After I had finished speaking to Bianca I went upstairs to the flat and locked the door behind me. I put my baker’s whites into the washing machine and sat down at the kitchen table to think. I had made myself a sandwich but I couldn’t face eating it. The moist pink slice of ham in the middle of it reminded me irresistibly of Achim’s face, flushed with unspeakable ardour. After that thought had occurred to me I couldn’t even look at it any more. I got up and tipped the whole lot into the bin.
It’s not just me, I thought. If what Bianca said was true, Achim was systematically harassing every single one of the girls in the bakery. I had got off lightly so far, it appeared, probably because I was the boss’s daughter. On one occasion when Bianca had gone into the kitchen when Achim was alone there, he had put both of his repulsively clammy hands right down the front of her blouse. Now that my father was out of the picture altogether for some time to come, there was no knowing what he might try.
But that was not all. Bianca told me that Achim had the unpleasant habit of relieving some of the girls of their day’s tips. Even before she had finished describing what he did, I could very well imagine it: the slimy remarks sliding inexorably towards implied threats and finally outright bullying. She had ended by warning me to keep a close eye on the takings. Now that both my parents were absent, she thought there was no knowing what Achim would do.
The question was, what was I going to do about it?
Think, think, I told myself. I tried to consider all the options again, mentally spreading them out before me like a deck of cards. It was really impossible to consider speaking to my parents, a fact that Achim was no doubt depending on. Could I talk to Max? I quickly rejected that notion. If I approached Max for anything he would be bound to use it as a bargaining chip to try to get me to wish something for him in return. Julius? I dismissed that idea too. Assuming that I could get over the awkwardness between us, I was quite sure that Julius would want to help, but I had the instinctive feeling that he would suggest something honest and reasonable, like talking to Achim, which I knew perfectly well would do no good at all. I had to act now, or the next attempt he made would be worse. I didn’t want to think what might happen next; my imagination simply shied away from it.
In the end there was really only one answer and it lay hidden in the woods to the north of the town, a grey and crumbling bulk whose walls were carved with silent screams of hate and fury. I thought about Kai, his handsome face twisted with anger into an ugly gargoyle. I thought about Achim Zimmer saying, You’re going to like me a lot. You’ll see. And I thought about Rote Gertrud, dragged out of her house by a shrieking mob. I supposed most of them had been men too. I wondered if the accusations of child murder had been true. Perhaps they simply couldn’t stand the fact that a woman was living there alone, independent of any of them. Perhaps she had turned some of them down, laughed at them even, tossing her gleaming red hair. So they had burned her, working their own brutal magic, turning living flesh into ashes and sticks, a heap of black cinders to be torn away by the wind, up into an empty sky.
Why me? I thought. Why does the magic work for me and only me?
In stories, heroes and heroines always discover that the reason why strange things happen around them is that they are marked out in some way, that something sets them apart from other people: elvish blood, for example, or special powers handed down from father to son. I couldn’t think of a single thing that set me apart from anyone else. I was an ordinary girl, with an average education and possibly the most uninspiring prospects in the world. I wasn’t a mysterious orphan, nor even the eldest child; in fact, I strongly suspected that I had been an accident and wasn’t even supposed to be here at all. There was nothing I could see that would single me out for the witch’s blessing – or curse.
But I had wished Frau Kessel dead and she died.
There was no escaping from that. However I looked at it, the thing was too much of a coincidence, especially when you considered that my malign powers had apparently wiped out Klara Klein too.
My mind skipped back to the ruined house in the wood, to the day my sister had taken me there. Magdalena had wished Frau Kessel dead too, but it hadn’t worked for her. So it wasn’t just the house and it wasn’t something to do with my family. It was me. I was the focus for whatever was happening. There was no point in saying that I had never asked for this ability; it seemed I simply had it. I was like the shard of glass lying in a dry summer meadow that refracts the sun’s rays and causes the fire that ravages the field, turning the gold to black.
The question remained: was I going to curse Achim Zimmer? I stared down at my own hands, clasped as tightly as claws on the tabletop in front of me, and wondered why I even bothered asking the question.