How can it be?” said Stefan. He looked dazed. “How can we be… here?”
I glanced at Herr Düster, as though being the only adult he might produce a rational explanation. Herr Düster was the only one of us who didn’t look as though he were overwhelmed with surprise. He looked grave and incalculably sorrowful, like a doctor at a deathbed.
“My brother…” He pronounced the words strangely, as though rolling an unfamiliar and bitter taste around his mouth. “My brother’s house,” he said eventually.
“But it can’t be,” I said, as if I were pointing out an obvious fact to the very stupid. “It can’t be Herr Schiller’s house. I mean…”
My voice trailed off. I looked around me again. We were in a narrow hallway, one that I knew. I had stood very close to this spot a hundred times, perhaps more, shrugging my coat off my shoulders so that Herr Schiller could hang it on one of the pegs. I put out a hand and touched the shining dark surface of the hall table. It felt hard and cool under my fingers.
“Did he-you know-” I didn’t want to say the murderer “-I mean, how did he get in here? How could he go through the cellar without Herr Schiller-” I looked from Herr Düster to Stefan, not understanding their expressions “-without Herr Schiller knowing?” I finished.
There was a long silence. The two of them, old man and boy, were staring at each other. Something was passing between them that I didn’t understand.
“He’s gone,” said Stefan in a tight voice.
“Yes,” said Herr Düster, but his lips barely moved, and his voice was very low.
“I’ll look…” said Stefan, and he went to the front door and tried the handle. It opened easily and the door swung open. Stefan leaned out. I could see that a considerable amount of snow had fallen since we entered Herr Düster’s house; everything outside was blanketed with pure white. It was still falling; when Stefan pulled his head back inside, his hair was covered with melting white flakes. He came up to Herr Düster like a foot soldier reporting to his sergeant.
“I couldn’t see him-but there’re tracks.”
Herr Düster nodded, almost absently.
“I’m not sure, but I think they went around the side of the house.”
“The car, yes,” said Herr Düster, almost inaudibly. He seemed sunk in thought.
“What car?” I asked, but no one answered me.
“Do you know where-?” asked Stefan, and I shot him a look of frustration; everyone seemed to be talking in code.
Herr Düster nodded. “I think so. Yes, I think so.”
“What are you going on about?” I was almost hopping with annoyance. “Look, why don’t we wake Herr Schiller up?”
“Pia-”
“We’re in his house, after all.”
“Yes, his house,” said Herr Düster with gentle emphasis. Still I didn’t get it.
“Pia,” said Stefan in a tired voice, “it’s Herr Schiller. Don’t you see?”
“What do you mean?” I stared at him. “What do you mean, it’s Herr Schiller?”
“It’s Herr Schiller who…” Stefan changed tack at the last moment, as though swerving to avoid an obstacle. “It’s him we have to follow,” he said. “He’s the one who’s gone.”
“I don’t understand-” I began, but suddenly I did. A wave of nausea swept over me. I sagged back against the wall with the pattern of foliage on it. “No,” I said in a strangled voice.
Stefan looked at me helplessly. Then he turned back to Herr Düster. “We have to go. We have to go right now.” I was being dismissed.
“Stefan, this is a joke, right?” I said. My voice sounded unconvincing even to my own ears. “Where are we going? Shouldn’t we call the police-if someone-?”
“We don’t have time.” His voice was cool, but he was not trying to be unpleasant. He was stating a fact: if there were even the remotest chance of finding the owner of the boot before it was too late we had to leave now. If we waited we would lose any chance of catching-him. The one who had taken all those girls. The one who had left me in the well to drown among the wallowing horrors. I could only think of him as the one, not as Herr Schiller. It was impossible.
“Pia, you stay here.”
“No! No way, no…” I was stuttering in outrage. “No, you’re not leaving me here! I’m coming with you.”
“Pia.” Herr Düster sounded remarkably calm, although he must have been as aware as Stefan was of the seconds ticking by, the minutes trickling away, snowflakes twirling lazily down from the black sky and blanketing the tracks in snow. “You are soaked through. You can’t go out in the snow. You’ll freeze to death.”
“You said a car,” I pointed out sulkily.
“His car,” said Stefan.
“Yes, but you can’t follow him unless you go in one too,” I retorted. I glared at Stefan. He regarded me for a moment and then turned to Herr Düster.
“We have to go.”
Herr Düster looked at me for a long moment. If he were any other adult in the world I think he would have insisted that I stay inside in the warm. But either Herr Düster had been out of the company of other adults so long that he had forgotten the way things were supposed to be done, or he was one of those rare people who do not treat children as though they are completely incapable. He nodded sharply to me and said, “Pia, you may come with us, but you must stay in the car. Verstanden?”
“Yes.” I was breathless in my gratitude.
“Stay here, both of you, while I fetch the car.”
“But-” I started, but he cut me off.
“He’s not coming back. Not for a while, anyway. You’re quite safe here.”
I shut my mouth but I felt uneasy. My objection to staying in the house was not that I was afraid of Herr Schiller coming back, but that it gave Herr Düster the opportunity to go off without us. All the same, I could see the logic of his plan when he opened Herr Schiller’s front door: the icy draft on my wet jeans was so glacially cold that the skin of my legs felt as though it were burning off. I hugged the down jacket around me. My teeth were chattering.
“This is crazy,” said Stefan, not unkindly. “You should stay here, Pia. You’re going to freeze to death.”
“No way,” I said, clamping my mouth shut to try to stop the chattering.
“I wonder how he knows where-you know, where he went?” said Stefan.
“Um.” I couldn’t think of any reply. That Herr Schiller should have had any involvement at all in the disappearances of my schoolmates was terrifying enough; to try to imagine where he might have gone to and for what reason was completely beyond me. I still had the feeling that I might wake up and discover the whole thing was some kind of outlandish dream.
For what seemed like ages Stefan and I stood in the hallway of our friend’s home and waited for Herr Düster to arrive with the car. There was a feeling of subdued expectancy about the situation, as though we were the survivors of some bloody accident, waiting for the ambulance to arrive. I could not think of anything to say and it seemed that neither could Stefan, so for a long time we stood there in silence.
I was starting to wonder whether Herr Düster had gone off without us, when I suddenly heard a slight sound behind me. It was a soft sound, the sound of a velvet curtain brushing the floor, but it struck me cold. I do not know whether it is true that at such times the hair on the back of one’s neck stands up, but I felt as though an icy hand had been placed there. Before I could turn around or say anything, the soft slithering was followed by a sound like someone clearing their throat.
“Ste-fan…” I thought I might faint or be sick.
“What?”
“There’s something…” I forced myself to turn around.
There in the cellar doorway sat Pluto, regarding us balefully with his great yellow eyes. As I watched, his mouth yawned open, revealing a pink tongue and needle-sharp teeth, and he spat again. Then he turned with sinuous swiftness and disappeared down the spiral stairs.
Stefan exhaled slowly at my shoulder. “Verdammter cat.”
I nodded, swallowing.
“Are you all right? Did he scare you?”
“Not really. I just thought…” But I was not sure what I had thought. Useless to try to describe the grotesque ideas that had flitted through my brain when I heard that soft whispering noise and the rasping sound. I had stepped into trolldom that night, and now nothing was too horrible to be true. The monsters are loose, I thought, and my mind skidded neatly around the memory of what I had seen in the well.
“That’s how he got into Herr Schiller’s house,” said Stefan suddenly. He touched my arm. “You remember, that time he made us jump?” He had conveniently forgotten that it was he who had jumped, he who had screamed the place down. Still, I couldn’t be bothered to correct him. I nodded. Stefan was still looking at the doorway where the cat had been. At last he gave a low whistle.
“No wonder Herr Schiller went mad when he saw him. He must have known Pluto came through the cellar. He probably didn’t shut the door properly.” He shook his head disbelievingly. “I bet he thought Pluto had given the whole game away.”
I wasn’t listening. I was thinking of the moment before I fell into the well, of the sounds I had heard and the thing that had brushed against my leg and made me panic so that I sprang forward into nothingness. Pluto. I was thinking that if I ever got hold of him I would like to put my hands around that furry throat and strangle him.