Entering the jagged hole in the wall, I could see little more than the black shapes of Stefan and Herr Düster, backlit by the flashlight. Still, I could make out a little of the tunnel we were in, from the weak yellow light and the feel of the walls under my hands. They felt surprisingly regular: I thought I could feel the shape of bricks, as neatly fitted together as a garden path.
Somehow I had imagined the hole as an organic thing, a tunnel burrowed crudely through the earth as though by a monstrous mole. It had no right to be there, after all. But this tunnel was meant. Someone had taken the trouble to build a secret pathway underneath the Orchheimer Strasse, though what their motive might be I could not begin to guess.
It was long: we must be out from under Herr Düster’s house by now. The movement was bringing some sort of life back into my frozen limbs, though my legs felt as cold as a butcher’s slab, my sodden trousers sticking uncomfortably to my skin. I felt as though I had returned to myself; fear and excitement had sobered me up as smartly as a slap to the face.
Abruptly, Stefan stopped and I suddenly found myself pressed up against his back.
“What?” I asked excitedly. I could see absolutely nothing apart from the halo of the flashlight around his head.
“It is a room.” Herr Düster’s voice sounded oddly flat. I shoved at Stefan’s back.
“Go on.”
Stefan stepped forward, moving warily: I guessed that he was thinking of my fall into the well. Now that he was out of the way I could see a little of the room we were in.
“It’s someone’s cellar.” I could not keep the disappointment out of my voice. I had been expecting something more dramatic: a vampire’s crypt, or a mad scientist’s laboratory. Not this smugly dull room with its contents so neatly stored away.
Shelves filled one side of the cellar, stacked with boxes and crates. On the other side old furniture stood in a prim line, backs to the wall like old maids at a tea dance. A selection of garden tools had been hung up on hooks, spaced at exactly equal intervals, like a display in a museum. The only thing that was at all out of place was right at my feet: a pile of bricks, still with ragged chunks of mortar attached.
Herr Düster was standing in the center of the room, moving the beam of the flashlight slowly over the stacked shelves. He did not seem disposed to continue his pursuit of whomever or whatever it was we had heard escaping through the tunnel.
“Herr Düster, we have to go,” said Stefan, urgently.
The old man raised his head and looked at him.
“He’s getting away!” Stefan sounded beside himself. “We have to move.”
Herr Düster moved his head. I think he meant to shake it, but the movement was so slight that it looked as though he had simply turned his neck, as if there were something he didn’t wish to hear. The beam of light wavered along the line of shelves.
“We have to-” began Stefan.
“I think,” said Herr Düster, and his voice sounded curiously sad, “I think that we must call the police.”
“No,” said Stefan instantly. He gave a great sigh of exasperation. “If-if we go back now and call them, he’ll get away.”
Herr Düster said something in such a low voice that neither of us could hear what it was. Then he said, more loudly, “It is for the police. Not for-children.”
“Verdammt!” snapped Stefan. He actually stamped his foot, like a small child. His hands clutched the air in frustration, as though trying to tear something down. “We’re not babies.” He glared at Herr Düster. “We’ll go. Give me my flashlight back.”
Herr Düster didn’t move. Stefan took a step toward him, and Herr Düster involuntarily stepped back. The beam swung in a wide arc. Perhaps they would actually have come to a hand-to-hand struggle for the flashlight. However, as the beam swept across the cellar floor, I saw something.
“Look.”
They both followed the direction of my outstretched finger. Something lay on the stone floor, close by the claw feet of an ugly escritoire. A single boot. A girl’s boot made of pale pink suede with a fussy-looking fake-fur trim. The side zip was undone and the boot yawned open, exposing its furry throat.
“What is that?” said Herr Düster in a voice rimed with dread.
“It’s a boot,” said Stefan in the tone of someone stating an obvious fact. The real import of Herr Düster’s question, What in God’s name is that doing here? had passed him by. He stooped and picked it up. As he turned back to us, Herr Düster flinched. He looked at the boot as though it were some repulsive thing, a great spider or a decomposing rat. In the sickly light his seamed face looked more wrinkled than ever. The myriad lines on his ancient features seemed to shiver and reform under the influence of a powerful emotion, but what it was I could not tell.
“It’s probably from one of the girls, the ones-” I began, and stopped. I had been about to say the ones who went missing. But those girls were no longer missing; we knew where they were.
“Maybe,” murmured Stefan, turning the boot over in his hands. He looked at me. “Or maybe it’s a new one.”
I stared at him, my mouth open. Suddenly an image flashed across my mind: my father standing in the kitchen with the telephone in his hand, saying, “Kolvenbach” and “Mein Gott.” If my mother had not told him to just go, he would have said, “Another girl is missing.”
“Lieber Gott,” said Herr Düster quietly.
“Herr Düster-?” started Stefan.
The old man regarded him, an unfathomable expression on his face. Then, slowly, he nodded. “We will go. But,” he added somberly, before Stefan could take off like a greyhound, “as soon as it is possible, we will call the police. Verstanden?”
“Yes,” agreed Stefan instantly. He held the boot out to Herr Düster, but the old man shuddered and declined to touch it, so he stuffed it inside his own jacket.
Cautiously, we picked our way to the other end of the cellar. In the far right corner was an opening the size of a doorway but with no door across it. Stone stairs spiraled up out of sight. Stefan found a light switch on the wall by the staircase and tried it, but nothing happened. Either the bulb had blown or the power had been switched off.
Stefan made as if to start up the stairs, but Herr Düster laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.
“I will go first,” he said firmly. There was a challenging note in his voice that made me think of Oma Kristel’s reaction whenever my father or Onkel Thomas had told her to take things easy and think of her age. He began to climb the stone stairs, Stefan and I following as closely as we could.
Inevitably the stairs, having curled back on themselves, reached an abrupt end at a narrow and very firmly locked door. Herr Düster applied his shoulder to it and it jumped a little but did not open. However, the very fact that it had moved was encouraging; if it had been bolted in place from the other side I doubted it would have moved at all.
Stefan pushed past Herr Düster and hurled himself at the door, thumping it with his shoulder like an American football player so that it rattled in the frame. But still nothing happened. Herr Düster and I crowded onto the lower steps to give him more room.
This time Stefan aimed a mighty kick at the lock. I listened in frank amazement to wood splintering. More and more I had the impression that Stefan lived his life in some sort of imaginative action movie. He launched another kick and with a mighty crack! the door gave way and swung open, almost precipitating him on the other side. He steadied himself and would have started through the doorframe, but Herr raised a finger to his lips to indicate that we should stay silent and listen first.
I could see very little of what was on the other side of the door, since both Stefan and Herr Düster were now crowded into the frame. I could make out a wall papered with a rather old-fashioned design, and the side of a light-brown lampshade lit from within by a low-wattage bulb. The lamp was nondescript but the wallpaper pattern gave me pause: it was somehow familiar. Wreaths of stylized foliage, faded green and brown against an ivory background. Every so often there was a curling leaf shape faintly reminiscent of a fish.
Gently, I pushed at Stefan’s back. “Let me out.” As he moved forward I stepped out into the room behind him. We stood, side by side, Herr Düster’s presence forgotten. I could hear Stefan panting from the exertion of kicking in the door; he sounded as though he had been running. He was staring about him like a tourist in a cathedral, as though he couldn’t quite take in everything he was seeing. At last he turned to me, with the words on his lips, but I got there first.
“I know this house.”