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The pain returned with consciousness. It was an old friend now, a wake up call designed by some cruel, capricious god. Perhaps Stalin's statue still held sway over the park after all? Despite the pain, the grass was green, the sky was blue, and everything was deathly quiet.
"Sasha?" he mumbled to the sky.
Len blinked blood and grit from his eyes and struggled to rise. He clutched something pliable but sticky. A business card slick with blood.
In his fogged peripheral vision, he noticed other forms, people, lying next to him.
Len propped himself up on his good arm, glanced around—and fought not to retch. He recoiled and struggled against the bile climbing his throat.
He was in the centre of the circle. The five youths lay rigid on the grass, arranged in a perfect pentacle around him. Their bodies were chest-down but their heads twisted fully around, facing the sky with wide-mouthed, silent screams and flesh drained of colour. Intertwined hands and feet finished the grisly array, fingers in complex knots and nails bleached white, lending the pentacle five exact points.
Despite the pain, Len regained his feet as quickly as he could. The agonised faces stared up and through him. Not knowing which way to turn, he hobbled over the arranged body of the youth with the piercings, cringing as his foot snagged on the corpse's jacket. He battled with the corpse—and hysteria—to free his shoe before wrenching it clear with a painful, exaggerated tug.
Once clear, he shambled past the trio of dead pigeons and over to the empty park bench. He propped his weight against it and fought for breath, sucking in greedy, fitful mouthfuls.
A metre from the youths' bodies, at the apex marked by the hands of the green-haired leader and the feet of the boy with the hood, six parallel lines of Rubik's Cube squares lay pressed into the grass. They were arranged by colour, although most were spattered with blood and hard to recognise. Save for the broken cube, there was no sign of the man in grey.
Likewise, any of the passers-by drawn by Sasha's song were long gone, leaving Len to fend for himself amidst a formation of corpses.
He struggled to avert his eyes from the macabre scene. Instead, he scanned Letna Park in the hope of seeing the sisters. Beyond the line of fallen trees, two white figures dwindled into the distance, no more than tiny blurs by the river. They may have been the last remnants of a dream for all he knew.
He took a first and final step towards them. Every inch of his body ached or trembled. He shook his head, "Never mind." The sisters were beyond his reach—and questions—now.
Len turned from them, the trees, the pigeons, and the corpses, to stare at his trembling fist. He slowly unclenched it to study the blood-smeared card within. In elegant French script, it was imprinted:
Société du Rêveur
"Society of the Dreamer," he translated.
There was no address or phone number but a message was on the back, written in a compact, feminine hand”
"Thank you for your efforts, Mr Worthington," he read aloud, "the song is simply called The Lullaby. Pray the Dreamer does not wake."
After re-reading the card, he stuffed it into his torn shirt pocket.
His eyes drifted to the riverside in the hope of spying the sisters one last time. Like the echoes of the song, they, too, had vanished. With Sasha's absence went the brightest piece of his heart, captured by her voice as surely as her Dreamer's dreams.
Aware of his surrounds as if for the first time, everything seemed so surreal. The world was more disjointed than he remembered it.
Smoke columns rose from every quarter of the city to stain the sky. Fewer spires reached for the heavens, and beyond them, Prague Castle, and much of the hill on which it stood, lay in perfectly-formed pyramids of rubble. Sirens whined in the distance, a cruel replacement for the splendour of the Lullaby.
He shuffled away, head down, without so much as a backward glance, nursing aches and bruises as he hummed a joyless, wordless tune. A rough parody of another singer, somewhere out there, whose angelic voice kept the world sane and whole and asleep.
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Download the podcast (audio) version of “The Song of Prague” for free at Pseudopod:
https://pseudopod.org/2011/06/03/pseudopod-232-the-song-of-prague/
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About the author:
Shane Jiraiya Cummings lives in Perth, Western Australia. He has been acknowledged as "one of Australia's leading voices in dark fantasy", had more than seventy short stories published in Australia, USA, and Europe, and his work has been translated in Spanish, French, and Polish. Shane has won two Ditmar Awards, and he has been nominated for more than twenty other major awards including Spain's Premios Ignotus.
Shane is an Active Member of the Horror Writers Association and former Vice President of the Australian Horror Writers Association. When he is not writing, Shane is an editor and journalist by day and a sword fighting instructor by night.
In his youth, Shane was trained in the deadly arts of the ninja, and the name Jiraiya (lit. "Young Thunder", after the legendary ninja Jiraiya) was bestowed upon him by his sensei.
More information on Shane (including his free fiction) can be found online at https://www.jiraiya.com.au.
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You can find Shane's other e-books at all good online retailers:
Novellas:
Phoenix and the Darkness of Wolves (Damnation Books). ISBN: 9781615720552
Requiem for the Burning God. ISBN: 9780987076809
The Smoke Dragon. ISBN: 9780987076823
Collections:
Apocrypha Sequence: Deviance. ISBN: 9780987076830
Apocrypha Sequence: Divinity. ISBN: 9780987076847
Apocrypha Sequence: Inferno. ISBN: 9780987076854
Apocrypha Sequence: Insanity. ISBN: 9780987076861
Shards. ISBN: 9780987076816
Print version, illustrated by Andrew J. McKiernan (Brimstone Press). ISBN: 9780980567724
Chapbooks:
Shards: Damned and Burning, illustrated by Andrew J. McKiernan (Brimstone Press). Free download from https://www.jiraiya.com.au
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