulpit of the cathedral while preaching of the Gadarene swine. The explanation given by the mayor was more mundane, but probably the truest. Marcus Ziegler was dead, he said, and nobody had yet been appointed to take his place. Marcus Zeigler had been the dog-cat-and-rat catcher in Lotingen for more than fifty years. At last, French troops had been ordered into town to discharge their muskets at the beasts. I remembered going to my office the morning after, wending my way through the evidence of the slaughter. The market square had been carpeted with strays, not all of them as dead as I might have liked. For a long time afterwards, my sympathies were with the French. Every time I heard a musket crack, I took heart. One menace less, I thought.

‘They are hungry,’ I said, a mite too sharply. ‘They’ll wander off in no time once they’ve had their fill. We’ll soon be free to leave.’

‘They’ll come back,’ she murmured, staring into space. ‘They always do.’

‘If they become a nuisance, they’ll be shot,’ I protested.

‘I was not talking of the dogs,’ she said quietly.

‘What, then?’ I asked, perplexed.

‘Frau Sauchen came to the house this morning selling apples.’ Helena’s voice was flat and low, without a trace of emotion in it. ‘She said that something must have happened at the cemetery. She saw a crowd outside the gates with pikes and torches. A girl had been murdered…She saw
you
there, Hanno. In the company of French soldiers, she says. And then, all night…you did not come home. I didn’t know what to do. Should I wait for you, or should I go to visit Anders?’

She was silent for some moments, the flowers still held tightly in her fist.

‘What kept you away so long, Hanno?’

Silently, I cursed the tongue of the widow Sauchen who sold fruit from house to house. ‘They will not let the body enter the village,’ I began to say. ‘The dead girl is from Krupeken…’

Helena spoke, interrupting me. ‘They think that she’ll return to haunt them.’

‘You know the superstitions,’ I countered. ‘They grow in Prussia like the apples on Frau Sauchen’s trees.’

She appeared not to have heard me.

‘Why do people believe that the dead come back?’ she asked me, as if there might be a plausible answer. ‘Why would they
want
to come back?’

I took her hand and held it in my own. It was as cold as ice.

‘Folk tales tell us that when some people die, they are reluctant to leave the living. They wish to remain with their families and their loved ones,’ I said, trying to explain it away, conscious of her fragile state after our recent loss.

‘They are not damned souls,’ she murmured. ‘They cannot go away because they love us too much…’

‘You know these tales as well as I do, Helena,’ I said, hoping to halt the flow.

She turned to me and she smiled. It seemed an age since she had smiled. ‘Why should we fear them, in that case? Her parents ought to be glad.’

I was lost for words. She had found a logic in the legends and she seemed to be quite comfortable with it.

‘Where did you bury her, Hanno?’

I let go of her hand.

‘A temporary resting-place,’ I said with a sigh. ‘She won’t be there for long. As soon as I have laid my hands upon the killer, I’ll take her back to Krupeken…’

‘Is she lying close to Anders?’

Helena’s intuition often confounded me. What should I say? The fact that they had both been laid in the same ground – this supposedly un-dead woman, and our child, who had died the most frightful of natural deaths – would frighten her, I thought.

I placed my hand on her shoulder, and gently pulled her to me, forcing her to turn around and look at me. We were so close that the sigh which escaped from my lips caused the curls on her brow to flutter. I ran my tongue over my own lips to wet them, then gently touched my lips to hers. I wanted with all my heart to help her. I wanted to save her, repair the damage which the baby’s death had brought upon us. Helena seemed to be physically tormented, unable to recover from the loss. Those wounds on her lips were a visible manifestation of her suffering. Did she bite her lips when she was alone with her sad thoughts?

Her shoulders stiffened beneath the pull of my fingers, but I held her close and urged her, lip to lip, to abandon herself to me, and let me comfort and console her. She gave herself to me for a minute, perhaps, then slid away, leaving a damp saliva trail on my cheek, settling her head into the cavity between my shoulder and my neck. I rocked her gently for some moments, as if she were a child who needed help before she could sleep. And as I cradled her, I told her where I had buried the body of Angela Enke the night before with the help of Lars Merson. In the same section of the cemetery, I said, though I was careful not to say that they were laid side by side.

‘They don’t come back,’ I whispered. ‘I am so sorry, Helena. Anders can’t come back to comfort us.’

A sudden gulping sigh escaped from her lips. It might have been the start of a torrent of much-needed tears, but it stopped as quickly as it began. ‘I wish he could,’ she whispered. ‘I’d welcome him in any form. I would open the door…’

Something pushed hard enough to rattle the gate. Growling and yelping followed on. Helena drew herself up stiffly against me. I held her by the shoulders. We stared together at the gate, waiting to see if some more determined assault would follow on, but all we heard was silence.

‘Are they lying in wait for us out there?’ she whispered.

I held her close to my breast, making hushing sounds, urging her to be quiet. We stood that way for some more minutes, listening, but hearing nothing. On a sudden impulse, as if some signal had been given, we turned as one, still clinging to each other. I led her by the hand towards the gate, taking care not to make a sound. And there we stood for another minute.

No howl or bark was heard.

No cracking and chewing of bones.

Silence.

‘They’ve gone,’ I whispered.

I unlatched the gate without letting go of her hand. I inched it open, looking out for any danger, careful of Helena, knowing that she was still worried that the hounds might be lurking there, poised to attack us again.

But I was wrong.

I did not expect it. She withdrew her hand from mine, reached up, shifted the stock and pulled down upon my collar, exposing the spot where the lips of Emma Rimmele had pressed against my neck.

She studied it for an instant, knit her brows, but did not say a word.

Every possible explanation ran through my head. I had hurt myself while digging in the dark. I had burnt my skin on the lantern-glass. Lotte had put too much starch in my collar.

Helena removed her finger and pushed my collar back into place. ‘I think we are free to leave,’ she said very quietly.

Indeed, the lane was empty.

The dogs had gone, leaving the cow-bone of recent contention forgotten on the cobbles. I took Helena by the hand and I led her home. We saw nothing of note until we reached our own front gate. As I closed the gate, I took a deep breath. At my back, I heard the voice of Helena.

‘What in heaven’s name is this?’ she said.

She was staring up at the first floor of the house. Two rooms look out over the narrow front garden: the bedroom on the left, where the children sleep, and the other room, which has not been used since Anders died. That bed room should have been used as a nursery for Edviga, but now the baby slept in the company of Manni and Süzi, her elder brother and sister. Three in a room, and one room empty. Helena would not allow a thing to be changed in there. The sheets and the mattress had been thrown on a bonfire, of course, but the medicine, glass and spoon which Anders had used throughout his illness still stand where they stood in that dark period.

Helena was shielding her eyes, looking up at the eaves above the windows. They poke out from the roof tiles like gibbets, or hoists. Blowing in the breeze, rattling and clinking together were the strangest collection of objects. I recognised a chicken leg, a pair of spiked hen’s claws, a wish-bone, and some other bones that might have come from the chicken’s wings and ribs.

‘Silly girl,’ I murmured, thinking of Lotte. ‘She doesn’t mind the ravens and the crows, if it keeps away the fantastic creatures of her own imagination.’

What Helena muttered through clenched teeth was not meant for my ears, I am certain of it. Even so, I heard what she said. For one instant, my heart, which had been beating rapidly with the exertions of the night and the excitements of the day, stopped still.