by Helen Grant
I slid down the wall and hugged myself. I put my head on my knees and clasped handfuls of my hair in my fingers. I shut my eyes and all I could see was Kai von Jülich’s body slumped behind the wheel of his sports car. I opened them again and that was better, but I could still smell a memory of that unspeakable odour on my clothing.
I sat there for a long while without any coherent thoughts about what to do. I felt in my pocket for my mobile phone but it wasn’t there. I supposed it was lying somewhere on the footpath which led up to the house or perhaps on the gravel by the gate. There was nothing in my pocket except a twenty-cent piece and the crumpled sheet of paper I had taken from the car, now scrunched into a ball. I smoothed it out against the knee of my jeans, although I didn’t expect it to tell me anything useful. There were no words that could change what I had just seen slumped behind the wheel of the car, nothing that could change the brutal reality of it.
I did not recognize the handwriting, but there was something else, something I knew well. The logo I had glimpsed showed an angel holding out a slice of cake. The note was written on paper headed Konditorei Nett. My gaze slid from the angel’s chummily smiling face to the words written below in black ink.
Dearest Kai …
I began to feel as though I were going mad. Who at the bakery could possibly be writing letters to Kai von Jülich on our official headed paper? The paper was closely covered with handwriting on both sides. I turned it over to see whether there was any signature. There was, but although I read it several times still my brain was having problems processing what my eyes were taking in.
Steffi Nett.
I flipped the paper over and then back again. Dearest Kai … Steffi Nett. I was apparently holding in my hands a letter from myself to Kai von Jülich; a letter written in a handwriting that was not my own and that I had no memory of writing.
Am I losing my mind?
I stared at the signature until it ceased to have any meaning at all and was just a group of syllables spilling across the page. Steffi Nett. Steffi Nett. Finally I pulled myself together, turned back to the other side and began to read.
Dearest Kai, you may be surprised to get this letter from me. Well, don’t be …
The tone of the first few lines was familiar – more familiar than I would ever have dared to be in the days before Kai had asked me out. In fact it was positively flirtatious. I imagined Kai reading this and my face began to tingle with hot embarrassment. Then I read on and embarrassment turned to sickening horror. Whoever had penned this letter in the guise of Steffi Nett had gone on from coquettish opening phrases to offer herself – myself – to Kai in such blatant terms that it turned my stomach to read it. No wonder it had brought Kai running; I thought that even old Father Arnold himself would have been knocking on the bakery door looking for more than a ham and egg roll if he had received a letter like this one. It didn’t just suggest what we might do together; it described everything in meticulous detail. The last paragraph was a revolting exhortation to Kai to come to the bakery and make a date with me if he wanted to put these suggestions into action. And don’t tell anyone, the writer had added. Not if you want the time of your life. There was a nauseatingly saccharine sign-off – ‘little kisses and love’ – and underneath that, in the same black ink, my name.
I didn’t want to read the letter through again, as it made me feel sick. I wished I had not even read it the first time. It was disgusting and all the worse because there was a basic lack of honesty to it. It wasn’t a declaration of love. It wasn’t even a declaration of desire. It was a lure baited with the grossest suggestions that the writer could come up with. I was angry with the writer for putting my name to it and I was angry with Kai for believing in it. Were there no brains at all in that gilded head of his? Then I thought again about the thing in the car, and the smears and blotches on the inside of the windscreen, and I gave a great groan of horror, squeezing my eyes tight shut to try to block out the memory.
It wouldn’t go away, though. I suspected it would never go away, that I would never be able to lie down to sleep at night again without fearing that the awful thing that Kai had become would be waiting in my dreams, the terrible ruin of his face turned to me in reproach.
I was far from understanding what had taken place here, but there was no sorcery in what had happened to Kai, nothing but the brutal finality of a butcher’s cleaver descending. And yet somehow I was at the centre of this, with the curses I had scrawled like a signature on a death warrant. It was my name at the end of the letter I had found in Kai’s car, even if the handwriting was not my own.
In the end there was only one decision to be made. I dragged myself up on legs that felt rubbery with shock and staggered around the corner of the house. The thought of re-entering the garage was appalling. I looked at the front gate and told myself that I could cross the gravel drive, climb over it and walk back to the town. I could call the police and let them break into the house. But even before I had started moving towards the open garage, pulling the hem of my shirt out of my jeans so that I could press it over my mouth and nose, I knew that I was going to look for myself. Whatever had happened, it was about me and I was not going to walk away.
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
I slipped into the garage between the silver Mercedes and the wall, keeping as much distance as possible between myself and the red sports car. I could see almost at once that there was a door at the back that led to the house. I thought that I could make myself cross the few metres to that door and try the handle. I pressed the cloth of my shirt tightly to my nose, moving as quickly as I could and praying that I would not throw up again. I reached the door, pressed the handle down and rather to my surprise it opened easily.
The interior of the house was dark. I stepped inside and closed the door behind me, thankful to have its wooden panels between me and the garage with its expensive sarcophagus. I stood where I was for perhaps half a minute, letting my eyes adjust to the dimness, and I became aware that the air in the house had a taint that was all too familiar. I listened too and once I heard something in the distant reaches of the house, perhaps in the attic or cellar, that might have been a scuffle or a creak, but that was all. It could have been something or nothing. If Hanna was inside the house she was keeping very quiet.
I was in a hallway, I now saw. I began to move cautiously down it, slowing to peer through each open doorway. There was no sign of any living thing in the house, nothing to suggest any immediate threat, and yet everything I saw impressed me with a sense of wrongness. I noticed an ugly little telephone table piled high with unopened mail. I passed the Landbergs’ large kitchen with its brown wooden fittings. The shutters were only half down and in the half-light I could see that every work surface was cluttered with dirty crockery, cartons and jars. I went into the living room and found a pair of neatly folded reading glasses lying on the glass-topped coffee table next to a copy of the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger that was weeks old.
I went back into the hallway. Once again I stood and listened, but all I could hear was a faint ticking, the sound of some household appliance crooning to itself. I looked up the stairs at the dim reaches of the landing. I was aware of that smell again, the one that was always there in the background. After a while you got used to it, but sometimes you’d catch a whiff of it again and realize it was still there, sweet and ripe and foul, as though the whole house were some gigantic diseased lung exhaling rot with every breath.
Reluctantly I set my foot on the bottom stair. There was a faint creak as I put my weight on it. Then I climbed slowly up, stopping on every third step to listen. The house seemed to be empty, so why did I have that feeling of strained expectancy, as though someone or something was up there waiting for me? It was a relief when the first-floor landing finally came into view and I could see that it was empty.
The air was fouler up here. All the doors on the landing were closed, so the only light came from a little glass panel overhead. In spite of the expensive decor �
�� the thick patterned rug, the paintings on the walls, the large Chinese vases full of dried flowers – the upper floor was a comfortless place. The sprays of desiccated flowers made me think of a funeral parlour.
I noticed almost immediately that one of the bedroom doors had been efficiently if crudely sealed with strips of silvery duct tape which ran along all the door frame. There was no key on the outside. I tried the handle but the door wouldn’t budge.
Some small and animal part of my brain was telling me that I didn’t want to go in there anyway, that I didn’t want to see what was in the room, that I definitely didn’t want to know what was making that smell which clung greasily to everything. In defiance of its increasingly urgent voice, I made myself check the door again, but it really was locked.
I went to the next one, and tried the handle; it opened easily. Inside, the shutters were up and the room was full of light. This was clearly Herr Landberg’s study; it had his heavy personality stamped all over it. There was a very large desk, as solid and unfashionable-looking as its owner, with an expensive padded leather office chair behind it and a grey metal filing cabinet to one side. The walls were adorned with photographs of Herr Landberg and his shooting-club friends, all stoutly upholstered in hunting green and baring their teeth at the camera, and little wooden shields with the body parts of animals attached to them: horns and skulls and the occasional stuffed head, the eyes staring glassily across the room. I took all of this in at a glance, but the thing that really caught my attention was the metal gun locker bolted to the wall. It was wide open, as though inviting passers-by to help themselves to one of Herr Landberg’s well-maintained rifles as casually as taking a cigarette from the pewter box on his desk.
The other thing I noticed was the second door to my right, a door which almost certainly connected with the sealed room. The door was standing open and from this angle all I could see was a strip of flowered wallpaper and the heavy folds of curtains. Judging by the deep shadows, the shutters were most of the way down. I stepped a little closer and now I could see that all around the door frame was the same silvery duct tape, only it was puckered here and there where the door had been wrenched open.
The sickening smell of decay that pervaded the house was boiling out of the sealed room in waves. This was the putrid core of it. I knew what I would see – what I had to see – before I went to the bedroom door, but still the sight of it almost rendered me incapable of action. Both of them were in there, in bed. Frau Landberg – recognizable by the dry nest that was what remained of her bouffant dyed black hair and the frilled nightdress she wore – was lying on her back under a counterpane that was a Rorschach pattern of dark and sinister stains. I thought that she had probably died there where she lay, with her eyes staring up at the glass chandelier until they filmed over and finally sank back into her head. Herr Landberg, however, appeared to have put up a fight. There were splashes and streaks of dried matter all over the floor on his side of the bed. I suspected he had managed to get out of bed before he was struck down and had lain on the parquet floor, gazing up at his destroyer, as the life pumped out of him. Then the killer had heaved the corpse back into the bed and pulled the covers up to his chest, leaving the two of them surrounded by the trappings of their affluence, like an entombed Pharaoh and his queen.
I had known that the house must contain a chamber of horrors like this one ever since I saw Kai von Jülich’s car in the garage, but it was still a paralysing shock to see the two bodies lying there in their miasma of tainted air. A terrible sound escaped me, the dusty sound of the last strut supporting known reality giving way. I heard an answering groan and it was then that I realized for the first time that I was not alone.
CHAPTER SEVENTY
She was sitting on the floor on the far side of the bed with her back to the wall and her knees up. I couldn’t see her hands.
‘Hanna,’ I said.
Her face was a pale shape in the gloom. ‘You shouldn’t have come here,’ she said.
I made no reply. I was afraid to look at the things in the bed again and afraid to draw another breath of that thick and poisonous atmosphere. Abruptly I turned and stumbled out of the room. When I got to the landing I took great gulping breaths; in comparison with the tainted air in the bedroom, it was sweet and clear here. I staggered to the head of the stairs but I didn’t trust my legs to carry me down them. I sank on to the top step and put my head in my hands.
After perhaps half a minute I heard Hanna’s footsteps behind me and then I felt a hand on my shoulder.
‘I’m sorry you had to see that,’ she said.
She might have been talking about something mildly unpleasant, something squashed on the road. I didn’t look at her.
‘What happened?’ I managed to ask eventually, still clinging to the faint hope that there might be some explanation for what I had just seen other than the obvious one – the one that wasn’t just staring me in the face but actually had me by the lapels and was shaking me.
‘You did,’ said Hanna simply.
I felt her sit down beside me.
‘No,’ I whispered into my hands. ‘That – in there – I never wished for that.’
I heard Hanna sigh. ‘You didn’t always know what to wish for,’ she said. Her hand on my shoulder moved to the side of my neck and I could feel her fingertips on my skin, almost caressing me. ‘You still don’t. You don’t know what you need, Steffi. It was me from the start, taking the papers, the ones with your wishes on.’
‘You?’ I said.
The silence between us stretched out so long that when she finally spoke it almost made me jump.
‘There’s no magic,’ she said suddenly. ‘Just like there’s no God. Nobody’s handing out favours to people like you and me. The shy one and the fat plain one. People like my parents and yours, they go to church and pray and think that someone’s listening. Nobody’s listening. There’s only one thing that matters, one thing that can make any difference, and that’s wanting something yourself badly enough. You understand that. I saw it when I saw you making those wishes. I knew you understood.’
I remembered the way Hanna had seemed so excited, the way her eyes had shone, how she had licked her lips so that they gleamed. I had thought it was the thrill of the game, even that it was some twisted dynamic between her and Max. Was it possible that it had really been all about me? Hanna moved closer to me and I felt her hand on my wrist, as light and deadly as the touch of a venomous spider. It was all I could do not to flinch away.
‘It doesn’t really matter that you didn’t guess,’ said Hanna, ‘because now you know. I did everything you wished for, didn’t I?’
She waited.
‘Yes,’ I croaked.
‘Almost everything anyway,’ she said musingly. ‘I didn’t have to do anything to Klara Klein. That just happened. Or if you want to believe in magic, that was it. That was fate. Klara Klein dying, that was what gave me the idea.’
Now her hand slipped right over my hand and she entwined her fingers with mine. I was too shocked by her words to react to her touch. I was thinking that if she said she had done everything I wished, everything except Klara Klein …
Hanna was a little closer to me now. Our shoulders weren’t just touching; I could feel the pressure as she leaned against me.
‘You wished for Klara Klein to die,’ she said, ‘and she did. No magic, just a fat old bag who couldn’t stop stuffing herself with cherry streusel. The only miracle is that she lasted so long. But Max and Jochen and the rest of them … the looks on their faces, the things they said when they thought you’d done it with the curse you wrote. The power to make things happen, that’s the real magic. I saw it and I know you saw it too, because otherwise you wouldn’t have kept on wishing.’
Oh, God, I thought. I was remembering the moment at Rote Gertrud’s house when I had scribbled Kai von Jülich’s name on a piece of paper, my heart thumping with guilty excitement. I had made sure that none of the others saw what I had
written because I thought they’d laugh at me. Shy little Steffi with her unrequited crush. And yet my secrecy had been entirely in vain. It had been one of my own friends who plucked the wish from the box and read the secret of my heart.
‘You wrote the letter to Kai,’ I said. ‘How could you do that?’
I felt her shift slightly. ‘You wished for him,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you? I told you, the power to make things happen, that’s the magic.’
‘Not like that,’ I told her.
In spite of my shock I felt actual anger. I remembered Kai’s face looming at me in the car, the way I had hit my head on the glass as I tried to escape his embrace, the painful impact with the ground when I fell out of the car. I had heard the roar of the engine, the sound of gravel thrown up by the tyres, as I had flung myself, bruised and shocked, into the undergrowth, desperate to get away. He’s a pig, I had told Hanna afterwards, and I supposed he really had been: too stupid to question the contents of the note and too brutish to accept that no meant no, whatever had gone before. All the same, it needn’t have happened, that scene in the Tal. We could have carried on with our separate lives, with me yearning hopelessly until he found himself some girl like himself, well-off and arrogant. I need never have stumbled to the witch’s house to curse him, have limped home with my bruises and my torn shirt, to be confronted by Frau Kessel, who had drawn her own monstrous conclusions. It had all started there, with that cursed letter.
‘I didn’t want it to be like that,’ I repeated.
‘It couldn’t have been any other way,’ said Hanna. ‘You needed to see what he was really like.’
‘Why?’ I almost shrieked. ‘Why did I need to see?’ I pulled away from her, pulled my hand from hers. ‘He nearly raped me, Hanna. I thought we were going on a date and then he just went mad. He hurt me.’