Wish Me Dead

by Helen Grant

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Helen Grant was born in London, and read Classics at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. In 2001 she and her family moved to Bad Münstereifel in Germany, and it was exploring the legends of this beautiful town that inspired her to write her first novel, The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, which was shortlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal and the Booktrust Teenage Prize. Helen now lives in Brussels with her husband, her two children and two cats.

  BOOKS BY HELEN GRANT

  The Glass Demon

  The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

  Wish Me Dead

  HELEN GRANT

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  penguin.com

  First published 2011

  Text copyright © Helen Grant, 2011

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-141-33774-6

  For William Grant

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER ONE

  The funny thing is, I never even meant the first one. I had nothing against Klara Klein, nothing at all. It was Max who started it, with his plan to visit the witch’s house.

  There were six of us: Max and Jochen, both of them tall and well built, but Max sprouting a head of unruly dark hair while Jochen had blond curls; Izabela, who had slightly exotic looks and an accent, both inherited from her Romanian mother; robust, dark-haired Hanna, who went through her life with her chin out; wiry, compact Timo, who had been my boyfriend for three years; and me, Steffi Nett, the shy blonde one. Six of us, but as usual it was Max who came up with the plan.

  I knew it was a crazy idea, just the same as it was a crazy idea to go skinny-dipping in the Steinbach dam that time, or steal stale pastries from my parents’ bakery kitchen to see who could eat the most. Max and Jochen were always egging each other on. It was a pattern that had started when we were in kindergarten together and it showed no sign of changing. When Max and Jochen are both in their nineties and sitting side by side in easy chairs in the old people’s home at Otterbach they will probably still be putting each other up to all manner of idiocy, stealing each other’s hearing aids and trying to peer up the orderlies’ skirts.

  I can recall the precise instant when this particular scheme occurred to Max. It was the last night of April and the first dry evening of a wet week. We were waiting in the snack bar on the Orchheimer Strasse, all six of us, because Jochen had decided that he couldn’t do anything unless fortified with a Currywurst beforehand.

  I was standing at the big plate-glass window, staring out. There was a red sports car idling at the other side of the street, a streamlined monster with gleaming bodywork. I didn’t need to look closely to see who was behind the wheel, but I did anyway. Kai von Jülich. Blond, blue-eyed and staggeringly gorgeous. Wealthy too; I didn’t know anyone else in Bad Münstereifel whose parents could have bought them a car like that, even Max, whose family were very well off. Kai was only a year or two older than me, but he might just as well have come from a different planet.

  I realized with a start that Kai’s head had turned. He was looking towards the snack bar and had almost certainly seen me gazing out at him. Instantly I turned away, my face burning with embarrassment. To my relief, no one seemed to have noticed my confusion. Timo wasn’t even looking my way; he was looking at Izabela instead.

  Max was lounging against one of the tables, idly looking at the calendar on the wall of the bar, with its large glossy illustration of a motorbike, and jiggling one denim-clad leg in impatience. Suddenly he said, ‘It’s Walpurgisnacht.’

  ‘So what?’ said Timo.

  ‘So we should … ’ Max paused and considered for a moment. ‘We should go to Rote Gertrud’s house.’

  ‘Rote Gertrud?’ asked Izabela. Not having been born in the town, Izabela had not grown up with the tale of Red Gertrud, the Witch of Schönau.

  M
ax expanded on the theme as we left the snack bar, Jochen having collected his curried sausage. ‘Rote Gertrud, the witch, right? Only not an ugly old bag like they normally are. She’s supposed to have been … ’ He broke off and outlined an hourglass figure with his hands. ‘You know, hot. She had a house way out in the middle of the forest, right off the track, where nobody ever goes. This was three hundred years ago.’

  ‘Four hundred,’ said Timo.

  ‘Three hundred, four hundred, who cares? Whatever,’ said Max. ‘Anyway, get this. The house is still there. They burned the witch but they left the house standing, and it’s still up there, in the woods. And since it’s Walpurgisnacht, when the witches are supposed to fly, we should go up there and see if Rote Gertrud is flying too.’

  ‘That’s a –’ began Timo, and I was pretty sure he was going to say crap idea, but Jochen interrupted him.

  ‘What? That place in the Eschweiler Tal? You’re crazy.’ There was no mistaking the admiration in his voice. He took an enormous bite of Currywurst, and not for the first time I wished that he would learn to chew with his mouth closed. ‘What’re we gonna do up there? Hold a black mass or something?’

  Max looked at him as though he had just invented the Theory of Relativity. He slapped Jochen on the back. ‘Genius. That’s exactly what we’re going to do.’

  ‘We are?’

  ‘Course we are.’ If Max saw the glances Hanna and I exchanged, with much rolling of the eyes, he chose to ignore them. ‘We’re going to have a black mass and call up Gertrud’s ghost.’

  ‘Isn’t that a seance?’ asked Izabela. She had her arms around her slender body, hugging herself; it might have been for warmth, but I thought she looked apprehensive.

  Max was unperturbed. ‘Black mass, seance, whatever it is, we’ll do it.’

  ‘It’ll be pitch dark up there and the ground’ll be wet,’ objected Timo.

  ‘So?’ Max shot him an evil look. ‘Got a better idea?’ He gestured towards the posters taped to the snack-bar window. ‘Want to go to the jazz night at the old people’s home?’

  Having demolished all audible opposition, Max led the way to the car. Timo was walking a little apart from the rest of us, his face a mask of resentment. He knew he had been checkmated. Izabela took the opportunity to drift over and speak to me, appearing at my elbow like a thin, dark-haired wraith.

  ‘Steffi? The Eschweiler Tal, isn’t that where that guy who did all the murders is supposed to have put the bodies?’

  I knew exactly whom she meant. Everyone in the town knew the story, though we didn’t talk about it much: it was like the scar of some horrible wound, healed over but still visible, something which gave you trouble on damp mornings but was otherwise best ignored.

  ‘One of them,’ I said reluctantly. ‘I think they found the rest in a house in the town.’

  Actually I did not just think this, I knew it for a fact, and like everyone else whose family had been in the town at the time, I could have pointed out the house itself; I could have named the killer. But Izabela’s family had moved to Bad Münstereifel afterwards; to them the story of the killer who stole the town’s children from the streets was a newspaper article, a bloody tale as gruesome and as remote from everyday life as the legend of the eternal huntsman who roamed the Quecken hill.

  ‘Do we have to go there?’ she said in a low voice.

  With her pale skin and strands of dark hair falling over her face, she might have been Snow White, begging the huntsman not to take her into the depths of the wood.

  ‘Max is right,’ cut in Hanna from behind us. ‘What else are we going to do?’ She gave Izabela a playful shove. ‘Come on. Maybe it’ll be fun.’

  Izabela looked at me. I shrugged – and the die was cast.

  Perhaps if I had sided with her, if the three of us girls had insisted on doing something else, we might not have gone to Gertrud’s house at all that night. We might never have tried to raise Gertrud’s ancient spirit, we might never have hit upon the plan of asking it to carry out our commands, and maybe all the things which happened afterwards would never have come about at all.

  I’ve told myself since then that I couldn’t have done anything differently. Wasn’t I the shy one, the one who couldn’t even make Realschule, let alone the very academic Gymnasium, because I was too timid to say a word in class? The one who was studying to be a baker because she couldn’t find the right words to tell her parents that it was the last thing on earth she wanted to do? It would have been almost impossible for me to speak up, to change the way the evening went. That’s what I tell myself now, when regret becomes too bitter – I just couldn’t.

  CHAPTER TWO

  So now there we were, sitting in the brooding darkness on a couple of tree trunks that were soft and slimy with wet moss, and bolstering our courage with a stomach-churning mixture of drinks, Bitburger beer and miniatures of Kleiner Feigling, a fig vodka, left over from Karneval. Rote Gertrud’s house was somewhere close by, hidden in the tangled undergrowth and overshadowed by ancient beech trees.

  I remembered my sister, Magdalena, bringing me here one afternoon when I was a kid, maybe eight or nine and still at primary school. I could not recall why we had done it. She must have been left in charge of me, and when she made up her mind to come here she had to bring me along. But as to why she had wanted to come at all, that escaped me. Now I came to think of it, it was a strange place to bring a child, and it could not have been easy to get here. We must have cycled, although she would have had to nag me like mad to go that far. Why had we gone there? It was a mystery.

  They called Gertrud Vorn the Witch of Schönau even though she lived most of her life in the house in the forest. Supposedly she was born in the village of Schönau, to the south of Bad Münstereifel; at any rate, the Münstereifelers were keen to disassociate her from their town. They called her Rote – Red – Gertrud not because of the long auburn hair she had, but because her hands were literally and figuratively stained with blood – the blood of innocents. She’d lured away and murdered two children, Hans Schmitz and little Löttchen Bär. For this she was dragged from her house by a mob of angry citizens howling for retribution and burned to death on a bonfire. They say the fire went out three times because the Devil, the witch’s master, blew out the flames. More likely it was because the fire was too hastily built and more firewood had to be added to keep it going. Gertrud took an hour to die, during which time she shrieked ‘like a devil’ and fought in vain to escape. She screamed her innocence until her smoke-scoured lungs gave out.

  After Gertrud’s death, no one cared to take the stones from the walls or steal the timbers from the roof, which was why the house remained, crumbling slowly in the depths of the woods. The witch’s house.

  ‘So,’ said Max eventually, breaking the silence. ‘Are we going on?’

  He swung the torch around so that the beam danced over the damp tree trunks and sagging bushes. Black shadows leapt and scurried, my imagination unwillingly transforming them into imps and goblins circling just outside the borders of the light.

  ‘Do we have to?’ asked Timo. In the torchlight his lean face looked pinched and resentful.

  ‘No point in coming all this way and not going into the house,’ said Max glibly. ‘Who’s coming?’

  I felt in the pocket of my jacket for my torch. As I stood up, I realized that the little bottles of vodka had had more of an effect than I thought and I staggered, my head thumping. The light from Max’s torch seemed to wink at me, as though it were the revolving beam of a lighthouse. It was nauseating, the light flashing in time to the throbbing of my head. I closed my eyes for a moment to shut it out.

  Stumbling through the bushes with the others, I had a faint nagging sense of anxiety, but it was almost drowned in the false courage of the vodka, a distant signal like the black box of a crashed plane beeping away under a mile of icy seawater. I switched on my torch but I couldn’t keep the beam level. People kept bumping into me, shoving me, and the bushes c
lutched at my clothes with thorny hands. I fell over a tree root that twisted unseen across my path. My heart pounded as I fought back the image of hands reaching up from the spongy earth, trying to grasp me.

  ‘This is it,’ said Max suddenly, and stopped short so that we were suddenly all jostling each other.

  In the feeble torchlight I could see a wall rising up in front of us, speckled with black growths like the tarnish on an old mirror and seemingly featureless. For a moment I wondered stupidly where the door was and then I realized that we must be at the side of the house.

  ‘Come on,’ said Max, and vanished round the corner, leaving us to follow as best we could over the trailing brambles and broken chunks of stone which were strewn over the ground.

  The front of the house was in a considerably worse state than I remembered from my childhood visit. There was a hole in the wall so large that I could have stepped through it. Max ignored this and went for the doorway, which was little better than a hole itself, the door long gone and the lintel sagging alarmingly. At the last moment he turned and put his torch under his chin, shining it upwards to make himself look like Dracula. With his saturnine looks and the yellow light deepening the hollows of his face, the resemblance was a little closer than I cared for. We all laughed, but the laughter sounded tinny in my ears and I was beginning to feel little prickles of nervousness. I stopped short at the threshold and peered inside.