THE SONG OF PRAGUE
Shane Jiraiya Cummings
Copyright © Shane Jiraiya Cummings 2011.
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All characters in this book are fictitious.
No reference to any living person is intended.
* * *
It was the most beautiful song he had ever heard. Haunting, melancholy, but with a magical quality—a soul—infused into each note. The song drew Len to the park from the very moment he stepped from Vltavska station.
Letna Park was a sprawling smear of greenery nestled between the city spires and the river. Len had been here a few times before, clearing his head between meetings or trawling antique shops, depending on the reason for his stay. He frequented the park for the views of the Old Town and the behemoth Prague Castle perched on its crag.
Letna Park was rambling but too small to constrain the majesty of such a voice. The song blossomed louder in his ears with every step. A traveller no more, he was Odysseus a-quest, drawn across a sea of shrubs and grass by a siren of the modern age.
As he penetrated deeper into the park, he could feel the ghost of Stalin's statue scrutinise his folly. The statue was decades gone, consigned to the graveyard of forgotten monuments. In its stead, a stern-eyed presence remained to haunt Westernised Czech teenagers and madmen like him chasing songs through the park.
He pushed past a tangle of bushes and stumbled upon the object of his quest. Two women sat stiff and rigid-backed on a park bench, framed by a copse of hardwoods. The smaller of the two, a pale girl wearing large tinted glasses, had knotted her slender hands together in her lap as she sang. The other woman's age was hard to guess—early thirties, perhaps. She mirrored the singer's pose but instead clutched a small handbag. She fidgeted with the strap of her bag, and her eyes were alive with movement.
Len crept closer. The tune was clearer: part opera, part folk-song, and part something else, although the words were foreign to him. The older woman spied his advance and shifted towards him. Her face clouded.
The singing girl was entranced in weaving her song, lost behind her glasses as she swayed to an internal rhythm.
He blushed as he stepped from the bushes, suddenly self-conscious as he pulled stray twigs and leaves from his hair.
"What are you doing, Len?" he muttered to himself. He allowed a few precious moments to drift by as he stood, motionless, absorbing the girl's voice.
Others, too, were drawn by the song. At first, two joggers in tracksuits, a woman rugged up in faux fur, a man walking his dog, then clumps of people. They all approached like sleepwalkers, lulled from their routines to drift ever closer towards the girl.
Len's eyes grew heavy in a blissful, narcotic way. The noises of the world fell away to dreamy insignificance. The song dampened everything in the park—the bray of motor cars and the flapping wings of stray pigeons. Only the susurration of leaves overlapped the melody with clarity. Nature and girl harmonized together. Her voice filled the cavity of his world, seeped into even his hidden, guarded places. His body tingled.
Childhood lessons flicked through his head: caution, courtesy. None of it seemed to matter. His legs carried him forward across the open green and brought him before the singer and her companion. Other spectators, perhaps overawed by the song, kept a more respectful distance.
The older girl's scowl sharpened with his proximity. The songstress continued to sway her head, lost to anything other than her song.
The women's features bordered on delicate; similar lines marked them as close kin, possibly sisters. Their simple matching white dresses held a ceremonial significance that was not lost on Len. He'd seen their like in antique shops during his travels. Their garb accentuated the choral quality of the song and also highlighted their pallid skin. Even the mild Continental summers had rarely touched them.
"Excuse me," he whispered to the brunette, sidling closer so as not to disturb the song. "That song. It's so familiar. I'm sure I've heard it before." And he had, he was sure. Certain notes or the lilt of the singer's voice triggered memories, or at least, fragments of memories. He was certain of it.
The singer's companion held a finger to her lips, still scowling. She slipped her other hand inside her clutchbag.
The singer continued her ethereal melody, the intrusion unregarded. Her poise was amazing, transforming her into a single-minded instrument. In the midst of an ascending chant, the singer's sister (so he assumed) waved him off. Len ignored her. At close proximity to the singer, the power of her voice, of the song, radiated through him. He was barely able to think.
"Please," he murmured, "my name is Leonard—Len. Len Worthington. I ... I don't mean to disturb you, but I must know the name of that song." He edged closer and dropped to one knee.
"Leave us be," the sister whispered. Her accent was harsh but rich—airs of southern England and Scandinavia entwined.
"Please, ma'am. I've been through Prague a dozen times and half the world on top of that. I can't place such a haunting tune, but it's so familiar."
"Mr Worthington," the woman spoke in measured doses, "for your sake, let us be."
The singer's voice rose to an operatic zenith. A line of pigeons circled overhead, forming a radial crown above the girl as she held the note for one endless moment.
"Please! I must know!" His voice wasn't loud but it was enough to intrude on the singer's world. The girl's voice wavered for a fraction of a second—barely a heartbeat.
The edges of the world shuddered and blurred.
Three pigeons fell from the sky, their fall almost slow-motion accompanied by a low and lengthy note from the girl, who had resumed her smooth rhythm. The birds struck the ground in silence only a few metres away, where they lay motionless on the grass, their wings outstretched to form a perfect feathery triangle.
Len stared at them, his mouth agape. The pigeons' symmetry was absurd yet disturbing beyond words. He blinked in case his eyes were as befuddled as his ears.
The girl continued singing as if nothing had happened, filling the park with her unearthly melody. The remaining pigeons overhead scattered as she entered a slower, mournful phase of the song.
"What ... what just happened?" Len asked of the sister.
"This is none of your concern. Leave us alone." She tensed even more, if such a thing were possible.
Len stood and took an uncertain step backward. The song filled his every pore. The weight of the world constricted his chest and flowed through him like sludge. Every breath stung, every coherent thought was stolen. The air congealed before his eyes. Time slowed, casting the women as ghostly blurs. The stand of nearby trees swayed their branches in sympathy. The world became indistinct, a dreamscape.
The bystanders, the enthralled, grew person by person, from one dozen to two, then three. Some gasped at the melancholy of the song, some openly wept, hugging themselves or sagging against a nearby tree, but most simply stood and stared.
"What ..." The rest of Len's words burbled from his mouth and vanished.
"Sir." The sound of the sister's voice cut through the song's mystique and brought reality into focus once more. "You must ..." She trailed off, distracted by something over his shoulder.
Voices—guttural voices—wafted across the green. They were alien, an unpleasant contrast to the song.
Len turned, expecting monste
rs torn from legend. Instead, a gang of spiky-haired teenagers approached. They laughed and pointed, egging themselves on with the clipped harshness of Czech profanity. Their green-haired leader had an ice hockey stick slung over his shoulder. Another punk poked at the grass with a gnarled tree branch.
The youths muscled their way through the gathered audience, shoving the enraptured aside. One elderly man turned to argue but crumpled to the ground when smacked across the face with the handle of the hockey stick.
Many of the onlookers, those still possessed of their faculties, shrank away or retreated to safer ground behind bushes or other landmarks. Some collapsed under the weight of the song's lament, oblivious to the men.
A neatly attired gentleman loitered metres behind the punks, twisting a Rubik's Cube puzzle in deliberate clockwork motions. His grey suit matched the cloud creeping across the horizon behind him. Reflective glasses hid his eyes and the blades of angular cheekbones.
"Mr Worthington," the woman called from behind. "Len. Do you truly want to know about the song?"
The song rose to a subdued peak, a spike emerging from melancholy.
He hesitated, glancing at the approaching gang. "Yes." He knew what she was asking.
"The world is in the balance, Len Worthington. I'll tell you the name of the song if you stop those men." There was no plea in her voice.
He pulled his gaze from the advancing punks and the man behind them.
"The world? What?"
"Do you love the world and its people?" she asked. "For if you do, you must keep those men from interrupting my sister."
He glanced again at the approaching men, his gaze settling on the man in grey behind them. A cold wave passed through his gut.
"Mr Worthington?"
The gang's voices rose in contrast to the song. To Len's ears, their approach was akin to a needle raking a vinyl record. The whole situation was like a waking dream. "Why? Who are they?" He searched her face for some glimmer of truth, insanity, or both.
"Should Sasha stop singing, we're all in unimaginable danger. She has to persevere for another ..." she looked at her watch, "four minutes before another takes up the burden." Her voice betrayed a trace of vulnerability.
"I keep them away for four minutes and you tell me the name of the song?"
She peered inside her handbag. "Yes."
"So why didn't your sister sing somewhere a little more private?" He tried to stay chirpy in the face of this madness.
"There's no time for this! These people want the song to end. Isn't that enough? Please! They're getting close."
The sight of the dead pigeons helped shake the song's hold from Len's mind, but he was still reluctant to step away from the girl, Sasha, as her voice climbed a stair of notes. He could feel the sister's eyes and the weight of her expectations at his back. He sighed, took hold of himself, and strode out to meet the gang.
They were only twenty metres from the women when he intercepted them.
"Good morning, boys." His greeting sounded trite and very English, escaping his lips before something more poignant could be mustered. "Come on, we don't want to disturb these young women, now."
A chorus of laughs and jibes passed between the punks, a barrage of Czech mostly directed toward the green-haired leader. He pondered for a moment, absorbing everything they had to say.
"Good day mister English man," he said in halting but passable English. Some of the flunkies laughed. The leader prodded the turf with his hockey stick as though testing it. The laughter died down.
Len strained his ears as the punk spewed a string of abrasive Czech curses. He caught only the barest essentials and didn't like where the conversation was going.
The grey-suited man held himself well away from the gang. A smile played across his face as the blue side of his cube came together beneath his spidery fingers. His teeth, like his fingernails, were whiter than paper.
"We don’t need to do this here," Len opened his arms wide in the hope of distracting the punks from Sasha's song, although they appeared unaffected. His own words sounded slurred and out-of-sync. "Let's go somewhere else."
"Happy English man," the gang leader leered, "go home!"
The punk jammed the hockey stick into Len's chest, forcing him a step backwards. He stifled a wheeze from the impact. Two of the runts chuckled as they hid at the back of the pack.
Len tallied his opponents as he fought for a clean breath. One of the cowards behind the leader wore a denim vest riddled with self-styled black Texta graffiti. The other hid beneath a hooded sweater.
The standoff stretched into an uncomfortable silence. When they realised Len wasn't going to step aside, the gang members spread out to encircle him. Len jumped back, holding his arms high and wide as if to ward off evil spirits. The boys with the vest and the hooded sweater were the least decisive, hanging back while a pock-faced kid with a face full of metal and the guy with the tree branch flanked the leader.
The song, as ever, was a haunting backdrop to the brutal scene. The stud-faced youth strayed too far forward, lulled by Sasha's mesmerising low chanting. Len lashed out, his agility a surprise. The kid dropped.
Too quick to block, the hockey stick crunched into Len's ribs. The branch crashed down on his defensive forearm. The pain burned but was fleeting. A thin-lipped snarl, drawn across the branch-wielder's bucked teeth, flashed before his eyes. Then a blur, a shaking of the earth; disorientation. Len found himself face down in the grass, reeling from a kick to the gut as the world faded to black.
The Song of Prague Page 1
