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  Before enclosing it with her letter to Ernst, she had scrawled on the bottom of the Polaroid three words: “Denk an mich!!!” “Think of me!!!”

  He had discovered what he was going to do with the two extra rooms—the “P-shaped bunker,” the secret cellar—in May 1984. Not before. Not even the prosecution, one day long in the future, could find any evidence to suggest that the crime he was about to commit had been premeditated by more than three months. The years spent planning the cellar, the excavation of seven rooms, and the subsequent excavation of other, secret rooms: All of this he had done as a sleep-walker who knows his way around his own home without opening his eyes. Part of his mind—his instinct—knew where it was all leading; the other—the conscious part—did not.

  At this point he regarded what he intended to do with the cellar as a purely temporary solution. But it was a plan that nevertheless required careful preparation. Because time was against him, he hurried. He worked day and night to get the job done. The hole behind the shelf unit in his workshop he kept small so that it could be obscured, like a safe hidden behind a painting. Being a practical man, he attached one side of the shelf unit to the wall with hinges so that it could be opened and closed like a door.

  Next he carried a king-size mattress and a bed frame down into the cellar and laid them out on the floor of the square room. He wired the cellar for electricity and bought other paraphernalia: two items from an electronics store and some plastic knives and forks. These he carried down to the secret cellar and carefully arranged so that they were ready.

  A third letter from Elisabeth to Ernst, dated August 9, 1984:... I usually have two days off a week and go swimming, play tennis or football. I like listening to music and I like being on my own and daydreaming. But if life was made of dreams then, well, I don’t really know.

  To all appearances Elisabeth Fritzl came from a loving family, earned a decent living, and was looking forward to moving in with her sister in the autumn. None of which stopped her from disappearing a second time, on August 28, 1984.

  Of course, her parents were beside themselves with worry. When his daughter failed to materialize the following day, Josef Fritzl marched straight down to the police station in Mozartstrasse to report her missing. It was a delicate situation for the officer in charge, having to explain to a man as sure of himself as Josef Fritzl, a man used to getting his way, that he was without legal recourse now that Elisabeth was eighteen, an adult, who could come and go as she pleased. And although he reassured Fritzl that the Amstetten police could be relied upon to do its utmost to find her—and hadn’t they played a significant role in tracking Elisabeth down the last time she had run away?—he felt obliged to remind the father that his daughter had presumably disappeared by choice.

  Now the officer took out his notepad. Had Elisabeth seemed troubled recently? It was Josef’s turn to feel embarrassed. Reluctantly he admitted that, yes, her behavior in recent months had given him grave cause for concern: her drinking, smoking, and, he suspected, solvent abuse; the late nights (only the other day she hadn’t come home until five in the morning); his and Rosemarie’s growing suspicion that their daughter had involved herself with the wrong crowd. He shook his head. It had, in all honesty, been very difficult to keep track of her. She showed little respect for her parents and, although she lived at home, cared little for their rules. He suspected his daughter might have joined some sort of commune. She had recently started expressing an interest in alternative religions. Behind his desk the officer silently took notes. He didn’t say so at the time, but it was clear to him that Elisabeth was an easily corrupted, unreliable girl. He reassured her father that he was sure she would turn up eventually. They usually did.

  Part Two

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Cellar

  Now the air grows stale and everything becomes obscure. Now things darken. Now we enter a place where little is known and we are forced to imagine. We are forced to imagine what we can hardly imagine.

  What do we know? We know what Elisabeth told investigators: that on August 29, 1984, the day she went missing, the day she was thought to have run away to join a cult, that her father asked her to help him with some heavy lifting. Everyone else was out: Elisabeth’s sister, Rosemarie, who had just had a baby and was visiting from Linz, was shopping with her mother. Another sister, Doris, was out for a walk with her baby in the pram. Except for Josef and Elisabeth, the house was empty.

  He asked her to help him carry a door into the garage and this she had done: Father and daughter together had carried the door down into the garage and set it down against a wall. You could enter the garage through the garden at the back of the house. It sloped down into the earth and was connected by a door to the cellar. A second entrance to the cellar. The other one was near the old house, next to the main entrance to the apartment block. But it made sense to be able to get into the cellar from the garage. It meant that Josef could carry whatever was inside his car straight into the cellar without having to haul it across the garden first.

  They were still in the garage when Josef remembered that there was something he wished to discuss with Elisabeth, and so he had unlocked the door in the garage and ordered her into the cellar, saying that he wanted to talk to her somewhere private. Together they had walked down a dimly lit corridor and, through another locked door, into Josef’s Werkstätte, his workshop, which he used as a second office. Elisabeth had never been down here before, nor had her mother, nor had any of her brothers or sisters. They had ceased to be interested and, even if they had been, the cellar was strictly off-limits: Its doors were always locked and Josef carried with him the only set of keys.

  Once they were in his office, Josef asked his daughter to take a seat and, having done so, Elisabeth waited to find out what she was in trouble for. He had gone back to the garage to fetch something. He didn’t say what and she hardly noticed; she had locked herself up in that dreamy, inaccessible way of hers that he hated. She was sure she was going to get a lecture. Her father had decided long ago that she had “gone off the rails,” what with her moods and answering back all the time. He hadn’t liked it at all, the way she was turning out. So she waited impatiently for him to come back and give her a lecture, so that it would be over and she could go.

  Only two days earlier there had been an enormous row between Elisabeth and her father: That was the day she had broken the news to him that she was going to live with her sister, Rosemarie, in Linz. She had already moved most of her belongings out of Ybbsstrasse by this point, but when she had told him that this was it, she was going, he had flown off the handle in a way she had never seen him do before. She had explained to him that she and Rosemarie had agreed that she would move in over the weekend and that it was fine because her sister had a spare room in her apartment. But he had gone mad. He had lost all his self-possession. He was shouting and swearing and red in the face—he was so furious that half of what he was saying hadn’t made any sense. “You won’t get out of it like this,” he was shouting, along with other things about how she was a drug addict and couldn’t just go wherever she wanted. And she had just stood there, inert, trying to switch off and ignore him. All she had wanted to do was get on with her packing.

  While she waited for her father to come back to the office, she noticed for the first time a gun lying on one of the shelves on the wall: a small handgun that was lying there in among the tools. It had made her feel uneasy. The whole place was giving her the creeps.

  He said that he wanted to talk, but this had been a lie. He had not wanted to talk, had no intention of talking, and the next thing she knew he had clapped his right hand around her face. He must have crept up and lunged at her from behind, because she hadn’t seen it coming; hadn’t noticed him there, suddenly so close; hadn’t seen that he was holding something. He clapped his right hand over her mouth and nose and in his hand was a piece of cloth. A faint smell: something like glue and alcohol. She found out later that he had soaked the cloth in chl
oroform; most probably he had bought it from a pet shop. Vets still use chloroform to render animals unconscious before an operation. He clapped his hand over her face and she didn’t stand a chance. She was tiny—she weighed barely more than eighty pounds—but she had struggled. She had kicked him and flailed about with her arms. But he was strong and well over twice her weight, and she had started buckling in the chair. He had needed to hold the cloth to Elisabeth’s face for a few seconds—for as long as it took for her to pass out.

  When she awoke she didn’t know where she was or what had happened to her. She felt disoriented from the anesthetic and was seeing double. And she had never been in the cellar before, so at first she didn’t understand that the place she was in was a cellar at all. All she knew was that it was dark and that there was a smell of mildew and that she was alone. She could hardly move because she felt so nauseated from the chloroform. But there was another reason, too. She realized, as she gradually emerged from the chaotic depths of an artificial sleep, that her hands had been tied behind her back with a chain.

  It must have shocked and frightened her very badly to find herself in that unknown place. But worse than waking up alone in a strange cellar with her arms tied behind her back with a chain that, she could feel with her fingertips, had been wrapped around her upper arms and wrists in two figures-of-eight, then secured with a padlock; much worse than this was the fact that the cellar had obviously been prepared for her arrival. Much thought had gone into its design. It must have been very frightening indeed to realize that this room had been done up specially. That it had in fact been expecting her to turn up for weeks.

  She had awoken slumped, not on the floor, but on a bed. And it was a proper bed, not just a mattress: a king-sized mattress on a bed frame, made up with pillows and other bed linens. Behind the foot of the bed an iron post had been screwed to the concrete floor, and attached to it was one end of the chain that he had used to bind her arms behind her back. From her wrists to the post, the chain measured about half a metre—which meant that even when the nausea lifted, her movements were very restricted. She could get on and off the bed, but that was about it.

  Although it was very dark, she could establish some basic facts about where he had taken her. She was in a small, but not claustropho- bically tiny, square room with low ceilings—roughly the same size as the courtyard of the house, directly overhead. It was quiet; no footsteps could be heard from above, and the voices of the lodgers were very far away; the familiar sounds of everyday life barely penetrated the ceiling, which was low and clammy and yet less clammy than the walls and the floor. As well as the bed there were other objects in the room, and these she could just make out in the darkness: the reflective surface of a television screen; beneath it, the silver panel of a video recorder. There was a sink, too, and a toilet: He had gone so far as to plumb the cellar. But, chained up as she was, she was unable to reach the toilet, or even undress. He had tied a gag around her mouth, which she now noticed for the first time; it had slipped down and was hanging around her neck.

  The door to the room, she now realized, was ajar with a set of keys dangling in the lock. She had wanted to grab them, but they were too far away, and the next thing she knew there he was beside her tightening her chains. He didn’t say very much. He only told her that it was all her fault and that he had never wanted to resort to this. “Der Krug geht so lange zum Brunnen bis er bricht,” he said. It was an Austrian proverb: “The pitcher that goes to the well too often gets broken,” meaning Elisabeth had pushed him too far this time. She had no idea what he was talking about. Then he left, locking the door behind him. For twenty-four hours she was left there, not knowing where he was or why she was there. Shackled, afraid, not knowing what had happened to her or what was going to happen to her, whether this was a punishment, and if so, how long it would last.

  What else do we know? We know, from the plans of the house that Josef had submitted nine months earlier to Amstetten Council, something about what had happened between the time he drugged her and the time she woke up alone in the room; that once she had passed out, he had laid her on the floor so that his hands were free to lift the shelf unit off the wall, the same shelf unit where, minutes earlier, Elisabeth had caught sight of a gun. The unit had been pushed up against the wall to cover the hole that Josef had made there, a hole that didn’t so much resemble a door as the entrance to an animal’s burrow: a narrow opening carved out roughly through the concrete wall, barely three feet in height, it came up to his waist. A tiny hole. A concealed, miniature entrance to a second, secret cellar that had never come into being as far as Amstetten Council was concerned, and so did not officially exist.

  If you looked into this hole to find out what was beyond it, you could see only blackness.

  Beyond the hole is a crawl space, big enough for him to crouch and pass through, but it proves difficult with his unconscious daughter in his arms. So he enters the hole bent over double with her bunched up in his arms. Or he pushes her through the hole, then creeps in behind her. Or pulls her in after him, moving backward as a badger or a fox drags its prey into its den. Once through this hole, he makes his way along its narrow passageway. One final door: He unlocks this, then bolts it at his back, his daughter lying unconscious in his arms. They are very deep in the cellar now, as deep as it is possible to go; they are inside the room where he had secured an iron post to the floor.

  Her designated bedroom—what else could you call it? And in some grotesque way it does resemble the bedroom in 40 Ybbsstrasse in which she has lived, on and off, throughout her young life. The room he has allocated for her in the cellar has a bed and a television in it, just like her bedroom upstairs. He has equipped it with a washbasin, a toilet, and, she finds out later, an electric stove—just what you would expect to find in any ordinary household. There is permanence about it, an attempt at homeliness even, as evidenced by the knives and forks he has provided—if these had not been made of plastic. Real knives—he knows from raping at knifepoint a young nurse in Linz—can be turned into weapons. So the knives and forks are plastic and the doors lock only from the outside. A place that could more accurately be described as an inverted version of her room upstairs: Where there should have been light, there is darkness; where there should have been windows, there are cracks in the walls, through which seep the only source of ventilation—sour air contaminated by the smells of earth and mortar on its long journey into the cellar from above. The water that flows from the tap is unheated. The bare lightbulb that hangs from the ceiling can be turned on and off only by a switch on a wall several rooms away, so that Josef can leave her in darkness whenever he chooses.

  There is something irreconcilable about the room, if you could call it a room; its atmosphere is closer to that of a cave, a low-ceilinged, damp, and stinking cave that sweats moisture from every surface. A cave within which he has nonetheless assembled an enormous bed, a stove, a sink, and a toilet—as if these were things that in any way belonged here. Josef bending the facts. Trying to make the cellar into something it’s not. Taking what’s upstairs and burying it here under the house. The room he has chosen for her is absurd. For it isn’t a room at all. It is an impersonation of a room: an uninhabitable, secret, underground hovel where he wants his daughter now to live.

  What else do we know? To get to the cellar on the second day of her captivity, the same day he went down to the police station to report his daughter missing, he used the main entrance, the one that was accessed through a locked door in the courtyard of the house. He unlocked the door and descended the flight of stairs that lead into the cellar. At the foot of the stairs is a second door, the entrance proper to the cellar. Having unlocked it, he stepped into the first room: the “Vorraum Terrazzo,” he had called it in neatly aligned, squashed capital letters on the application form to the council. Vorraum means “entrance hall” and terrazzo, borrowed from Italian, referred to the faux-marble flooring: a complicated procedure in which chips of stone or glass are e
mbedded in a layer of concrete and then, when this is set, polished smooth with a grinder. For centuries the technique has been used in Venice to make inexpensive floors out of fragments of marble salvaged from other buildings. Just as Josef had used odds and ends left over from the gutting and refurbishment of number 40 to make the floor of the cellar. “Spare in die Zeit, dann hast du in die Not.” “Waste not want not.” “A penny saved is a penny earned.”

  Josef, never throwing anything out; recycling everything. He had grown up poor; grown into a man obsessed with notions of property and ownership. He was always drawn to the solidity of buildings, of bricks and mortar, the illusion of stability they gave him. And he had learned to conceive in every last chipped tile or cracked brick another use. He was always fishing things out of trash containers, stopping his car by the side of the road if ever he saw discarded rubble in one, collecting odds and ends, broken pieces of furniture, lumps of things that were unidentifiable; all of them went into the trunk of the car to be hoarded in the cellar and eventually turned into something else. Vorraum: a rather grand title to give a room in what was essentially a storage facility; a name more appropriate to a room in somebody’s home than a cellar. Rather a lot of effort to put into a place that was to be seen by only Josef and once, nine months earlier, by a council inspector who had been so impressed by his handiwork that he had issued a permit for the cellar that same day.

  From the Vorraum Terrazzo Josef passed through the third door into the second room, the Ersatzteillager, the room for spare parts; and from there through the fourth door into another storeroom: perhaps carrying a battery-operated flashlight, perhaps not. He knew the place so well, having constructed every room himself, it is more than likely he would have been able to negotiate its passageways in the dark; he knew it like the back of his hand, as if it were a part of himself. Josef striding from chamber to chamber. He was not a man who liked to be rushed. The sounds of keys jangling; his footsteps; the sounds of doors opening and closing; the click of keys turning in locks; the drip of condensation on the concrete floor; the drone of the wood-fired furnace, very close by now. Josef moving deeper and deeper into the bowels of the cellar, traveling always counterclockwise from the house. The bowels of the cellar, or, some would argue, its womb; away from daylight, away from fresh air, away from other people and the constraints—moral, physical, statutory—of civilized life. A million miles away from where Elisabeth had been packing her things into a suitcase just a day ago. But at the same time not far at all: just nine or ten feet, if there had been a way of tunneling up.