The dog bobbed his head and whined again and gestured toward the lane that he seemed intent that Victoria should walk down.
She stood. “Very well. The least I can do is take advantage of the opportunity you’ve given me to get home safely now that you’ve driven my attackers off.” She walked toward the street she had come along and the dog fell into position beside her. She rested her fingertips on the back of his neck and he beamed up at her.
The dog escorted Victoria silently back toward her apartment building. A block away from reaching it, though, he stopped and whimpered, pulling away from her side.
“Is this as far as you can come, boy?” Victoria asked. The dog nodded.
“Thank you again!” Victoria knelt down and ruffled the fur on either side of his head, behind the ears. The creature’s eyes rolled up into their sockets as if in bliss. Then Victoria stood and the dog turned, trotting briskly away.
She stood staring after him into the shadows. Why and how had he come into the plaza at that moment? She could think of no other explanation than that of the angels and saints hovering in the air around the Loreto cloister. But then she also recalled the stories she had heard as a girl. Stories that reported encounters going back hundreds of years. Stories of a large black dog that could be found in the Loreto Plaza just before midnight and who would escort the lost or the endangered safely back towards the Little Town or the castle. Was it the mysterious dog of the legends that had brought her home?
Victoria shook her head. A day before, she would have dismissed such a thought as a child’s fairy tale. Now, having just lit a candle in her own footprint to expose a man who had stolen her best friend, she wasn’t so quick to dismiss the possibility that the dog had emerged from the mists of legend just when she needed him.
Back under the hedge on the periphery of the plaza, the little candle stub continued to burn quietly. The dog lay on the ground and rested his head between his large paws, watching the candle as if waiting to raise the alarm if any foliage caught fire. It took only a few moments longer for the candle to burn itself out. The wick sputtered and collapsed into the pool of melted wax that had began to seep into the ridges and swirls of the footprint in the dirt.
The dog licked his lips again and slowly pulled himself up to stand again. He peered around the plaza, inspecting it one last time for any signs of danger. Then he turned and vanished into the shadows along the cloister’s wall.
Professor Sean O’Neill, from the Department of Folklore at Dublin’s University College, lay in bed under the ornately carved beams of the hotel room. It had been a wonderfully successful first full day of both the Monsters conference and the Evil conference. Although he always seemed to have difficulty maintaining conversations, he had joined a group of conference-goers for dinner and then followed them to a small pub tucked down an alleyway in the Old Town. They had eaten and talked, laughed and drank together until they could hardly keep their eyes open. The energy level at the conferences had been high all day and suddenly they all felt like collapsing. Sean had made it back to the hotel, certain he would fall into bed and almost immediately fall asleep.
But he lay there, unable to sleep. As much as he wanted to avoid thinking about the university politics back home, he could not help himself. He had nearly reached his fortieth birthday and his scholarship would be up for review for a promotion to full professorship this year. He knew he was not popular. He was awkward in social situations and had a difficult time concealing his opinion of the inferior academic work of most people in his department. He knew that others, whom he considered less academically gifted than himself, had been awarded professorships simply because they knew how to make friends and socialize with the important professors in the department. Professors whose scholarship and reputations were much overrated, as far as Sean could tell. He knew that his own work was vastly superior to theirs but they would be the ones to judge him. It was so patently unfair.
It was hot that night. Oppressively hot. The humidity was oppressive, too. The ceiling fan spun slowly, circulating the air in lazy arcs around the room, but to no avail if the goal was to make it comfortable enough to sleep. The damp sheet clung to his skin. More than just the heat and his concern about the politics of obtaining a full professorship, there was some other unidentified source of anxiety gnawed at him as well. Laying on his back, he peered into the darkness above him.
Even in the daylight, he had been unable to make out the figures in the centuries-old carving in the beams running across the ceiling. It had seemed like vines and clusters of fruit. He had also thought he saw strange misshapen faces peering into the room from the foliage running along the beams. Now, in the dark, he had only his memories to help him sort the curves, outcroppings, and indentations of the wood into coherent images. Through the open window, he heard a dog bark in the night but otherwise there was only silence.
Sean finally drifted off into a fitful uneasy sleep. Semiconscious, he tossed and turned, tangling himself in the sheets. His throat felt parched and, his mind never quite surfacing to the state he would have recognized as awake, he stumbled to the mini-bar to open a bottle of water. He swallowed it in two or three gulps and made his way back across the room and fell atop the bed. A little later, he made his way to the bathroom, again not sufficiently aware to qualify as awake. Once more he made his way back to the bed and threw himself down on it. It wasn’t long before he was caught again in the tangled sheets, one cheek pressed against a pillow as a thread of saliva slowly making its way from the corner of his mouth and through his auburn beard onto the pillowcase.
Dampness grew under his cheek. Half-awake, he was also certain that he was half-dreaming because one of the sprites leaped down from one of the ceiling beams. The foliage and bunches of grapes that wreathed its face rustled as it moved stealthily on its toes toward Sean’s bed. Nearing the bed, the forest sprite reached its bony, stick-like fingers towards his face. Sean felt the fragile green tendrils of its fingertips and rubbed his palm across his face. He grumbled in an almost-snore and rolled over.
Another wood sprite leaped down from another beam and tip-toed around the bed. It drew near the foot of the bed and reached towards Sean’s exposed foot. Its tendril-fingertips brushed against the sole and then ran up the man’s calf to where the sheets were wrapped around Sean’s leg. Sean’s toes twitched and he jerked his leg away from the ticklish touch.
A third figure jumped into the room from yet another beam. This one, another amalgam of misshapen humanity and leafy sticks and vines, slunk toward the now-snoring lecturer from Ireland. Flexing its knees momentarily, it jumped onto the bed, where it made its way through the ridges and valleys of the sheets, steadying itself by reaching out to lean against Sean. Sean, reacting to the sensations of the sprite navigating the bedclothes, rolled over. The sprite shrieked quietly and jumped back to the floor before it could be trapped under the man’s torso.
Sean’s snores rumbled through the room. In his dream, he saw small, shadowy figures—walking forms of sticks and foliage—slinking around the room. A wavering pinpoint of light caught his attention near the ceiling and he saw the stub of a burning candle just below the beam, near where it met the wall. The flame of the candle danced in the breeze caused by the ceiling fan. Weaving and dipping, the ghostly flame caught hold of a tendril of the carved foliage above it and—pausing a moment to gather its strength—began to consume the woodwork. The fire then raced along the vines, causing dozens of the strange sprites to jump out of their hiding places and onto the floor below.
Seemingly startled and disoriented, the sprites chattered among themselves, staring and pointing around the room. They all rushed towards Sean.
Sean watched the scene play out in his dreamlike semi-consciousness. He heard his own snoring. He saw the candle wink out, the fragments of the wick falling over into the pool of melted wax. He saw the ghost of the fire, however, continue to expand along the beams and drive the little vine-men down towards the bed. He saw th
em poke and tickle his sleeping form and heard his half-laughter mingle with the snores. He saw himself contort and writhe to escape their reach. Then they all swarmed to one side of the bed and, reaching under the frame, rocked it as if testing their strength and coordination. With a great heave, they began to tip the bed on its side. Sean felt himself begin to roll onto the floor.
He braced himself for the crash he was expecting. But the floor gave way and suddenly he seemed to be falling through the night sky, sailing and soaring on the air currents above the Little Town. He saw what he was sure was the roof of his hotel. He felt the air give way beneath him, his stomach lurching at the sudden drop. Then he felt himself buoyed up again as a different breeze caught him and the draft gently guided him away from the river and up the hill toward the castle.
He had never experienced a dream like this. The physical sensations were not the brief flashes he experienced on occasion as he slept. These sensations were continuous and ongoing and detailed. The night air rippled against the individual hairs on his arms. He flailed his legs as if swimming, half-able to control the direction of his flight but unable to control his altitude or even his position, upright, horizontal or upside-down. He could feel the sheets unfurling and then tangling around his body again. Since he had collapsed on the bed without even a pair of undershorts, he was glad to keep the sheets wrapped around him.
“Just in case someone looks up,” he thought. Then he realized, “But this is a dream. It doesn’t matter what anyone sees. This isn’t real.”
A sudden updraft caught him and he sailed higher, turning somersaults in the air as he careened higher and higher above Prague. Given that it was a dream, he was not surprised that he was able to both look down on the city as a whole and yet see incredible detail on the streets. The close-ups were as if a film had zoomed in on a scene to reveal the twitch of a character’s upper lip and betray the anxiety plaguing an amateur undercover agent in danger of being discovered. Even without his glasses, he could see the wrinkles in individual cobblestones and the crumbling mortar between them. He saw the glistening foam on the river’s surface and heard it rushing under the Charles Bridge. He saw the crumbling sills beneath the dark windows of the houses lining the streets that crawled up the hill toward the castle.
He narrowly escaped being driven by the breeze into the incredible spires of the Baroque church on the Little Town Square. Coming round the spire, he was shocked to see another person sailing along in the air tangled in a sheet. This man, sandy-haired and clean-shaven and seemingly in his mid-forties, seemed even more unable to control his movements than Sean, sending himself into a series of somersaults by his waving and kicking. The air currents swung the two men closer, and Sean recognized Professor Theodore Cooper, who only ever seemed to be called “Theo” and who had organized the conferences from Oxford. Sean called out, reaching for the Oxford don, but the wind pulled the Irishman away and Theo was twisted about on his head like a child’s plaything.
“How odd!” Sean ruminated. “What is he doing in my dream?”
Sean looked down and saw the Hunger Wall that slithered through the parks of Petřín Hill as well as the tracks of the small railway that connected the hilltop with its lower region. He was startled to see another of the men attending the Monsters conference. At first a small speck in the sky, the figure was soon close enough that Sean could make out the features of Alessandro DiFranceso, the Australian-Italian who had been quite the flirt with the women at both conferences. Alessandro’s taut and muscular torso was much more visible without his clothes; the bedsheet that Alessandro had brought with him into the sky was much more gracefully draped about him, almost like a Roman toga, than those wrapped around either Sean or Theo. Alessandro dipped behind the dome of the Strahov Monastery on the hill, without apparently having noticed Sean.
Sean kicked his feet against the wind, attempting to propel himself toward the monastery church to investigate this other conference-goer who had intruded into his strange dream. “Maybe this is the way my mind is processing all the people I’ve met?” Sean wondered. “Are all the conference-folk going to appear here? This could be more exhausting than the conferences themselves!” Try as he might, however, Sean’s efforts to come close to the Strahov buildings only seemed to propel him further in the opposite direction. He heard a voice call his name, though, and whirled about.
A tall, slim silver-haired woman in a nightgown waved and called his name again. She was holding the hand of a shorter, beefy, man with a salt-and-pepper beard who was wearing a striped nightshirt. Neither had any sheets about them, perhaps having lost hold of them earlier in their flight. The woman’s shorter male companion seemed too busy looking about him and pointing out various sights below to be bothered with noticing Sean.
“Father Dmitri! Sophia!” Sean called out to the couple. He waved to Sophia, who tugged her husband’s sleeve and pointed out Sean’s appearance. The priest nodded quickly, glanced in Sean’s direction, and returned to his efforts to identify the landmarks below. Before Sean or Sophia could call out again, a gust sent Sean head-over-heels past the Orthodox priest and his wife, who were sailing towards Strahov.
Sean eventually righted himself and was able to look around again. On his right was the cathedral within the walls of the castle complex. Beyond that, Golden Lane, with its alchemists’ apartments-turned-souvenir-shops. On his left, the hill continued to rise slightly. He was approaching the spire and roof of the Loreto cloister.
“What?” burst from Sean’s lips. Two portly figures in sheets clambered along the edge of the roof on unsteady feet, as if looking for a way down from the tiles to the cobblestone plaza. In the shadows of the night and without his glasses, it was difficult to make out who the two figures were. Whether this plaza was normally lit with floodlights, he was unsure, but they were all dark now and Sean had to rely on the moonlight and starlight to see. How had the figures gotten stranded on the tile roof?
As Sean drifted closer to the cloister, he realized that the two figures were stout, even bulky, older men and they were having as much difficulty walking with the sheets bunched around their legs as they were maintaining their balance on the steep incline of the roof tiles. The tiles clattered under their feet. One of the men slipped. His legs flew out from underneath him and he grabbed his companion to steady himself. Both men crashed onto the roof and slid off the gutter into midair. Luckily, the two men were caught by another drifting breeze and lifted into the air briefly before being gently deposited on the earth near a bench and bicycle rack in the plaza. A woman Sean did not recognize was sitting on the bench.
There was a sudden roar from the center of the plaza. Massive flames erupted from the cobblestones near the entrance gate of the Loreto. The heat from the fire smashed into Sean, nearly knocking him over. With the double vision possible in dreams, he clearly saw an old woman bound to a stake in the midst of the bonfire. Her voice cried out. She coughed and choked as the smoke filled her lungs. Steam rose from her water-drenched clothes and hair. Sean heard her even when her voice was little more than a whisper. But he didn’t question the logic of what he saw and heard. There would be time for that later, after he awoke back in his room. This was a dream, after all.
“Svetovit!” he heard the woman cry out. “Curse them, Svetovit! Teach them to fear you!”
Svetovit? That name sounded vaguely familiar, but Sean was unsure where he had heard it or how long ago. Where had his subconscious mind found it? Why insert it into this dream about the conferences?
“…let all their nightmares come to life.” The old woman’s chin fell forward. The fire rushed up to meet her face. The fire, intent on devouring its victim, did so with relish. The flames continued to curl and dance, rather than dying down or fading away. Then they parted, and in the clearing stood a woman robed in dazzling white and clutching an assortment of objects: a staff, a sword, a chalice, a disk inscribed with a five-pointed star. She faced the Loreto but seemed to be looking through it and acros
s the cityscape beyond.
Two figures congealed out of the air and stood in the plaza, off to one side. One was a handsome man somewhat older than Sean himself and the other was a pretty woman with an almost-thirty face and a hint of make-up, brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, brown eyes. They both looked familiar and he realized they were more conference people: the man was the Jesuit from New York—“George, I think,” Sean muttered—and Hron’s assistant Magdalena. They seemed intently focused on a table or altar and they each drove a dagger into the surface. A lone voice caught Sean’s attention and he looked back to the woman in the glistening robes. She was sobbing and holding her face in her hands. As the dagger was driven repeatedly into the tabletop, she fell to her knees as if felled by the blows of the knife. One by one, each of the items in her arms seemed to be wrenched from her grasp by invisible hands. She struggled to keep hold of them even as she wailed and mourned, but her efforts were unsuccessful and they each vanished in turn. She collapsed onto the ground, one hand beating her breast. Her sobbing became more intermittent. She faded away and the fire knit itself together, subsiding.
Now the figures of George and Magdalena stepped into the center of the plaza and took turns emptying a chalice of the last drops of something in it followed by a cascading torrent of water poured from a flask into the chalice before it then splashed onto the ground and then a thurible of coals overturned. The ground beneath them rumbled and Sean could feel the air shake from the vibration.
A great but indistinct figure now hovered in the air above the fire, a figure of cloud and smoke astride a great eight-legged horse of cloud and smoke. The figure seemed to be looking over the Loreto and toward the city. Slowly the horseman guided the steed around the Loreto spire until its view of the castle, cathedral and entire city was unimpeded. The horse stood there a moment.
Then the horsemen drove his heels into the steed’s ribs and the horse charged toward the midst of the city below, towards the river where the Charles Bridge crossed it. More fire flared. Thunder roared. The figure dissolved in the crash and roar of an explosion that shook the entire valley. Buildings collapsed. Crowds ran through the street amid screams of pain and terror. Smaller but similar figures, shadows of cloud and fire, hunted the people running through the streets. The river burst from its banks and surged down the streets as well, knocking over other buildings and drowning the people it caught in the lanes and alleyways.
Come Hell or High Water: The Complete Trilogy Page 43
