The physician looked up cautiously. The roof directly above him seemed solid. There were no beams or joists, but smooth, stable clay. Its round shape that came to a point at the top lent further stability to the tunnel. Simon had seen things like that in a book on mining. The men who had built these corridors had been masters of their craft. How long did it take them to create this maze? Years? Decades? The collapse just now must have been due to the humidity that made the hard clay crumble. Water must have seeped in somewhere. Other than that, the tunnels were in perfect shape.
Simon was still amazed at the construction. Why on earth did these people spend so much energy creating a maze that had no obvious purpose? That it made no sense as an underground hiding place had just been convincingly demonstrated by the fire. Whoever built a fire in one of the upper chambers could be sure that people would come scampering like rats from the smoke-filled corridors to the surface. Or that they’d choke down there.
Unless this tunnel led to the outside somewhere…
Simon took Sophie by the hands.
“We’ve got to go on before the entire corridor comes down. It has to lead to the outside somewhere.”
Sophie looked at him, her eyes wide with fear. She seemed to be frozen, rigid with shock.
“Sophie, can you hear me?”
No response.
“Sophie!”
He gave her a ringing slap in the face. The girl came to.
“What…what?”
“We’ve got to get out of here. Pull yourself together. You go ahead with the candle, and be careful it doesn’t go out.” He gave her an intense look before continuing. “I’ll take Clara and stay right behind you. Understand?”
Sophie nodded, and they set out.
The corridor took a slight turn before it straightened out again. Then it began to rise, almost unnoticeably at first, then steeper and steeper. First they could only crawl on all fours, but then the corridor became wider and higher. Finally they could walk, stooped over. Simon carried Clara on his back, her arms dangling on both sides of his shoulders. She was so light that he barely noticed her weight.
Suddenly Simon felt a draft coming from up ahead. He took a deep breath. It smelled of fresh air, of forest, tree sap, and springtime. Never before had air seemed so precious to him.
A few moments later the tunnel ended.
Simon couldn’t believe it. He took the candle from Sophie and looked around in a panic. No passageway. Not even a hole.
It took him a while to discover a narrow shaft that led vertically upward.
About fifteen feet above them, daylight was falling in through narrow cracks. Up above, well beyond their reach, was a flagstone. Even if Simon had taken Sophie on his shoulders she couldn’t have reached the heavy slab of stone. And she certainly wouldn’t have been able to lift it.
They were trapped.
Gently, Simon let the unconscious Clara slide to the ground and sat down beside her. This wasn’t the first time today that he felt the urge to cry, or at least to shout at the top of his lungs.
“Sophie, I think we can’t get out of here…”
Sophie snuggled up and put her head in his lap. Her hands clung to his legs. She was trembling.
Suddenly Simon remembered the mark. He tugged at Sophie’s dress to reveal her shoulder.
On her right shoulder blade was the witches’ mark.
He fell silent for a long time.
“You children painted these marks yourselves, didn’t you?” he finally asked. “Hematite, a simple powder…You must have seen the symbol somewhere at Goodwife Stechlin’s, and then you scratched it into your skin with elderberry juice. It was just a game…”
Sophie nodded, pressing her head into Simon’s lap.
“Elderberry juice!” Simon continued. “How in the world could we have been so stupid! What kind of a devil would use a children’s beverage to write his marks? But why, Sophie? Why?”
Sophie’s body trembled. She was weeping into Simon’s lap. After a while she spoke without raising her head.
“They beat us, they kicked us, they bit us…Wherever they saw us they spat on us and made fun of us.”
“Who?” Simon asked, irritation in his voice.
“The other children! Because we’re orphans, because we have no families! So anyone can walk all over us.”
“But why the mark?”
For the first time Sophie looked up.
“We saw it on a shelf at Martha’s place. On a jar. It looked a bit like…witchcraft. We thought if we had the mark on us it would protect us like magic. Nobody’d be able to hurt us then.”
“Magic to protect you…a charm,” Simon mumbled. “A silly children’s prank, nothing more…”
“Martha told us about that kind of protective magic,” Sophie continued. “She said there are spells to ward off death, illness, or hailstorms. But she didn’t tell us about any of these. People would say she’s a witch…”
“Oh my God,” Simon whispered. “And that’s exactly what happened.”
“So we came down here to our hiding place, at the full moon, to make sure the magic would work. We scratched the mark into one another’s skins and swore we’d stick together forever. That we’d always help one another and spit on and detest the others…”
