Helen Grant - The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

I set off at the briskest pace I could manage, desperate to pound some warmth back into my limbs. With the snow clouds gone and the pale winter moon shining down, I could see quite well. The wet trunks of the trees that lined the riverbank stood out like dark stripes against the white of the snow. I counted five trees, and then ten. When I had passed twenty I would turn around.

The night was absolutely silent apart from the huffing of my own breath and the crunching of snow underfoot. The woods around Münstereifel are full of game-deer, hares, foxes-but now there was nothing moving among the bare trees. Glancing behind me I thought the car seemed unimaginably far away. I counted the twentieth tree and stood still, listening.

Somehow the silence was worse than any sound could have been, however threatening. There was an air of expectancy about it. I thought of Unshockable Hans, the intrepid miller, waiting and watching for the spectral cats. The headless ghost of the evildoer, doomed to roam the valley until someone dared speak to him.

Abruptly I stopped short, sucking in a painful breath of glacial air. There were footprints in front of me, footprints that came from the middle of nowhere and started in the middle of the path. The footprints of a man: I could see the marks of heel and toe sharply defined in the crisp snow.

For a moment I held my breath. Then with a surge of relief I exhaled. Of course, the footprints did not really start in the middle of nowhere. When I looked properly I could see brown tufts of foliage sticking up through the kicked-over snow where he had come up the riverbank before he stepped onto the path. Herr Schiller .

I looked at the path ahead, looked back behind me at the bridge and the cars, then back at the path again.

About fifty meters ahead of me there was a rocky outcrop where the hillside met the level ground, slightly obscuring my view of the path. The black skeletons of shrubs stuck out on it like bristles. As I watched, a yellow glow suddenly bloomed behind the bristles, backlighting them with a pulsing corona of dazzling brightness. I was as shocked as if the world had tilted sideways and sent me sliding about like dice in a cup. My brain simply refused to process what my eyes were seeing. Dumbfounded and rooted to the spot, I watched that eerie light flame upward, gilding the snow with its golden radiance, and then I knew: it was the Fiery Man of the Hirnberg .

I think I took a step back, staggering, but I was still unable to run. Wide-eyed and openmouthed, I saw a figure clothed in blinding flame step from behind the outcrop, into the middle of the path, arms outspread as though crucified by the fire that streamed from every limb.

Distantly, I could hear someone screaming. Stefan? I dared not turn my head, as though the blazing thing would swoop upon me with those flaming talons outstretched if I took my horrified eyes off it for an instant. I took another step backward.

The fiery form was coming toward me, it was coming nearer , although each step was halting, as though wading through the inferno that surrounded it. I could not feel the heat yet, but I saw the incandescent figure brush against a broken branch and a bundle of desiccated leaves instantly ignited, shriveling and sparking.

Panic forced its way up inside me. I was aware that I was babbling nonsense, but I seemed to have no control over my own voice. No, no, go away, I didn’t call you, I didn’t, I didn’t . Terror was expanding inside me, but still I could not run.

Paralyzed with dread, I watched Death close in on me with feet that scorched the bare earth under the snow. I thought I could feel the deadly heat of the blazing hands that were held out to me, as though in supplication. I closed my eyes against the searing brilliance of the fire, fists drawn in tight to my body as though I could somehow shrink into myself and escape the branding heat of that fiery touch. Even through closed eyelids I could see the yellow glare. A sound like a creak escaped from a throat too constricted with fear to scream. I could hear it now, the roaring and crackling.

“Go away,” I whispered, and waited, my eyes still screwed tight shut, my whole body trembling. I waited. Nothing happened. Then suddenly I heard a sound that was ponderous but somehow soft, the muffled sound of a burning bonfire falling in on itself. There was warmth on my legs.

I opened my eyes. The burning figure lay outstretched on the melting snow in front of me, the clawlike left hand almost touching my boot. Flames were still licking over something horribly black and charred. I took a step backward, and then another, and then all of a sudden my paralysis had broken and I was turning to run, run for my life. My breath was painful and ragged. The glacial night air seemed to stab my frozen limbs with a thousand tiny knives. My boots skidded on snow and I almost fell, but righted myself like a galloping colt, my heart pounding as though it would burst. Anything to get away, to put as much distance as possible between myself and the thing I had seen.

I turned to look back, staggered, taking in nothing but a dizzying slice of starry sky and black branches against snow, and ran slap into something in my path. For several seconds I clawed at it, desperate to get past, shrieking in frustration, and then suddenly I realized I had run into a person. My flailing arms were being held gently but firmly by gloved hands. I felt the rasp of woolen fabric against my cheek. Words were being spoken; in the confusion born of panic I could not take them in, but the effect was calming, as though I were a terrified animal.

I pulled back a little and took in a jacket of the traditional sort, with a stand-up collar and polished horn buttons. It was probably hunter-green but in the moonlight it looked almost black. My eyes traveled upward: the face was deep in shadow underneath a jaunty Tyrolean hat. I sucked in a deep breath.

“Hans,” I said, and my heart swelled with recognition. “Hans-it’s you.”

“Yes,” he said, and his voice sounded surprised.

I flung my arms around him and clung on. Safe at last. “Unshockable Hans,” I murmured over and over again into the rough wool of his jacket, as though the name itself were a talisman. “Unshockable Hans. At last.”

Whatever else one might say about Stefan’s cousin Boris, whose dubious career has probably by now culminated in a custodial sentence somewhere, he did commit at least one public-spirited action in his life. It was Boris who, having let himself out of Herr Düster’s house as easily as he had let himself in, slipped into the little alley, intending to make his exit unseen, and had literally fallen over our bicycles, ripping his jeans and laying open the skin of his calf in the process.

Shielded by the alley, he had taken out his flashlight to inspect the damage. He didn’t recognize my bike, but he knew Stefan’s. It had a stupid hooter on it, a rubber thing shaped like the head of Dracula, with fangs agape. It was quite distinctive-I’ve never seen another like it. Stefan had been given it when he was a lot younger and had become attached to it, although it was so goofy-looking that it probably took his cool rating down another notch every time he took the bike out.

Boris was no Sherlock Holmes, but still he was puzzled about the bike. Perhaps another person, having found it, would have assumed that Stefan had simply left it there for reasons of his own, or that it had been stolen for a prank and dumped. But Boris had just been in Herr Düster’s house, and the reason was this: he thought it was Herr Düster who was plucking girls from the streets like an elderly vampire, and he was determined to find out. Discovering the bicycles only confirmed his worst fears.