The Glass Demon

by Helen Grant

  I heard afterwards that Father Krause left the train at Köln’s main station, where he crossed the Bahnhofsvorplatz and climbed the steps to the city’s great Gothic cathedral, the Dom. The area is nearly always teeming with people and nobody seems to have taken any special notice of one dark-clad man of about sixty making his way to the cathedral’s west door, even though he had several nasty-looking head wounds which were encrusted with dried blood. Perhaps they thought he was a vagrant who had fallen down dead drunk in the street somewhere. At any rate, no one accosted him. He entered the cathedral and walked down the nave towards the fourteenth-century stained-glass windows from which Sts Gereon and Maurice, Kunibert, Peter and Maternus gaze down upon the high altar.

  He did not try to approach the high altar. In that case he would probably have drawn attention to himself much more quickly. Instead he stopped close to the Vierungsaltar, the altar which stands in the centre of the cross formed by the nave and transepts. He seems to have remained there for quite some time. Later, when the story had filtered out to the press, visitors to the Dom that day were falling over themselves to tell newspaper reporters and television crews that they had seen him standing there, staring fixedly at the great window in the south transept. More compelling than the tales related by media-happy tourists was the testimony of a local woman, Magdalena Fuchs, who had visited the cathedral to pray. Frau Fuchs said that Father Krause had accosted her as she passed him and had told her that the south window had been designed and made by an ancestor of his, Gerhard Remsich, in the sixteenth century. Frau Fuchs visited the cathedral so often that it is quite possible that she hardly noticed the individual subjects of the windows any more, but still this pronouncement surprised her: the design of the window in the south transept is an abstract one by a modern artist. She looked at the window, as if to confirm what she already knew, and then she looked at Father Krause and decided that it would be safer not to contradict him.

  A little later one of the red-coated cathedral wardens noticed Father Krause in an agitated state, apparently attempting to approach other visitors, all of whom were swerving to give him a wide berth. I suspect that the warden nursed a secret desire to vent some of the irritation that had been building up after hours of shepherding gum-chewing tourists out of the building. At any rate, he went up to Father Krause and asked him in a very high-handed way what he was doing.

  Opinion is divided about what happened next. Several witnesses swore that Father Krause cried out, ‘Mein Haus soll ein Haus des Gebetes sein – ihr habt daraus eine Räuberhöhle gemacht!’ and threw himself on the warden with his fists flying. Others were equally ready to swear that the discussion had been peaceful until Father Krause suddenly took a large stone out of his coat pocket and aimed it at the south window. The warden tried to restrain him and took a blow to the head which cracked his skull. A woman who saw Father Krause standing over the warden’s prone body with the bloody stone in his hand began to scream. One of the other wardens ran to call the police, but by the time they arrived Father Krause had been subdued, thanks to the intervention of two beefy tourists from Peoria.

  Whatever really happened – whether an enraged killer would have had time to shout out, ‘My house should be a house of prayer – you have made it a den of thieves’ or not – the chunk of stone suggested that the window in the south transept had had a narrow escape.

  Even now, I do not think that Father Krause will ever be called to account for what he did. He went before the courts and was declared schuldunfähig – that is, ‘incapable of being guilty’ – which is similar to being found not guilty by reason of insanity under British law. A lot of psychiatric terms were bandied about, all of which I took to mean that Herr Krause was, and continues to be, tormented by his own legion of demons.

  The investigation into the events of that autumn never definitively proved that Herr Mahlberg’s death was anything other than an accident, although the broken glass at this and the other murder scenes was noted. When asked about it, Herr Krause is said to have looked sly and said that it had been left by ‘the Glass Demon’. Whether he believed this or not is unclear. I myself think that there remained quite enough cunning in that corrupted mind for him to have planted the glass fragments himself as a warning, knowing how it would be interpreted by both superstitious locals and experts on the Allerheiligen glass.

  No connection was ever established between Herr Krause’s family line and that of Gerhard Remsich. Herr Krause’s family had been affluent in times gone by and a considerable amount of land had belonged to them, including the area of forest where the church stood and a long-vanished manor house whose foundations lie crumbling somewhere in the woods. All that remained by Herr Krause’s time was the land where the church was concealed and the farm inhabited by the Reinartzes. Michel’s father had leased both from Herr Krause on condition that he maintained the church in secret. It seems that as long as he did so, he was under no kind of threat from Herr Krause. Herr Krause himself had no means of maintaining it and he was content with the arrangement so long as it allowed him to do what he wished, which was to hug the secret of the glass to himself like an unscrupulous art collector hoarding a stolen masterpiece.

  As for Michel’s father, the farm was the ideal place for him to live with his two sons, Michel and Jörg. I had wondered about Jörg, about Michel’s reluctance to talk about him, about the strange grimace Johanna had made when I asked her about him. What’s right with him? she had said. Jörg had seemed elusive, even furtive – I had never seen anything of him myself apart from that glimpse of someone closing a window at the farm, as though hastily sealing himself in, out of my sight. I was not there the day Jörg and his father came to the castle, but Tuesday’s description of Jörg’s silence and the way he had spat on the floor suggested someone crude and menacing. Like everyone else in Baumgarten, I had jumped to conclusions.

  Michel was right: his brother is not the same as most people, and hasn’t been since birth. He probably won’t ever be fully independent and he will probably continue to look at the world through the eyes of a child. All the same, he is fiercely loyal to his family. The day he and Michel Reinartz Senior stormed into the castle and threw their repulsive offering on to the dining table, he was simply following his father’s lead. He himself is as harmless as a person can be – certainly less pernicious than the tongue-waggers who ill-judged him.

  I wondered about Jörg’s and Michel’s mother – whether her interest in the glass and her belief that it should become public knowledge had led to her death. Michel said it hadn’t.

  ‘The police asked Dad a load of questions about that. But they think it really was an aneurysm.’ He cleared his throat. ‘They’re sure enough that they’re not going to – you know…’

  I did know. It was not necessary to complete the sentence: dig her up.

  ‘And the priest who told him that the glass was responsible for her death?’

  Michel looked at me with his eyebrows raised.

  ‘Father Krause,’ I said, supplying the answer myself.

  Thinking about it made me rather queasy. Even then, long before we had even dreamed of coming to the Eifel to look for the Allerheiligen glass, Bonschariant had claimed a victim for his own. So what if her death had been a random tragedy and not his work at all? You cannot expect a demon to play fair.

  I still think about that, and about the morning Herr Krause called at the castle, ostensibly looking for my father but in reality probably coming to check that he had done his work thoroughly when he tried to spit my brother with a spear. Perhaps even coming to gloat. It makes me shudder, but not as much as the memory of him glancing around the room, his gaze dancing quickly from the table to the sideboard. At the time I had thought he was looking for evidence of my own transgressions, signs that I had been dabbling with the black arts. Now I think that perhaps he realized that I knew where the glass was, and he was looking for a weapon.

  If Michel had not turned up at that precise moment, my pa
rents would have come home a couple of hours later and found – what? There were so many ways in which Herr Krause could have made his point. I think again of the window depicting Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac, the patriarch standing there with a great knife held aloft, preparing to plunge it into his little son’s body, and I feel faintly sick. At such times I am not sorry that those windows were destroyed.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  I did not see my father for a week. There was no question any more of staying at the castle. Uncle Karl appeared, summoned by the police or by my father, I can’t say which, and took me back to Koblenz with him. I don’t know where my father spent that week. Tuesday spoke to him by phone every day but always in hushed tones; occasionally she would look round to see whether I was anywhere in the vicinity. One time I asked her where he was and she simply said, ‘Upset,’ in an absent-minded voice. For once it seemed she was being tactful; personally I thought my father probably wanted to kill me.

  The rest of the time Tuesday sat around doing very little, sometimes playing with Ru and very often crying, quietly and for a long time. I would go out most days, not with any particular aim but just to wander about in the fresh air, feeling my body moving and trying to let my mind freewheel for a while, and I would come back again an hour later and find that she was still sitting there with tears running down her face. It was hard to think of anything to say to her. I made her cups of tea, and sometimes I took Ru out for a couple of hours so that she could rest – not that she ever seemed to lie down or even relax. Polly was always between us, like a pale thin ghost, reproaching us with her absence. But we never spoke about her.

  I remember one day towards the end of that week, when it began to rain before dawn and kept it up for hours, a long depressing downpour which pattered on to the windows and made the world outside run and blur as though we were seeing it through eyes brimming with tears. Uncle Karl’s wife, Marion, had taken Ru and her own son, Johann, off somewhere for the day; I think she had no idea what to say to us either. I went to look for a coat. In spite of the weather the thought of being cooped up indoors was intolerable. I didn’t bother asking Tuesday whether she wanted to come with me.

  The only raincoat in the house was Tuesday’s – predictably, it was more fashionable than functional, made of shiny black material with an elegant cut and a sash belt to nip in the waist. I looked at it for a few moments and then put it back into the wardrobe. I had no desire to steal Tuesday’s clothes any more.

  In the end I didn’t bother with a coat at all. I just walked out into the rain and slammed the door behind me. It was a mild day, otherwise I would have frozen within five minutes. Eifel rain has a drenching quality; after barely a minute in it you might as well have emptied a bucket of water over yourself. It drove into my face like a hail of miniature fists and ran down the back of my neck. My clothes, rapidly soaked through, stuck to my skin like slime. I blinked hard and tried to drag wet strands of hair out of my eyes with dripping fingers. The sensation of rain streaming down my face made me gasp, but I didn’t turn back. I strode out along pavements which turned into paths and then over grass which insinuated itself wetly against my ankles and soaked my shoes. The sky above was a great grey mass pressing down on me. I increased my pace. First I hurried, then I jogged and finally I broke into a run, hurling myself along, heedless of bushes and brambles which tore at my clothes as I passed.

  I ran until I was utterly out of breath and was beginning to think that I might be sick. Then I came to a stop and stood there in the rain with my chest heaving and my limbs tingling. I put my head back and looked up. Nothing had changed. That fuzzy grey light still filled the whole sky like a creeping mould. The sun had vanished forever. My sister was still dead.

  I walked home, and when I got inside I was not sure what to do with myself. Water was running off me in streams. I couldn’t walk to the bedroom or the bathroom without leaving a dripping muddy trail behind me. I closed the door and stood on the doormat shivering. My teeth were beginning to chatter.

  A door closed somewhere in the house and I heard footsteps – hesitant, slow footsteps. Tuesday appeared at the end of the hallway. Without her make-up, with her hair unbrushed, she looked younger and somehow smaller than she normally did. For the first time I realized that I was taller than she was. I began to think too that it must have hurt her whenever I said she wasn’t my mother. It was certainly true that she wasn’t the mother I had dreamed for myself, the warm, capable, endlessly understanding mother. But perhaps she hadn’t expected me to turn out the way I did either.

  Tuesday walked down the hallway towards me and, when she got to me, she put her arms round me. I was soaked to the skin, and pretty soon she must have been soaked too, but she still held on to me.

  It’s all my fault, I wanted to say. I knew we were all in danger but I couldn’t find the way to tell you. Something was cracking inside me, as though someone had pushed a chisel into a rift in a stone and was hammering, hammering. It was my fault for going to the church, for letting him see me in there. Polly would be alive if it weren’t for me. I wanted to tell Tuesday this, but all that came out were great racking sobs. I was gulping and coughing. Tears mingled with raindrops. I tasted salt on my lips.

  Tuesday’s shoulders were heaving; after a while I realized that she was crying too. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she kept saying. ‘I’m so sorry.’ She sounded as though she were choking. ‘It’s all my fault. I should have seen she was sick. I should – I should have stayed at home. I should never have left her.’

  ‘It’s not –’ I began, and stopped. It’s not your fault, I had been going to say. You couldn’t have known this would happen. And it wasn’t you who killed her. It was that – devil.

  A weight was beginning to lift from me. I knew I would never be free from regrets about Polly’s death. If I had insisted on going home earlier, regardless of what the school might have said – if I had told my father what I suspected, instead of keeping it all to myself – if I hadn’t insisted that Michel take me to the church in the woods in the first place… But Tuesday was blaming herself, and I supposed my father was too. The truth was, none of us had intended this to happen, and none of us had taken Polly to the top of the tower and thrown her to her death. There was only one person responsible for that. I realized this at last, and it was a great relief.

  I found that I was in control of myself again. I was no longer choked by tears; I could speak. I put my arms around Tuesday and let her cry.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I murmured into her hair. ‘It’s OK, Mum. It’s not your fault.’

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  Eventually, of course, we were allowed home, although ‘home’ was hardly what it felt like when we finally arrived back in England. My father had managed to get the tenants out of our house and once the supposed sabbatical year had ended he would return to his old job. His dreams of becoming Professor Fox had evaporated and he himself was a broken man. I had the feeling that something inside him – guilt, or simple misery – took some strange satisfaction from the idea of knuckling under and working for the detested Lyle, now Professor of Medieval Studies. He saw himself as a bondsman tugging his forelock to the landowner, a dispossessed slave bowing to his master. I felt some dim understanding of this. After all, it was from him that I had inherited my own self-destruct button. In spite of this, we hardly ever spoke.

  Sometimes we would be sharing a room, but not speaking – he would be writing, I reading, and I would look up to see him staring at me. Once or twice he said, ‘Lin,’ but then seemed to change his mind. I knew he was thinking about the Allerheiligen glass, about the magnificent treasure he had so very nearly seen, but I could not bring myself to talk to him about it. We both knew very well that the only accessible place in which Gerhard Remsich’s masterwork now existed was my memory, but my father hesitated to ask me and I could not bring myself to raise the topic with him. We might have carried on like that forever had it not been for Professor Lyle.

  I
met him one morning outside the Faculty of History. My father had given me a lift into the town centre and had then gone into the faculty building. This was ostensibly to read some obscure article, but more probably so that he could sit in a sunny corner of the library and ponder lost opportunities. I had some errands of my own to run and was supposed to be meeting a friend later.

  I was trying to make up my mind which way to go first when someone said, ‘It’s Lindisfarne, isn’t it?’

  I scowled, feeling a stab of irritation so strong that it almost amounted to hate. I detest that name, and if I ever commit matricide it will be because Tuesday, in a fit of New Age madness, had seen fit to saddle me with it. She was welcome to name herself after days of the week or months of the year or anything else if she liked, but she could have given me a normal name.

  ‘No,’ I said shortly, before I had even taken a proper look at the speaker.

  ‘Miss Fox? You are Miss Fox?’

  I looked directly at him and realized that it was Professor Lyle. I had never met him before but his face had been splashed all over the university magazine when he got the appointment. I recognized that jowly and faux-jovial face without any trouble. I wondered what he wanted.

  ‘I’m Lin Fox,’ I said, in tones which clearly implied that I wouldn’t have been Lin Fox if I could possibly have disobliged him.

  ‘Oliver Fox’s daughter, yes?’

  I noticed he didn’t say Dr Fox and guessed that he would have reduced my father’s status to Mr if he had dared. I nodded curtly.