The Vanishing of Katharina Linden (5 page)

I
t was fully dark when my father finally came home. He was still in his Scarecrow outfit, although his brown face paint was all smeared, as though he had been wiping the back of his hand across his face like a little child. As he stood stamping his feet on the doormat, my mother came out of the kitchen, drying her hands on a tea towel.

“And?” was all she said.

My father shook his head. “Not a sign of her anywhere.” He bent to unlace his shoes, breathing heavily. When he straightened up, he said, “Someone thought they saw her up near the Orchheimer Tor, but it was another child in a similar costume. Dieter Linden’s still out looking, but I don’t think he’ll find much now it’s dark.”

I was listening to this from the kitchen table, where I was working my way through my supper: gray bread, a slice of cheese, and a smear of
Leberwurst
. My father’s choice of words struck me as odd even at this stage: he didn’t think Herr Linden would
find much
, as though he were not looking for a person but a thing, or worse, pieces of a thing.

“I wonder what—” my mother began, then glanced back into the kitchen to where I was sitting and hastily added, “I expect she’s gone home with one of her friends and forgotten to call her mother.” Then
she and my father went through into the living room and closed the door.

Their voices resumed, but at such a low level that I couldn’t have made sense of any of it unless I had pressed my ear to the door, which would have been far too risky. I looked down at my piece of
Leberwurst-
coated bread, with a neat semicircle bitten out of it in the shape of my teeth. I wondered whether Katharina Linden really
was
at a friend’s house. If not, where was she? It didn’t make sense.
People don’t just disappear
, I thought.

The next morning being Rosenmontag, there was no school. My parents had half promised to take Sebastian and me to another parade some kilometers away, but when I got up at half past nine it was to discover that my father had already gone out. My mother was in the living room, dusting the furniture with a grim expression. I didn’t need to ask whether our excursion was off. My mother was attacking the cleaning with the zeal of someone gritting their teeth and undergoing some particularly unpleasant therapy.

“Where’s Papa?” I asked.

“Out,” said my mother tersely. She straightened up, rubbing the small of her back. “He’s gone to help someone with something.”

“Oh.” I wondered whether he was going to look for Katharina Linden again. “I think I might go around to Stefan’s after breakfast and see if he can come out. Is that OK?”

My mother paused for a moment. “How about you stay here today, Pia?”

“But, Mama …” I was dismayed.

“Pia, I really think it would be best if you stayed home.” My mother sounded weary but firm. “If you can’t think of anything to do, you can help me with the cleaning.”

“I’ve got homework,” I informed her hastily, and beat a retreat to the kitchen before she could rope me into anything.

The day dragged by horribly slowly. I wondered what Stefan was up to. Was he outdoors somewhere, or had his parents also imposed a curfew on him? I wondered if it had anything to do with the Katharina Linden thing that seemed to be sending all the adults temporarily weird.

At five o’clock, when it was dark, my father came home and almost instantly disappeared into the living room again with my mother. They were in there for about half an hour, after which my father went upstairs for a shower and my mother came looking for me, with a serious expression on her face. I recognized this as her
here-comes-a-little-talk
look. I was sitting on the living-room floor with a magazine; she came in, sat down carefully on the sofa, and patted the cushion next to her. With an inward sigh, I got up and went to sit next to her.

“What?” I said.

“Don’t say ‘what?’” said my mother automatically.

“Sorry,” I said, equally automatically; it was an exchange we had had a thousand times. “Is it about Katharina Linden?” I asked immediately.

My mother cocked her head on one side. “Yes. I’m telling you about this because you’re bound to hear about it when you get back to school,” she began.

“They haven’t found her, have they?” I said.

“Well, no, they haven’t, not
yet,”
said my mother, laying emphasis on the last word as though to imply perfect confidence that Katharina would be found at any moment. “But I hope they
will
find her, very soon.” She sighed. “There may be a perfectly innocent explanation. Perhaps she went home with a friend and didn’t tell anyone.”

She stayed overnight and still didn’t tell anyone?
I thought skeptically.

“All the same,” my mother was going on, “we should all be just a little … careful for a while. We don’t really know what’s happened.” She reached out and rubbed my arm almost absently. “I’m sorry we even need to have this conversation,” she said. “But you never know … Pia, you must promise me not to go anywhere with anyone without telling me first. You remember that book you had in the second grade?”

“Ich kenn dich nicht, ich geh nicht mit,”
I quoted, then looked a little askance at my mother. “Do you think someone’s taken Katharina, then, like in the book?”

“I hope not,” said my mother. She seemed momentarily at a loss how to proceed. “Just be careful,” she said at last. “And if you see anything odd, Pia, you come and tell me or Papa, understand?”

“Hmmm,” I said noncommittally. I was not sure what she meant by
odd
. “Sebastian’s crying,” I pointed out, tuning in to a muffled wailing from upstairs.

My mother got to her feet. “All right, I’ll go and see to him. Just remember, won’t you?”

“Yes, Mama.” I watched her leave the room and start up the staircase. I didn’t move from the sofa, but sat there swinging my legs against the front of it and thinking over what she had said.
Anything odd
.

Now that I’m older, I can see what my mother meant by
odd
. Adults think something is odd if it doesn’t fit the normal routine. The person who puts down a package on a railway platform and walks away from it. The car that’s still behind the lone woman driver even when she’s made four or five turns and maybe even doubled back on herself. Things that don’t fit the usual pattern. Danger signs.

But to me, when I was ten,
odd
, or the word my mother actually used,
seltsam
, which means “odd, peculiar, strange, weird,” could signify a great many less tangible things. It could mean, for example, the deserted locked-up house by the Werkbrücke, which the schoolchildren always scurried past at top speed, deliciously afraid of seeing some unspeakable face pressed against the dusty window glass.

It seemed to me—if not to the adults—that Katharina Linden’s disappearance could be attributed to some supernatural agency. How otherwise could she have been spirited away from under the very noses of her family, in broad daylight too, in a town where everyone knew everyone else? I did not know—I did not know
yet
, I told myself, for I was determined to find out—who or what it was that had taken Katharina. Still I was now convinced, correctly as it turned out, that she would never be seen alive again.

T
hat icy February, when Katharina Linden vanished, the entire town was in a state of shock, and yet nobody thought it would happen again. During Karneval, Bad Münstereifel was full of people from goodness-knew-where, and there was so much mayhem going on that anything might happen. Once Karneval was over, and the town was quiet again, nobody really expected another child to disappear. All the same, my mother began to take rather more interest in my comings and goings than was comfortable. There was to be no more roaming around the town on my own, and she was reluctant to let me go off to the playground in the Schleidtal, even if Stefan came as well. Going to Stefan’s house was out too, since it meant being smoked like a herring in the fumes of his mother’s chain-smoking. It was a relief for me and Stefan to be able to escape to the more agreeable environment of Herr Schiller’s house, where nobody asked about homework and we could beg him to tell us old stories of the town. That was how he came to recount the tale of Unshockable Hans.

“Unshockable Hans?” said Stefan. “What kind of name is that?”

He and I were sitting on the overstuffed sofa in Herr Schiller’s living
room, sipping coffee so strong that it almost took the enamel off your teeth.

“They called him that because he wasn’t afraid of anything or anyone,” answered Herr Schiller, his tone very faintly reproving. “He lived in a mill in the Eschweiler Tal, long ago, before your grandparents’ parents were born.”

“The Eschweiler Tal. We’ve been there with the school,” said Stefan.

“Then you will know, young man, that it is a very quiet place. Lonely even, especially in winter,” said Herr Schiller. “Now, that mill had a bad reputation. A ghost mill, they called it, infested with all sorts of witches, phantoms, and monsters. It was as though the very timbers of the mill had soaked up the unearthly forces that seethed and thronged in the valley, like the wood of a wine barrel takes up the stain and scent of the wine.”

Stefan shot me a glance at this extravagant piece of narrative. I ignored him.

“No one had ever succeeded in staying in the mill for any length of time—not, that is, until Hans moved in. Previous inhabitants had been chased out; hardworking, unimaginative men who had invested most of their life’s savings in the mill had fled from it like frightened children, their faces as white as milk. It was not that Hans was too insensitive to feel or see the things that swarmed around the mill; it was simply that he did not fear any of them. He could walk through the mill at night, when the building was full of furtive scratching noises, and malevolent eyes glinted redly in the darkest corners, and he would be as relaxed as a visitor wandering through a greenhouse full of tropical butterflies. And perhaps because he was so totally unafraid, it seemed that none of these creatures could touch him.”

“Cool,” said Stefan.

Shut up
, I telegraphed at him with a furious glare.

“The phantoms waited eagerly for Hans to flee like the others,” went on Herr Schiller. “When he didn’t, they redoubled their efforts. Things with far too many spindly limbs and leathery wings articulated like the spokes of an umbrella would dive upon him as he strolled through the mill after sunset, and tangle in his flour-dusted hair; grotesque faces would leer up at him out of the water butt outside, or from the corner cupboard where he kept his knife and plate. At night the creaking of
the mill’s timbers mingled with groaning and wailing that would have made anyone else’s hair stand on end. Hans endured it all unmoved.

“Well, at last the things that infested the mill grew angry. At night the creaking of the beams sharpened to shrieks, and by day the great cogs of the machine seemed to move more slowly, as though working against some unseen resistance. If Hans cared about these things, he gave no sign.

“However, one day late in April he left the mill and walked into the town. When he returned he had a little package in the pocket of his breeches, carefully done up in a clean handkerchief. Intrepid as he was, Hans knew that in two nights it would be Walpurgis, the eve of May Day, when the witches gather for their Sabbath. The unseen foes with whom he was struggling for possession of the mill were certain to make some kind of attack.

“The last day of April was cloudy and overcast, and a chill wind was blowing. Night came in early and inside the mill it was dark, the light from Hans’s one little lantern hardly penetrating the deep shadows. Hans ate his solitary dinner of rough bread and cheese, said his prayers like the good Catholic he was, then put out the lantern and lay down on the pallet that served as his bed. Hans always slept well, caring nothing for little scuffling footsteps on the floor of the mill, or tiny clawed feet running across his blanket in the night. Tonight he slept on his back, his face turned boldly up to the ceiling and his beard quivering gently to the rhythm of his snores.

“For several hours his sleep was undisturbed. The oppressive atmosphere that had haunted the mill for days seemed to have lifted. The wind outside had dropped, the clouds had parted and the full moon shining through the little window above Hans’s rough bed outlined the few sticks of homely wooden furniture and the parts of the mill machinery in glowing silver.

“Perhaps it was the light that woke Hans up. At any rate, he opened his eyes and looked about him. Was it his imagination, or had he seen two twin lights, hot and red like the glowing embers of a fire, winking at him from a corner? Yes; there it was again—
blink-blink
, as if something were watching him, but shutting its eyes lazily for long seconds. Hans coughed gently, as though to show his unconcern, and was about to turn over and pull his blankets around him, when he saw a second
pair of lights glowing from the top of a cupboard. Again they seemed to glint for a moment and then blink out.