The bus stop stood alone in the middle of a wood. It wasn't attended to as often as the other stops. Moss grew on its roof and the timetable on the back wall was stained with rain. Trees with black trunks gathered close round it and shadowed it. The bulb in the light fitting flickered and sputtered. If witches were real, then this would be the sort of place from which they caught the bus.
They stood on the edge of the night, where the light stopped, out there in the thickening dusk, part of the shadows.
The teenagers were hanging around outside the hypermarket in the slow evening, trying to decide what to do. Then there, at the edge of the car park, at the top of the grassy rise, under the trees, figures. They didn't arrive, they didn't move, they just gathered, in the grainy gloom, thin and grey, barely there at all, almost a trick of the light.
Hanna dared Lukas to go see who it was and Mia followed him. The figures seemed to recede as they approached, as if a camera was zooming out. They seemed almost skeletal, skin tight over bones, and they were barely dressed at all - just rags, some rough, stripey material, wearing away at their protruding joints.
The eyes, though. That is what Mia remembered, what made her sure she had seen something, there beyond the sodium yellow. The eyes, wide in stark sockets, feverish and bright, staring at them with a fierce hatred.
The road from Spandau to Gross Glienicke runs straight down, with the graveyard on one side and the woods on the other and there, halfway down it, is the bus stop. It was a marker for the kids, halfway to the lake, halfway to the town, never a destination itself. No one ever got off there and no one would ever want to. A place unvisited. By the living at least.
There was a little playground down by the lake but it was too late in the evening for small children. They were all tucked up in bed. Lena and Hanna, bored, were squeezed into the too small swings, listlessly kicking up sand as they creaked back and forth and talked. The night was still and quiet and the only sound was the metal frame of the swings squeaking as it shifted under them.
Then another sound. Something in the water. Something big like a paddle or someone wading.
What beach there was was funnelled down between the trees and the shore was out of sight from where they sat. They stopped swinging. Something was coming up the beach. Shadows gathered under the branches.
A figure lurched into sight. Fully dressed, but their clothes were old fashioned and cheap. And waterlogged. They looked, the girls told their friends, like the people in their grandparents' photo albums, regrettable eighties haircuts and regrettable eighties denim.
On they trudged, sand sticking to their soaking cuffs. And another figure, and another.
Their skin, pale and bloated from the water, sagged from their bones, their hair hung in limp clumps. They trudged up the beach into town, grey and brown under the yellow street lights, and with them came a smell of stagnant water and of rot.
It was only after they had gone that the girls could catch their breath enough to start screaming.
Behind the bus stop halfway to Spandau, opposite the graveyard, there was a ditch, full of unmoving water stained black by fallen leaves. Someone had put a plank over the ditch as a simple bridge and from the plank a path disappeared into the darkness of the forest.
It wasn't much of a forest, truth be told, sandwiched in between housing estates, main roads and an old earthwork, the Teufelsgraben. Hardly the deep, dark, witchy forest of German folk tales.
But anywhere that a path winds into shadow under dripping and entangled branches, where there is stifling silence under the close trees, where nothing stirs and no bird sings, that is a forest, dark and fearful and sinister.
They were walking aimless through the twilight, quite happy not to have an aim, to be not doing anything, when they heard it coming.
Down the sunset suburban streets it came, rattling as it rolled. Every house was turned from the road, windows already lit with lamps, but street lights not yet on, small children shouting in back gardens, front rooms blue with television glow, no cars, no busses, no passers by, only the teenagers there to hear it rumbling up behind them.
Having been walking down the middle of the empty street, they broke instinctively for the pavements, turning to look back as they did so. And they stopped.
A wooden wheel, taller than a man. Indeed, a man was strapped to it, naked, dirty, bloodied. The wheel rolled on its edge, unwavering. Tied at the wrists and ankles, the man's hands and feet flopped this way and that as it rolled, as if they had no bones in them. His limbs and torso were pummelled with bruises. He had been castrated and his pubic hair was matted with blood, the wide wound bulging with intestine. His eyes and mouth were open, his expression one of horror and agony, his face looping round and round, inverting with each roll, his long hair painting the tarmac with a dark, wet trail of blood.
He made no noise. Just gaped, stared, turned, as the wheel rolled on, past the frozen teenagers, down between the silent, homely houses, into the night.
By the time their shouting had filled the road with adults, the wheel had gone.
Deep in the woods behind the bus stop was a house. Low eaved, dark windowed, huddled in under the trees, its garden drawn tight about it. The sort of house that children, lost in the forest, happened upon and never left.
In the little house lived an old woman, an old woman who was little more than a shuffling pile of threadbare old cardigans and an army surplus greatcoat. A little old woman who once a week edged wordlessly round the hypermarket, who spoke to no one and whom no one spoke to. A bent, creeping old woman who in the day tended the flowers in the graveyard opposite and in the night... In the night what might she do? Dance, wild, around fires that burned deep in the trees? Sing and call out to forgotten powers under the moon? If witches were real, then this would be one. After all, this was clearly a witch's house and she lived in it.
Teenagers have nothing to do. There are plenty of things they could be doing, of course, ask an adult and they'll think of something, but the adults are busy. The adults are in, feeding the younger children or slumped, work-weary, in front of mind-numbing variety shows. They are out, in silent, stuffy restaurants and noisy, unwelcoming bars.
And so the teenagers, too young to work, too old to play, must make their own entertainment. So they are the ones that see the things. The things that happen on the edge of the town. On the edge of the light. On the edge of the day.
They see the arms and legs in the trees.
The teenagers edge their way down the thin path, into the wood, trying not to look up.
A head hangs from a branch, tied by its hair, the eyes protruding where the skin is taut over the cheeks.
They urge each other on, on to the witch's house.
Two arms have been afixed either side of a tree trunk, so that it seems to be reaching out to them as they pass.
They have have seen the horrors in the dusk and they have heard the old woman called a witch and there can be no coincidence there.
A row of headless corpses hangs from a long, thick tree limb, swaying gently, jostling each other. Above them, nailed to the bole, is an eagle of gold, beneath it the letters: SPQR.
The teenagers come to an incongruous garden gate in the middle of the darkening wood and stop.
The house is asleep, curtains drawn, shut up. Is the old woman not there?
It is somehow even more disturbing to discover, when they, delaying, turn round, that the trees are empty of bodies. The forest is silent. Night is falling.
The old woman, they discover, is sick. The door was not locked and they followed her voice, thin, weary, to a cold back room, where she huddled under a blanket.
They had not discussed, they suddenly realise, what they might do when they found her, but confronted with this shivering bundle, that looks like any grandmother, what can they do?
"Three things," whispers the old woman, for tasks in stories always come in threes.
There is soup on the stove that can be heated up and a furnace to be restarted. And then:
"The third thing," she says, "Is not so easy."
Witches, they discover, are real.
Behind the lonely bus stop, halfway down a dark and untravelled road, deep the woods, there burns a fire.
Around the fire, on the edge of the light, gather figures. Out of the darkness of the Teufelsgraben, the Devil's Ditch, they come, movements in shadow that become forms, become faces. A figure in armour, the half opened visor almost concealing a half opened face, an hussar, the white sash over his blue uniform stained bright red, an infantry man, legless, leaving bloody handprints on the bark as he pulls himself upright against a tree.
On the other side of the fire, behind the low garden fence in front of the house, the teenagers are working. They have a system set up, running back and forth between the wood store and the bonfire, passing logs hand to hand, keeping the flames fed, keeping the light alive, keeping the darkness at bay. There are new witches in the wood.
Behind the bus stop, deep in the woods, the teenagers have something to do. They are all witches now.