Helen Grant

“At school, the news that Pia Kolvenbach was moving to England and that her parents were divorcing had circulated with lightening speed. Suddenly I was no longer ostracized for being the Potentially Exploding Girl, but the new attention was worse. I could tell that the girls who sidled up to me and asked with faux-sympathetic smiles whether it was true were doing it on the basis of discussions they had heard between their own parents, to who they would report back like scouts. Soon there would be nothing left of me at all, nothing real: I would be a walking piece of gossip, alternatively tragic and appalling and, worse of all, a poor thing.”

“It would have been good to be the girl who helped solved the Katharina Linden case, instead of the girl whose grandmother had exploded at the family Advent dinner. I wasn't greedy; it needn't have been Katharina's actual corpse that we found; a severed head - a finger - even a piece of her clothing would have been enough; the little red bow from her hair, perhaps.”

“Herr Schiller? Are there really any such things as ghosts?' The old man did not even show surprise at the question. He heaved a sigh. 'Yes Pia, there are. But never the ones you expect.”

“Pluto was a well-known fixture in Bad Münstereifel, at least among those who lived in the old part of town. A large, foul-tempered, and unsterilized inky-black tomcat, he had once made it onto the front page of the local free paper (admittedly during a quiet week as regards other news) after a resident of the town accused him of making an unprovoked attack on her pet dachshund.”

“She slid open the box, extracted a match, and struck it with a flourish. The flame flared up in the gloom of the unlit room, a tiny golden beacon. For a moment, Oma Kristel held it aloft, then the unthinkable happened. The match slipped out of her fingers and fell straight onto her pink mohair bosom. With a whooomph! like the sounds of a gas furnace firing up, the hairspray with which Oma Kristel had doused herself ignited, obliterating her in a column of flames.”

“What was really unfair about the whole thing was that Oma Kristel hadn't so much exploded as spontaneously combusted. But Gossip is Baron Münchhausen's little sister, and never lets the truth get in the way of a good story.”

“My life might have been so different, had I not been known as the girl whose grandmother exploded.”

“A ghost mill, they called it, infested with all sorts of witches, phantoms, and monsters. It was as though the very timbers of the mill had soaked up the unearthly forces that seethed and thronged in the valley, like the wood of a wine barrel takes up the stain and scent of the wine.”

“Nobody cared about Oma Kristel, about the way she had tried to keep herself attractive long after Youth had packed its bags and moved out of the aging tenement, about the way she always had some little gift for me, a sample bottle of unsuitable scent or a brooch made of sparkly paste.”