A dull pain pounded inside Barbara’s head as she groaned and rolled restlessly back and forth.
Where am I? What happened?
She tried to sit up, but there was something holding her back. She shook, and pain shot through the back of her head. At the same time, she realized her hands and feet were in shackles. Now everything started to come back to her.
Markus Salter. The man in the boat box. All the blood.
“Help!” Barbara screamed without knowing where she was or whether anyone could hear her. Her vision was still blurred from the blow with which Salter had knocked her unconscious.
“Help! Is anyone there?”
“You can spare yourself all the shouting,” said a hoarse voice nearby. “I’m the only one here, and I can’t help you.”
Barbara struggled to turn her aching head. She squinted, and after a while her vision grew clearer. She was lying on the bare floor of a stone room illuminated by just a single torch. Dressed only in the wet monk’s robe, she shivered in a draft of cold air coming through a tiny opening near the ceiling, through which she could see the night sky.
A woman was lying on a cot in one corner. Her blond hair was dirty and matted, her once-beautiful dress tattered, and her cheeks sunken like those of a corpse. Nevertheless, she attempted a smile.
“I’d like to tell you there’s nothing to fear, little one,” she said in a weakened voice. “But I fear that would not be the truth.”
“Where is he?” Barbara asked.
“Our abductor?” The woman groaned as she tried to turn in Barbara’s direction. Only now did Barbara realize that she, too, was shackled. “I thought you could tell me. He only said he’d have to go and get the scribe.”
The scribe. .
Barbara was shocked. The face of the person shackled and lying in the boat box had been so covered with blood that she hadn’t recognized at first who it was. But now she knew. It was Hieronymus Hauser, Katharina’s father. Shortly after the Kuisls arrived in Bamberg, he’d come to pick up his daughter one night at the executioner’s house. A pleasant-looking, chubby man whose features she’d almost forgotten until now. What, in God’s name, was going on?
“If you want to know why he’s doing this, little one, I can’t tell you,” the woman continued as if reading Barbara’s mind. “But you must know we are not the first. He brings all his prisoners here-old and young, women and men-then he questions, tortures, and kills them, as if they were witches. For days I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out why he does it, but by God, I just don’t know, any more than I know why he has spared me until now.”
“He’s an actor,” Barbara whispered. “He comes from a group of itinerant actors.”
“I know, my dear. Earlier, he was going on and on about how we were coming to the final act, and we were just his bit players. I think we have to assume he’s insane.” The woman heaved a sigh and suddenly appeared deeply saddened. “So there’s probably no point in wondering why he’s doing this. We will die. . for no reason. But who says there always has to be a reason to die?” Then she turned again to Barbara with a tired smile. “If I understood him correctly, you are a hangman’s daughter. Is that right? I’ve never seen you in town before.”
“I come from Schongau,” Barbara whispered. “That’s down by the Alps.” She told the woman a bit about herself and what she’d experienced in Bamberg. It helped, at least for a short time, to clear her head and put the nightmare behind her. The stranger told Barbara her name was Adelheid Rinswieser and she was the wife of an apothecary in Bamberg. Evidently she was one of the people who’d disappeared, and gradually Barbara came to the awareness that the nice man Markus Salter was indeed the horrible werewolf-and that she was now one of his victims.
Suddenly, small details came to mind: Salter’s constant fatigue, his dark gaze, the wolf pelts in Matheo’s chest, and Salter’s sudden decision to take her out of Bamberg just after she’d told him she was the niece of the Bamberg hangman.
Now she remembered how surprised, almost horrified, he’d acted when she told him.
After lying there in silence for a while, listening to the rain outside pouring down harder and harder on the roof, she asked, “What is he going to do with us? Is he going to kill us, like all the rest?”
“When he’s finished with us here he’ll take us over to another room,” Adelheid replied darkly. “I’ve seen it. It’s. . horrible, like something out of your worst nightmares.” She looked at Barbara gloomily. “But listen, I’ve still not given up. Now there are two of us, and soon perhaps three if that scribe is still alive and comes to join us. Perhaps then we’ll have a chance. Perhaps-”
She hesitated on hearing a bolt being slid back above them on the ground floor. There were heavy footsteps and something came bumping down the stairs, one at a time. Barbara assumed that Salter was dragging the heavyset Hieronymus Hauser down to the cellar. But strangely, the steps were not heading toward their cell, but in the opposite direction. She heard another door squeaking as it opened.
“Oh, God,” Adelheid gasped. “He’s taking him to the torture chamber and starting with him right away.” Her eyes flickered in the dim light. “I don’t know if I can stand that again.”
Tensely, the women listened for sounds at the other end of the hall. Apparently Salter had left the door to the hall open. The women could hear groans, then a rasping and clicking sound, and then the steps once again.
This time the steps were approaching.
16
THE RIGHT BRANCH OF THE REGNITZ, EVENING, NOVEMBER 2, 1668 AD
Night was falling as the small group approached the wooden bridge that separated the city from the gardens around St. Gangolf to the north. Earlier, the Kuisls had paid a visit to Aloysius’s house and armed themselves. Jakob and Bartholomäus had picked out some heavy cudgels made of ash wood, Georg and Magdalena each carried long hunting knives that Aloysius had given them, and Simon took Bartholomäus’s old wheel-lock pistol that was so rusted it could probably only be used as a club. Only Jeremias remained without a weapon.
“My appearance is all the weapon I need,” he said with a grin as they walked along the pier in the rain. “Wait and see-when that fellow spots me in the dark, he’ll take off like a shot.”
“Maybe we should have brought along Bartholomäus’s execution sword,” Magdalena said, taking a dubious look at her rusty hunting knife. “It looked sharper than this old bread cutter.”
“To do what? Chop wood?” her father said with a smirk. “Only a woman would make a suggestion like that. Out on the battlefield, a large two-hander like that might be useful-I had one once myself-but not in this dense forest and swamp. If we’re going to storm the house, I’d rather have a cudgel.”
He swung his club around menacingly, and Magdalena instinctively stepped back. She hated it when men showed off with their weapons. On the other hand, she did feel a bit safer with the hunting knife in her hand. She couldn’t help thinking how this nice fellow Markus Salter had probably killed seven people.
And soon, perhaps, two more.
Earlier, when Magdalena had said good-bye to her two boys, she’d wondered briefly if she really should go along. It would be dangerous, and as a woman she wasn’t much use in a fight. But then she thought of Barbara, and her mind was made up. She could never sit idly at home while her sister was in mortal danger.
So she gave each of the boys a kiss and told them she had to go along with Father and Grandfather to look for Aunt Barbara. The children had looked at her with serious expressions, as if they understood how important and dangerous this mission was.
“Then will Barbara come back again?” Peter had asked in a soft voice.
Magdalena had nodded and held her boys closely so they would not see the tears in her eyes. “Of course,” she whispered. “You’ll see-by tonight she’ll be lying in bed beside you again and singing you a song. Now be kind to Aunt Katharina and help her bake cookies. That will surely make Barbara happy when she comes home.”