Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence. Michael Marshall Smith

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       Chapter 11

      ‘But … but … but … how?’ Hannah asked.

      It wasn’t the first time she’d asked. ‘And also … why?’

      It wasn’t the first time she’d asked that either. She and Granddad were in the living room. The man in the crumpled suit had told the giant mushroom to get out of the bath and go wait outside. The mushroom, whose name seemed to be Vaneclaw, had done what it was told. A little later there had been a faint yelping sound, caused by it wandering too close to the edge of the bluff and falling over it. The man in the suit – or ‘the Devil’ as he kept insisting he should be called – said he’d be able to do less harm down there, and to ignore him for now.

      After a while, however, the mushroom had started calling out, rather plaintively. The noise eventually got loud enough that Granddad became concerned it might get into the dreams of people in nearby cabins, and so the old man in the suit irritably went out to make the mushroom be quiet. He’d been gone for some time.

      Meanwhile Granddad had listened to Hannah ask the same questions, again and again. How, and why, could he possibly know the Devil, the most evil and awful being in the universe, that a lot of people said didn’t even exist?

      Each time she asked, Granddad seemed to try to make a start at answering, but faltered. So she asked yet again.

      ‘Let me tell you a story,’ he said, finally.

      Once, he said, there was a boy.

      His name was Erik Gruen. Erik was thirteen years old and lived on a farm, a small farm, in the vast flatness of central Germany. It was not a very good farm. Every day Erik and his brothers and sisters helped their parents, tilling the land and planting seeds and looking after their straggly collection of livestock. Each year, the family barely scraped by. There was never much food, and Erik – the youngest of six children – went to work in the field every day wearing a selection of cast-offs not just from his elder brothers, but sisters, too. You might think that would have been embarrassing, but it was not, because everyone wore the same – torn rags and bits of sacking, held together with string. The point was not looking smart but being protected from the elements, because often it rained. It was cold a lot of the time, too, and windy.

      It was a tough life, though they didn’t know it. This hard, endless struggle was all they knew, all their parents had known, and all their parents’ parents had known, back into the mists of murky time. The Gruens had been working this scabby patch of land for centuries. That was what they did, all they had ever done, and all they would ever do.

      Except that one morning, when it was raining so hard there was nothing they could do outside and the entire family was crammed into the tiny farmhouse, sniping at each other, Erik decided to take a walk. He headed down the long, winding lane and got as far as the road (itself only a track slightly wider than the lane). He kept on walking until he’d gone further than ever before, and then he walked some more.