The Murder Farm (10 page)

M
ick turns over on his back, can’t grasp the horror of it.

He’ll kill me if he catches me, he’ll kill me too, he thinks. Tears are running down his cheeks, he’s frightened to death. He puts both hands over his face. Presses them firmly to his eyes. Tries to control his breathing, which is coming out of him in ragged gasps. Eyes closed, he lies there. But the madman down below doesn’t hear him. Blind to everything in his frenzy, he strikes again and again.

How long Mick lies like that he doesn’t know. One after another, they fall into the butcher’s hands below him. First old Danner, then his granddaughter, too. They all step out of the light and into the dark. Even before they can notice or even guess at the danger, they are struck down.

As they lie on the floor of the barn the murderer brings the pickax down again and again on his victims, frenzied, raging.

Lying on his back Mick doesn’t have to watch the crime with his own eyes. He just hears it, hears the footsteps of the victims, hears them call for their family, hears the little girl call for her
mother. Hears the pickax coming down, coming down again and again.

After an eternity there is silence. The silence of death.

It is another eternity before Mick notices the silence. He works his way slowly, almost soundlessly, over toward the steps down from the loft on his stomach.

The barn beneath him is empty. The murderer must have gone through the cowshed and into the farmhouse.

Mick has just this one chance of getting away unseen and saving his own life. He takes a deep breath and climbs down the steps. Down the steps, out into the open air.

He runs breathlessly, runs on and on. His legs can hardly carry him. The cold night air burns his lungs. Every breath he takes burns them. He runs until he falls over and stays lying there on the bare ground. Gasping. The darkness has caught him. He doesn’t know where he is. He has lost all sense of direction. He runs on from the house in wild panic. He wants to get farther and farther away from the house, the farm, the horror.

H
e sits there with his face turned to the window. His blank gaze staring into the distance. He sits there on his bed in his bedroom, sees things without perceiving them, looking inside himself, not out.

Behind him is his wife’s bed. It has been covered with a linen bedspread since her death three years ago. He doesn’t have to look at it, yet he sees it all the time. It stands in the room like a coffin. Warning and reminding him. Day in, day out. He can even catch the smell of death. That smell still lingers on, drifting through the room like gossamer. His wife is ever present in this room. Overpowering, like her slow sickness that seemed as if it would never end.

This afternoon’s images appear in his mind’s eye, his conversation with his sister-in-law Anna. She stands before him as clear and plain as she did two hours ago. She had come out to find him in the farm buildings. Said she wanted to speak to him, had to speak to him.

Incredulity and grief in her face.

They went around together to the bench behind the house. From there you can see the whole orchard in spring. You see the trees in full blossom. You see the land reborn. He loves that sight; he looks forward to it every year.

But the branches of the trees were still bare today, bare and dead from last winter. She sat down beside him. They sat there in silence. She was holding a piece of cloth in her hands. Only now did he see and recognize it. A cloth reddish-brown with blood. The one he had used.

The cloth he had wiped his hands on. He had wanted to wipe away his guilt, wipe it away with the cloth, but it still clung to him. He had meant to throw the cloth away, but where? So against his better judgment, against all reason, he had kept it. Perhaps, the thought goes through his head, he didn’t throw it away on purpose for her to find it, so that he could confess his guilt to another human being. He didn’t want to be alone, alone with what he had done.

Anna put her arm around him and simply asked, “Why?”

“Why?”

Why did he go out to the farm that night?

He couldn’t tell her. He doesn’t know why himself.

He wanted to talk to Barbara. Just talk to her. He didn’t dare knock at her window. He had knocked at her window too often already, and she didn’t open it to him, didn’t speak to him. Yet he had been dependent on every word she spoke, every gesture she made.

Yes, he was dependent on her, enslaved by her. He had stolen around the house countless times by day and by night, just wanting to see her. He stood outside her window. He watched her undressing. So close and yet so far, beyond his reach.

The curtains open, she was standing there in the lighted room. So that he could see her and yet know she would never be his.

That evening he’d been drinking, Dutch courage. He didn’t want to be sent away again. That’s why he went to the barn. From the barn you could easily get into the house, he knew that, you went out of the barn along the feeding alley in the cowshed, over to the farmhouse.

She wasn’t going to dismiss him yet again. Kick him aside like a stray dog. But the old man was the dog, the animal, it wasn’t him.

He wanted to talk to Barbara, persuade her to come back to him. That was all he wanted. Just to talk.

And then, oh, the way Barbara stood there in front of him. Laughed at him, mocked him, told him to look at himself, look at himself in the mirror. She loved her father a thousand times more than she loved him, a stinking alcoholic sissy. She’d knocked him down a peg, humiliated him. When he tried to take her in his arms she even hit him. He put out both hands to her throat. He took her firmly by the throat and pressed it. Pressed his hands tight.

He holds those hands in front of him now, looks at them, hands covered with calluses from the hard work they’ve done all their life.

He goes on talking; he has to tell Anna the whole story. He has to confess. Not just the night of the murders, no, he has to get it all off his mind. It bursts out of him like a raging torrent, a tide sweeping him away with it. Anna is the branch to which he clings to save him. Save him from the torrent, save him from drowning. He wants to free himself from that compulsion. Free himself from everything that has been weighing him down for years. He needs her to absolve him.

“Barbara was a strong woman, she defended herself. Somehow she managed to get away from me.”

Why he suddenly had the pickax in his hands, where he got it from, he can’t say, he doesn’t remember when he first brought it down.

All he sees is Barbara lying on the floor in front of him. She wasn’t moving anymore, she didn’t stir at all.

He tried to drag her away from the light, into the dark.

At that moment, there’s old Frau Danner in the doorway. “I didn’t want her to start screaming.” Without even thinking, without hesitation, he struck her too.

One after another, he struck them down.

As if in a frenzy. A frenzy of bloodlust, his mind clouded, no longer master of himself. No, it wasn’t he who struck them down, he didn’t do it. The Wild Hunt took him over. The demon, the destroyer struck them down, all of them. He himself watched, watched as they were struck down. Couldn’t believe he was capable of such a thing, couldn’t believe any human being was capable of it.

He went on from the barn into the farmhouse. None of them must survive. Not one. He was going to kill them all.

It was like a compulsion, an inner voice that he obeyed. He was enslaved to that voice as he had been enslaved to Barbara. As immoderate in his desire to kill as he had been immoderate in his desire for her body. Yes, he had felt the same greed, found the same satisfaction.

He wasn’t going to leave any of them alive, not one.

The new maid in her little room, he’d nearly missed her. Lord of life and death as he was that night, he almost let her live.

When the storm was over, he locked the barn and the house.

Only then did he take the key. The key that locked the front door of the house. He’d need it if he wanted to come back and obliterate his tracks.

His mind had suddenly become very clear. Clearer than it had been for a long time. He saw it all before him and knew what he must do.

He would come to feed and tend the animals. To remove all trace of himself.

He had freed himself from a demon, his own demon.

It must all look like a robbery. The more time passed, the better for him. He wouldn’t be suspected. He hadn’t done anything.

Except that he couldn’t get little Josef out of his mind, the little boy lying in bed in his own blood. He couldn’t forget that image.

Why did he kill them all?

“Why does anyone kill? Why does he kill what he loves? Anna, you can kill only those you love.

“Anna, do you know what goes on in people’s minds? Do you know that? Can you look into their heads, into their hearts? I’d been locked up all my life, locked up.

“And suddenly a new world opened up to me, a new life. Do you know what that’s like?

“I tell you, we’re lonely all our lives. We’re alone when we come into the world, we die alone. And in between I was caught in my body, caught in my longing.

“I tell you, there’s no God in this world, only Hell. And Hell is here on Earth in our heads, in our hearts.

“The demon’s here in every one of us, and every one of us can let our demons out at any time.”

They sat there in silence.

After a while he stood up and went to his bedroom.

He has taken his old pistol out of the drawer in the bedside table. Now the gun lies cold and heavy in his hand.

Everything has fallen away from him. He just sits there, sits there calmly.