The Master's Apprentice - Oliver Potzsch Page 0,35

in charge of the questioning. They were sitting around the table in the living room. No one touched the full jugs of wine in front of them.

“It could be robbers living in the woods,” the blacksmith suggested. “I heard them talking about a band of highwaymen in Tiefenbach waylaying carriages. Not even the imperial road is safe any longer!”

“Let us send out men with torches immediately!” said the prefect. “We have to find our children—now, before it’s too late!”

“And what about the boy?” asked the priest, studying Johann, who was shivering all over. “He still seems to be out of his senses.”

“Put him in the hole!” ordered Gerlach. “Maybe it’ll help him remember what really happened—it has worked for others. And it’s still a mild punishment for what he’s done.”

The bailiff hesitated at first but then nodded. “You’re right, Jörg. Perhaps he’ll come to his senses and then he can tell us the truth.”

They took Johann, who was unsteady on his feet, by the arms and walked him to the prefecture’s tower, which stood at the far end of the courtyard. The prison room was a dark, musty chamber with one tiny, barred window and a heavy, iron-studded door, which crashed shut behind him. Johann was alone. Soon he could hear the shouts of men outside and dogs barking—the search had begun. They would comb the forest the same way they did during a hunt, including the clearing Johann had described to them. He hoped and prayed they would find Margarethe and Martin. But deep down inside he felt that the two had gone forever, like the other children before them.

Johann’s knees buckled.

Racked by silent fits of crying, he sank onto the dirt floor. Until then, a shell of fear and shock had enclosed him. He’d replied to the men’s questions like a puppet, but now an icy wave of reality came crashing over him. He had sinned gravely, and prison really did seem like a mild punishment for his crimes. How could he have run away and left Margarethe and Martin behind? What had possessed him to do such a thing? No one had attacked him or pursued him. Everything that had seemed like the most wonderful thing in the world before—Margarethe’s kiss, touching her body all over, their whispers and moans—all that seemed dirty and bad to him now. Perhaps the church was right to condemn lust as the tool of the devil, because the two of them seemed to have called upon the devil, upon pure evil, with their doings.

He had been punished by God.

Johann desperately tried to figure out what had happened in the forest. Had there been outlaws about, like the blacksmith suspected? The whimpering could have come from Martin with someone holding a hand over his mouth. Margarethe fought back and shouted, “Go away,” so it would seem there was only one assailant, not several. He would have stood a chance against one man! He should have at least tried, instead of running like a chicken. The devil’s face etched into the rock, Margarethe’s screams, the twilight, the whimpering—everything had frightened him so much that he’d panicked.

The whimpering . . .

An old memory rose to the surface.

The wagon . . . The cage with the raven and the crows . . . The canvas billowing in the wind . . .

He’d heard a similar kind of whimpering before, eight years ago, when the magician was leaving town with his wagon. Could Tonio be behind all this? One misfortune after the other had occurred since the man had returned to Knittlingen. First he had made Johann wish for Ludwig’s death, whereupon it became reality. And now Martin and Margarethe had gone missing in Schillingswald Forest. Johann realized he hadn’t seen Tonio at the fair.

Because he was in the forest?

Of course Johann knew that children and youths were abducted from time to time. There were horror stories of hungry outcasts, of lunatics and wild men who caught little children and ate them. But Johann didn’t really believe that part. The poor souls were probably sold to the highest bidder and spent the rest of their days as mine workers below ground, as slaves in faraway countries, or as child harlots. But the suspects were always gangs of robbers—a single man with a child would be too conspicuous. Tonio’s presence in town and the terrible events could only be a stupid coincidence.

Johann huddled down in a corner of the prison chamber and thought about his life. Faustus,