The Hangman's Daughter (35 page)

“Is Kuisl down there with you?” he asked.

“No.”

“Really? Children, you must tell me. This is no longer a game!”

“By the Holy Virgin Mary, no!” Sophie’s voice came from below. “Oh God, I am so scared! I heard steps, but I can’t get away because of Clara…”

Her voice changed into weeping.

“Sophie, you need not be afraid,” Simon tried to calm her. “The steps you heard were certainly ours. We are coming to get you out of there. What’s the matter with Clara?”

“She…she’s sick. She has a fever and can’t walk.”

Great,
thought Simon.
My lantern is out, I got lost, the hangman has disappeared, and now I also have to carry a child out of here!
For a brief moment he felt as if he could weep just like Sophie, but then he pulled himself together.

“We…we’re going to make out all right, Sophie. For sure. I’m coming down now.”

He took the lantern in his teeth and slid down the tunnel. This time he was prepared for the fall. He only fell a couple of feet and landed almost softly in a puddle of ice-cold muddy water.

“Simon?” Sophie’s voice came from the left. He thought he could see her outline in the dark: a spot that looked a little darker and seemed to move slowly back and forth. Simon waved. Then it occurred to him how nonsensical that was in the dark.

“I’m here, Sophie. Where is Clara?” he whispered.

“She’s lying next to me. Who are those men?”

“Which men?” While Simon spoke, he crawled toward the outline. He felt a stone step and on it moss and straw.

“Well, I mean the men I heard above. Are they still there?”

Simon tapped his way up the step. It was as long and as wide as a bed. He felt the body of a child stretched out on it. Cold skin, small toes. Rags covering her legs.

“No,” he answered. “They…they’re gone. It’s safe. You can come out.”

Now Sophie’s outline was very close, right next to him. He reached for it. He felt a dress. A hand reached for him and held him tightly.

“Oh, God, Simon! I am so scared!”

Simon hugged the little body and stroked it.

“All will be well. Now all we have to do is…”

He could hear a scraping sound behind him. Something was slowly pushing through the opening into the chamber.

“Simon!” Sophie cried out. “Something is there! I can see it. Oh, God, I can see it!”

Simon turned around. At a spot not far from them, the blackness was darker than the rest. And this darkness was coming closer.

“Do you have any light down here?” screamed Simon. “A candle? Anything?”

“I have tinder and flint. It must be here somewhere…for heaven’s sakes, Simon! What…what is it?”

“Sophie, where is the tinder? Answer me!”

Sophie started to scream. Simon slapped her face.

“Where is the tinder?” he cried once more into the blackness.

The slap helped. Sophie quieted down instantly. She felt around briefly, then handed him a fibrous piece of sponge and a cool piece of flint. Simon pulled the stiletto from his belt and struck the stone in wild blows against the cold steel. Sparks flew, the tinder started to glow, and a tiny flame flared up in his hand. But just as he was about to light the lantern with the glowing fibers, he felt a draft from behind. The shadow fell over them.

Before the lantern went out a second time, Simon saw a hand swoop down in the fading light. Then darkness overcame him.

In the meantime the hangman had gone through two more chambers without finding any trace of the children. The room he had reached with the ladder had been empty. Shards of an old pitcher and a few rotten barrel staves littered the floor. In the corner alcoves there were recessed stone seats. They were scrubbed smooth and looked as if hundreds of frightened people had squatted in them over the years. Two tunnels led from this chamber into the darkness as well.

Jakob Kuisl cursed. This dwarf’s hole was indeed a damn maze! It quite possibly extended underground all the way to the church walls. Perhaps the priest had been right after all with his ghost stories. What secret rites could have taken place down here? How many hordes of barbarians and soldiers had already passed above, while deep down in the earth, men, women, and children listened fearfully to the conquerors’ steps and voices? Nobody would ever know.

Above the entrance to the tunnel at the left were a few marks that Jakob Kuisl could not figure out. Scratches, arching lines, and crosses that could be of human or natural origin. Here, too, the passage was so narrow that one had to practically push one’s self through. Could there be some truth to the stories that an old midwife had told him almost thirty years earlier? That the passages were built so narrow on purpose so that a body would surrender all that was bad, all sickness, all bad thoughts to Mother Earth?

He forced himself through the narrow hole and found himself in the next chamber. It was the largest so far, a good four paces to the other end, and the hangman was able to stand up straight in it. From there, a narrow passage went on in a straight line. There was another hole directly above Jakob Kuisl. Pale yellow roots, finger thick, were growing out of the narrow shaft, down to him, brushing over his face. Far above, the hangman thought he could see a tiny ray of light. Was it the moon? Or was it only an optical illusion, his eyes longing for the light? He tried to figure out how far he had moved away from the well in the meantime. It was quite possible he was standing directly beneath the linden tree, in the middle of the clearing. Since olden times, the linden tree had been considered a holy tree. The mighty specimen at the building site was certainly a few hundred years old. Had at one time a shaft led down from the trunk of the linden tree to this resting place of souls?

Jakob Kuisl tested the roots by pulling on them; they seemed to be tough and capable of supporting some weight. He briefly thought of pulling himself up on them to check whether they actually belonged to the linden tree. But then he decided after all to take the horizontal tunnel. If he found nothing on the other side he would turn back. Mentally he had continued to count. Soon he reached five hundred, the number he and Simon had agreed on.

He bent down and crawled into the narrow tunnel. This was the narrowest passage so far. Clay and stones scraped his shoulders. His mouth was dry, and he tasted dust and dirt. He had the impression that the tunnel was beginning to taper down like a funnel. A dead end? He was about to crawl back when he saw in the light of the lantern that the passage widened again after a few more feet. With difficulty he pushed forward through the last part of the tunnel. Like a cork being pulled from its bottle he finally landed in yet another chamber.

The space was so low that he had to stoop. It ended just two steps further on, at a moist clay wall. There was no other passage. This was clearly the end of the maze. He would have to turn back.

As he turned again toward the narrow hole he noticed something out of the corner of his eye.

On the left side of the chamber, something had been scratched into the clay at chest level. This time they weren’t simple scratches or scribbles as before above the arch. This was an inscription, and it looked as if it had been made pretty recently.

F.S. hic erat XII. Octobris, MDCXLVI.

Jakob Kuisl caught his breath.

F.S.…that had to be the abbreviation for Ferdinand Schreevogl! He had been here on the twelfth of October, 1646, and he had obviously wished for posterity to know about it.

The hangman quickly calculated back: 1646, that was the year the Swedes had occupied Schongau. The burghers had been able to prevent the burning of their town only by paying a high ransom. In spite of this, all the outer boroughs of Schongau, that is to say Altenstadt, Niederhofen, Soyen, and even Hohenfurch, fell prey to the flames in the following two years. Kuisl tried to remember. Schongau, as far as he knew, had been surrendered to the Swedes in November of 1646. That meant that if the old Schreevogl was down here already in October of the same year, it could only have been for one reason.

He had hidden his fortune here in the maze.

Jakob Kuisl’s thoughts were racing. The old man had probably always known of the tunnels, an old family secret that he had finally taken to the grave. When the Swedes came, he buried the major portion of his money down here. Jakob Schreevogl had told Simon that hardly any money was mentioned in his father’s will. Now the hangman knew why.

The old man had left the treasure down here all that time, probably expecting hard times to come! And when he had a falling-out with his son he had decided to bequeath the land together with the treasure to the church––but without telling the church anything about it. There had been some hint, however. What was it that Schreevogl had once told the priest?

You would yet be able to do much good with that parcel of land…

Who knows—perhaps he wanted to tell the priest all about it and then died quite suddenly. Perhaps he wanted to take his secret to the grave. After all, Ferdinand Schreevogl had always been known to be an eccentric old bird. But someone must have known about the secret, and that someone had done everything to find it. The construction of a leper house had at first upset those plans. But then he had hired the soldiers to vandalize the building site so that he would have sufficient time to search without being observed.

Nor had that unknown person stopped at three murders. The murders of children…

Jakob Kuisl mulled it over. The children must have seen something, something that could have given the man away. Or did they actually know about the treasure, and had he tried to squeeze the secret out of them?

The hangman let the light from the lantern wander over the muddy ground. Rubble covered it, and a rusty shovel was leaning in a corner. Kuisl rummaged through the rubble with his hands. When he found nothing that way he took the shovel and started to dig. Briefly he thought he could hear a faint sound far away, like a voice calling softly. He stopped. When he heard nothing more, he dug deeper. The chamber was filled with the clanging of the shovel and his labored breathing. He dug and dug, and finally he hit hard rock. Nothing, no treasure. No shards, no empty box, nothing. Had the children been here earlier and taken the treasure?

Once more his gaze passed over the inscription on the wall.
F.S. hic erat XII. Octobris, MDCXLVI…

He stopped and moved closer to the wall. The area around the inscription looked lighter than the remainder of the wall. A rectangle, about three feet long, had been lightly covered with clay so as to obscure the difference with the rest of the wall.

The hangman seized the shovel and struck it with all of his strength against the inscription. The clay crumbled and behind it red bricks appeared. He struck one more time and the bricks split open. Behind them a hole appeared. It was only as large as a fist, but when the hangman struck three more blows, it widened and revealed an alcove behind it that had been walled up.

On the alcove’s seat stood an earthenware jug whose opening had been sealed with wax. The hangman struck it with the shovel. The jug burst open and a stream of gold and silver coins spilled all over the alcove. The coins shone in the lantern’s light as if they had been polished only yesterday.

Ferdinand Schreevogl’s treasure…and Jakob Kuisl had found it.

As far as the hangman could see, these were silver pennies and golden guilders from the Rhineland, all in perfect condition and of impeccable weight. There were too many of them to count. Kuisl estimated that there were more than one hundred coins. With this kind of money one could build a new patrician home or buy a stable with the finest horses. Never before in his life had the hangman seen so much money at one time.

With trembling fingers he collected the coins and let them trickle into his bag. They jingled and the bag got markedly heavier. With the bag in his teeth, he finally struggled to push his way back into the adjoining chamber.

There he stood up, bathed in perspiration, knocked the clay dust from his garment, and started out for the first chamber. He grinned. Young Simon had probably long arrived there and was fearfully awaiting his return in the dark. Or he had already found the children. Didn’t he hear someone calling softly a while ago? Either way, he would have a nice surprise to offer the young fellow…

The hangman smiled a grim smile and walked past the roots dangling from the hole above him.

He stopped short.

Why were they moving?

Quite some time had gone by since he had last gone through this chamber and brushed against the roots. Yet they were still swaying softly back and forth. There was no wind down here. This meant that either someone had walked across the clearing directly above him, causing the roots to sway or else…

Someone must have touched them from below.

Had someone else come this way? But who? And to go where? The chamber had only two exits. He had come out of one of them just before and the other was a dead end.

Not counting the shaft above him, of course.

The hangman carefully approached the lower end of the hole and looked up. The pale yellow roots brushed like fingers across his face.

At that instant something huge and black, like an enormous bat, came flying down on him from the shaft. Instinctively Kuisl threw himself to one side and landed painfully on his shoulder in the wet clay. He nevertheless succeeded in holding on to the burning lantern. Frantically he fumbled at his belt for the larchwood club. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a figure deftly rolling away on the floor and getting back on his legs. He was wearing a bloodred doublet, but his hat with the rooster’s feathers had slipped off when he jumped. His right hand was holding a torch, and his bony hand was glimmering white in the light of the lantern. In his left hand he was clutching a saber.

The devil smiled.

“A good leap, hangman. But do you really believe you can escape me?”

He pointed at the club in Kuisl’s hand. In the meantime the hangman had gotten on his feet and was balancing his massive torso back and forth in expectation of the assault. The club in his right hand really looked like a toy.