Stefan Kiesbye - Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone

“Cat?” Anna asked. “Oh, I’m a witch, you should know,” she said and laughed. “Usually she sits on my shoulder.”

What happened next I can ascribe to only my fear and the long search for my friend. Anna had made a bad joke, but my nerves threatened to snap, and I didn’t comprehend why she would stand in a fur coat and sandals in front of me. “How do you kill a witch?” I said under my breath, and in one desperate move I jumped down the last remaining steps, raised my stick, and struck that fur-clad apparition. But I had aimed badly and hit only her shoulder. Anna screamed, and maybe I knew then what a terrible mistake I had made, but I also feared her loud voice, which would alert the miller to us. I wanted to shut her up. So I hit her again.

Yet in that moment I could hear a car approaching and then stopping outside the mill.

“Oh God,” said Anna. She pressed her hands to her head where I had struck her and lay on the ground now. “Oh God,” she said again, and her face turned crimson.

And all my fears returned. Anna was a witch, Anna was my best friend’s sister, and I had attacked and beaten her. And who was outside? I dropped my stick and ran down the hallway and into the kitchen as fast as I could. I opened the door and was about to storm out into the snow, when a tall figure, clad in dark clothes, blocked my way. But I couldn’t stop, ran into him, and together we tumbled into the snow. I was first to get back on my feet and made toward the woods. I ran, ran, a loud voice at my back ordering me to stop. But I kept going, and only after what seemed like an eternity, after I was thoroughly drained from working my way through the deep snow, did I finally stop, turn to make sure that no one was following me, and then drop to the ground. My face was hot and I welcomed the cold, buried my face only deeper in the snow. How long I lay there I don’t know, but shame, anger, and fear fought within me and cooled only after a long time.

It was dark around me when I finally got up again and slowly continued on my way home. I was cold and wet, and no matter how fast I walked my teeth chattered and my face stayed numb. How would I explain that I had struck Anna Frick? How could I confess to my father, the Gendarm , that his son might have to go to jail because he had assaulted the pub owner’s daughter? And this only one year after Broder had drowned in the Droste River? That time I’d been lucky, saved, because of my father’s influence, from sharing Alex’s fate.

That it had indeed been Anna Frick and not a witch was all too clear to me, but while I trudged home, I slowly gained confidence that I would get away with my crime once again. I wouldn’t have to follow in Alex’s footsteps and leave the village. Maybe Anna wouldn’t tell her dad about the mill, about Martin Schürholz and his attack on her.

When I got back to Hemmersmoor and saw the lights in the windows and the candles on the Christmas trees, which were maybe lit for the last time that year, I breathed more easily. And when I finally sat down at the dinner table and we started eating what was left of the goose, and my mother told me that one day I would freeze to death because of my foolishness, and my dad asked where the hell I had been all this time, I told them about the Black Mill. I hadn’t found Bernhard, no matter how hard I had tried. My parents shook their heads, and my sister, Birgit, laughed. “Did you think the Black Miller was holding him hostage?” she asked.

Of my new secret, I didn’t speak to them. I didn’t say a word about Anna. Mr. Frick never came to our doorstep to talk to my father about the matter. The dark figure I had toppled back at the mill was no ghost or wizard. Only one family in Hemmersmoor owned a sedan that wouldn’t quite fit our narrow streets, a black Mercedes, which all children eyed with curiosity and jealousy. I had never seen Rutger von Kamphoff, and yet I knew immediately who was lying underneath me in the snow. And slowly I understood that, as far as it concerned me, it might as well have been a ghost. Rutger wouldn’t come after me.

“And did you see a witch come flying out of the smokestack?” my sister sneered.

I bit my lips, shook my head, lowered it, and slowly counted to thirty.

Käthe Grimm followed the gaze of a howling dog when she was seventeen and ever since had been seeing will-o’-the-wisps, frightful funeral processions after dark, and weddings of the undead, the faces of the bride and groom torn from the bone. We had many ghost seers in Hemmersmoor, but they could be cured by a friend’s over-the-shoulder gaze. For Käthe, it was too late, however—no spell could reverse the damage done by a howling dog.

She had been courted by many men in her youth; now, in her late thirties, she was fat, and warts disfigured her once pleasant features. Her strawberry-blond hair looked dull and was thinning. After she paid a visit to the general store or the apothecary, people found it on shelves and counters.

We all knew her middle-of-the-day outbursts, her high shrieks, wide-open and terrified eyes, her fingers pointing this way and that. Yet we didn’t see a thing, and we stopped searching. We hardly heard, anymore, her pleading with ghosts to spare her. Still, before crossing her path girls crossed themselves—we did not want to share her predicament. We wanted to get married.

In the summer four of us spent our long afternoons in Anke’s room, clipping pictures of fantastical dresses from the catalogs her mother received by mail. We dreamed of wedding dresses made from brocade and with long trains, of millionaires in sports cars who would glance only once at us before whisking us away to other countries and continents.

Anke turned a thick notebook with hard, black covers into her wedding book. It contained not only a picture of her dress but also photos of wedding cakes, silverware, and tablecloths. She planned every small detail, and we mocked her because she had cut off the heads of the grooms and drawn new ones.

“Looks like Rutger von Kamphoff,” I said.

“He’s chasing after Anna.” Sylvia was the tallest of us and had been the first to get breasts. She’d kissed two boys, while neither Johann nor Torsten had ever asked me again if I wanted to kiss them behind the school or by the river at night.

“It can’t be,” Anke said infuriated.

“Sure can,” Sylvia replied.

“He’ll never marry her. Never ever.”

“As if you stood a chance.”

Anke closed her book and pouted.

When our dreams became too sticky, we ran to the old cloister. The Swedes had destroyed it in the Thirty Years’ War and raped and killed the nuns hiding inside. The order had moved to the south, past Bremen, and never tried to rebuild. Among the ruins we played our favorite scenes from “Sleeping Beauty,” Romeo and Juliet , and Antigone , and we loved the tragic endings of the latter, and let Sleeping Beauty die of grief over her prince’s sad fate at the hands of a wizard, dragon, or resurrected stepmother.

On our way through the village, Käthe would stammer about nine dead children playing hide-and-seek with her. She looked more worn than usual, could always be seen eating crusts of bread as if to ward off evil spirits. Sometimes we snuck up behind her and cried “Boo!” then ran off, not listening to her curses.

“Nine dead children,” Sylvia said. “And if they really do exist?”

“She’s crazy, always was,” Anke answered. I had hardly spent any time with her last summer. On the afternoons I didn’t spend at the manor, she usually disappeared to meet the boys at the Black Mill. “Nine dead children. Where would they come from?” She never told me anything about those afternoons she spent with Martin and Christian and the others, but now she didn’t want to have anything to do with those “stupid boys.” She was way ahead of me. “Käthe says they’re all siblings.” She tipped her finger to her forehead.