The Vanishing of Katharina Linden (33 page)

“Shut up.”

“Wie, bitte?”
I was instantly enraged at his rudeness.

“Shut
up
.”

“You shut—” But my indignant tirade was cut off short as the flashlight suddenly went off with a click.

“What are you—?” I began, but this time when Stefan’s sharp
“Shhhh!”
came out of the darkness there was no mistaking the urgency in its tone.

“What are you doing? Put the light back on!” I hissed in a loud whisper. I fumbled for my own, but realized with a sinking feeling that it must be in the pocket of my jacket.

“Shhhh. I can’t.” There was a pause during which I frantically tried to make Stefan out in the darkness. “Be quiet,” ordered his disembodied voice.

“What—?”

“I think there’s somebody there.”

Fright and anger flared up inside me like twin gas jets. “You
Blöd-mann
, don’t try to scare me!”

“I’m not trying to scare you.
Listen
.”

Fear seemed to have solidified in my chest like a stone, shot through with veins of disbelief. I simply could not
believe
that someone else was
in the house with us, not after the narrow escape with Boris. The very idea made me sick with injustice. The whole universe seemed to be conspiring against us, firing off volleys at our every move. I strained to listen, willing there to be nothing.

“I don’t hear anything,” I whispered. “Put the light back on.”

“No. Just wait.”

The darkness was not quite absolute; a dim rectangle of dark gray showed the gap between the room we were in and the next, but most of the light from the other room was cut off by the cupboard in its corner. On all other sides the dark was absolute. My eyes strained to make out anything in a blackness so complete that it seemed to have a texture of its own. I imagined it as black velvety fur like Pluto’s, black fur that my outstretched fingers could almost have touched as they groped uselessly in the air. It pressed in softly and insistently from all sides, enveloping and choking me.

“Stefan—” I started, and then I heard it. A muffled but very definite
thump
. It sounded as though someone had tried to bounce one of the heavy balls they had in the school gym. I flailed with my hands in the air, trying to catch hold of Stefan’s shoulder, his sleeve, anything, just as long as I didn’t have to be in the dark all on my own. A moment later I heard a second
thump
, then a dragging pause, and then the sound was repeated.
Thump
. My heart seemed to pound in time with it, a sledgehammer threatening to shatter its cage of ribs.

“O
Gott
. What are we going to do?” I quavered. The sound had to be coming from the cellar we had just passed through—hadn’t it? It must be disorientation from the darkness that made me think it came from somewhere behind me, somewhere in the black depths of the unlit room. Since we could not escape through the cellar we must try to hide ourselves here. But how?

“Stay still,” whispered Stefan.

Stupidly I nodded, forgetting that he could not see me. I swallowed, and it was like swallowing a mouthful of dust. I did my best to stay absolutely motionless, but it was not like playing some sort of children’s game, trying not to blink while someone walked around you looking for involuntary movements. Now my pose felt more like the painful rigidity of a muscle spasm. My right leg was trembling so violently that the sole of my boot made soft sounds on the stone floor. Out of the
darkness came a rasping sound like someone clearing their throat. The next second something brushed past my calf with muscular intent. Hot panic seethed through me like acid. With a scream that scoured my throat I lunged away from the unseen thing, and suddenly found myself plunging forward into space. I had stepped over the edge of the well.

Instinctively, I raised my arms to protect myself from the impact against the opposite side. My right forearm hit the stone with such force that pain ricocheted up to my shoulder in a blazing trail, then I felt myself falling backward for what seemed like an interminable time. At last I hit the water.

It was shockingly cold. I went right under, and then struggled my way to the surface, my clothes soaked and heavy, my right arm throbbing with pain. I put my hands out to find the sides of the well and touched nothing. With a titanic effort I lifted my waterlogged arms out of the water, treading water frantically, but I couldn’t feel anything above me either.

A sudden horrible vision streaked across my mind—I had fallen into an enormous subterranean lake, limitless in all directions. I would flail about in it until exhaustion and the weight of my sodden clothes dragged me under. I screamed, took in half a mouthful of water, and choked. The water tasted foul, tainted. For a second I went under again. Even when I was fully submerged my feet did not touch the bottom. I surfaced again, gasping.

At last one of my groping hands brushed against something solid. My fingertips scraped along what felt like stones, slick with wet. My relief was short-lived; there was nothing to hang on to. My fingers trailed uselessly along the smooth surface. I struck out, mindless of the pain in my forearm, fighting to stay afloat. The cold was seeping through every inch of clothing. Struggling to keep my face out of the water, I shouted,
“Stefan!”

There was no reply.

“Ste
—
!”
I swallowed another mouthful of water and the shout turned into a choking cough. I threshed about with my arms, beating at the stone wall with the flat of my hands as though trying to break a door down. Then finally my fingers closed upon something, something I could grasp with both hands.

At first I thought it was some sort of debris, a piece of tree branch wrapped in a tangle of rubbish, carried along from some part of the river that was open to the air and now jammed against the side of the well. It was not pleasant to touch the sodden surface of it, something that felt like sacking, slimy to the touch.

I hung on with my left hand and let my right roam over the thing, my mind trying to make sense of what I felt, blinded by the dark. There was something suggestive about the shape of whatever I was clutching, something from which my imagination shied.

Dimly I was aware that it was no longer fully dark in the well. Someone had put on a light in the room above, or else carried in a powerful lantern. I should call for help. Regardless of who was up there, and of the consequences of the enormities Stefan and I had committed, it was too late to recover the situation ourselves. Still something kept me dumb, some dawning realization that closed my throat with horror. My fingers were moving over something appallingly familiar, but from the shape only; the texture was all wrong.

Wax
, I thought,
or soap
. For a split second a spurt of hope so strong it was like joy flared up inside me. I was touching a doll. Or a dummy. My fingers moved over the curve of a cheek, the unmistakable whorl of an ear. A doll. Crudely made, but …

The light was growing stronger. Someone was letting a lamp down the well; I heard a brittle
clink
as it swung into the stonework, then it cleared the bottom of the walls and yellow light flooded the space below. Suddenly I could see what it was that I was holding and screamed. In blind animal panic I let go and tried to flail my way backward through the water, anything to get away from it, the thing that had somehow jammed itself against the wall, a thing I recognized but in a form I had never seen before, a
wrong
form.
“O Gott, O Gott,”
I howled. All I could think was,
It has teeth
.

S
tefan! Stefan!”
I had literally screamed myself hoarse. With a supernatural energy born of sheer terror, I lunged upward, trying to grab the lantern that swung overhead in a desperate attempt to pull myself out of the well with its appalling occupant.

Instantly the lantern moved up with one swift jerk, out of range of my flailing hands. Whoever was holding the cord it was attached to was reeling it in. The light was receding, and the shadows were racing in from all sides.

“Noooooo!”
Threshing and kicking, I felt my boot come into contact with something in the water, a thing that bobbed and spun away from me in the darkness. Something seemed to implode inside me. I could not even scream anymore. A tiny croak, a squeak, forced its way out, and then all I could hear was the sound of my own ragged breathing sawing painfully through the air. I would go mad; I
was
going mad.

I could no longer feel the thing that had bobbed away from me in the dark, but I knew it was there, spinning around in the black water an arm’s reach away from me. How many of the things were there in the well with me?
Katharina Linden. Marion Voss …
but even if I had been lucid enough to count, it would have been meaningless. These things floating like sodden logs in the inky water with me had
nothing to do with the missing girls—they had become something else altogether.

Far above me, where a dim circle of yellow light was still faintly discernible, there came a curious grinding sound. Grinding—or scraping. Someone was lugging something heavy across the stone floor.

“Hilfe.”
I tried to yell for help but the sound came out flat and tiny, as though the darkness had muffled it.
“Hilfe.”

There was no answering call, but I heard someone make a grunt, as though with exertion. The next second there was a dull thump as a flagstone fell into place over the top of the well, cutting off the last of the light and sealing me in the darkness.

I
don’t remember very much about the time after the light went out. I had no sense of time passing. It might have been five minutes or it might have been an hour that I spent suspended in the cold and dark, with nothing but the rasp of my own breathing, vibrating with the shivers that racked my body.

I dared not try to swim back to the wall, but in the absolute blackness I became disoriented and eventually bumped right into it. My hands closed over a stone that jutted out a little and at last I was able to hang on and gain some respite from the exhausting effort to swim in waterlogged clothing.

My thoughts, which had been racing around my brain like trapped insects, seemed to have run themselves down in ever-decreasing circles, until I was conscious of nothing but the pain of my freezing fingers clamped over the cold stone.

There were no last-minute visions of my life flashing before my eyes, no last prayers for my parents and my little brother. There was no past, no future, only the cold and the dark, and the implacable stone. The water seemed to be rising; it was no longer merely at my shoulders, it was lapping my chin. Was it really rising, or was I sinking? It no longer seemed important.

When the sounds started above me I was hardly even interested anymore. My brain registered them without understanding. Metal on stone, scraping, muffled voices. None of it seemed to add up to anything that had any relevance to me. The pain in my right arm had settled into a nagging ache and I couldn’t even feel my fingers. I wondered if they were still clamped over the jutting stone. Perhaps I had let go and drowned already, and this black limbo was all that awaited me afterward.

“Pia?” Stefan’s disembodied voice drifted down the well shaft. I didn’t reply.
“Pia?”
There was a note of panic in it this time. Voices murmured at the top of the well. Then I heard something whisper down the shaft and hit the water with a soft splash. Someone had thrown down a rope.

“Pia! Pia, are you all right?”

“Yes,” I croaked faintly.

More conferring at the top of the well. Then light pierced the darkness. It would have been comical in other circumstances; Stefan had let down his flashlight on a string. It hung there like a visitor from another world, the light of a submarine deep in a black ocean. I concentrated on the light, not wanting to look at anything else in the well. My neck felt stiff from turning. With one hand I let go of the stone. Hesitantly, I reached for the rope.