The Glass Demon Read online

  I set off at a quick pace in the direction of the gate. As I passed Frau Roggendorf I saw her, out of the corner of my eye, silently turning her head to watch me go.

  The gate was open. I wandered through a wrought-iron archway and found myself in the cemetery. It was a large one, and old. Some of the gravestones had a thick rime of lichen growing on them. Most of them were beautifully kept, though, and gazing over the ranks of knee-high granite and marble slabs was unnervingly like looking at a model village. There seemed to be nothing to alarm anyone. I could not see any other visitors; the gravelled paths, laid out with geometric precision, were all clear. I began to walk along one of them, reading the names of Baumgarten families who had laid generations of their dead to rest here: Kolvenbach, Flamersheim, Ohlert.

  It had been very dry over the past few weeks and most of the flowers left out on the graves were dead or wilting. Those which had been recently left there stood out as bright splashes of colour against the greys and rusty browns of the tombstones. It was perhaps for that reason that I was able to pick out the grave of Hans-Pieter Roggendorf, the late lamented husband of the very Frau Roggendorf who even at this moment was rocking and sobbing on a stone outside the cemetery. I saw it because of the brightly coloured chrysanthemums which were scattered haphazardly all over the shiny marble slab and the arid earth around it, strident spots of glowing yellow, orange and crimson against the shades of brown. As I walked up the dusty path towards the grave I could see that it was among the older plots, and indeed when I was close enough to read the dates on the headstone I found that Herr Roggendorf had passed away in 1989. It was hard to imagine that after all this time Frau Roggendorf was still so traumatized by his death that she was moved to shower his grave with flowers.

  That was not all she had showered his grave with, I noticed. A large and battered black leather handbag was lying on its side like a deflated lizard, its contents spilling out over the ground. I was not surprised to see the half-consumed tube of antacids, the ubiquitous packet of paper tissues which most German ladies seem to carry around as a talisman against the dark forces of the cold virus, or the old-maidish pink plastic comb. What were more surprising were the little gold watch, the seed-pearl necklace and the brooches. Evidently Frau Roggendorf carried her valuables about with her to prevent burglars getting their hands on them. Now it looked as though she had decorated her husband’s tomb in true pharaonic style, with all the riches she possessed.

  I stood by the grave, looking down at these assorted offerings and wondering what on earth could have possessed her to run shrieking from the graveside, as she clearly had. Scuffing my feet carelessly in the dust, I looked around me, trying to see what Frau Roggendorf had seen.

  I almost jumped out of my skin. There was someone peering at me over the top of a gravestone, not three metres away. The first searing fizz of shock was instantly replaced with fury. No wonder the old woman had nearly had a heart attack. ‘Du Arschloch –’ I started to say – at least, I drew in breath to shout at him, but the next second the words died on my lips, and all that came out was a long hiss of breath like the escape of steam from a boiler.

  Whoever it was whose head I could see, the chin resting almost casually on top of the gravestone, was not looking at me at all, not looking at anything in fact. Nor was he – or she, it was impossible to say – likely to be offended at my trying to call him an Arschloch. In fact, he was grinning at me, but he was not grinning with amusement. He was grinning because he had no lips; they had long since pulled back from the rows of yellowing teeth and rotted away.

  Frau Roggendorf was a screamer, but I was not. I could barely force out a whimper. The world seemed to have turned hot and flat and silent as I stared at the thing, and it stared back at me with empty eye sockets. My feet had taken on a life of their own; I heard the susurration of my boots moving across the dusty earth as I unwillingly rounded the end of the grave and gazed at the body in its entirety.

  It was frozen in the act of climbing out of a grave – at least, that was what my eyes told me, though in some distant corner of my horrified brain some shred of detached logic was assuring me that that was impossible. A dead man doesn’t splinter his tombstone into two; he doesn’t haul himself painfully up towards the light and then collapse, his skull coming to rest on a headstone, the pathetic brown sticks of his limbs sprawled out as though trying to get some last futile purchase on the earth.

  It can’t be, whispered some disbelieving voice at the back of my mind, though my eyes were telling me that it was. I began to think that I should scream, that I should yell my head off so that Michel would come and drag me away, and I wouldn’t have to look at this thing any more, this abomination which had crawled back up to the daylight with its message of grim mortality. I opened my mouth, but all that came out was a sound like the whine of a frightened animal.

  In the end the only thing which spurred me into action was the knowledge that if I stood there any longer on legs which were trembling beneath me I might actually fall over. The prospect of tumbling into that open grave, of actually falling down among those tattered bones, was so terrible that I forced myself to step back, and once I had taken one step the next was easier. I backed away, and then I turned, and then finally I was running back down the dusty path between the gravestones.

  The gate seemed much further away than it had before and I was horribly aware that there was no one else in the cemetery. Nobody alive, I thought dismally, scanning the ranks of polished headstones. Impossible now not to think what they stood for – that each of them was a sentinel placed over a thing like the one I had seen grinning at Herr Roggendorf’s grave. The dead were all around me, legions of them. The blood roared in my ears and my throat seemed to constrict as I staggered the last few metres to the gate.

  Michel was standing next to Frau Roggendorf, who was still hunched on the block of stone, her face ashen and her wrinkled old lips working soundlessly. He looked up as I came stumbling out of the cemetery and I saw his face change.

  ‘Lin? What’s happened?’

  I almost fell into his arms, heedless of what he might think.

  ‘There’s a –’ I couldn’t think of a single German word to begin to express what I had just seen. ‘There’s a dead man,’ I choked out eventually in English.

  Michel looked down at me as though I had gone completely mad, glanced at the cemetery wall and then back at me again. Of course there’s a dead man in there, said his expression. It’s a cemetery – what did you expect?

  ‘He’s out – he – someone opened the grave.’

  ‘What?’ Now he looked as though he could not believe his ears.

  ‘The grave is open.’ I let go of Michel; a sour taste was filling my mouth and I thought I might be sick. ‘Don’t go,’ I begged him, seeing that he was about to take a look for himself. If he left me here I thought I might run amok as Frau Roggendorf had, throwing herself into the road in an attempt to get someone to stop.

  Michel put his hands on my shoulders and squeezed gently. ‘I have to look. I’ll be back in two minutes. One,’ he added, looking at my stricken face.

  As he walked quickly away I sank down on to the dusty grass at the side of the road. I didn’t want to catch Frau Roggendorf’s eye. I was having enough trouble holding myself together; I didn’t think I could bear to see the shocked expression on her wrinkled face again.

  Michel was back very quickly. He no longer looked sceptical. Now he looked a little pale and sick, like someone who has nosed at a bad car accident and wished they hadn’t. He did not try to touch me or comfort me. He was holding himself oddly, stiffly, as though we were both soaked in something disgusting and he was just keeping the bile down until he could scrub himself clean.

  ‘We have to phone the police,’ he said.

  He spoke in English but his German accent was as strong as I had ever heard it at that moment. Suddenly he seemed an alien thing to me, part of this freakish place where the dead lurked around every corn
er, lying under apple trees like some strange and loathsome windfall, or bursting obscenely out of their resting places. I put my arms around my knees and hugged myself. I did not want Michel to touch me. I said nothing but watched through slitted eyes as he walked back to the Volkswagen to fetch his phone. He stood leaning against the car for several minutes, talking into it, sometimes pausing to listen and occasionally running a hand through his dark hair so that it stood up in untidy spikes. Eventually he put the phone into his pocket and walked back towards me.

  ‘The police are coming,’ he said.

  I said nothing. Michel hunkered down beside me, not seeming to notice the way that I edged back away from him.

  ‘They said not to touch anything.’

  I could have snorted at that if the idea had not been so disgusting. Nothing could have induced me to go back into the cemetery and touch that brown and hideous thing. I put my head down on my knees and squeezed my eyes tight shut.

  ‘Lin? You didn’t touch anything, did you?’

  ‘No,’ I told him in a muffled voice.

  ‘Are you sure? You didn’t knock anything over?’

  ‘No,’ I said more forcefully. Why wouldn’t he leave me alone? I put my head up and glared at him. ‘I didn’t touch anything, I didn’t knock anything over, right?’

  Michel didn’t say anything. I looked at him for a moment and then I said, ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Because,’ said Michel slowly, ‘there’s glass on the ground. You know, by that grave. Broken glass.’

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The police came, and an ambulance came too. I sat on the grass and watched the ambulance slowly mount the verge, the blue lights revolving slowly. Idly I wondered why they had bothered with an ambulance – the thing in the graveyard was well beyond the reach of medical attention. But the ambulance was for Frau Roggendorf and me.

  There were two policemen, a tall meaty-looking one and a smaller, skinnier one with an extravagant moustache bisecting his angular face, both of them dressed in bomber jackets and peaked caps and with guns on their hips. With a certain sense of déjà vu I watched them saunter nonchalantly into the cemetery and then emerge a few minutes later looking distinctly green in the face.

  After that everything seemed to happen very quickly. The paramedics examined me and discovered that I was uninjured, but Frau Roggendorf was a very different matter. She was well over seventy and she had had a shock so sudden and severe that it was a miracle her old heart had not stopped dead like an overheated motor blowing a gasket. As it was, she was complaining of chest pains and shortness of breath, and the ambulance men were desperate to get her to hospital before she had the opportunity to follow the late lamented Hans-Pieter into eternity.

  It was fortunate for us that Frau Roggendorf survived the shock of seeing that grisly head leering at her liplessly over the top of a gravestone. When the doctors had finished with her and allowed the police to speak to her, she was able to confirm that we had arrived after she had seen the ghastly thing propped against the headstone and had staggered out into the road to try to flag down a passing car. We had not been out of school for more than fifteen minutes when we had seen her, and she had been there for most of that time, first inside the cemetery and then outside in the road. She had first seen us when we stopped the car and Michel went to help her. If she had not been able to tell the police this, they would undoubtedly have drawn their own conclusions from the desecrated grave and the presence of two teenagers.

  None of the other drivers who had edged their vehicles past the scene in the road came forward. In the days that followed, everyone that Michel or I met seemed to know someone who had been passing the cemetery that day – a cousin’s gentleman friend, or a neighbour’s sister, or the delivery man’s aunt by marriage. Oddly, however, when you tried to pin anyone down to exactly who had been there, the answers were uniformly vague. Not one of those public-spirited disseminators of information ever spoke to the police. For official purposes, the road to Baumgarten had seemingly been as deserted as the surface of the moon that afternoon.

  The rest of the day, spent mostly at the police station in Baumgarten, was a blur of conversations with the police, sometimes in German and sometimes in English. The skinny one with the moustache spoke relatively good English, which was a relief because most of my German seemed to have evaporated with the shock of what I had seen. Besides, there was nothing in the lessons I had had or the comfortable summer I had spent last year in the Müllers’ homely farmhouse which could possibly have prepared me to describe what I had seen.

  Eventually my father appeared to take me home. Someone had had to be dispatched to the Kreuzburg to fetch him away from his work, since it was impossible to get a mobile signal there and there was no landline. The police had finished with Michel too; I felt that they let us go with a slight feeling of regret, but it was perfectly plain that we were not the ones who had broken the gravestone and dug up that grotesque and tattered thing.

  Outside the police station the air was still warm although it was almost evening. My father kept up a stream of cheerful-sounding chat as he led me over to the car and unlocked the door. I suspect that he thought this was the best way to cover the awkwardness of the moment. He had no real idea what to say to a seventeen-year-old who had just seen the cinema trailer for Judgement Day. He told me an anecdote I had heard before, about an archaeological dig where a lead-lined medieval coffin had been left in the sun during the lunch break and had exploded, showering the site with liquefied remains. He debated aloud my chances of making it into the local paper, an idea which seemed to please rather than mortify him; for my father, any event which occurred was nothing without an audience. He also made a remark which I knew was an attempt to jolly me along, to the effect that I could hardly be let out of the house without stumbling over corpses.

  When he made this particular remark, we were still on the steps of the police station, with Michel at my shoulder, and I felt rather than saw him react to my father’s words. He said nothing, and his goodbye, as he went off to fetch his own car, was perfunctory. All the same, I knew he had understood the significance of the word corpses. Not a corpse, but corpses plural.

  Michel would be picking me up again at seven thirty the following morning. With a heavy heart I got into the car and pulled the seat belt across myself. I hoped he would have forgotten about the remark by tomorrow, but somehow I knew that he wouldn’t. That wasn’t the way things worked around here. Tomorrow morning I was going to have some explaining to do.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  By the time my father and I arrived back at the Kreuzburg, the afternoon was blurring into evening and the castle ruins were golden in the late sunshine. I ran into the house and found the rest of the family clustered at one end of the pine table in the living room. The other was occupied by a mound of books and my father’s notes, which were fanned out on the tabletop and fenced in by a cluster of coffee cups.

  Ru was sitting in his high chair, or rather he was slumped sideways in it, clearly almost too sleepy to eat, while Polly tried to tempt him with spoonfuls of mush. It was immediately apparent that Tuesday had abdicated from the task of feeding Ru on the grounds of severe mental trauma; she was sitting bolt upright on one of the uncomfortable wooden chairs, with a handkerchief balled in her left hand and a little bottle of Bach Flower Remedy within reach of the right. She had a slightly fevered look which made me wonder whether she was about to seize the bottle and try to drink the contents. I recognized the expression on her face as her Earth Mother in Crisis look. I sighed inwardly. I had had enough to deal with that afternoon without having to cope with a full-scale scene as well.

  In the event, Earth Mother in Crisis was instantly replaced with Outraged Fashionista, as Tuesday took in what I was wearing. She was on her feet immediately.

  ‘Lin! That’s my jacket! And my jeans – and is that my Ghost top you’re wearing?’ She took a step closer. ‘It is.’

  ‘Tuesday,�
� said my father, appearing at my shoulder. There was a mild warning tone in his voice. ‘Later. Lin’s had a shock.’

  There was a minuscule pause as Earth Mother in Crisis struggled to reassert herself. Eventually Tuesday said, ‘You’re right, Oliver.’ She came tip-tapping over the flagstone floor towards me and actually put an arm around my shoulders. ‘Are you all right, sweetheart? It must have been horrible.’ She stroked the shoulder of the jacket I was wearing. ‘I would have just died if I’d seen something like that.’ I could feel her fiddling with the collar of the jacket, caressing it as though it was a small animal, and it was all I could do not to shake her off with irritation.

  ‘I’m OK.’

  This was not strictly true. I thought I would never be able to sleep with the lights off again, and as for ever crossing another graveyard…

  Still Tuesday didn’t leave me alone. She was peering anxiously at my – her – clothes with an expression of what seemed to be perfectly genuine concern.

  ‘You didn’t touch the – the thing you saw, did you?’ she said. ‘I mean, you didn’t get any of it – on yourself, did you?’

  Now I really was annoyed. I shook her off like a dog shaking off a biting insect. ‘No. I didn’t get any bits of – of corpse on your top.’ I shuddered at the thought. ‘And of course I didn’t touch it. Are you crazy?’

  Tuesday put her hands up in a gesture of wounded motherhood, but thankfully she did not try to hug me again.

  ‘I’m going to take Ru upstairs,’ said Polly into the silence which followed.

  Polly hated arguments, and if she could not smooth one over she would always prefer to put as much space between her and the row as she possibly could. Sometimes I wondered how we could possibly be sisters, when I seemed to be permanently fizzing with indignation. Lin Fox, the human bath bomb – just add hot water and stand well back.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ I said hastily.