The Vanishing of Katharina Linden (14 page)

“Look.”

I looked, and at first I was not sure what I was seeing. Chunks of masonry, just like all the other ones littering the site. But then the shattered stones coalesced into a shape, and I realized that I was looking at a circle. A perfect ring of stones, arranged with precise order and neatness.

We approached it carefully and stood looking down at the stones.

“Na, und?”
I said. “It’s just a circle. It’s probably the bottom of another turret, or maybe it was a fireplace or something.”

“No, it wasn’t,” said Stefan with conviction. “Look: there’s no moss on any of the stones.” He was right; there wasn’t. “If it had been there since who knows when, there would be moss all over it, right?”

“Right,” I conceded, impressed with his deductive skills. I moved to step into the circle, but he put out an arm to stop me.

“I don’t think we should go in.”

“Why not?”

“It might be—you know, black magic.”

I stepped back hastily. “What’s that thing in the middle?” I asked. We both craned forward, trying to look more closely without actually entering the circle. It was a little pile of stones, with a larger, flat stone balanced on top of them. On top of the flat stone was a little heap of something burned.

“Hair,” I said, shuddering with disgust.

“It’s not hair,” said Stefan. “Look, it’s sort of crumbly. It looks like herbs or something. Maybe tobacco—or other stuff.”

“Other stuff?”

“You know.” Stefan rolled his eyes at me; why did I have to be such an innocent? “Stuff like Boris smokes.”

“Oh.” We looked at each other. Suddenly I couldn’t stop myself; a giggle came bubbling up inside me. “Do you think the eternal huntsman smoked it?”

“Idiot,” said Stefan, but he was laughing too. He mimed someone taking a long drag at a joint, then intoned,
“Mensch
, when I smoke this stuff I feel like I could ride forever.” We clutched our sides and shrieked with laughter.

“Do the hounds smoke it too?”

“
Sicher
, and the horse as well.”

We laughed ourselves hoarse. At last, when I was beginning to think I would actually be sick from laughing, Stefan suddenly said, “It was a black mass.”

I stopped giggling. “That’s not funny.”

“I wasn’t
trying
to be funny.” He pointed at the little heap of burned stuff. “That would be the—you know, the table, like in church.”

“The altar,” I supplied.

“Yes, and the stuff on it, that’s the offering.”

“The offering?”

“The sacrifice.”

I didn’t like the sound of that; it made me think of religion classes with Frau Eichen, and bearded patriarchs dragging their sons up hills to slaughter them because God told them to do it. And everyone else thinking it showed what wonderful trust in God the old man had, and not thinking how the little boy might have viewed the situation, Daddy waving a carving knife around and only just deciding at the last minute to kill a ram instead.

“That’s creepy,” I said, ever the mistress of understatement.

“That’s what I saw,” said Stefan, thinking aloud. “It wasn’t the huntsman and his men, it was a black mass. The light was the fire when they burned the stuff, whatever it was.” He turned to look at me, his face serious. “The voices … that was them saying the black mass.”

“And the hoofbeats?” I asked.

Stefan looked at me, and I could almost see his mind working as he ran through the possibilities. Then his eyes widened and his lips parted; I could actually
see
it, the moment that the idea dawned on him.

“Cloven hooves,” he said.

We stared at each other. “Let’s get out of here,” I said hastily. Stefan did not need to be told twice; we both turned and set off over the uneven ground, clambering over the tumbled mounds of earth and broken stones, with as much haste as we could manage without breaking into
an undignified scramble for safety. We reached the path and set off downhill without looking back once. Stefan was striding so fast that I had to trot to keep up.

“Are we going to tell anyone?” I asked him, panting with exertion.

“No way.”

“Not even Herr Schiller?”

“Well, maybe him.” We both knew Herr Schiller was different; he was a grown-up, but he wouldn’t assume that we were making it all up; and he would know what to do. If, that is, there was anything we
could
do. Perhaps, like stepping into the stone circle, it was a thing best left undone.

I left Stefan near the cemetery at the foot of the Quecken hill and hurried home, my mind fizzing like a wasps’ nest with toxic thoughts: whispers at midnight and unseen presences calling up the Devil, and burned sacrifices. Little girls who vanished without trace. Witches and spectral huntsmen and cats who were not really cats.

When I let myself into the house my thoughts were so saturated with these eldritch horrors that it was hardly a surprise to see my mother looking as white and shocked as I did myself. It was not until she threw her arms around me and began hugging and shaking me in turns that I realized anything was wrong.

“Where have you
been?
I’ve been
sick
with worry.”

My father came out of the kitchen, and as I registered the fact that he was home from work early I saw that his face, too, was pale and drawn. I looked from one to the other in confusion. What on earth was going on? It was several minutes before I worked out what must have happened.

Another child had vanished.

T
hat Wednesday, when it happened, it was clear and bright; not hot, but sunny. It was the middle of the day, a time when the town was relatively full, with little knots of schoolchildren wending their way to the bus stop, staff from the shops popping in and out of the bakeries for lunch, working mothers hurrying home to be there when their children arrived. Little groups of those powerful German citizens known as
Senioren
stood about putting the world to rights. An ordinary, cheerful weekday.

Of course, even at busy times of day there were dark and quiet parts of the town; the little backstreets where the overhanging houses leaned toward each other overhead, and the high walls threw deep, damp shadows. But even in these quiet places, you would not have felt particularly threatened. Aside from a brief moment of excitement in 1940 when Hitler used a bunker in nearby Rodert, the last big event had been the flood of 1416. Nothing ever happened here—and
nothing
is precisely what seemed to have happened to Marion Voss. In fact,
nothing
is what she vanished into, what she became.

A few people remembered seeing a little figure,
Ranzen
on back, pigtails bobbing as it progressed down the street that day; but was it her? She was of average height, she had light brown hair, she was carrying
the same galloping-horse-patterned
Ranzen
as thirty other little girls her age. Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf helped someone who might have been her to cross the road on the way to the Klosterplatz, where the school buses were parked. Frau Nett from the Café am Fluss saw a child who might have been her stumble outside the bakery and be helped up by an older girl. Hilde Koch claimed to have seen a little girl who was
certainly
her outside the kiosk at the Orchheimer Tor, clutching a bag of candy. But no one saw where she went.

It seemed that somewhere along her way through the town she had stepped off her path, turned up an alley or gone into a building, and vanished into thin air, dissolved into the ether. It was like one of those magic tricks where you see the magician put something into a box, and then he opens it, and you can see that it is empty. One moment she was there, skipping along the street, and the next she had gone. All that remained were glimpses, fragmentary memories that hung on the air reproachfully, like the echo of a cry. Marion Voss had become—nothing.

To me, the vanished child, Marion Voss, was even more of an unknown quantity than Katharina Linden had been. Not only was she not in my year at school—she was in the third grade—but she lived out in the village of Iversheim, a few kilometers north of Bad Münstereifel. I must have passed her in the school corridors or seen her in the playground, but I have no memory of it.

She was a very ordinary-looking little girl, with her long hair usually done up in two braids, as on the day she disappeared; she wore glasses with thin silver-colored rims, and studs in her ears; she had nondescript but pleasant features and a dark mole on her left cheek close to her mouth.

All this I learned from the photographs that appeared in the local and regional newspapers—front-page news, the second girl to disappear in the Town of Terror. My parents kept the papers out of my way at home, but still, whenever I passed a tobacconist’s shop, Marion Voss’s face would be staring out from the newsstand, repeated endlessly in grainy detail. So I knew what she looked like.

I also discovered that she was an only child, although she had a big circle of grieving cousins. She had a dog, a Labrador cross called Barky,
and two rabbits (the newspapers did not say what the rabbits were called). She liked to dance, to sing; she was learning to play the recorder. She had a scar on one knee from an accident with her bicycle two years before. She had had meningitis when she was at kindergarten but had recovered. Her parents couldn’t believe how lucky she had been at the time; now they couldn’t believe what had happened to her. Her grandmother had promised to light a candle in Sts. Chrysostom and Daria every day until Marion was found.

All this the newspapers told us, and more. What they could not tell us was what had become of her.

No one could decide, in fact, exactly when and where Marion Voss had disappeared. Her mother, who worked in the mornings as a receptionist in a doctor’s office, had not been expecting her daughter to come straight home after school; she thought Marion was going home with a schoolfriend who lived in the town.

The schoolfriend’s mother, however, had not been expecting Marion, or so she said; she had an appointment herself that afternoon and couldn’t entertain extra children.

The schoolfriend, when questioned, lost her head completely, thinking that she was being blamed for the disappearance, and became quite unable to give a coherent account of the situation. It was eventually surmised that she had invited Marion over without telling her mother, and then the two of them had quarreled and she had told Marion not to bother coming after all. It was never established at what point the quarrel had occurred, but Marion did not get on her usual school bus with her classmates, nor did she get on the later bus for Iversheim.

Since her mother was not expecting to see Marion until she picked her up that evening, the girl’s disappearance would have been undiscovered for at least six hours, were it not for the fact that Frau Voss had suddenly remembered that Marion had a dentist’s appointment at three. She had telephoned the schoolfriend’s mother, and suddenly the two of them had realized that they did not know where Marion was at all.

There were more meetings, and this time when Frau Redemann called the school together to announce tighter security measures and remind us all not to go with strangers, she was flanked by Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf and another policeman we did not know, with
knife-edge creases in his trousers and a face that looked as though it had been carved out of granite.

“If anyone knows anything about Marion Voss, or if any of you saw her on Wednesday afternoon, you must come and tell me,” Frau Redemann announced, her voice sounding higher and less steadfast than usual. She was fidgeting, her long hands fiddling with the pendant on her bosom; there was an air of badly suppressed desperation about her. She was used to dealing with difficult parents, children who brought their family problems into the classroom and disrupted everyone else, fourth-grade boys trading cigarettes in the bathrooms. But this was something that was most definitely not in the job description.

You could see it on her face every time she looked around the crowded hall at the hundreds of children entrusted to her care, or glanced at the grim faces of the policemen.
This is not fair
, said her expression.
I didn’t sign up for this
.

“Or you can tell the police,” she added nervously, as though she could shovel the entire situation onto their plate. Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf shuffled his feet and raised his chin; the other policeman continued to look over our heads, his expression so neutral that it was impossible to tell whether he was bored or simply saving his energy for pouncing upon criminals.

The assembly was dismissed. Back in the classroom Frau Eichen was distracted, and kept popping out of the room to hold whispered conversations in the corridor, presumably with other teachers. The gaps in our educational program were enthusiastically filled by Thilo Koch, who expounded his lurid theories of what had happened to Marion Voss and Katharina Linden.

“My brother Jörg,” he would begin, “my brother Jörg says they were eaten by a cannibal. That’s why they haven’t found the bodies. He’s
eaten
them.”