The Vanishing of Katharina Linden (35 page)

“We have to—” began Stefan.

“I think,” said Herr Düster, and his voice sounded curiously sad, “I think that we must call the police.”

“No,” said Stefan instantly. He gave a great sigh of exasperation. “If—if we go back now and call them, he’ll get
away
.”

Herr Düster said something in such a low voice that neither of us could hear what it was. Then he said, more loudly, “It is for the police. Not for—children.”

“Verdammt!”
snapped Stefan. He actually stamped his foot, like a small child. His hands clutched the air in frustration, as though trying to tear something down. “We’re not
babies.”
He glared at Herr Düster.
“We’ll go
. Give me my flashlight back.”

Herr Düster didn’t move. Stefan took a step toward him, and Herr Düster involuntarily stepped back. The beam swung in a wide arc. Perhaps they would actually have come to a hand-to-hand struggle for the flashlight. However, as the beam swept across the cellar floor, I saw something.

“Look.”

They both followed the direction of my outstretched finger. Something lay on the stone floor, close by the claw feet of an ugly escritoire. A single boot. A girl’s boot made of pale pink suede with a fussy-looking fake-fur trim. The side zip was undone and the boot yawned open, exposing its furry throat.

“What is that?” said Herr Düster in a voice rimed with dread.

“It’s a boot,” said Stefan in the tone of someone stating an obvious fact. The real import of Herr Düster’s question,
What in God’s name is that doing here?
had passed him by. He stooped and picked it up. As he turned back to us, Herr Düster flinched. He looked at the boot as though it were some repulsive thing, a great spider or a decomposing rat. In the sickly light his seamed face looked more wrinkled than ever. The myriad lines on his ancient features seemed to shiver and reform under the influence of a powerful emotion, but what it was I could not tell.

“It’s probably from one of the girls, the ones—” I began, and stopped. I had been about to say
the ones who went missing
. But those girls were no longer missing; we knew where they were.

“Maybe,” murmured Stefan, turning the boot over in his hands. He looked at me. “Or maybe it’s a new one.”

I stared at him, my mouth open. Suddenly an image flashed across my mind: my father standing in the kitchen with the telephone in his hand, saying, “Kolvenbach” and
“Mein Gott.”
If my mother had not told him to
just go
, he would have said, “Another girl is missing.”

“Lieber Gott,”
said Herr Düster quietly.

“Herr Düster—?” started Stefan.

The old man regarded him, an unfathomable expression on his face.
Then, slowly, he nodded. “We will go. But,” he added somberly, before Stefan could take off like a greyhound, “as soon as it is possible, we will call the police.
Verstanden?”

“Yes,” agreed Stefan instantly. He held the boot out to Herr Düster, but the old man shuddered and declined to touch it, so he stuffed it inside his own jacket.

Cautiously, we picked our way to the other end of the cellar. In the far right corner was an opening the size of a doorway but with no door across it. Stone stairs spiraled up out of sight. Stefan found a light switch on the wall by the staircase and tried it, but nothing happened. Either the bulb had blown or the power had been switched off.

Stefan made as if to start up the stairs, but Herr Düster laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.

“
I
will go first,” he said firmly. There was a challenging note in his voice that made me think of Oma Kristel’s reaction whenever my father or Onkel Thomas had told her to take things easy and think of her age. He began to climb the stone stairs, Stefan and I following as closely as we could.

Inevitably the stairs, having curled back on themselves, reached an abrupt end at a narrow and very firmly locked door. Herr Düster applied his shoulder to it and it jumped a little but did not open. However, the very fact that it had moved was encouraging; if it had been bolted in place from the other side I doubted it would have moved at all.

Stefan pushed past Herr Düster and hurled himself at the door, thumping it with his shoulder like an American football player so that it rattled in the frame. But still nothing happened. Herr Düster and I crowded onto the lower steps to give him more room.

This time Stefan aimed a mighty kick at the lock. I listened in frank amazement to wood splintering. More and more I had the impression that Stefan lived his life in some sort of imaginative action movie. He launched another kick and with a mighty
crack!
the door gave way and swung open, almost precipitating him on the other side. He steadied himself and would have started through the doorframe, but Herr raised a finger to his lips to indicate that we should stay silent and listen first.

I could see very little of what was on the other side of the door, since both Stefan and Herr Düster were now crowded into the frame. I could
make out a wall papered with a rather old-fashioned design, and the side of a light-brown lampshade lit from within by a low-wattage bulb. The lamp was nondescript but the wallpaper pattern gave me pause: it was somehow familiar. Wreaths of stylized foliage, faded green and brown against an ivory background. Every so often there was a curling leaf shape faintly reminiscent of a fish.

Gently, I pushed at Stefan’s back. “Let me out.” As he moved forward I stepped out into the room behind him. We stood, side by side, Herr Düster’s presence forgotten. I could hear Stefan panting from the exertion of kicking in the door; he sounded as though he had been running. He was staring about him like a tourist in a cathedral, as though he couldn’t quite take in everything he was seeing. At last he turned to me, with the words on his lips, but I got there first.

“I know this house.”

H
ow can it
be?”
said Stefan. He looked dazed. “How can we be …
here?”

I glanced at Herr Düster, as though being the only adult he might produce a rational explanation. Herr Düster was the only one of us who didn’t look as though he were overwhelmed with surprise. He looked grave and incalculably sorrowful, like a doctor at a deathbed.

“My brother …” He pronounced the words strangely, as though rolling an unfamiliar and bitter taste around his mouth. “My brother’s house,” he said eventually.

“But it can’t be,” I said, as if I were pointing out an obvious fact to the very stupid. “It can’t be Herr Schiller’s house. I mean …”

My voice trailed off. I looked around me again. We were in a narrow hallway, one that I knew. I had stood very close to this spot a hundred times, perhaps more, shrugging my coat off my shoulders so that Herr Schiller could hang it on one of the pegs. I put out a hand and touched the shining dark surface of the hall table. It felt hard and cool under my fingers.

“Did he—you know—” I didn’t want to say
the murderer
“—I mean,
how
did he get in here? How could he go through the cellar without Herr Schiller—” I looked from Herr Düster to Stefan, not understanding their expressions “—without Herr Schiller knowing?” I finished.

There was a long silence. The two of them, old man and boy, were staring at each other. Something was passing between them that I didn’t understand.

“He’s gone,” said Stefan in a tight voice.

“Yes,” said Herr Düster, but his lips barely moved, and his voice was very low.

“I’ll look …” said Stefan, and he went to the front door and tried the handle. It opened easily and the door swung open. Stefan leaned out. I could see that a considerable amount of snow had fallen since we entered Herr Düster’s house; everything outside was blanketed with pure white. It was still falling; when Stefan pulled his head back inside, his hair was covered with melting white flakes. He came up to Herr Düster like a foot soldier reporting to his sergeant.

“I couldn’t see him—but there’re tracks.”

Herr Düster nodded, almost absently.

“I’m not sure, but I think they went around the side of the house.”

“The car, yes,” said Herr Düster, almost inaudibly. He seemed sunk in thought.

“What car?” I asked, but no one answered me.

“Do you know where—?” asked Stefan, and I shot him a look of frustration; everyone seemed to be talking in code.

Herr Düster nodded. “I think so. Yes, I think so.”

“What are you going on about?” I was almost hopping with annoyance. “Look, why don’t we wake Herr Schiller up?”

“Pia—”

“We’re in his house, after all.”

“Yes, his house,” said Herr Düster with gentle emphasis. Still I didn’t get it.

“Pia,” said Stefan in a tired voice, “it’s Herr Schiller. Don’t you see?”

“What do you mean?” I stared at him. “What do you mean, it’s Herr Schiller?”

“It’s Herr Schiller who …” Stefan changed tack at the last moment, as though swerving to avoid an obstacle. “It’s him we have to follow,” he said. “He’s the one who’s gone.”

“I don’t understand—” I began, but suddenly I did. A wave of nausea swept over me. I sagged back against the wall with the pattern of foliage on it. “No,” I said in a strangled voice.

Stefan looked at me helplessly. Then he turned back to Herr Düster. “We have to go. We have to go right
now.”
I was being dismissed.

“Stefan, this is a joke, right?” I said. My voice sounded unconvincing even to my own ears. “Where are we going? Shouldn’t we call the police—if someone—?”

“We don’t have time.” His voice was cool, but he was not trying to be unpleasant. He was stating a fact: if there were even the remotest chance of finding the owner of the boot before it was too late we had to leave
now
. If we waited we would lose any chance of catching—
him
. The one who had taken all those girls. The one who had left me in the well to drown among the wallowing horrors. I could only think of him as
the one
, not as Herr Schiller. It was impossible.

“Pia, you stay here.”

“No! No way, no …” I was stuttering in outrage. “No, you’re not leaving me here! I’m coming with you.”

“Pia.” Herr Düster sounded remarkably calm, although he must have been as aware as Stefan was of the seconds ticking by, the minutes trickling away, snowflakes twirling lazily down from the black sky and blanketing the tracks in snow. “You are soaked through. You can’t go out in the snow. You’ll freeze to death.”

“You said a car,” I pointed out sulkily.

“His
car,” said Stefan.

“Yes, but you can’t follow him unless you go in one too,” I retorted. I glared at Stefan. He regarded me for a moment and then turned to Herr Düster.

“We have to go.”

Herr Düster looked at me for a long moment. If he were any other adult in the world I think he would have insisted that I stay inside in the warm. But either Herr Düster had been out of the company of other adults so long that he had forgotten the way things were supposed to be done, or he was one of those rare people who do not treat children as though they are completely incapable. He nodded sharply to me and said, “Pia, you may come with us, but you
must
stay in the car.
Verstanden?
”

“Yes.” I was breathless in my gratitude.

“Stay here, both of you, while I fetch the car.”

“But—” I started, but he cut me off.

“He’s not coming back. Not for a while, anyway. You’re quite safe here.”

I shut my mouth but I felt uneasy. My objection to staying in the house was not that I was afraid of Herr Schiller coming back, but that it gave Herr Düster the opportunity to go off without us. All the same, I could see the logic of his plan when he opened Herr Schiller’s front door: the icy draft on my wet jeans was so glacially cold that the skin of my legs felt as though it were burning off. I hugged the down jacket around me. My teeth were chattering.

“This is crazy,” said Stefan, not unkindly. “You should stay here, Pia. You’re going to freeze to death.”

“No way,” I said, clamping my mouth shut to try to stop the chattering.

“I wonder how he knows where—you know, where
he
went?” said Stefan.

“Um.” I couldn’t think of any reply. That Herr Schiller should have had any involvement at all in the disappearances of my schoolmates was terrifying enough; to try to imagine where he might have gone to and for what reason was completely beyond me. I still had the feeling that I might wake up and discover the whole thing was some kind of outlandish dream.

For what seemed like ages Stefan and I stood in the hallway of our friend’s home and waited for Herr Düster to arrive with the car. There was a feeling of subdued expectancy about the situation, as though we were the survivors of some bloody accident, waiting for the ambulance to arrive. I could not think of anything to say and it seemed that neither could Stefan, so for a long time we stood there in silence.

I was starting to wonder whether Herr Düster
had
gone off without us, when I suddenly heard a slight sound behind me. It was a soft sound, the sound of a velvet curtain brushing the floor, but it struck me cold. I do not know whether it is true that at such times the hair on the back of one’s neck stands up, but I felt as though an icy hand had been placed there. Before I could turn around or say anything, the soft slithering was followed by a sound like someone clearing their throat.