The Vanishing of Katharina Linden (32 page)

B
oris?”
The information stopped me in my tracks. “It was
Boris?
”

“Doch
. I saw him through the crack in the door.”

“But—but—” I was floundering, trying to make sense of it. “How could it be Boris?”

“I don’t know. But that’s why the door was open. He must have unlocked it.”

“How?” I demanded. “He can’t have a key, can he?”

“Of course not. But that wouldn’t stop him.”

Stefan’s voice was matter-of-fact; closer to the epicenter of Boris’s questionable pursuits than I was, he found the idea of his cousin picking the lock of someone’s house quite unremarkable. “It’s a good thing he didn’t hear us come in. He’d have gone nuts.”

“But—if that was Boris, where’s Herr Düster?”

Stefan shrugged. “Gone away. Like Frau Koch said.” He clicked his flashlight back on, then leaned past me almost casually and tried the door handle, but of course the door did not budge.

“Why did he lock it?” I asked, sullen with the unfairness of it.

“So Herr Düster wouldn’t know he’d been in here—I suppose.”

“Can you unlock it?”

Stefan shook his head. “I don’t think so.” He glanced at me swiftly
and took in the hunched shoulders, the fists held out in front of me like claws. Gently, he reached out with his free hand and grasped my wrist. “Hey. Don’t panic.”

“We’re locked in.” My voice sounded unnaturally high.

“We’ll get out.”

“How?”

“I don’t know … we just will.”

“But we’re locked in!”

“You said that.” Stefan’s voice was mild. He cocked his head. “We’re in here already, so why don’t we finish looking?”

The sudden realization that if there
were
any corpses in the house we were now locked in with them was almost too much for me; it felt nothing short of miraculous that I was still on my feet and not writhing in paroxysms of terror on the threadbare runner. I kept staring at Stefan as though concentrating on him rather than the house around me would stave off the thought.

“Come on,” I managed in a weak voice.

He shook his head. “Take your jacket off first.”

“Why?” I was reluctant to emerge from the warm shell of down and expose myself to the house’s atmosphere.

“Because whenever you move it makes that stupid noise.”

I sighed, but he was right. I undid the zip and shrugged out of the jacket.

“Put it in there,” said Stefan, indicating the living room. He didn’t need to add
in case anyone sees it
. I was already spooked enough. I stuffed the jacket underneath one of Herr Düster’s ancient sideboards.

“Now what?”

“We can go upstairs first, or down into the cellar.”

“You said we didn’t need to go upstairs,” I pointed out. “You said serial killers never leave dead bodies up there.”

“Well, they probably don’t.” Stefan made a face. “I mean, could
you
go to sleep at night if you knew there was a dead person stuffed in your wardrobe?” He saw my expression and added hurriedly, “Look, we couldn’t have gone up there if Herr Düster had been here, but we can now he’s away. We might as well.”

I looked at the black space at the top of the stairs and then down at the floor under my feet.

“I don’t know,” I said feebly.

“Toss for it, then,” said Stefan briskly, fumbling in his pocket and eventually producing a single ten-pfennig coin. “Which side do you want?”

“The oak leaves.”

Solemnly Stefan tossed the coin into the air, made as if to catch it, fumbled, and dropped it on the floor. We both squatted down. In the flashlight’s beam we could just make out the coin, glinting dully:
10
, we both read. I stood up and leaned against the wall. I felt a strange lack of interest in which option Stefan would choose; the whole affair seemed out of my hands.

“The cellar,” he said decisively. He set off down the dark hallway, then turned, his flashlight winking at me. “Come on.”

I trailed unwillingly behind him. The hallway narrowed slightly as it passed the stairs; in the dark it felt oppressively like entering a tunnel. Outside the sickly yellow of the flashlight beam, everything was draped in velvety shadow. Anything could have been lurking in the corners of the hallway and the angles where the walls joined the ceiling: great spiders, snub-nosed bats, chittering rodents. I shuddered.

“Here,” said Stefan.

There was a narrow door under the stairs, the wood worn and battered. There was no lock, only a black metal latch, which Stefan carefully lifted. The door opened easily. “I bet he oils the hinges,” said Stefan. “So nobody hears him going in and out—you know, with the bodies.”

“Shut up.”

“Come right inside,” he said, unabashed, as he stepped into the rectangle of darkness. “Come on,” he added, seeing me hesitate. “I want to shut the door.”

“What?” I could not imagine anything worse than being shut inside that unfamiliar dark space, with the smell of dust and decay and the weak light from the flashlight picking out little night creatures as they scurried away across the walls, their many legs working furiously.

“I want to put the light on.” Stefan sounded impatient. “No one will see it, as long as we shut the door.”

“Oh.”

Reluctantly, I squeezed in beside him, peering down and feeling
about with the toe of my boot, afraid of taking a tumble down the stairs. A moment later there was a firm-sounding
click
and the light came on. Suddenly Stefan was no longer a dim shape highlighted with the yellow flashlight, but a solid figure standing close to me with his fingertips still grasping the old-fashioned switch. I was grateful for the light; a half turn showed me that we were both perilously close to the top of the cellar stairs. A fall down those in the dark would have been disastrous. The little space we were standing in seemed to double as a closet; a row of Herr Düster’s battered-looking jackets hung from pegs.

I nudged Stefan. “Look.” There was an ancient-looking rifle propped up against the wall under the coats.

Stefan shrugged. “Everyone has those. I bet even Hilde Koch has one, to keep off burglars.”

He started down the stairs and I followed him, not without an involuntary glance back at the firmly closed door. It was hard not to think of the cellar as a trap. If we had not been able to break the padlock from the outside, it had to be completely impossible to burst through the cellar hatch from underneath. With no other way out, it felt very uncomfortable to be moving farther and farther from the door. Worse, my entire skin seemed to be one enormous itch, crawling with imaginary spiders and insects. I rubbed my palms together and shivered.

As we descended the stairs we found ourselves in a room a little larger than my bedroom. I supposed it must be directly under the living room. The walls had been thickly coated with whitewash, now a dirty ivory color. I guessed the cellar was very old, older perhaps than the main house. It was clear that Herr Düster did not use it very much. Most of what was in it was lumber. There were broken sticks of furniture, and a few dirty sacks containing salt for wintertime gritting and what looked like very old and very dried-out peat.

Stefan went scuffing his way through the accumulated dust on the floor, peering into the sagging sacks and poking at the broken furniture with the toe of his boot. Under the yellow light of the bare bulb that illuminated the cellar he looked unhealthily sallow. The whole place smelled damp and musty, and I was reluctant to touch anything with my bare hands, as though the filth were somehow infectious.

Trying not to brush against any of the gray-looking furniture, I wandered about the cellar. I supposed I was looking for clues, but nothing
suggested itself. Most of the things looked as though they had not been moved or touched for years.

Eventually my meandering path brought me to the far corner, where Herr Düster had abandoned an ugly carved cupboard so large that I could have climbed inside it. There was nothing in it now; one of the front doors was hanging by one hinge, giving a view of an interior inhabited by nothing other than mouse droppings.

I frowned; how had people ever lived with such ugly things? I went to the side of it; it was just as ugly seen end-on. I noticed that it wasn’t actually flush against the wall. There was a gap of perhaps eighty centimeters between its ramrod back and the rough surface of the wall. Enough for a person to pass between them without difficulty, unless it were Hilde Koch with her barrel figure.

I heard a sigh close by my right shoulder; Stefan was standing there.

“Found something?”

“Not really.” I shrugged.

“Let’s look.” He shouldered past me and into the gap.

I stayed where I was; I didn’t relish the idea of gathering black dust and cobwebs on the shoulder of my sweater if I brushed the wall.

“Pia?” came Stefan’s muffled voice. “There’s a sort of door.”

S
ort of?” I repeated slowly. “What do you mean a
sort of
door?”

“Well, it’s not really a door.” Stefan’s voice was suddenly clearer—I guessed he had turned to face me. “There’s no actual door, but there’s a gap. You can get through into the next room.”

I examined my reaction to this information as calmly and carefully as a surgeon examining a limb for broken bones. I felt neither frightened nor alarmed. There was an inevitability about it. I pictured a hidden room tucked away behind the monstrous cupboard, a secret place with vaulted ceiling and stone floor, the missing girls laid out like a repeating series of Snow Whites, red lips and white, white skin, eyes shut tight as though sleeping.

“Pia? Are you coming?”

“Yes.”

“Look out, there’s no light in there.”

I followed Stefan into the space between the cupboard and the wall. He was standing in the very corner, shining his flashlight into the darkness. Now I could see what he meant about a doorway. With the cupboard masking the corner you would naturally assume that it was just that, a corner, no doubt full of lurking spiders and beetles. In fact, the
far wall of the cellar did not quite meet the other wall in the corner; there was a gap wide enough for a person to pass through.

Together we peered inside. With the cupboard blocking out most of the light, it was pitch dark in there. The flashlight beam could illuminate only a little at a time, settling hesitantly here and there like a moth. We could not see to the back of the room. The floor appeared to be made of flagstones, worn smooth with age. Several of them, levered up from some spot outside the weak circle of yellow light, were stacked against the stone wall.

As I leaned into the room I could smell a difference in the air. It was subtle but noticeable, a smell I could not identify but that I thought of as an
outside
smell, a cool smell.

“I don’t know,” I said doubtfully.

“Don’t know what?” Stefan sounded impatient. “We might as well look now.”

He stepped into the room. Unwillingly, I followed. I found I was shivering a little in my sweater. I wished I had not left my down jacket upstairs. At any rate my dark imaginings of dead girls laid out like medieval ladies on their sarcophagi were not realized; a sweep of the beam showed nothing at all on the stone flags, not a stick of furniture, not so much as a lump of coal.

“What’s that?” I said, touching Stefan’s arm. He swung the flashlight around. Almost in the dead center of the floor was a black patch, a circle like a dark pool.

“Cool,” said Stefan loudly. His voice echoed, giving it a strangely disembodied effect. “I think it’s a well.”

“A well?”

“Yeah. Don’t you remember what Herr Schiller said about it?
Ach, Quatsch
, you weren’t there that day, were you? He said all the houses in Bad Münstereifel used to have one.”

“I don’t think ours does.”

“No, they sealed them all up after the war, remember?”

Dimly, I recollected something of the sort. I remembered Frau Kessel’s tale about her Great-Aunt Martha’s dog falling into the well in her house and drowning, before the well was capped in the 1940s.

We approached the hole, Stefan brandishing the flashlight like a weapon. I circled it with caution, not wanting to meet the same end as
Great-Aunt Martha’s dog. We stood on each side, gazing down. Stefan was right: it
was
a well. About two meters below us I could see the dark glint of subterranean water. That was what I had sensed when we had entered the room: the cool smell of water flowing.

“Phew,” said Stefan with exaggerated relief.

I looked at him. “What?”

“That’s what the stones were taken up for. I was thinking …” His voice trailed off and he looked at me, his face ghostly in the light. He gave a false-sounding little laugh. “Stupid or what?” He cocked his head. “Don’t look like that. It’s OK. It’s just a well.” He leaned over it, gazing down into the dark waters. “It’s deep, too.”

“Stefan?”

“Hmm …?”

“Can we go?” I could not keep the pleading tone out of my voice. I had tired of playing detective. I was desperate to get out of the house. “I really want to go home.”