Shortly before noon they discover footprints of the Little People. Out of caution they stop, but after a thorough examination Claus determines that they are leading southward, away from here. Besides, the Little People are not yet dangerous in spring. Only in autumn do they become restless and malevolent.
They find the place in the late afternoon. They almost would have passed it, because they veered off the path a little. The underbrush is thick; you hardly know where you’re going. But then Sepp noticed the sweetly sharp smell. They pushed branches aside, broke limbs, covered their noses with their hands. With each step the smell grew stronger. And there is the wagon, a cloud of flies swarming around it. The sacks have been torn open. The ground is white with flour. Something is lying behind the wagon. It looks like a heap of old skins. It takes them a moment to realize that it’s the remains of the donkey. Only the head is missing.
“It was probably a wolf,” says Sepp, flailing his arms to fend off the flies.
“That would look different,” says Claus.
“The Cold Woman?”
“She’s not interested in donkeys.” Claus bends down and gropes around. A smooth cut, no bite marks anywhere. No doubt, it was a knife.
They call for the boy. They listen. They call again. Sepp looks up and goes silent. Claus and Heiner keep calling. Sepp stands as if frozen.
Now Claus too looks up. Horror reaches for him and holds him and grips him even tighter until he thinks he might choke to death. Something is hovering above them, white from head to toe, and staring downward, and even though it’s growing dark, they can see the wide eyes, the bared teeth, the contorted face. And as they’re gaping upward, they hear a high sound. It sounds like a sob, but it’s not one. Whatever is above them there, it’s laughing.
“Come down,” calls Claus.
The boy, for it’s really him, giggles and doesn’t budge. He’s completely naked, completely white. He must have rolled around in the flour.
“Good Lord,” says Sepp. “Great merciful Lord!”
And while Claus is looking up, he sees something else that he just a moment ago didn’t see yet, because it’s too strange. What the boy is wearing on his head up there, while he is standing giggling and naked on a rope without falling down, is no hat.
“Blessed Virgin,” says Sepp. “Help us and don’t abandon us.”
Even Heiner crosses himself.
Claus draws his knife and, his hand trembling, carves a pentagram into a tree trunk: point on the right, the shape securely closed. To the right of it he engraves an alpha, to the left an omega. Then he holds his breath, counts slowly to seven, and murmurs an incantation—spirits of the upper world, spirits of the lower world, all saints, kind Virgin, stand by us in the name of the triune God. “Get him down,” he then says to Sepp. “Cut the rope!”
“Why me?”
“Because I say so.”
Sepp stares and doesn’t move. Flies land on his face, but he doesn’t wave them away.
“Then you,” Claus says to Heiner.
Heiner opens and closes his mouth. If he didn’t find it so hard to speak, he would now say that he has only just dragged a woman through the forest and saved her; completely on his own he found the way. He would say that everything has its limits, even the tolerance of the most forbearing. But since talking is not in his nature, he crosses his arms and looks stubbornly at the ground.
“Then you,” Claus says to Sepp. “Someone has to do it. And I have rheumatism. You climb now or you’ll regret it as long as you live.” He tries to remember the spell that compels the resistant to obey, but the words slip his mind.
Sepp utters terrible curses and begins to climb. He groans. The branches don’t give him a good foothold, and it takes all his strength not to look up at the white apparition.
“What is going on?” Claus calls up. “What has gotten into you?”
“The great, great devil,” the boy says cheerfully.
Sepp climbs back down. Hearing this reply was too much for him. Besides, it came back to him that he threw the boy into the stream, and if the boy remembers it and is angry at him, then now is not the moment to confront him. He reaches the ground and shakes his head.
“Then you!” Claus says to Heiner.
But he turns around without a word, walks away, and disappears in the thicket. For a while he can still be heard. Then no longer.
“Go back up,” Claus says to Sepp.
“No!”
“Mutus dedit,” Claus murmurs, now remembering the words of the spell after all, “mutus dedit nomen—”
“Makes no difference,” says Sepp. “I’m not doing it.”
There’s a crack in the underbrush, the sound of branches breaking. Heiner is back. It became clear to him that it would soon be night. He can’t be alone in the dark forest; he won’t be able to stand it again. Angrily he fends off flies, leans against a tree trunk, and hums to himself.
When Claus and Sepp turn away from him, they notice that the boy is standing next to them. Startled, they jump back. How did he get down so quickly? The boy takes off what he was wearing on his head: a piece of fur-covered scalp with two long donkey ears. His hair is encrusted with blood.
“For God’s sake,” says Claus. “For Mary’s and God’s and the Son’s sake.”
“It was a long time,” says the boy. “No one came. It was only a joke. And the voices! A big joke.”
“What voices?”
Claus looks around. Where is the rest of the donkey’s head? The eyes, the jaw with the teeth, the whole huge skull—where is all that?
The boy slowly kneels down. Then, laughing, he tips over sideways and stops moving.
They lift him up, wrap him in a blanket, and make off—away from the wagon, the flour, the blood. For a while they stumble through the darkness, until they feel safe enough to lay the child down. They don’t light a fire and they don’t talk to each other because they don’t want to attract anything. The boy giggles in his sleep. His skin is hot to the touch. Branches crack. The wind whispers. With his eyes closed Claus murmurs prayers and incantations. This helps a little, for they gradually feel better. As he prays, he tries to estimate how much this will cost him: the wagon is wrecked, the donkey dead, above all he will have to replace the flour. Where is he going to get the money?
In the early morning hours the boy’s fever subsides. When he wakes up, he asks in confusion why his hair is so sticky and why his body is white. Then he shrugs and doesn’t trouble himself further about it, and when they tell him that Agneta is alive, he is happy and laughs. They find a stream. He washes himself. The water is so cold that he trembles all over. Claus wraps him in the blanket again, and they set off. On the way home the boy tells the fairy tale he heard from Agneta. There’s a witch in it and a knight and a golden apple, and in the end everything turns out well, the princess marries the hero, the evil old woman is dead as a doornail.
Back in the mill, on his straw sack next to the stove that night, the boy sleeps so deeply that it is as if nothing could ever wake him again. He’s the only one who can sleep, for the dead baby returns: only a flicker in the darkness, along with a soft whimpering, more a draft than a voice. For a while she is in the partitioned area in the back where Claus and Agneta are lying, but when she can’t reach her parents’ bed because the pentagrams on the posts keep her away, she appears in the room where the boy and the mill hands have bedded down around the warm stove. She is blind and deaf and understands nothing and knocks over the milk bucket, whirls the freshly washed cloths off the shelf, and gets tangled in the curtain on the window before she disappears—into the limbo where the unbaptized freeze in the icy cold for a million years before the Lord forgives them.