We reached the car red-faced and panting, almost choking with the exertion of running down the hill. My ankle was flaring with pain and Hanna had a long scratch on one forearm from running into a sharp twig. I sagged against the side of the Mercedes but dared not sink to the ground. It seemed to me that as soon as Hanna could unlock the car we should get away, putting as much space as we could between ourselves and whatever we had seen. I didn’t even like to say the name aloud, though it was hammering in my head like a painful drumbeat. Rote Gertrud. We had seen the witch, actually seen her, walking in the woods. I yanked on the car door, willing it to open, but Hanna was still fumbling with the keys.
Finally I heard the central locking click. I tore the door open, almost fell over myself in my haste to get inside, slammed the door and sat shivering in the passenger seat. I glanced out of the window at the shadowy border of the woods, willing there to be no sign of the black-clad figure, then squeezed my eyes shut, unable to bear the tension of looking. I heard Hanna getting into the driver’s seat and the door closing.
‘Go,’ I said. ‘Drive.’ My teeth were chattering.
The engine roared into life. There was another hail of gravel on the bodywork as the car pulled away; another focus for Herr Landberg’s fury when Hanna got the car home. At that moment, however, I couldn’t have cared less. Herr Landberg might ground Hanna for taking the car; he might ask both of us for a month’s wages to repair the bodywork. But I could not begin to imagine what Gertrud Vorn might want from us in exchange for granting our wishes.
Why now? I asked myself as I clung to the door handle, lurching from side to side as Hanna did a rough three-point turn and then roared back down the track. Why did she appear today and not before? But I remembered the first time we had been at the ruined house, all six of us. We had heard something then and tried to dismiss it as an animal – a deer or a wild pig. Perhaps even then the witch’s eyes had been upon us. Perhaps she would have approached us before, if we had stayed a little longer.
Perhaps it’s payback time, I thought, and my stomach seemed to turn over, nauseatingly, as though I had stumbled at the head of a flight of stairs. Guess who she’s coming for?