The best days, when I was a child, were the days with Aunt Helga.

She wasn't really an aunt, but Dad and Mutti called her that and so did we girls. She had a small house in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of an insignificant village, in the middle of Europe: at the centre of the world.

All the work done on it was the work of her own hands. In the garden, too: she lovingly pruned the apple tree, the cherry tree and the plum tree that we climbed, each at its right season, to pick as much ripe fruit as we could eat and more, buckets of it to make jam and pies and cream-cake. Herbs were everywhere, not confined to precise plots, because, Aunt Helga said, each one needed to grow where it grew best. She used to pick leaves off a plant, at random it seemed, and rub them in her hands to hold under my nose or Anna's to let us inhale the scent, sweet or tart or pungent, and ask us the name. We never remembered the names. She laughed at that and tossed the leaves on the compost heap, "earth to earth," she said.

There were sides to Aunt Helga that we alone knew. I suspect that there were sides to her that we didn't know and other people did. There was so much of her --small as she was-- that it had to be impossible for any one person to know her completely. Her house was full of books: every time we stayed with her we found something new to read that we hadn't seen before, though we were sure we had looked in that exact place the previous summer.

She had a little dragon that managed to keep out of sight by looking like a fat orange tomcat most of the time. She called him "Puss" or "Mietzekatze" as if he was an ordinary cat, but Anna had seen him take his real form once and shaken me awake in the middle of the night to look at him.

---

I was eleven and Anna almost fourteen when it all changed.

I was due to go to high school after the summer holidays. It scared me half to death, even though I had a sister who had done two years already and didn't seem to have suffered from it. Dad had one of his conferences, in New Caledonia or something, and Mutti was going along this time because they'd done the research together, so they gave us a rail pass and told us to take ourselves to Aunt Helga. Whether that was trust or neglect --and there was a very thin line between those in our family-- I didn't know, and probably will never know.

She didn't have a telephone, and in those days nobody had an e-mail address. But we'd arrived without notice before and she'd never been away. Dad had written her a postcard, but not remembered to post it until the day we left, so we would arrive long before it.

It was easy enough to get to Aunt Helga's house, though it took a long time. First the international train, then the Land-Express, then the steam train that crept up the hills doggedly, and finally the green-and-white caterpillar that called itself a train but was little more than a glorified tram. We arrived in the middle of the afternoon, surprised that it was so early: it had felt like travelling all day.

"Sophie," Anna said, "don't you feel something in the air?"

There was a lot in the air, but I couldn't determine right away what she was talking about. Excitement, unusual in this place. Apprehension, perhaps, change, resentment. Resistance to change.

"Yes," I said tentatively.

"It doesn't feel right."

True: it didn't. "Scary," I said.

We trudged down the hill and up the other hill, dragging our suitcases. It was a good thing that Mutti had made us take the wheeled monsters instead of rucksacks, however much we'd protested that we weren't old women, because it was warm and muggy and we were sweating like horses even without having to carry twenty pounds on our backs. The only things we actually carried were the tapestry bags that Aunt Helga herself had made for us the previous summer. Anna's was blue with a design of fishes, mine green with leaves and apples.

Anna, taller and stronger, was far ahead of me. I heard her raised voice before I could see the house. "Where did she go?"

A man's voice, "I don't know, miss."

"Well, didn't she tell you? Who called you in, anyway?"

"King of Saxony, miss."

"What?"

I rounded the corner and saw Anna standing, hands on hips, in front of a large workman. The workman had obviously been doing something to the outside of the house: there was a ladder against it with a bucket hanging from the top. He put a white-stained hand into the front of his white-stained overalls and took out a battered piece of paper. "King of Saxony. Here."

It did look like a royal document. Anna took it from the man's hand and peered at it, reading under her breath. "'Monument-- preserve and sustain--' But where did she go?"

The workman's shrug seemed to go on forever.

"Perhaps she left a note," Anna said. "Do you know if the door is open?"

Another shrug. She tried the front door. It was locked. The back door. It opened. "You stay here, Sophie. I'm not going to lug that case inside as well."

It took a long time. I stood looking at the house. It looked like a postcard, stilted, unreal. No life in it.

When Anna came out she was as white as writing paper. "Ice cream at Monika's," she said. She didn't say another word until we were at our usual corner table, each behind a sherbet.

"Well, did you find a note?"

"Nothing. All her own things are gone. All the clothes and papers. It's just the monument things that are left. The museum things. Old jugs and all the old furniture and books and the spice cupboard. The typewriter is gone, and the fridge. I thought we could stay there until she's back, but we can't live as if it's eighteen hundred, not on our own, not with workmen around."

I understood. It would have been fun to do it with Aunt Helga.

"Did you see Mietzekatze?"

She shook her head. "We'll have to go back and ask the neighbours. She can't have moved, can she?"

"Aunt Helga would never move." The words we weren't saying hung in the air between us.

---

"Well, I always thought she was a little mad," the dumpy woman said. There were three cats weaving around her legs, none of them orange. "But she never gave any trouble until last May. They came and took her away, they did, screaming and kicking."

I could imagine that Aunt Helga had screamed and kicked for being taken away from her house. "Where did they take her?"

"Hospital, dearie. It was a white van with male nurses in." She licked her lips as if she found the thought of male nurses delicious.

"We were a bit worried about the cat," Anna said quickly.

"Oh, he'll be all right. I fed him for a while and then he took off on his own. Saw him again a few days ago, sleek as ever, he'll have found another home by himself. I'm pretty sure he didn't run after her all the way to Fulda."

I filed that name away in my mind. I was still pondering whether to ask further when Anna said, "Can we visit her?"

"I suppose so, unless she's gone completely deranged. Do you have the address?"

Anna shook her head.

"Well, your mother will have it, I suppose. So you're not going to be here for the summer. Pity about my apricots. Pick some before you go, why don't you?"

---

"Fulda. That's all the way over in Hessen. If she's only ill, why didn't they take her to hospital somewhere closer?"

"Perhaps she's got a rare disease. Something they can't cure in the little hospital."

"Poppycock." Anna threw an apricot stone out of the train window with an angry gesture. I was very glad it wasn't me she was angry with. "Someone is doing evil things to her. I can feel it."

I was about to say 'poppycock' back to her when I remembered how the village had felt. And the house.

"Did you keep me out of the house because you were afraid you'd find her dead body?"`

She sighed. "Frankly, yes. I think this was worse, though. We don't know."

"Why didn't we stay in the house for one night? Or ask Monika to put us up? This way we'll arrive at midnight. And have nowhere to stay."

"The whole village will know we're looking for Aunt Helga now that the woman next door knows. And if the person doing the evil is still there we won't be safe either."

She had a point. But evil people could take the train just as well as we could. On the other hand, we'd been the only people on the platform.

"Don't worry about somewhere to stay," Anna said. "I have a plan. Remember where we stayed with Dad in Fulda year before last? They won't care that we don't have any grown-ups with us. If they even notice."

"And who's going to pay for that?"

"King of Saxony, miss," Anna said smugly and opened her tapestry bag. Sure enough, Friedrich August looked at us with his twinkly eyes from a whole wad of tens, twenties and hundreds. "Aunt Helga won't mind. She'll expect us to use it for that."