Seizing a candle and running to the cellar door, Marlene twice missed the lock.
The air that assaulted her was putrid, worse almost than the pigsty. She lit the candle and went down the steps, counting them as she went. Nine. Just like those leading to the sty. And, just like the sty, the cellar was much larger than she had imagined. It had the same walls of dark brick and smelled of lime and dung.
She saw it immediately. You couldn’t miss it.
In the middle of the cellar, almost touching the cobwebbed ceiling, stood a kind of monolith covered with a sheet. It was at least three metres high, almost two metres wide and just as deep. An imposing, enigmatic monolith that seemed to be daring her to take a peek at what was hidden beneath the sheet. Marlene took a step forward.
The sheet was not cloth but leather, leather made dark and shiny by time. Holding the candle out in front of her, she went closer. The leather was covered in tiny notches. By the light of the candle flame, they looked like scales. Marlene shuddered. She hated snakes. Usually, scales would have made her run away.
But the monolith was luring her in, and Marlene stepped forward to take a closer look.
They were not scales (how could they be? there were no snakes as big as that). They were incisions, burned in with a scalding iron or something similar.
Perfect circles.
She reached out, ready to pull off the cover and see what it concealed, but then she stepped on something that squeaked, stopping her in her tracks. She lowered the flame.
Rags. Except that rags did not squeak. With the tip of her boot, she lifted what remained of a check shirt and kicked it aside. Beneath the rags were bones.
The bones of mice, squirrels, marmots. She pushed away some wrapping paper and found more.
Slightly larger ones, like rabbit bones, or light ones, like birds of prey. Stag bones, deer, ibex. Bones scattered all over the floor.
Vulpendingen, she thought.
But that was not what she was here for. Nor was the monolith, although she was immensely curious.
Sodium pentothal, remember?
With difficulty, Marlene looked away. All around her was chaos. Clothes of all sizes thrown in the corners, mostly men’s clothes – boots, windcheaters – but women’s clothes, too, some reduced to shreds by time and insects. There were shelves, some ramshackle, others reinforced with wooden beams bristling with nails. All sorts of objects were stacked up on these shelves. Chipped cups, broken rucksacks, flasks. And books. Dozens, if not hundreds, of books. On the floor, a pair of small, round glasses glittered in the candlelight. What the hell was a pair of glasses doing here? She did not wonder for long, her attention drawn instead to the skulls hanging on the walls.
They were pig skulls. She counted six of them. Skulls covered in spider’s webs, which looked as if they were ready to pounce on her, maul her like—
Stop it.
She saw it on a shelf. A large box with a cross. Sodium pentothal. Red and white, as Keller had said.
Marlene took it from the shelf and turned it over in her hand. A pile of chemical substances, a pile of warnings printed on the outside. Inside, phials.
Anti-epileptic.
Epilepsy? Did pigs suffer from epilepsy? Still she did not go up the steps. With unprecedented violence, a thought took hold of her: Let that damned sow die.
Marlene could not do it.
She closed the door behind her, blew out the candle and ran to the pigsty.