The funny thing is, I never even meant the first one. I had nothing against Klara Klein, nothing at all. It was Max who started it, with his plan to visit the witch’s house.
There were six of us: Max and Jochen, both of them tall and well built, but Max sprouting a head of unruly dark hair while Jochen had blond curls; Izabela, who had slightly exotic looks and an accent, both inherited from her Romanian mother; robust, dark-haired Hanna, who went through her life with her chin out; wiry, compact Timo, who had been my boyfriend for three years; and me, Steffi Nett, the shy blonde one. Six of us, but as usual it was Max who came up with the plan.
I knew it was a crazy idea, just the same as it was a crazy idea to go skinny-dipping in the Steinbach dam that time, or steal stale pastries from my parents’ bakery kitchen to see who could eat the most. Max and Jochen were always egging each other on. It was a pattern that had started when we were in kindergarten together and it showed no sign of changing. When Max and Jochen are both in their nineties and sitting side by side in easy chairs in the old people’s home at Otterbach they will probably still be putting each other up to all manner of idiocy, stealing each other’s hearing aids and trying to peer up the orderlies’ skirts.
I can recall the precise instant when this particular scheme occurred to Max. It was the last night of April and the first dry evening of a wet week. We were waiting in the snack bar on the Orchheimer Strasse, all six of us, because Jochen had decided that he couldn’t do anything unless fortified with a Currywurst beforehand.
I was standing at the big plate-glass window, staring out. There was a red sports car idling at the other side of the street, a streamlined monster with gleaming bodywork. I didn’t need to look closely to see who was behind the wheel, but I did anyway. Kai von Jülich. Blond, blue-eyed and staggeringly gorgeous. Wealthy too; I didn’t know anyone else in Bad Münstereifel whose parents could have bought them a car like that, even Max, whose family were very well off. Kai was only a year or two older than me, but he might just as well have come from a different planet.
I realized with a start that Kai’s head had turned. He was looking towards the snack bar and had almost certainly seen me gazing out at him. Instantly I turned away, my face burning with embarrassment. To my relief, no one seemed to have noticed my confusion. Timo wasn’t even looking my way; he was looking at Izabela instead.
Max was lounging against one of the tables, idly looking at the calendar on the wall of the bar, with its large glossy illustration of a motorbike, and jiggling one denim-clad leg in impatience. Suddenly he said, ‘It’s Walpurgisnacht.’
‘So what?’ said Timo.
‘So we should … ’ Max paused and considered for a moment. ‘We should go to Rote Gertrud’s house.’
‘Rote Gertrud?’ asked Izabela. Not having been born in the town, Izabela had not grown up with the tale of Red Gertrud, the Witch of Schönau.
Max expanded on the theme as we left the snack bar, Jochen having collected his curried sausage. ‘Rote Gertrud, the witch, right? Only not an ugly old bag like they normally are. She’s supposed to have been … ’ He broke off and outlined an hourglass figure with his hands. ‘You know, hot. She had a house way out in the middle of the forest, right off the track, where nobody ever goes. This was three hundred years ago.’
‘Four hundred,’ said Timo.
‘Three hundred, four hundred, who cares? Whatever,’ said Max. ‘Anyway, get this. The house is still there. They burned the witch but they left the house standing, and it’s still up there, in the woods. And since it’s Walpurgisnacht, when the witches are supposed to fly, we should go up there and see if Rote Gertrud is flying too.’
‘That’s a –’ began Timo, and I was pretty sure he was going to say crap idea, but Jochen interrupted him.
‘What? That place in the Eschweiler Tal? You’re crazy.’ There was no mistaking the admiration in his voice. He took an enormous bite of Currywurst, and not for the first time I wished that he would learn to chew with his mouth closed. ‘What’re we gonna do up there? Hold a black mass or something?’
Max looked at him as though he had just invented the Theory of Relativity. He slapped Jochen on the back. ‘Genius. That’s exactly what we’re going to do.’
‘We are?’
‘Course we are.’ If Max saw the glances Hanna and I exchanged, with much rolling of the eyes, he chose to ignore them. ‘We’re going to have a black mass and call up Gertrud’s ghost.’
‘Isn’t that a seance?’ asked Izabela. She had her arms around her slender body, hugging herself; it might have been for warmth, but I thought she looked apprehensive.
Max was unperturbed. ‘Black mass, seance, whatever it is, we’ll do it.’
‘It’ll be pitch dark up there and the ground’ll be wet,’ objected Timo.
‘So?’ Max shot him an evil look. ‘Got a better idea?’ He gestured towards the posters taped to the snack-bar window. ‘Want to go to the jazz night at the old people’s home?’
Having demolished all audible opposition, Max led the way to the car. Timo was walking a little apart from the rest of us, his face a mask of resentment. He knew he had been checkmated. Izabela took the opportunity to drift over and speak to me, appearing at my elbow like a thin, dark-haired wraith.
‘Steffi? The Eschweiler Tal, isn’t that where that guy who did all the murders is supposed to have put the bodies?’
I knew exactly whom she meant. Everyone in the town knew the story, though we didn’t talk about it much: it was like the scar of some horrible wound, healed over but still visible, something which gave you trouble on damp mornings but was otherwise best ignored.
‘One of them,’ I said reluctantly. ‘I think they found the rest in a house in the town.’
Actually I did not just think this, I knew it for a fact, and like everyone else whose family had been in the town at the time, I could have pointed out the house itself; I could have named the killer. But Izabela’s family had moved to Bad Münstereifel afterwards; to them the story of the killer who stole the town’s children from the streets was a newspaper article, a bloody tale as gruesome and as remote from everyday life as the legend of the eternal huntsman who roamed the Quecken hill.
‘Do we have to go there?’ she said in a low voice.
With her pale skin and strands of dark hair falling over her face, she might have been Snow White, begging the huntsman not to take her into the depths of the wood.
‘Max is right,’ cut in Hanna from behind us. ‘What else are we going to do?’ She gave Izabela a playful shove. ‘Come on. Maybe it’ll be fun.’
Izabela looked at me. I shrugged – and the die was cast.
Perhaps if I had sided with her, if the three of us girls had insisted on doing something else, we might not have gone to Gertrud’s house at all that night. We might never have tried to raise Gertrud’s ancient spirit, we might never have hit upon the plan of asking it to carry out our commands, and maybe all the things which happened afterwards would never have come about at all.
I’ve told myself since then that I couldn’t have done anything differently. Wasn’t I the shy one, the one who couldn’t even make Realschule, let alone the very academic Gymnasium, because I was too timid to say a word in class? The one who was studying to be a baker because she couldn’t find the right words to tell her parents that it was the last thing on earth she wanted to do? It would have been almost impossible for me to speak up, to change the way the evening went. That’s what I tell myself now, when regret becomes too bitter – I just couldn’t.