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

come to pick me up from afterschool care in the afternoon. And the woman who ran the programme would say to her, ‘But Natascha hasn’t been here!’ My mother would be beside herself and I had no way to protect her. It cut my heart to think of her coming to get me and not finding me. ‘What could happen anyway?’ I had thought as I had left that morning without saying a word of goodbye, without giving her a kiss.
You never know if we’ll see each other again.
    The kidnapper’s words made me jump. ‘They’re not coming.’ Then he got back in the car, started the engine and drove off again.
    This time I recognized the gables and rooftops of the houses that I could just make out through the narrow strips of window along the sides. I could tell where he was steering the car to – back to the edge of the city and then on to the arterial road leading towards the town of Gänserndorf.
    ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
    ‘To Strasshof,’ the kidnapper said forthrightly.
    As we drove through Süssenbrunn, a deep sadness engulfed me. We passed my mother’s old shop, which she had recently closed down. Just three weeks before she would have been sitting here at the desk in the mornings, doing the office work. I could still picture her and I wanted to cry out, but I only produced a weakwhimper when we drove by the street that led to my grandmother’s house. Here I had spent the happiest moments of my childhood.
    The car came to a standstill in a garage. The kidnapper ordered me to remain lying down on the floor in the back and turned the engine off. Then he got out, fetched a blue blanket, threw it over me and wrapped me up tight. I could hardly breathe, and I was surrounded by absolute darkness. When he picked me up like a wrapped package and carried me out of the car, panic struck me. I had to get out of that blanket. And I had to go to the toilet.
    My voice sounded muffled and foreign under the blanket when I asked him to put me down and let me go to the toilet. He stopped for a moment, then unwrapped me and led me through a hallway to a small guest toilet. From the hallway I was able to catch a glimpse of the adjoining rooms. The furnishings appeared fusty and expensive – yet another indication to me that I had really fallen victim to a crime. In the TV police shows that I knew, criminals always had large houses with expensive furnishings.
    The kidnapper stood in front of the door and waited. I immediately locked the door and breathed a sigh of relief. But the moment of relief lasted only a few seconds. The room had no windows and I was trapped. The only way out was through the door and I couldn’t stay locked behind that door forever. Especially as it would have been easy for him to break it open.
    When I came out of the toilet after a while, the kidnapper wrapped me up in the blanket again: darkness, stuffiness. He lifted me up and I felt him carry me several steps downwards: a cellar? Once at the bottom of the stairs, he laid me on the floor, pulled on the blanket to move me forward, threw me again over his shoulder and continued onwards. It seemed an eternity before he put me down again. Then I heard his footsteps moving away from me.
    I held my breath and listened. Nothing. There was absolutely nothing to hear. Still, it was a long time before I dared to cautiouslypeel the blanket off. There was absolute darkness all around. It smelled of dust and the stale air was strangely warm. Beneath me I could feel the cold, naked floor. I rolled myself into a ball on the blanket and whimpered softly. My own voice sounded so peculiar in the silence that I became frightened and stopped. I don’t remember how long I remained lying there. At first I tried to count the seconds and the minutes.
Twenty-one, twenty-two
… I mumbled to myself, to time the length of the seconds. I tried to keep track of the minutes on my fingers. I kept losing count, and I couldn’t allow that to happen, not now! I had to concentrate, remember