The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

by Helen Grant

  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.”

  Chapter Forty-five

  Sort 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.”

  “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.

  Chapter Forty-six

  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 cal
l, 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.

  Chapter Forty-seven

  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.