The Murder Farm Read online

  She has been to see the priest. She entered his room with some hesitation. She looked for an excuse. Wanted to speak to him, to ease herself and her conscience.

  But then, when she was facing the priest, she stood there like a schoolgirl, couldn’t get out the words she had been planning to say. He sat there behind his desk.

  What brought her to him? Was there something weighing on her conscience?

  And there was a smile on his lips. That omniscient, self-satisfied smile.

  His request for her to lighten her conscience, and that smile, too, the look in his eyes, had been enough to silence her completely.

  Why should she do it?

  Was this man to be her judge? Was he to sit in judgment on her life and what she had done? No, she didn’t want to talk to him about it. Didn’t want to receive absolution from any man. What absolution, why should she?

  She had done nothing wrong. Wrong had been done to her. Wrong had been done to her since she was twelve years old.

  For years she had fought against her feelings of guilt, had always done as she was told.

  At school they were taught that Eve gave Adam the apple, and so both were guilty of original sin and were driven out of Paradise.

  She hadn’t driven anyone out of Paradise. She had been driven out of it herself.

  To this day she sees her father before her. Her father, whom she had loved so much. She remembers feeling his hands on her body, those groping hands.

  She had lain there perfectly rigid. Incapable of moving. Frozen. Hardly daring to breathe.

  Eyes tight shut, she lay there in her bed. Not wanting to believe what was happening to her. Her father’s breath on her face. His groans in her ears. The smell of his sweat. The pain that filled her body. She kept her eyes shut, tight shut. As long as she didn’t see anything, nothing could be happening.

  Only what I see can happen to me, she had told herself.

  Next morning her father was the same as usual. For weeks nothing more happened. She had almost forgotten the incident. Had suppressed the memory of her father’s smell, the smell of his sweat, his groan, his lust. It was all hidden behind a thick veil of mist.

  She still wanted to be “a good daughter.” Just that, a good daughter. She wanted to honor her father and her mother. As the priest always said they must in Religious Instruction. Everything her father did was right. He was the center of her life, he was Lord God Almighty on the farm.

  She had never seen anyone contradict him or oppose him. Her mother didn’t. She herself couldn’t either. With time, the intervals between the occasions when he came to her grew shorter. More and more often he wanted to spend all night in her bed.

  Her mother seemed not to notice any of it. She kept quiet. Quiet as she had always been for as long as Barbara could remember. No one noticed anything.

  In time Barbara got the impression that what her father did was right, and her disgust for him was wrong. After all, her father loved her, loved only her.

  She wanted to be grateful, to be a good daughter.

  Like the girls in the story of Lot and his daughters. Lot who had fled from the city of Sodom into the wilderness with his daughters. Lot lay with his daughters there, and they both bore him children.

  That was what it said in the Bible. Why, Barbara asked herself, why should what was pleasing to God in Lot’s case be wrong in hers? She was a good daughter.

  She twice bore her father a child. She twice let herself be persuaded to name another man as its father.

  The first of them, Vinzenz, came to their farm just after the war, a refugee from the East. He was glad to work on the farm and have a roof over his head.

  It came easily to her to make eyes at him, and when she told him she was pregnant he was ready to marry her at once. He saw prospects of money and the farm ahead.

  When her husband discovered the secret of her child’s real father, even before Marianne was born, he threatened to see them all sent to prison. Her father gave him a considerable sum of money, saying that Vinzenz could go to the city with it, or even emigrate.

  Vinzenz agreed to be bought off, and he left the farm at the first opportunity.

  Where is he now? She has no idea, and it was a matter of indifference to her at the time. The deal gave her a father for her child.

  And life on the farm went on.

  When she became pregnant again, and this time there was no man around who could shoulder responsibility in the eyes of the public, her father had the idea of palming the child off on Hauer.

  At the time Hauer had just lost his wife. It was easy for Barbara to seduce the man. The “old fool,” as she called him, swallowed her story with eager passion. Barbara had to laugh out loud. It was easy to pull the wool over a man’s eyes.

  Matters didn’t become difficult until Hauer urged her to marry him. She must find out where Vinzenz was and sue for divorce, he said. Or even better, get him declared legally dead. These things could be done, he knew “the right people,” everything was possible for cash down.

  She made more and more excuses, until she finally broke up with him.

  The man gave her no peace. He stood outside her window for nights on end. Knocking, begging to be let in.

  He even lay in wait for Barbara, urging her to come back to him.

  Barbara was repelled by the man. Just as she had always been repelled by her father. The older she grew, the less she wanted to be a good daughter. Her abhorrence of her father and men in general grew greater all the time.

  They were all the same in their greed, their nauseating lust.

  With the years, she had learned to make her father dependent on her. She loved it when he begged for a night with her, even went on his knees to her. She had him in her hands. The relationship had changed. Now she called the shots.

  He must pay for his forbidden passion. Pay with the farm. He has transferred the farm over to her, on her conditions. She dictated the agreement to him. Now he depends on her and her favor.

  Of course she wanted to buy forgiveness with her donation. She wanted to be free, and free also of a sin that she would never have committed of her own accord.

  Time passes very slowly. The minutes and hours crawl by at a snail’s pace.

  Mick is still on the alert. The house isn’t quiet yet.

  He is waiting for his moment to arrive. In his mind, Mick goes over the plan once more. He’s going to wait until the house is quiet and then go down into the barn.

  The fire-raising trick. He’s often done it before. It’s easy.

  The people who live in the farmhouse are lying in their beds. He starts a fire in the barn.

  The cry of “Fire! Fire!” would be enough to wake Danner and his family abruptly. Drowsy with sleep, they’d run to the barn to save what they could.

  What with all the panic now breaking out, he’d have plenty of time to get into the house. The Danners would be busy getting their cattle out of the sheds to save them from the flames. In the ensuing chaos he’d find and purloin all the ready cash in the farmhouse. The Danners would be much too busy keeping the fire under control and raising the alarm to stop him.

  Afterward, no one would be able to say who first spotted the fire. His own tracks would go up in flames along with the barn, and he’d have disappeared into the woods by the time the blaze was out.

  Mick leaves his hiding place in the loft. The moment seems to have come. It has been quiet in the house for some time now. Carefully, he makes his way forward to the suspended ceiling of the barn. To the threshing floor there. He pauses. Hears his heartbeat, hears his own breathing.

  A rustling beneath him. A thought flashes through his mind: there’s someone down there in the barn! Why didn’t he see him coming? How could he have made such a mistake? No point thinking about it now. Whoever’s down there must leave before Mick can strike.

  A second person comes into the barn. Mick hears a woman’s voice. He knows that voice. It’s Barbara’s.

  He doesn’t r
ecognize the man’s voice. It’s not Danner anyway, Mick is sure of that. What are they talking about? Mick can hear the voices, but he can’t make out what they’re saying.

  He lies flat on the floor. Now he can peer through the floorboards.

  The exchange of words is turning into a quarrel. The voices grow louder, the woman’s rises, hysterical, shrill. The man takes Barbara by the throat, choking her. It all happens fast as lightning.

  For a moment Mick turns his head aside. Tries to get a better view from another position.

  When the two below are back in his field of vision at last, the man is raising a pickax above his head. Bringing it down on Barbara, who collapses without a sound. Lies on the barn floor. Her attacker goes on striking the defenseless body on the floor in mindless rage. Brings the pickax down again and again. It is some time before he leaves her alone.

  Mick lies on the suspended ceiling of the barn, hardly dares to breathe, to move.

  He’s killed old Danner’s daughter, the thought goes through his mind. Killed her like a mangy cat!

  The unknown man bends over the battered body, lifts it. Tries to drag the lifeless form away from the door, further inside the barn. Away from the light, into the darkness.

  Suddenly there are steps, a voice. Old Frau Danner is standing in the doorway. Mick holds his breath.

  “Barbara, where are you? Are you in the barn?”

  The old woman is struck down even before she has really entered the barn.

  Mick 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.

  He 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?