by Helen Grant
‘I don’t know. I just have this really, really bad feeling.’ I shook my hair out of my eyes. ‘My stupid dad left her alone at the castle.’
‘She’ll be fine, Lin…’
‘Maybe,’ I said shortly. ‘I just want to get back there, OK?’
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
The journey back to the castle seemed to take forever. Anyone other than Michel would soon have become tired of me, the way I was squirming in my seat and rolling my eyes at slow-moving vehicles like a blue-rinsed back-seat driver. Every kilometre that crawled by was pure agony. As we entered Baumgarten a tractor pulled out in front of us, towing an enormous muddy trailer piled high with what looked like turnips. I gave a howl of frustration and slapped the dashboard with the flat of my hand.
‘Calm down,’ said Michel. ‘Polly’s fine.’
‘You don’t know that,’ I snapped. I exhaled heavily. ‘Look, I’m sorry, it’s just I made Dad promise not to leave her there alone and he bloody did it anyway.’
Michel said nothing to this, but he pulled out into the middle of the road and peered around the tractor. He had to pull in again sharply; a moment later a bus thundered past.
‘Scheisse.’
I laughed at that, but it wasn’t really funny. I felt as though I might boil over into hysteria at any moment.
At long last we reached the turning on to the track which led into the woods. Michel went as fast as he could. The little Volkswagen lurched and bounced over ruts and potholes. As the trees sped past I wound down my window and stuck my head out, hoping to hear or sense something which would tell me that all was well – or at least the absence of anything which would tell me that it was not. I remembered the day my father and I had heard sirens as we drove down this very same track. It was not a comforting thought.
‘Can’t you go any faster?’
‘Are you joking? We’ll take off altogether.’
The moment the car screeched to a halt outside the castle I wrenched the door open and ran for the gate. It was closed. I dropped my school bag on the ground and grasped the handle with both hands. As I pushed the gate open, I heard Michel come up beside me.
‘Polly?’
I stepped into the courtyard and looked around. The front door of the house was ajar. There was no sign of Polly and no sound other than ravens cawing overhead.
Michel touched me on the shoulder. ‘She’s probably in the house. Maybe she can’t hear you from there.’
‘Polly?’
My voice rose as I moved quickly over to the open door. I went inside. Everything looked perfectly normal: nothing overturned, nothing broken. There was a mug on the pine table, half-filled with what looked like herbal tea. A dining chair stood at an angle to the table, as though Polly had suddenly stood up. There was no sign of a struggle. So why did I have this overwhelming feeling that something was horribly wrong?
I moved slowly through each room, calling Polly’s name. She was not in the kitchen. I touched the kettle; it still felt very slightly warm. I supposed Polly had made the tea an hour or so before. I turned around and went back into the living room.
‘I’m going to try upstairs,’ I told Michel.
‘You want me to come?’
I nodded. It was a relief not to have to do it by myself, especially after what had happened to Ru. I didn’t want to think of finding a scene like that one all on my own.
In the event we found nothing at all. The bedroom doors were closed; I opened all of them except Ru’s, which was still sealed shut, but there was nobody there. The bathroom was also empty and rather cold. I touched the soap in the little dish by the sink; it was perfectly dry.
I clattered back down the stairs with Michel close behind me.
‘Polly?’
‘Maybe she went for a walk,’ suggested Michel.
‘She wouldn’t do that.’
I stood there indecisively, looking at the abandoned cup of tea on the table. I knew Polly wouldn’t have gone off on her own. Could my father have come back for her? Impossible – he didn’t have the car. I slid my mobile phone out of my pocket and flipped it open, but of course there was no signal.
‘Let’s try outside.’
I stepped out of the front door and scanned the courtyard. There was no movement other than the restless wheeling of the ravens overhead, their harsh voices filling the air. I began to follow the thick yellow stone wall, as it ran away from the house and towards the square tower which had been the keep of the castle. Polly and I had explored the ruins not long after we arrived at the Kreuzburg, but we rarely strayed into them after that. If Ru had been older he might have liked to run about in them, waving a toy sword, but there was little to interest either of us and the tower was always locked. Still, I was running out of places to look.
It was not possible to see the foot of the tower from the courtyard. I had to go through a crumbling archway made of the same yellow stone and up a worn flight of stairs.
‘Polly!’ I shouted.
There was no reply.
I paused on the steps and called out her name again. ‘Polly! You can come out now. It’s not funny.’
At the top of the steps I had to go through another archway and turn a corner into an inner courtyard where the tower stood. At first I thought there was nobody there. There was nothing moving in the courtyard other than clumps of weeds nodding gently in the breeze. The tower stood silent and uncompromisingly square, its ancient stones blurred and weathered by the passing of centuries. There was a thin band of blackness at the edge of the door, but at that moment I did not stop to think what it meant. The only sound was the crunch of gravel under my feet.
It was then that I saw her. For a moment I did not realize what I was seeing. At the foot of the tower there was something lying on the ground, something scarlet, an indistinct shape which might have been anything. I thought, What’s that lying on the ground? But a horrid conviction was already forming in my brain. I took one unwilling step towards the tower and then another, my heart thumping and my breath shivering in my throat. One step closer, my eyes straining – then I was running towards her, stumbling, arms flailing, the breath streaming out of my lungs in one great throat-scouring scream.
‘Polly! Polly!’
I fell to my knees beside her. My sister was sprawled on the cold earth, her face half-turned into it, her eyes half-open as though trying to take a sly peep through the strands of light hair which had fallen across them.
‘Polly…’
I felt hollow inside. There was no known emotion which could encompass a discovery like this. My sister was dead. I knew it without touching her. Death was written in that frozen face, nestled into the unfeeling ground. It was in the sickening redness which matted her hair and stained the earth around her head like an obscene halo. Earth which shivered and glittered with tiny fragments of broken glass.
I stretched out a trembling hand and touched Polly’s shoulder. I might have been touching a block of wood. She was not utterly cold yet, nor – thank God – was her body stiff, but there was an inertness about it which made my hand reluctant to linger there. For the first time I became aware of the cloth which shrouded her body. Polly – my Polly, not this inanimate thing which clutched the earth with frozen claws – liked to wear white, pink, shades of blue. She had nothing which was this strident scarlet, nothing in this heavy velvet which blurred the lines of her body as snow blurs the contours of a landscape. I lifted the edge of it; the material was worn and moth-eaten. I thought it might be a length of curtain. There were some like it in my parents’ room.
I glanced at the tower door. Normally it was closed and locked. Now it stood open, the wood around the lock cloven into splinters. Someone had taken an axe to it. The implement still lay there on the stone lintel, a bright line of silver cut into the edge of the tarnished blade by the force of the blows.
I will never know how Polly’s killer got her to the top of the tower. I can only hope that it was by deception, that she did
not know what was going to happen until the last moment. But I fear she was dragged there, pleading for her life. Thin and weak as she was, she couldn’t have fought him off. She was light enough from starving herself that he could have picked her up bodily and carried her inside.
My eyes burning with tears not yet shed, I gazed up at the tower looming above us. When they had reached the top, she must have known what was about to happen. Perhaps she had tried to fight for her life, but it would have taken more strength than she had left in that starved body. The killer had wrapped my sister in the scarlet cloth and bundled her over the parapet at the top. Then he had thrust her screaming and struggling into space. Down she had plummeted, the red cloth streaming behind her, until life had exploded out of her on the stones below. A sickly realization overwhelmed me. The Fall of the Angels: the killer had reproduced the scene with my sister’s blood.
‘O Gott.’ Michel had come up beside me. ‘Is she…’
I could see the legs of his blue jeans and his boots out of the corner of my eye but I didn’t look up to meet his gaze. A hard resolve was growing inside me. I did not want to be swayed from what I intended to do.
I stood up. ‘Yes, she’s dead.’ My voice had a curiously hard, flinty sound to it even to my own ears. ‘Will you phone the police?’
I didn’t bother asking him to phone for an ambulance, though I supposed they would send one anyway when he told them what had happened.
‘What are you going to do?’ asked Michel mistrustfully.
He must have read some secret determination in the way I failed to meet his gaze, the way I moved restlessly as though longing to be somewhere else.
I made myself look him in the eyes. ‘I’m going to stay here with Polly.’
It would take him at least twenty minutes to drive to the farm, make the call and come back, I thought. Twenty minutes was a good enough head start. Let him come after me then – let the police come too, for all I cared – it would be time enough.
Michel looked reluctant, but there was no time for arguing.
‘You’re sure you’ll be OK?’ he asked.
I nodded. ‘Just… go.’
I stood by my sister’s body and watched him as he went back down the stairs and turned the corner. I waited as his footsteps faded into the distance. A minute more and I heard the sound of the car engine firing up. Michel had gone.
I went over to the open door of the tower and picked up the axe.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
The axe in my hands, I half-ran and half-walked through the forest, the fevered panting of my breath loud in my ears and the undergrowth crackling under my feet. Brambles tore at the legs of my jeans and once I nearly slipped over on a patch of mud, but managed to right myself without losing momentum. I didn’t waver for a moment. It was now or never. In an hour’s time or maybe less, the castle and the surrounding woods would be crawling with police.
Very soon I reached the place where the wire fence was supposed to block the path. To my surprise it had still not been mended; in fact it had been cleared right away to the side of the track. Several deep ruts ran through the place where the fence should have prevented anyone passing. I could make no sense of this. I simply stepped over them and went on my way, further into the forest.
I had only been to the church once before and then I had had Michel as my guide. Now I was alone and might very easily have gone astray among the winding paths and criss-crossing tracks. I did not stop to think about this. I was committed. I strode along with confidence, hefting the axe, trusting that for once luck would be with me, and it was. Another five minutes and I found myself at the edge of the clearing where the church stood.
I paused for a moment, looking at it. Here was the epicentre of the evil which had engulfed my family, the beating heart which pumped out its malevolence upon all whose lives it touched, from the abbot’s beautiful niece in the sixteenth century to my poor sister, who lay broken at the foot of the tower. It seemed darkly miraculous to me that anyone could pass through this forest and not feel them, the vibrations which emanated from it, tainting the very air around it.
Tightening my grip on the axe handle, I was about to approach the church when I noticed something which made my heart lurch in my chest. The door was already open. I stared at it and then glanced about me, but there was no sign of movement anywhere other than the gentle swaying of tree branches. I swallowed. Was it possible that Michel Reinartz Senior had been here and had forgotten to lock the door when he left? It seemed unlikely – but then who knew what he might or might not do? He seemed like nothing more than a madman to me.
I waited. Still there was nothing. If Michel’s father had been there, wouldn’t that great monster of a dog of his have been there too, barking its hideous head off? Cautiously I began to walk towards the open door of the church, moving as quietly as I could and listening for the tiniest sound that would tell me if someone was there. As I approached I could see that the interior of the church was not the black pit it had been the last time I had visited; there was light inside. Someone must have removed the boards as well as opening the door.
This is a bad idea, Lin. Still I went carefully on, stepping over sticks and trying to tread on patches of grass or moss where my footfalls would be muffled. Go back! Go back! screamed a voice in my head, but I ignored it. I had come here to avenge my sister; let a hundred maniacs with savage dogs try to stop me, I was determined to carry out what I had come to do.
I reached the open door of the church and still there was no sign of life. I peered inside. The boards were down, all right. From here I could not see the glorious designs on the windows but I could see the rainbow streaks which striped the wooden pews inside and turned the dilapidated tiled floor into a jigsaw of colour. Well, that would make my task easier. I had no intention of leaving a single pane unbroken for the police – or my father – to find.
I stepped inside. It was cool in here and musty. Glancing down the aisle, I noticed something strange: those wooden crates, the ones which had played so unpleasantly on my imagination the last time I had been here, had vanished entirely. Now that I looked more closely, I could see streaks of dirt or rust on the worn tiles, as though something had been dragged out of the church, passing right over the spot where I now stood.
That moment of contemplation, as I stood there wondering what had become of the crates and who had taken them, was fatal. Distracted from my purpose, I did not realize that there was someone in the church with me until it was too late. Something hit the back of my head with the blinding force of the aneurysm that had felled Michel’s mother and, groaning, I crumpled to the floor.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
It is not as easy to knock someone out as you might think from reading books. There was no merciful descent into darkness. Pain exploded in my skull, a nuclear bomb which sent agonizing shockwaves shrilling through my brain, turning the world to a dizzying kaleidoscope of seething particles. Yet I was still conscious when I hit the floor. I rolled over on to my back, groping for the handle of the axe. Above me loomed a dark figure, blurred and indistinct. It seemed about three metres tall. I could make out no features; my vision swam nauseatingly, so that the figure seemed to sway and hover over me.
The axe, where was the axe? My hands flailed around wildly. By pure chance my fingers touched the wooden handle, but as they closed on it something came down with excruciating force on my hand and I let go. A scream burst from me, scouring my throat. From the explosion of pain in my hand, I guessed that something was broken, but there was no mercy. Someone grabbed my hands, causing a fresh supernova of agony in the injured one.
No, I tried to say, but what came out was the shriek of an animal in pain. Then I was being dragged along the floor, hauled by the arms. In some dim corner of my brain I knew that I should be struggling, fighting for my life, but the pain was so enormous, so nauseating, that it paralysed me. I squeezed my eyes shut. Let it stop. I thought I could feel the bones in the broken hand grindin
g together, like a bundle of splintering sticks. A bright flare of agony streaked up my arm. Just let it stop – let it stop –
Abruptly the grip on my hands was loosened. I slumped down, the hard cold edge of a stair biting into my ribs. I guessed I was lying on the steps which led to the altar. I cradled my broken hand, weeping with great choking sobs. How had it all gone wrong so quickly?
I could hear fleet footsteps on the tiles but I could not tell where my attacker was. Thunder still seemed to roll and crash in my head, disorienting me. There might have been one of them, or two, or more, closely clustered around me or darting about all over the church. I opened my eyes and the coloured light from the windows was dazzling. I could make out no one in the main part of the church. I shook my hair out of my eyes, blinked hard and looked again. Nothing.
The next moment I knew why. Someone was behind me, on the altar steps. I heard the infinitesimal sound of something scraping against the tiles. My mind made pictures of cloven hooves moving across the tiled floor, of upraised limbs which ended in yellowed talons, of sagging jaws lined with teeth as sharp as butcher’s knives. Finally I had skidded off the edge of reality into a nightmare where a demon stalked his victims, his pitted reptilian skin tiger-striped by the coloured bands of light from the stained-glass windows. Windows of a church no longer sacred, a church which could offer me no salvation.
My heart pounding wildly, I struggled to sit up, the movement causing more sickening screams of protest from my injured hand. I was still trying to raise myself, my efforts staccato with panic, when someone did it for me. I was grasped firmly under the arms and hauled into a sitting position. At the first touch I felt a vertiginous thrill of shock, but a second later I realized what I was feeling. Hands. Whoever was dragging me up had hands. Not claws. Not the ragged talons of a demon.
When I was sitting up, my chest rising and falling as though I had run a sprint race, my hair hanging in tangled hanks over my eyes, he came round and squatted in front of me. I saw black first, the black garb of a priest, or a vampire, or a crow. Dark shoes, the arm of a black jacket. Then I looked up and saw a face I recognized.