‘What did you do?’
‘I ran,’ Connie replied with a weak smile. ‘I know it’s silly. I don’t believe in ghosts, and yet I saw one.’ She went to the top of a grand staircase. Looking back at him, she said, ‘Why did your father bring you here?’ She paused for an answer, but Hal was taken aback by the question and didn’t reply. ‘Tell him you want to go home. This place is cursed. Bad things happen here. I will stay for Mr Kratzenstein’s funeral, but not much longer. I don’t think it’s right to leave when he’s the one who hired me, but –’ she lowered her voice, glancing about – ‘no one ever visits. Bertha and Arnie don’t like me being here. The only person I can talk to is Aksel.’ She stopped and looked down. Hal noticed she was blushing. ‘I’d better get back. Arnold will wake soon.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE CURSED LIBRARY
Going to the banister, Hal looked down on Connie hurrying away. Hanging below him, on the landing halfway down the sweeping staircase, was a giant portrait of a stern man grasping a walking stick in his right hand. He was standing on top of Dead Man’s Pass, railway tracks in the foreground, at his feet, and a cold, swirling mist behind him. An ornate gold plaque at the foot of the frame declared he was Franz Christian Kratzenstein.
Hal wondered if this was the man who’d brought the curse down on the family.
At the foot of the stairs was a grand entrance hall. He decided to explore it. When he reached the landing, he heard the click of a door opening and stopped, holding his breath.
‘It’s this way,’ Herman said.
‘This better not be boring,’ Ozan muttered. ‘I was about to beat your high score.’
‘I’m telling you, the library is the best place . . .’ Hilda whispered excitedly.
‘Best place for what?’ Hal asked, smiling as all three of them jumped.
‘An investigation,’ Hilda replied, recovering herself. ‘The library is the best place to start an investigation. We’re being detectives.’
Ozan grinned at him. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Looking for my dad.’
‘Didn’t you find him?’ Hilda asked.
‘He’s in the study talking with the grown-ups.’ Hal shook his head. ‘But I did find Arnold’s model railway, and a massive stuffed wolf. I almost jumped out of my skin when I saw it!’
Herman giggled. ‘Opa put Adalwolf there on purpose, to frighten the guests when they get up to pee in the night. He thinks it’s funny.’
‘Adalwolf?’
‘All the dead animals have names.’ Herman pointed under the stairs. ‘In that bathroom is Björn the bear. He can give you a shock even if you know he’s there.’
‘You’ve seen the model railway?’ Ozan asked. ‘Where is it?’
‘In the room above the dining room. Arnold said we can go and see it whenever we want.’
‘You’re not allowed to touch the trains,’ Herman said. ‘They’re on timers. Opa controls them from his room.’
‘Can we go now?’ Ozan asked.
‘We’re being detectives,’ Hilda protested. ‘You agreed that we should investigate the curse so we can protect Herman.’
Ozan puffed out his cheeks and Herman blushed. ‘OK, but after the library we go and see the trains.’ Hal fell into step beside him, and he muttered. ‘Don’t know what she expects to find in there – it’s just a room full of books.’
‘It’s what’s inside the books that interests me,’ Hilda said, a note of exasperation in her voice.
The heavy doors creaked open, and the children stepped into a hall of wood and stone leading to a cathedral-like window of clear glass, beneath which stood an enormous antique globe. The innumerable volumes, a heady musk of old paper mixed with furniture polish and deadened sound silenced their chatter. On the left, bookcases of ancient leather-bound books extended into the space, separated by a thin arched window. Access to the highest shelves was via a gallery where there were ladders on rails.
As Hilda walked to the middle of the floor, she slowly turned, her arms open wide, greedily drinking it all in.
Ozan went straight to the giant globe, which was as tall as he was, and spun it.
‘There must be thousands of books in here,’ Hal whispered.
‘Isn’t it magnificent?’ Hilda said breathlessly, going to a shelf, tilting her head and reading the spines.
Hal followed her, but was dismayed to find that every book was in German. He went to the window. ‘It’s snowing!’ he cried, and the others turned to see. ‘Do you think it will settle?’
‘It’s cold enough,’ Ozan said.
‘We could build a snowman,’ Herman said, and actually smiled.
‘Right, where’s this secret room, then?’ Ozan said, eager to get the trip to the library over with.
‘Secret room?’ Hal was immediately interested.
‘It’s where the oldest books are, the precious ones,’ Herman said. ‘The Kratzenstein commonplace books are kept there. Opa says they are important historical documents about the German railway.’
‘What’s a commonplace book?’ Hal asked.
‘I know!’ Hilda butted in. ‘They’re diaries or scrapbooks. We made one as a school project. People used to put everything in their commonplace books – how much money they spent on things for their home, business accounts, recipes, quotations from clever people or poems. Anything that needed to be recorded went into the family commonplace book. And people wrote tiny, because paper was expensive. They drew lines to divide up a page and covered every centimetre of it.’
They followed Herman to a small wooden door in a turret in the corner.
‘Do you think the family would have written about the curse?’ Hal asked.
‘Let’s find out,’ Ozan said, trying the door handle. ‘It’s locked!’
In the arched window, beside the door, stood a ferocious-looking stuffed stoat, up on its hind legs, baring its teeth. Herman pulled the stoat’s jaw down, and a drawer popped open in the wooden pedestal on which it was standing. Inside the drawer was an iron key.
‘Cool,’ Hal declared.
Herman unlocked the door to reveal a spiral staircase inside the stone turret. Following him up the stairs, Hal thought they’d find themselves on the gallery, but they emerged in a small room with a square rug, a wooden table in front of a porthole window and walls lined with books – some of them fastened to shelves with black chains.
‘How does the library catalogue work?’ Hilda asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Herman admitted. ‘I come here to get away from everyone. It’s quiet, and no one thinks of looking for me here.’
‘Which ones are the commonplace books?’ Hal asked.
Herman pointed to a bookshelf with volumes the size of atlases, and they crowded round.
‘There are dates on the side.’ Ozan tipped his head to read them. ‘What date are we looking for?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Hilda said, looking at Herman.
‘Wait, everyone, step back!’ Hal grabbed their arms. ‘Look.’ He pointed at the shelf.
‘At what?’ Ozan asked.
‘The dust on the shelf. It’s been disturbed.’ He pointed to a mark in the dust before an ancient volume. ‘Someone has taken out this book recently.’
‘It could be a clue.’ Hilda carefully slid out the book, taking it to the table and opened the cover. The ink may once have been black, but time had turned it brown and yellowed the paper, which was crowded with the spidery scrawls of a minute German hand, unreadable to Hal.
‘Ich fasse es nicht!’ Hilda exclaimed, looking appalled.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Hal.
‘Some idiot has turned over a corner of a page!’
Ozan snorted. ‘So?’
‘Don’t laugh. This is an important historical document, and very old! This will damage the page.’ She unfolded the corner. ‘It weakens the paper structure. It could rip.’
‘Wait.’ Hal stopped her. ‘What’s on that page? Can you read i
t?’
‘The handwriting is so tiny . . .’ Hilda squinted, bringing her face close to the paper. Herman opened the table drawer and handed her a magnifying glass. ‘Isn’t it cool that someone from hundreds of years ago can communicate with us, right now?’
‘They can’t communicate with me,’ said Hal. ‘I don’t understand a word of it.’
‘Languages are codes,’ Hilda said. ‘Anyone can read them, but you need the right key.’
‘A key?’
‘Something to unlock the meaning. You can’t understand German, but if you had a phrasebook you would start to understand these words.’
‘Cracking a code is more exciting than translating a language,’ Ozan said.
‘No, it’s just easier. I find a complicated puzzle is more satisfying to solve,’ Hilda retorted.
Hal thought back to the code word H A N G M A N he’d found hidden in the baron’s letter to Uncle Nat. ‘What kind of things can be a key to a code?’
‘Anything,’ Hilda said. ‘It could be a number – for example the number seven. This would mean every letter A would be written as a G, because it is seven letters further on in the alphabet. The essential thing, if you’re using a code, is that the code maker and the code breaker have the same key . . . Oh! I think I’ve found something.’ Hilda leaned closer. ‘It’s an account of the day they blew up the rocks to make the railway cutting.’
‘Dead Man’s Pass?’ Hal felt a thrill.
‘Here it lists the quantity and the cost of the explosives, and here is a record of the wages they paid the men doing the work. It says they employed fourteen local men, and then there’s a line here . . . May the twenty-sixth. Accident – a rockfall killed a man and injured three. Herr Babelin died. And then there’s an amount of money. I think this was paid to the families as compensation.’
‘Is there anything about the curse?’ Ozan asked.
Hilda traced her finger along the words without touching the paper. ‘There’s something here.’ She screwed up her face as she read. ‘Frau Gobel Babelin refused the compensation. She spoke out publicly against the Kratzensteins, demanding justice for her dead son. The family employed a lawyer. There’s a sum of money entered for his fee.’ Her eyes scanned to the bottom and over to the adjacent page. ‘Franz Kratzenstein’s lawyer tries to get Frau Babelin to take the compensation money by threatening her with eviction. Her home is owned by the Meyer family, who are investors in the Kratzenstein railway.’ There was a long pause as Hilda read on, her lips half forming the words. ‘Here it is. A few days later, Frau Babelin, dressed in black, climbs to the top of Dead Man’s Pass and shrieks and wails for hours, cursing the rails, the rocks and the Kratzensteins for taking away her son. No one can get her to come down. In the end, she is dragged away by the village guards, and calls down a curse on the Kratzensteins, that their sons should die unnatural deaths, before their time, like hers did.’ She skimmed the rest of the page and drew a breath. ‘Oh! Frau Babelin died two days later in the jail. Whoever wrote this entered it as a money saving, because they would no longer need to pay compensation for killing her son.’
The four of them were silent.
‘Ach, nein! ’ Hilda whispered, the blood draining from her face.
‘What?’ Hal asked, dreading the answer.
‘They used the rock from the pass to build this library.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CATS, BATS AND CAULDRONS
‘Snos for a son,’ Herman whispered, looking at Hilda with wide eyes. ‘I will have to pay for what my ancestors did to Frau Babelin and her son.’
Hal shivered, feeling the horror of the curse for the first time.
‘Herman, you must not believe in curses.’ Hilda put her arm round him in a motherly gesture.
‘They’re only words,’ Ozan said.
‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,’ Hal said, to reassure himself as well as Herman. ‘It’s a saying we have in England.’
‘Sticks and stones can break your bones, and this curse is going to kill me,’ Herman said, his expression grave. ‘I heard them talking about how Papa died.’
Hal and Hilda exchanged a look of alarm.
‘Heart attacks happen to a lot of people . . .’ Ozan started to say, but Herman was shaking his head.
‘You don’t understand. My father . . . if there were arguments, he always won. He was fearless. I have never seen him nervous or scared, not once, in my whole life.’ He paused. ‘But Baron Essenbach told my mother that when Papa was found he had the look of a terrified man.’
‘Terrified?’ Ozan was startled. ‘How?’
‘I don’t know,’ Herman admitted. He pointed at the commonplace book. ‘It doesn’t say in there how Frau Babelin died. What if she did a spell, so her spirit would haunt us till the last son is dead? She is the witch. I know it.’
‘Herman, you’re scaring yourself,’ Hal said softly. ‘If the curse were true, your grandfather wouldn’t be alive.’ But Hal remembered Arnold saying It was me she wanted, and found himself wondering if Frau Babelin had killed the wrong Kratzenstein.
‘Exactly,’ Hilda said brightly. ‘Now, Ozan, didn’t you say you wanted to see Herman’s Opa’s model trains? We’ve learned all we can here. Let’s go.’ She closed the book and returned it to its shelf.
‘Cool! Let’s go back to the tower and play video games so I can beat your high score!’ Ozan said cheerily to Herman, who replied with a weak smile, and he let them bundle him down the stairs.
‘Do you believe in the curse?’ Ozan asked Hal on the way down. Hal paused before shaking his head. Ozan lowered his voice so Herman couldn’t hear. ‘But something must have frightened Alexander Kratzenstein.’
‘It could have been a wild animal,’ Hal said, thinking of Adalwolf.
Ozan grabbed his arm, ‘What if it was murder?’
‘If it was murder, the adults would have called the police.’
Ozan let go of his sleeve, considering this.
‘And if you wanted to murder someone, wouldn’t you choose a better way than frightening them to death?’
When they had passed through the library doors, Hal pulled the turret door key from his pocket. ‘We forgot to put the key back in the stoat! You go ahead. I’ll catch you up.’ And he disappeared back into the library, whipping out his pocketbook and pen. Fast as he could, Hal drew the commonplace book on its shelf and the disturbed dust. That book had been pulled out recently, but no others had been touched. The page containing the story of the curse had been marked. Someone had turned over that corner. Hal wanted to know who and why.
After he’d made notes on the content of the commonplace book and replaced the key he’d purposefully pocketed, Hal crossed the grand entrance hall and went through a pair of glass doors and into a courtyard with a fountain in the middle. The basin was dry. Either the water was off or the pipes had frozen. Hal saw with disappointment that there was no snow on the ground. He looked up and was surprised to find the peculiar, cobbled courtyard in the middle of the house had a high domed glass roof, divided into a geometric pattern of leaded triangles. The glass was covered in a thin layer of snow.
There was a high-pitched cry, and a dark shadow padded out from an ivy-clad corner of the courtyard.
‘Belladonna!’ Hal exclaimed. ‘How did you get in here?’ She rubbed her nose against his knee. ‘Are you lost? Did you get trapped?’ He picked the cat up. ‘Let’s take you back to Freya.’
The opposite doors took him into the green salon with the wild boar and the suit of armour. He took Opa’s lift to the first floor, passed Arnold’s bedroom and knocked at the next door, hoping it was the right one.
Rada opened it. ‘Belladonna!’ she exclaimed, taking the cat from him. ‘Have you been exploring?’
‘I found her,’ Hal said, following Rada inside.
Despite its dark wooden furnishings, the huge room was light and airy because of two incredible arched picture windows that seemed
to bring the Brocken into the room. He scanned the space, drawing the layout in his head, trying to take in as much detail as possible. This was the room where Clara had expected to stay: Alexander’s room.
‘She didn’t climb up the tower, did she?’ Freya asked.
‘No.’
‘She smelled delicious mouses, no doubt,’ Rada said, rubbing her face in Belladonna’s fur. The cat’s amber eyes closed, and she started purring.
‘She was trapped in the courtyard,’ Hal said, noticing a strange array of items: small dark glass bottles, several funnels, a pestle and mortar, a perplexing-looking copper pot with a bowl at the bottom, a cylinder above it, and tubes protruding from the side, on a wooden desk that stood before one of the big windows. It looked like a medieval chemistry set.
‘Belladonna goes wherever she wants,’ Freya said, unpacking the suitcase, which lay open on a four-poster bed with red curtains. ‘How do you like our tower? It was our playroom when we were children – Manfred, Alexander and I.’
‘It’s great,’ Hal said as Freya took a portable hot plate from the case and brought it over to the desk. He pointed at the strange copper pot. ‘What do you do with that?’
‘Make potions,’ Freya said happily, and clapped her hands together.
‘This is where Freya works her magic,’ Rada said proudly.
‘Magic?’ Hal approached the desk. Looking into a hessian bag, he saw it was filled with leaves that had a medicinal smell. He picked up a clear tub filled with moss and examined it.
Freya went to the window. ‘Snow,’ she muttered, watching the fat, fluffy flakes drift past. ‘The white cloak that turns plants black and deadens the noise of man.’ She turned to Rada. ‘It is good that we brought our boots.’
‘Ja,’ Rada agreed, taking a pouch of cat food from a pocket on the side of Belladonna’s basket and emptying it into a saucer on the floor.
While the women were distracted, Hal discreetly opened a drawer of Alexander Kratzenstein’s desk a few centimetres. It was empty. He tried another, and another – all empty. What had he expected to find? A clue? The missing will? And then, with a jolt, he realized that there was a desk in which Alexander was much more likely to have kept important documents: the one on the train. ‘I’d better go.’
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