I don’t remember what I dreamed, something terrible I suppose, because when I woke the pillow was soaked with tears and I had such a fierce migraine that it almost turned my stomach. I had to close my eyes tight and wait for the world to come back onto its axis.
I had drunk quite a lot after the screening. I remember little or nothing of what happened later.
The end credits, grim and relentless, which concluded with “In memory of the brave men of Dolomite Mountain Rescue,” and the applause, timid at first, then a torrent.
Mike looking around, relieved, while to me the noise seemed like nothing so much as the laughter of the Beast. Annelise brushing me with a kiss, and then leaning over to console Clara, who was in tears, her hair disheveled.
I don’t know if it was the applause or the sight of my daughter sobbing in my wife’s arms that made me go to town on the booze; the fact is that when Maddie Grady put one of her Martians in my hand, I knocked it back in one go.
The rest was all downhill.
I remember the odd fragment of the ride back to Siebenhoch. Stopping outside a hotel in which Mike and Linda Lee were to spend the rest of the night. The road shrouded in darkness, the outline of the chauffeur against the light, Clara sleeping in Annelise’s lap, Annelise replying patiently to my drunken questions—I don’t remember what they were, only the urgency with which I asked them.
The stairs.
The bed.
* * *
Slowly, the spasms of pain in my temples became less intense and I realized I was alone.
It was cold.
I got up, moving like a hundred-year-old. I checked the window. It was locked. There was light, though, coming from the corridor. Maybe Annelise had gone down to the kitchen for a snack, or maybe I was snoring so loudly that she had decided to spend the night on the couch in the study. I felt a pang of remorse.
I tiptoed into the bathroom, rinsed my face, and took a couple of painkillers. I drank a little water. I ruffled my hair in front of the mirror, trying to assume a vaguely presentable air.
The light was on in the study, the door slightly ajar. I knocked.
“Annelise?”
No reply.
I went in. Annelise wasn’t there. The computer on the desk was on, I could see the LED flashing intermittently. I shook the mouse. When the monitor came back on again, I had to hold onto the desk in order not to fall to the floor. I had spent too many hours on the file I found open in front of me not to recognize what it was. The notes I’d made during that downward spiral that had led me from a few words heard by chance at the Visitors’ Center all the way to the entrails of the Bletterbach, by way of Siebenhoch’s ghosts, Brigitte’s death, and Max and Werner’s confessions. The file on the Bletterbach killings. The one I had thrown into the recycle bin on the desktop but which, foolishly, I hadn’t deleted.
Annelise had read it.
Now she knew.
She knew the truth about Kurt, Evi, and Markus. About the man she had called father and the woman she had called mother. About what had happened to Oscar Grünwald. About the justice of the forefathers.
About my broken promises.
“Annelise?” I called out.
It was almost an entreaty.
No answer.
The house was shrouded in silence. I went downstairs, barefoot. My ears were plugged up, everything was muffled. The front door was wide open. The wind was blowing hard. There was water on the threshold. It was raining. In the sky, the clouds were a compact sheet of lead. My stomach contracted.
“Annelise?” I moaned.
I don’t know how long I would have stayed there, paralyzed, if Clara’s sleepy voice hadn’t shaken me.
“Papà?”
“Go to bed, sweetheart.”
“What’s happening, Papà?”
I expelled all the air I had in my lungs, took a deep breath, then turned. I had to be reassuring. I had to be strong. I smiled and Clara smiled back.
“Everything’s fine, ten letters.”
“Are you all right, Papà?”
“I have a bit of a stomach ache. I’ll make myself some tea and then go to bed. You should be asleep.”
Clara started playing with a strand of her hair. “Papà?”
“Clara,” I said, “go to bed, please.”
“The door’s open, Papà. The rain’s coming in.”
“To bed.”
I probably said it too aggressively, because her eyes grew bigger. “Where’s Mamma?”
“To bed, sweetheart.”
Clara tugged at the strand of hair, then turned on her heels.
She obeyed. I was alone.
“Annelise?”
I was answered by the dry boom of thunder. I headed for the door. I could feel the cold water under the soles of my feet. I tried not to slip. I looked.
The car wasn’t there.
I can’t remember much of the next few minutes, which I spent overwhelmed by anxiety and a sense of guilt. I only know that I somehow found myself dressed, with my cell phone in my hand and Max’s voice in my ears.
“Calm down, Salinger, calm down and tell me everything from the beginning.”
“Annelise,” I said. “The Bletterbach.”
I don’t know how much Max guessed, but I must have scared him quite a bit because his reply was, “I’ll be right there.”
I hung up. I stood there staring at the phone. I put it down on a cabinet.
I climbed the stairs, trying to slow my breathing.
“Sweetheart?” I said, entering Clara’s room.
She lay curled up under the blankets in a fetal position. She looked much younger than her five years. She had her thumb in her mouth.
“Mamma?” she asked hopefully.
I sat down on the bed, even though every fiber in my body was urging me to start running. “We’re going to fetch her now.”
“Where has she gone?”
“Ops’s.”
“Why?”
I had no answer for that.
“We have to get dressed, Max will be here soon and we have to be ready for him.”
If Clara had questions to ask me, she didn’t ask them. She was silent all the time it took me to dress her.
By the time the headlights of the Forest Rangers’ 4x4 cut through the darkness outside the house, Clara and I were in the doorway, well wrapped up in heavy rainproof coats.
Max got out of the car without switching off the engine. The wreaths of smoke from the exhaust pipe, tinged red by the headlights, assumed demonic shapes. I pushed Clara toward the back door and opened it for her.
“Annelise knows everything,” I said to Max.
“How did that happen?”
“She read my notes.”
Max clenched his jaw. “You’re a fool.”
“We have to go.”
“To Werner’s?”
I nodded.
* * *
Annelise wasn’t at Welshboden. Werner’s property was shrouded in darkness.
My father-in-law’s jeep wasn’t there, while mine had its door wide open. The house was empty.
I felt my eyes fill with tears. I wiped them with the back of my hand.
I didn’t want Clara to see me in that condition. She was already scared enough.
“I think you know where they went,” I said, looking straight in front of me.
Max didn’t reply. He reversed and set off in the direction of the Bletterbach.
I summoned up my courage, turned and said, “We’re going on an excursion, ten letters.”
“It’s raining, Papà.”
“It’ll be a kind of adventure.”
Clara shook her head slowly. “I want to go home.”
I reached out my hand and brushed her cheek. “Soon.”
“I want Mamma.”
“Soon, sweetheart. Soon.”
I felt my voice crack.
“Do you like music, Clara?” Max asked.
“Yes.”
He switched on the car radio. A cheerful little tune flooded the inside of the vehicle. It was Louis Armstrong.
“This is my favorite,” Max said, and sang, “When the Saints go marching in . . .”
A glimmer of a smile on Clara’s face.
“Am I out of tune?”
“A little.”
“That’s because the volume’s too low,” Max replied. And he started singing again at the top of his voice.
Clara laughed, raising both her hands to her ears.
I gave Max a grateful glance and laid my head back against the seat. The painkillers had started to take effect. The migraine had been reduced to a kind of undertow of pain.
Outside the 4x4, rain and darkness. Inside, Louis Armstrong.
It was crazy. Totally crazy.
When we got to the entrance of the Visitors’ Center, we noticed Werner’s jeep parked sideways and the gate wide open.
Max switched off the engine. The music stopped abruptly.
“We have two possibilities, as far as I can see,” I said.
“Three,” Max said. “The third is: we stay here and wait.”
It was as if I hadn’t heard him. “The cave or . . . there.”
There where everything had started. The place where Kurt, Evi, and Markus had met their deaths. Where Annelise had been born a second time.
“Or else we stay here,” Max repeated. “With Clara.”
I shook my head. There was no time to lose. I opened the door. “Are you coming with us?”
* * *
We were soaking wet even before we’d gone the first hundred meters. The rain was coming down as if it wanted to drown the whole world, and us with it. Up until that day, rain had meant something quite different to me. It was a nuisance that an umbrella or a windshield wiper brushed away. That night, I saw it for what it really was. Ice-cold water that oozed darkness and brought not new life, but death. It uprooted plants and killed animals, drowning them in their lairs. It got into clothes and made people lose heat. Heat is life.
Around us, the gorge of the Bletterbach roared. It wasn’t a single voice, it was a chorus in which one instrument was added to another until it produced a cacophony that was sometimes unbearable. Even the pouring of the rain sounded different depending on the surface on which it was beating. The deep tolling of the chestnut tree, the crystalline one of the red fir tree. The pounding on the rocks.
Many voices, one message. The Bletterbach was admonishing us not to defy it.
But nothing could stop me.
Annelise was there, somewhere (even though I knew perfectly well where), in the deep. She was wounded. If not physically, certainly in her soul. And that wound was my fault.
Clara was holding my hand, head bowed. She was walking quickly, although the mud had made her trousers heavy and swollen. I would have liked to hold her in my arms, but she had refused. Rather than waste time arguing, I had done as she wanted, vowing that when I noticed signs of her weakening I would persuade her to let me help her.
Every now and again I heard her singing in a low voice. It was her way of giving herself courage.
I envied her.
I had nothing but the guidance of Max, who was in front of me in the mottled darkness.
I tried to visualize Annelise’s face. The freckles around her nose, the way she bent her neck as she came closer to kiss me. I couldn’t do it. I saw only the pain with which she had uttered her ultimatum. Either her or the story of the killings. I had chosen the dead, and the dead had taken their revenge on me by snatching her away.
It was a stupid thought. The dead are dead. I remembered some graffiti written on the wall of a bar bathroom in Red Hook. “Life sucks, but death is worse.”
Evi, Kurt, and Markus weren’t responsible for what was happening.
I was responsible.
I had forgotten (or maybe I hadn’t had the courage) to delete the file with my notes. It was my fault that Annelise had found it.
But what on earth had driven Annelise to switch on my laptop in the dead of night and look through my files? Usually, I was the one who started searching for Christmas presents before I received them, not her. What had induced her to violate my privacy (and to be so determined as to check even the recycle bin)? It had to be something serious.
Something like . . .
I stopped.
Clara knocked into me and almost fell.
“Salinger?” came Max’s voice.
He was less than two meters in front of me and yet his silhouette merged with the shadows.
“It’s OK. It’s just . . .”
It’s just that when I get drunk, when I get seriously drunk, not after three or four glasses, not even after six or seven, but when the Martians take me and put me on their spaceship and give me a rollercoaster ride, I talk.
I talk in my sleep.
“Papà?”
Clara was still staring down at the ground.
“My shoes are dirty.”
“We’ll clean them.”
“Mamma will be angry.”
“Mamma will be happy to see us.”
We had been going for at least another three quarters of an hour before Clara stumbled. I quickly caught her and cleaned her cheeks with a handkerchief that Max gave me. There was no blood and Clara didn’t cry. My brave little girl.
“Now we have to go up a level,” Max said, pointing to a thicket of holm oaks above which a couple of red firs jutted. “There’s still quite a way to go, Salinger. According to my calculations, we have at least another two hours’ walk. Even more, in this rain. And Clara’s only a child,” he added, giving me a harsh look.
“Carry on.”
Max heaved a sigh and started clambering up the slope.
“Do we have to go up there, too?” Clara asked.
“It’ll be fun.”
“Is that where Mamma is?”
“Yes, it is. But to get there, I need your help, sweetheart.”
“What do I have to do?”
“I’ll hoist you on my back and you’ll have to hold on tight. Do you think you can do that?”
* * *
Two hours later, I had to stop. I was exhausted. I laid Clara down on the felled trunk of a pine, sheltered beneath a group of exceptionally large ferns.
She was finding it hard to keep her eyes open, and the hair that had escaped from under her hood was stuck to her face. It broke my heart to see her like that.
It was six in the morning, but there wasn’t even a hint of sunlight. The rain kept pouring down. And I’d become so accustomed to the thunder that I’d almost stopped hearing it.
I accepted Max’s thermos. I gave it first to Clara, then took a few sips myself. Sweet tea. It was like medicine.
The muscles of my back and legs were burning.
Max checked his watch. “Two minutes’ rest, no more. It’s cold.”
I collapsed on the ground, heedless of the mud.
“I haven’t yet thanked you, Max.”
“For what?”
I indicated myself and Clara, then the whole of the Bletterbach. “For this.”
“It’s a search and rescue operation. The stupidest of my entire career.”
“Call it what you want, but I’m indebted to you.”
“Make sure you don’t have a heart attack, keep that child warm, and I’ll consider the debt honored.”
I took Clara and hugged her to my chest. She had fallen asleep.
“How much longer?” I asked Max.
“Not much. If there was any sun, you could see the place from here.”
“We should be able to hear them, then.”
“With all this noise?” Max shook his head. “Not even if they used a megaphone. Now let’s go. Time’s up.”
I made to lift Clara, who barely protested, her eyes half-closed, but a terrible spasm in my back caused me to lurch forward.
“I’ll take the child,” Max said anxiously. “Is that OK with you, Clara?”
“It’s OK,” she murmured.
“Do you like my hat?” Max asked her.
“It’s funny.”
“And it’s warm.”
He put it on top of the hood of her coat. In spite of the rain, the lightning, and the crackling of the stones, I let out a laugh. “It suits you to a T, you know, ten letters? Maybe when you’re grown up, you could be a forest ranger, instead of a doctor.”
“I don’t know if I’d like that.”
“Why not?” Max asked, setting off again.
“Because where a doctor works, it doesn’t rain.”
* * *
I recognized the clearing even though I’d never been there before. From the forensics photographs, of course, but also from the accounts I’d heard.
The chestnut tree was more imposing than I had imagined it, and some of the fir trees must have fallen, because the edge of the precipice seemed closer compared with the photographs from ’85.
Annelise and Werner were under the rocky spur, the very same one under which Kurt and the others had camped. Werner was sitting with his back to the mountain and stroking Annelise’s hair. She was huddled between his legs. He raised a hand by way of greeting. Then he gently shook his daughter.
Clara slipped out of Max’s arms and threw herself on Annelise, who buried her in kisses.
“Here again,” Werner said, getting to his feet. His eyes were red.
He shook hands with Max.
“We’ve never really left it, have we, Werner?” Max replied.
“You didn’t tell me anything,” Annelise said, embracing me.
“I didn’t want . . .”
Annelise gently detached herself. “What?”
“I didn’t want you to be hurt.”
Annelise wiped away a tear. “Papà has told me everything.”
“What has Ops told you, Mamma?”
Annelise stroked Clara’s head. “Look how wet you are, sweetheart.”
“What has Ops told you?”
“A lovely story,” Annelise replied. “The story of the hunter who saves the princess from the monster.” She looked at Max. “The four hunters,” she corrected herself. “Werner, Günther, Hannes, and Max.”
“What happened to the monster?”
“The monster went back where it came from.” She looked me in the eyes. “I have that from a reliable source.”
“I . . .”
Annelise brushed my cheek with a kiss. “You’ve been reckless.”
The mountain was throbbing with electricity.
I was aware of what Werner had tried to explain to me in words, centuries before. The feeling of hostility in the Bletterbach. Hostility and age. Millions of years of an open-air graveyard in which monstrous creatures had breathed their last.
I thought of the blood of Kurt, Evi, and Markus.
I wondered if part of them were still here, in what they called “the deep.” Not on a biological level, of course. Wind, snow, water, and years had wiped out even the smallest DNA trace of Annelise’s parents.
But something, maybe on a more subtle level, a piece of something that we call the soul, must still be here, and it struck me, thanks to my wife’s kiss, that in spite of the Bletterbach, the thunder and the cold, at that moment the souls of Kurt and Evi were at peace. Thanks to Annelise.
And to the granddaughter they had never known.
“How many letters are there in the word ‘end,’ Clara?”
“Three,” she replied immediately.
“You know something, sweetheart? I need a hug. Will you give me one?”
Clara reached out to me, and as I had done an infinite number of times and as I hoped I would do an infinite number of times in the future, I lifted her and hugged her tight. Beneath the odor of the mud and the sweat, I smelled the smell of her skin and closed my eyes.
That smell was the casket in which all the happy moments of my life were kept. Cold pizza at five in the morning during the shooting of Road Crew. The Fight Club. Mein liebes Fraulein . . . Nebraska playing softly in the background. Annelise saying yes, in Hell’s Kitchen. The nine months of pregnancy. My reflection in the mirror murmuring that strange word: “Papà.” Mike’s opening his eyes wide, speechless for once, when I had told him that I would soon be a father and that he would be . . .
* * *
Suddenly, something went click in my mind.
* * *
Stunned, I laid Clara on the ground.
The Bletterbach no longer existed. Nor the rain. There was only that click.
And the memory of Mike’s dazed expression.
“January 3, 1985,” I said, in a choked voice. “January 3, Werner. Oh, God. Oh, God.”
“January 3,” Werner echoed, surprised. “Yes, Annelise’s real date of birth, but . . .”
I didn’t even listen to him.
The click was joined by another click and then another. An avalanche running quickly from a to z in a blinding explosion of horror.
Birthdays and triangles with the point at the top. And a soul that the implacable pressure of time had made as insensitive as rock, rock that, as had happened to the Bletterbach, had been damaged to such a point by hate as to bring into the light the unspeakable buried in the heart of every human being.
The substance of evil.
“What did the four of you do?” I murmured.
Werner was staring at me with eagle eyes that didn’t see. That hadn’t seen for thirty years, so blinded with love for Annelise that they hadn’t realized the obvious. Like those of Günther, hostage to his demons, or his brother Hermann with his sense of guilt and his determination to become someone. Like the eyes of Hannes, blinded with prejudice and then destroyed by the grief of his loss.
None of them had seen.
The answer had always been there, in plain sight. For all this time.
It was like a whiplash.
Adrenaline.
I raised my head, snarling. I grabbed a big branch from the chestnut, tore it off, scraping the palms of my hands as I did so, and clutched it like a sledgehammer.
“Annelise,” I ordered. “Take Clara and get out of here.”
“Salinger,” Annelise said, “calm down, please.”
“Go back. Now!”
I heard Clara whimper.
I ground my teeth.
“Jeremiah,” Werner said, “put down that branch.”
“Move away, Werner. I don’t want to hurt you. But if you take another step, I will.”
“God in heaven, son,” he said, incredulous. “What’s happening to you?”
“Do you have any rope with you?”
“In my rucksack, yes.”
“Then use it.”
Werner gave me a long, stunned look. “Use it?”
“You have to tie him up.”
“Tie who up?”
“Max. The Bletterbach monster. The killer of Evi, Kurt, and Markus.”
With each of these names I felt my anger increase.
And the clicks added one to another.
“That’s madness, Jeremiah,” Werner retorted. “It was Grünwald. He was crazy. You know that, too. He—”
“Grünwald was protecting them.”
“From who?”
“Jaekelopterus Rhenaniae,” I hissed.
“That’s all a lot of—”
“Grünwald,” I said, without taking my eyes off Max, who was motionless, “was really convinced that those monsters existed in the Bletterbach. He knew that Evi and Kurt would be coming down here on an excursion and when he heard that a storm was about to break out in this area he thought the underground lakes would overflow and release the Jaekelopterus. He sent the telegram and rushed here. He was crazy, but there was a logic in his madness. Isn’t that so, Chief Krün?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Max replied softly.
His calm made me furious. “January 3, Max!” I yelled. “Four months before the killings. Four!”
Was it possible that neither Annelise nor Werner understood?
It was all so damned simple.
“You know what my first thought was when Annelise told me she was pregnant? I thought I ought to tell Mike right away. Because Mike and I are friends and we always tell friends our good news. You and Markus were the only people who’d kept in touch with Evi and Kurt. And so you were the only people in Siebenhoch to know about the birth of Annelise. Evi and Kurt were your friends. You knew about the child. But why didn’t you tell Hannes or Werner when you organized the rescue party? It made no sense anymore to keep the secret.”
Werner turned pale. “What are you saying, Jeremiah?” he stammered.
He didn’t understand.
Or maybe he didn’t want to understand.
Because the consequences of my argument were catastrophic.
“You know what I’m paid for, Max? Constructing stories that start at a and end up at z. And in this case, a is the ringing of a telephone thirty years ago. At one end there’s you, and at the other . . . Who told you? Kurt? Evi? Or maybe the beginning of the story is Markus, in seventh heaven, knocking at your door to tell you that Evi’s pregnant but that nobody is to know about it. It doesn’t matter, I don’t think it was then that you decided to kill them. No.”
It was all so clear now.
“When Annelise was born, the two of you took the train and went to Innsbruck. Was it January? Or February? The important thing is that when you saw the baby, when you took her in your arms, it was then that you realized that Evi would never be yours, never. Because you loved her, didn’t you? Only, she’d chosen Kurt and had a daughter with him. That baby was the outward sign of their love. You couldn’t lie to yourself anymore, couldn’t hope anymore that they would part. That was the moment you decided to kill them.”
From a to b.
From b to c.
And then . . .
“But not immediately. Not then. They would have found you out, arrested you in a flash. You didn’t want to end up in prison. You continued to pretend. You wanted to kill them here. And for a very particular reason, isn’t that so?”
Max was shaking his head.
Thunder rumbled through the Bletterbach.
“Triangles,” I said. “Triangles with the point turned upward. The symbol that saved my life in the caves. Three triangles with the point turned upward. A crown, that’s what that symbol was. Krone, in German. Krün in dialect. It was your grandfather who carved those crowns on the walls of the mine, wasn’t it? He was responsible for safety. The mine and the caves, a single labyrinth nobody dares enter. You’re the last person in Siebenhoch to know them like the back of your hand. Did your grandmother take you there? Because madness doesn’t grow by itself. It settles. Layer by layer. It takes time. Years. It was her, wasn’t it? How much resentment did she transmit to you? How much hate did it take, Max?”
Max didn’t react.
His stupefied expression was perfect.
Worthy of an Oscar.
Or maybe he was genuinely surprised.
After thirty years, someone had discovered the truth.
“Madness settles in layers, and then hate eats into it until a hunger for blood emerges. It’s a slow, cold process. You waited. They were your friends, you knew them. You knew that sooner or later Kurt and Evi would go back to the place where their love was born. The place where you would be able to create a perfect alibi: the distance from Siebenhoch. Nobody would ever think of arresting you. Of course, it might take a long time, but what did that matter? The Bletterbach has been here for millions of years and you’re a patient man. But in fact, it took only four months. Then the self-regenerating storm gave you an even better cover than you could have hoped for, didn’t it? But then . . .” At this point, I exploded. “What did you feel when Grünwald sprang up out of nowhere? When he screwed up your plan?”
I took a step closer.
It was time to bring this to an end, and to attack.
“How long did it take you to get here, Max?” I pressed him. “How long does it take, cutting through the caves?”
Werner’s voice filtered through my anger. A trembling voice. “It isn’t possible. It means that . . .”
He had got there.
The horror.
“It means,” I finished for him, “that in this story there are three innocents. Kurt, Evi, and Markus. And there’s a hero. Oscar Grünwald. Oscar Grünwald who saved the child, ruining Max’s plan. Oscar Grünwald whom you all killed.”
Just like on the Ortles, I thought. The innocents and the heroes die, the guilty are saved.
“No,” Werner moaned.
That was his last word. His eyes opened wide and he raised his hands to his belly.
There was no expression on Max’s face as he turned the knife in the wound he had made.
Annelise screamed, clutching Clara tight to her and turning her head away.
“It takes an hour and a half, Salinger,” Max replied, in a toneless voice. “Here and back. An hour and a half. But you have to swim. Omi had made me do it ever since I was your daughter’s age. Swimming in the caves in the dark was necessary to revive the blood of the Krüns. That’s what Grandma said. When the mine collapsed in ’23, the water flooded everything. The miners drowned. My grandfather got his calculations wrong. He got them wrong because he was tired, because he was paid as little as all the other beggars in Siebenhoch even though he wasn’t just an ordinary miner, he was responsible for safety. He died along with the others, although he was better than any of them.”
He spat on the ground and looked at me.
“Think about it, Salinger,” he said. “An hour and a half. And barely thirty minutes to find them under this spur. Thirty minutes. It was destiny. Those three had to die. And the child had to die, too.”
He took out the knife and Werner fell to his knees. In a single fluid movement, Max aimed the blade at Werner’s throat. “Let go of the branch.”
I dropped it.
“Take three steps back.”
I obeyed.
Max assumed his good uncle face. “When did you start sticking your nose in this business?”
“A few months ago.”
“A few months!” Max roared. “Even that drunkard Günther suspected something. Who do you think made sure he found the report?” Beside himself with anger, he yanked Werner’s head. “And you? Thirty years spent thinking you were a hero. Thirty years and you didn’t understand a thing.”
Werner bowed his head in defeat.
Max displayed the blade of the knife. “It’ll be harder with you people, but much more enjoyable. An axe is too . . . crude.”
“Wouldn’t a gun have been enough?” I said. “Didn’t you have a rifle?”
“They wouldn’t have suffered enough. All the humiliations I’d endured. They had to pay. To taste a little of my shit. The shit Siebenhoch used to flavor everything I’d eaten since I was born. The heir to the man who’d caused the mine to collapse. As if a child could be guilty of anything. Oh, how they enjoyed taking their revenge on us. Making fun of us, laughing at our poverty. Just like Evi laughed when I told her I loved her. She thought it was a joke. A joke, can you imagine? She preferred Kurt. That son of a bitch. The rescuer. The hero. But in the end they both had to eat their words.”
Annelise let out a sob, which drew Chief Krün’s attention to her.
I didn’t want Max to look at her. Not until I was the one holding the knife. So I tried to gain time by bringing him back to his narrative.
“But then Grünwald showed up,” I said, as if interviewing one of the protagonists of my stories.
“Markus tried to run away. A coward to the end. He slipped and hit his head. I reached him to finish him off, but he was already dead. He just made me waste time. I cut off Evi’s head, took it in my hands, and put it down in front of Kurt’s eyes. He was dying, but he was still lucid and I wanted him to see it. Then I threw it away. When Grünwald suddenly appeared, screaming like a madman, I panicked and ran.” He let out a cry of annoyance. “I thought it was Omi. I thought she’d come back to take me to the caves. Now that I’d avenged my grandfather, Ihad to stay down there forever, with him.”
In his eyes there was an abyss.
“When I calmed down, I saw that Grünwald had found the child. And the axe. And an idea came into my head. A wonderful idea, Salinger. Those three bastards had got their just deserts. But what about the others? The ones who made fun of me because I went to school with broken shoes? The ones who laughed at Omi, at Frau Krün, because she’d lost everything when the mine collapsed? Her money, her husband and even her honor. A woman who’d been married to the Saltner of the mine! All those country bumpkins who thought they were better than us Krüns, even though we’d protected the miners of Siebenhoch for two centuries! I realized it was a way to turn their pathetic forefathers’ justice against them.”
Max was panting like an animal.
He was an animal.
“I turned back. I went to Verena’s party. Hannes arrived, then Günther, and together we went to pick up Werner. We came here and I pretended I didn’t know anything. I had everything under control. Almost everything,” he corrected himself. Then his eyes darted toward Clara. “How many letters are there in the word ‘end,’ sweetie?”
Hidden by Annelise’s body, Clara replied in a trembling voice, “Three.”
“Three,” Max echoed.
The blade disappeared into Werner’s throat. Werner slumped to the ground, spurting a gout of dark blood. His eyes rolled backward. His body jerked. Once, twice, three times.
The end.
Max didn’t even deign to look at him. He wiped the knife on his jacket. I stared, hypnotized, at the brown stripes on the rain-soaked fabric.
It was our turn.
It was at this point that I heard it.
* * *
I let go of the branch and threw myself toward Annelise and Clara just as the mud overwhelmed us. The Bletterbach was transfigured into an apocalypse of water, sludge, and debris. I grabbed my daughter by the elbow and lifted her into the air just in time before a piece of wood as thick as my thigh lashed the air where her head had been. She let out a cry that was also a sob. We fell. I flailed about. I managed to catch hold of a fir tree. The rock under which Kurt had pitched the tent became a cascade of mud. Werner’s lifeless body was swept away.
“Annelise!” I yelled.
She didn’t respond. Some debris must have struck her. I couldn’t see any blood, but her eyes were clouded over.
She was clinging to a root, looking into emptiness.
What about Max?
Where was he?
For a moment, I hoped he had been swallowed by the abyss, but I was wrong. Somehow, he had managed to grab hold of the chestnut tree and hoist himself to his feet. The knife still clutched in his hand, his face twisted in an expression of rage, he pulled away from the tree and began advancing, as the water swirled between his legs. He was inexorable.
“Mamma!”
Clara’s voice succeeded in waking Annelise. She turned to me, her eyes trying to get back into focus.
Max was towering over her, panting. He was holding her by the hair, her head tilted back, her neck exposed.
“The whore’s daughter,” Max said. “Let’s be done with it, Salinger.”
I threw myself toward him. My screams were the screams of the Beast.
The blade of the knife rose to the sky, ready to cut, when a flash of lightning filled the air with electricity. The crash of thunder made the walls of the Bletterbach tremble.
A fraction of a second. A moment’s hesitation.
It was enough.
I struck Max with my fist, knocking him backward. He spat, coughed, waved his arms. I struck him again. The pain in my knuckles paid me back for all the suffering endured until that moment. I grabbed him by the throat and lifted him. I struck him a third time. And a fourth.
By the fifth, I’d lost feeling in my hand.
I didn’t stop.
I wanted only one thing: to kill him.
All at once, I felt a burst of heat and the sudden pain blinded me. It was the knife, going right through my knee. Max lacerating the flesh, pushing and pulling. My flesh. My cartilage.
My leg gave way. I slipped and fell. The water dragged me away, while the pain grew and grew. I knocked into Annelise and we embraced. I felt the warmth of her body. I even felt her breath on my neck. But I also felt the tiredness. Resignation followed. It was nice to die like this. I’d been given the possibility of this last contact with the woman I loved. I closed my eyes. I felt a sensation of total peace. No more pain, no more fear.
No more Bletterbach. There was only death, and it was waiting for me.
Fade to black, as Mike would have said.
It was Clara who saved me.
“Papà!”
Her broken voice tore me from my lethargy. I couldn’t die. Not yet. Clara needed me.
I raised my head from the mud. I opened my eyes. The pain returned, the fear, the anguish.
The determination.
Still clinging to Annelise, I tried to move through the debris toward our daughter. I bumped into a rock. I grabbed hold of it. Annelise pressed herself against me.
“Salinger!” Max roared. “Salinger!”
He was on his feet, standing in the middle of the current.
A demon.
He opened wide his arms, yelling my name. Maybe he would have liked to add a curse or a threat, but he didn’t have time.
Something scythed through his leg at the height of his thigh, describing a half moon of blood in the air.
Max stopped yelling.
His back went rigid. His head fell back, his mouth gaping.
I saw his body rise thirty centimeters above the surface of the water, the horrible stump of his leg bleeding and kicking, the arms flailing.
Then . . .
Something emerged from his thoracic cage. Something that looked to me like a gigantic claw. Something that smashed the bones and went right through him. The monster of the Bletterbach.
The Jaekelopterus was there. And it was hungry.
It had had Max. It wanted me. And Annelise.
It wanted Clara.
There was only one thing to do.
I grabbed Clara. I grabbed Annelise.
I breathed in. I breathed out.
I closed my eyes and let the current carry us away.