3,096 Days by Natascha Kampusch Read Free Book Online Page A

is this? What time is it?
The windows of the delivery van were blacked out with the exception of a narrow strip along the upper edge. From the floor of the van I couldn’t tell where we were going, and I didn’t dare lift my head to look out of the windows. It seemed we had been driving for quite some time and were not headed anywhere in particular. I quickly lost any sense of space or time. But the treetops and the utility poles that kept whizzing by made me feel like we were driving around in circles in my neighbourhood.
    Talk. You have to talk to him. But how? How do you talk to a criminal?
Criminals don’t deserve any respect, so it didn’t seem appropriate to address him using the
Sie
form in German used for strangers and persons of respect. So I decided on
du
, the form of address that had, until now, been reserved for people who were close to me.
    Absurdly enough, I asked him first what size shoes he wore. I had remembered that from watching TV shows like
Aktenzeichen XY ungelöst
* . You had to be able to give an exact description of the perpetrator; even the slightest detail was important. Naturally, I didn’t get an answer. Instead the man snapped at me to be quiet and nothing would happen to me. Even today I don’t know howI managed to get up enough courage to disregard his order. Maybe because I was certain that I was going to die anyway – that things couldn’t get any worse.
    ‘Are you going to molest me?’ was my next question.
    This time I got an answer. ‘You’re too young for that,’ he said. ‘I would never do that.’ Then he made another phone call.
    After he had hung up he said, ‘I’m going to take you to a forest and turn you over to the others. Then I’ll be able to wash my hands of this business.’ He repeated that sentence several times, rapid-fire and agitated: ‘I will turn you over, and then I’ll have nothing more to do with you. We’ll never see each other again.’
    If he had intended to scare me, then he had found exactly the right words. The pronouncement that he was going to hand me over to ‘others’ took my breath away. I went rigid with fear. He didn’t need to say anything more; I knew what he meant. Child pornography rings had been all over the media for months. Since last summer hardly a week had gone by without some discussion of the people who abducted and molested children while filming it on video. In my mind’s eye I saw everything perfectly: groups of men would pull me into a basement and grope me all over while others took pictures. Up until that moment I had been convinced that I was soon going to die. What seemed in store for me now appeared even worse.
    I don’t remember how long we drove until we came to a stop. We were in a pine forest like the many found on the outskirts of Vienna. The kidnapper turned off the engine and made another phone call. Something appeared to have gone wrong. ‘They’re not coming. They’re not here!’ he cursed to himself. He seemed frightened, agitated. But maybe that was also just a trick: maybe he wanted me to take his side against these ‘others’ he was supposed to hand me over to and who had left him hanging; maybe he had just made them up to increase my fear and to paralyse me.
    The kidnapper got out and ordered me not to move. I obeyedsilently. Hadn’t Jennifer wanted to flee from such a car? How had she tried to do that? And what had she done wrong? My thoughts were all jumbled up inside my head. If he hadn’t locked the door, I could maybe open it. But then what? In just two strides he’d be on me. I couldn’t run very fast. I had no idea what forest we were in and what direction I should run in. And then there were the ‘others’ who were supposed to come and get me, who could be anywhere. I pictured it vividly in my mind, how they would chase me, grab me and throw me to the ground. And then I saw myself as a corpse in the woods, buried under a pine tree.
    I thought of my parents. My mother would