“I hope that’s correct,” she whispered.
George continued to sit quietly, meditatively, slowly and deeply breathing in and out. Magdalena found herself beginning to breathe in rhythm with him. She set her palms on the tabletop, mimicking him. The lights continued to flicker and dance around the circle.
George opened his eyes and reached for one of the dough figures on the tray, the one furthest from him at the apex of the star. The unexpected movement startled Magdalena, causing her to catch her breath.
George glanced at her, then turned his attention back to the dough figure that he held gently with his fingertips. He brought the figure to his lips and exhaled a long, slow breath onto it. Then he swiftly dipped it into the water of the chalice.
“I baptize you Theo,” he announced. Lifting the figure from the water, he shook a few drops from it and set it down on the tray again.
Taking the dough figure from one of the two low points of the star, he repeated his exhalation onto that figure and plunged it into the water of the chalice as well.
“I baptize you Dmitri,” he proclaimed. Shaking the few loose drops of water back into the chalice, he set the figure down where he had taken it from. He looked across to Magdalena and smiled, gesturing for her to take a figure next.
Magdalena’s body tingled. “This is like when I called up Flauros and Halphas in my back yard last spring,” she thought. “Or when George and I conjured the judgment of Prague last week. Real ritual. Real magic.” She shivered with nervous excitement. Taking the dough figure from one of the star’s side points, she took a deep breath and held it momentarily before exhaling slowly onto the face of the dough figure. Then, following George’s example, she inserted the figure into the water of the chalice before her.
“I bap… baptize you… Sophia!” she stuttered. She held it in the water a moment before she remembered to lift it out, shake it somewhat dry, and replace it on the tray. George smiled at her. She shivered again and blushed.
He took the figure from the other of the star’s low points closest to him, exhaled onto it and dipped it into the chalice.
“I baptize you Sean,” he asserted and then returned the figure to its place. He looked at Magdalena again and nodded.
She reached for the last figure, at the point of the star’s remaining arm. Bringing it close to her, she exhaled onto it for as long as she could and then dipped it into the water.
“I baptize you…” She paused, mentally sorting through the names of their adversaries to determine which one remained.
“Victoria.” The name caught in her throat. “I baptize you Victoria.”
George picked up the figure he had named Theo. He turned it over and around in his hands, and over again as if examining its features and limbs. Then he lifted it to his mouth and slowly, languidly slid his tongue up one leg of the figure and down the other.
Theo had collected the few boxes of salt that remained from their efforts of the previous night in his hotel room. The torn shopping bag in which he carried them seemed sturdy enough to continue using, for at least a little while. He headed to the lobby to meet Dmitri and Sophia.
Crossing the lobby, he nodded to the clerks at the front desk, who smiled and waved back. He reached the door to the street and cried out in sudden pain as he collapsed, his legs twisting into knots and giving way beneath him.
George returned the Theo figure to the pentacle tray and selected one of the figures from the lower points of the star, the one he had baptized “Sean.” Again he examined it, considering its details, the folds and whorls of the dough that had been baked until it was rock hard. He finally extended his tongue again and drew it slowly across the figure’s face.
Sean and Victoria stood in the street outside Alessandro’s hotel, looking at the knots of people continuing to flow down the streets toward the blockade at the bridge.
“So, now what should we do?” Victoria asked.
“Well, we cannot get to the conference,” Sean began, thinking aloud. “We can hope that Theo, Dmitri, and Sophia did not get across the bridge this morning before it was closed.” He considered the best strategy. “Finding them is probably what we should do next. Discuss our options for our next move.”
“So, back to Theo’s hotel?” Victoria asked.
“Yes. Back to Theo’s hotel,” Sean agreed. Frustrated, he reached up to rub his forehead but then shouted in agony, blinded by indescribable pain that suddenly pierced his eyes.
George replaced the Sean figure on the tray and gestured to Magdalena to select a figure. She hesitated a moment, and then picked up the figure she had declared “Sophia.” Following George’s example, she considered its various appendages and extremities before selecting one. Looking across the table into George’s eyes, she slid her tongue across the rough dough of the figure’s torso.
Sophia and Dmitri sifted through the discarded garments in their luggage, looking for the tarot cards they had dropped into one of the suitcases after returning to their room the previous night.
“I know they are here somewhere,” muttered the priest.
“Maybe we left them over there,” Sophia suggested, pointing to a small table on the other side of the bed.
As she moved to investigate the nightstand, a spasm of pain and nausea tore through her digestive tract. She stumbled to the bathroom, clutching her stomach, retching vomit again and again onto the rug.
George took up the “Dmitri” figure as Magdalena set down “Sophia.” Without any hesitation this time, George inserted the figure’s cranium into his mouth and slid his tongue over and around and across the entire surface of the doughman’s head.
Dmitri hurried to his wife’s side as she collapsed onto her knees in the bathroom, wrapping his arms around her shoulders.
“Sophia!” he exclaimed, his voice full of surprise and concern. “What’s wrong? Was there something bad at breakfast?”
Sophia gasped for breath as the contractions of her stomach paused. “I… am not sure…” She tried to remember what she had eaten that morning. “What did I have?”
Dmitri tried to think back to the breakfast they had shared. It seemed so long ago. “Well, there was coffee… And yogurt, yes?”
In the next instant, Dmitri too gasped in pain and shock, dropping to the floor beside his wife. He clutched his temples with his hands, wanting to both tear his hair out and stop the sharp pains that writhed and twisted through his head, the most sudden and incapacitating headache he had ever experienced.
Sophia heard the wordless moaning of her husband. Her eyes pressed shut, trying with all her might to keep the growing nausea from rising up throughout her again. She felt him on the floor beside her, his full weight leaning against her. She grasped the toilet bowl before her, struggling to both orient herself in space and support herself and her stricken husband.
Magdalena struggled to suppress a giggle. “What kind of game are we playing?” she wanted to ask aloud, but dared not disturb the quiet of the flickering magic circle in her kitchen. “What does this licking of the baptized figures accomplish?” she wondered.
George set down “Dmitri,” a snarl of contempt wrinkling his mouth. He pointed to the last figure, looking directly at Magdalena. She reached for “Victoria.”
Victoria helped Sean stumble back into the hotel lobby, his hands clutching at his face, weeping and gasping between ongoing screams of pain. Clerks and other staff rushed from behind the front desk and the nooks and crannies of the lobby. A flood of words offering assistance in a confusing mix of Czech and English and German and French and Russian assaulted her ears. She and the hotel staff eased Sean toward an overstuffed chair against a wall as he continued to wail. She knelt before him and tried to ease his hands away from his face to see what had caused such pain.
“Sean. Sean, let go,” she urged, wrapping her fingers around his. “Let me see. I need to see what is wrong…”
Magdalena turned the Victoria figure over and over in her hands. Whatever
she and George were causing to the academics, Magdalena had only thought of them as enemies and adversaries to be thwarted, people intent on the destruction of her beloved home city and the continued slander of Fen’ka under the bridge. But Victoria was her friend. Or at least, had been her friend. Until last night. Until the confrontation with Elizabeth. Victoria had been duped, perhaps, but had joined those determined to destroy their home, the beautiful city they had both held most dear. They had to be stopped, including Victoria and whatever assistance she was lending their efforts.
Closing her eyes, feeling the dough in her hands and with her tongue, she licked every surface of the figure that her tongue could reach.
“Sean! Let me see!” Victoria urged him again, his palms pressed firmly against his eyes as he rocked back and forth in the chair, his cries reduced to steady sobs and whimpers.
“The pain… like my eyes are being cut out… I cannot see,” he moaned. Hotel staff scurried to call a doctor.
“Do you think you got something in your eyes? Or do you think George…?” she began. She did not want to finish the thought. If George was capable of inflicting this kind of suffering, was Magdalena involved too? How could they wield such power? Or be so cruel?
“This is not the Magdalena I know,” flashed through her mind. “He has changed her. He is making her into a monster.” She felt sick at the thought.
But then she felt truly sick, losing control over herself. She felt her bowels relax and release whatever waste they held as spasms tore through her body, throwing her to the ground, where she rocked and ground her teeth in the few seconds she was conscious before darkness descended.
George lifted the dagger, the athame, from the table and held it over the doughmen on the pentacle tray.
Magdalena held her breath. Though she was unsure what would result from licking the figures, she was certain that plunging the knife’s point into one would cause extreme pain, if not death. Was George about to pierce the figures with the knife?
George held the athame over each of the dough figures in turn, tracing the lines of the star-pentacle as he moved the knife’s point from figure to figure. The flickering light hovering along the lines of the circle around them shifted and rippled, similar lines of light appearing to connect the figures along the outline of the star. Then George stood and used the knife to slice through the light shimmering behind him. The lights winked out, both along the circumference of the circle and the outline of the star.
He turned back to Magdalena. “These should be buried now,” he told her. “Is there a place nearby to do that?”
“I have a garden in the back,” Magdalena offered.
“The place should have a ritual significance,” George said. “A churchyard would be best.”
Magdalena thought a moment. “It is not a churchyard,” she said, “but there is a place to bury them near a church.”
“That will do,” George conceded. “Is it near here?”
“Not far. At the very top of the hill, past the castle,” she told him. “At the Loreto chapel.”
Sophia leaned against the toilet, dazed and confused. Waves of nausea rippled through her from time to time, forcing her to lean over the toilet bowl even though she seemed to have nothing left in her stomach to eject. Gradually the waves of nausea came less frequently and she thought that retreating to the bed might be an option. She had continued to support her moaning husband, whose only words had been “unbelievable migraine” and “Bozha moi!”
“Can you move at all, Dmitri?” she asked at last.
“The pain becomes a bit more tolerable if I do not move,” he whispered, “but I could manage, yes. Do you have an idea?”
“I am thinking that I might be ready to lie on the bed,” she answered.
Dmitri was silent for several seconds and then nodded. Together, they slowly crawled out of the bathroom and across the room to the bed. Both trying to assist the other, they made their way onto the bed and collapsed.
It was midmorning and the Loreto cloister was closed, as it always was on Mondays. The streets around it were empty, all the tourists gathered at the police barricade closing off the bridge. George had brought the five figures with them in a small bag and set them carefully on the ground beside them. The bushes and trees that surrounded the Loreto complex rustled quietly as he used the athame to trace an “X” in the dirt under one of the bushes.
Magdalena then knelt down and dug a small hole in the earth where George had marked, using the garden trowel she had brought as if she were preparing to plant a new flower there. George took each figure from the bag and laid it carefully in the soil, pressing it gently into the ground. Then Magdalena used the trowel to refill the hole and pat the earth flat. They stood and brushed the soil from their hands and knees. The disturbed ground was hidden under the sweeping branches of the evergreen bushes.
“Excellent work!” George congratulated Magdalena. He smiled at her and she felt herself blush.
George looked around the small plaza. Numerous trees and bushes covered the ground across the plaza, in addition to those that surrounded the cloister complex. One tree in particular seemed to catch his attention. He walked over to it and peered at its leaves, stroking one.
“Yew,” he announced. “How useful.” He half-turned back to Magdalena. “Bring me that bag,” he instructed. “The one we brought the doughmen in.” Magdalena was quick to stand beside him, the open bag in her hands along with the trowel.
George reached up and firmly grasped a small cluster of the leaves and used the athame to cut it free from the larger limb of the yew. He dropped the bundle into the bag and reached up several more times, using the knife to cut other bunches of leaves free.
“Yew leaves are such useful things to have around,” George said, apparently satisfied with their harvest. “Never pass by the opportunity to collect them,” he told Magdalena. He extended the crook of his arm and together they set out back down the hill toward both his hotel and Magdalena’s small apartment; she wasn’t sure to which they were returning.
The doctor arrived at the hotel lobby to find Sean clasping his palms across his eyes and rocking in an overstuffed chair, weeping quietly. Victoria lay on the floor, her torso twitching occasionally in the aftermath of an apparent seizure.
“Get me a glass of water, please,” he asked the hotel staff after his preliminary examination. “Help him take these,” the doctor instructed the bellhop who appeared with the glass of water, handing him two tablets. The young man leaned over and helped Sean sip from the glass, easing the sedative into his mouth between sips.
The doctor turned to examine Victoria and decided she seemed to be resting peacefully, despite the slight tremors from time to time.
“Make them both comfortable,” he told the clerk at the front desk. “Move them a bit to one side if you like, but not too far. They should both rest for several hours, but under someone’s observation—just in case.”
“What about a hospital?” the clerk asked. “I do not believe that they are guests of this hotel, doctor. Would they not be more carefully observed in a hospital?”
“They shouldn’t be moved far right now,” the doctor answered. “And there is no way an ambulance could come easily through the crowds in the streets today. Nor are any ambulances free for cases such as theirs. Many hospitals have begun evacuations because of the anticipated flooding. The rest are full to capacity. Beyond capacity. Even if I could get an ambulance to fetch them, where would it take them? Only to a makeshift ward in a school gymnasium. No, they are better off left here to rest.”
He gave the clerk his business card. “Phone me at this private number if there is any change in their condition.”
The rushing water under the Charles Bridge continued to climb the supports of the bridge like a hungry animal, struggling to reach the delicate morsel it knew was waiting above. Crowds continued to hover at the barriers that closed off the bridge as they watched the river grow stronger, deeper, angrier
. Other people were collecting along both sides of the riverbank, each watching the other side of the city.
“Look!” a young woman standing in the court of a restaurant on the Little Town side of the river tugged her boyfriend’s sleeve as he attempted to take a photograph of the bridge, the statues along its balustrade silhouetted against the sky.
“Wha—!” he exclaimed, her tug causing the camera to jerk and catch a smudged photo of the cloudy sky instead. He half-turned toward where she was pointing.
The river was clearly crawling into the dark, gaping entrances to sewers and tunnels liberally sprinkled across the face of the wall across the river, a wall that must have been built to safeguard the Jewish Quarter and the Old Town from the ravages of the river. But the furious, hungry river, kept for so long from the city and reaching higher than it had in more than a century, was discovering the weaknesses in the city’s defenses.
A half-dozen evangelical students from an American Bible college who had come to Prague for summer mission work stood on the platform of the Staroměstká subway station in the Old Town.
“Springs from the deep!” insisted one of the upperclassmen. “I tell you, it was more than rain for forty days and forty nights that caused Noah’s flood! The springs of the deep burst forth too!”
“Springs of the deep?” asked one of the girls, a younger student. “What were the springs of the deep? My pastor only ever preached about the rain for forty days.”
“The springs of the deep were the waters God had sealed away from the earth, above the heavens and under the ground,” another one of the girls said smugly. “The earth was surrounded by water, sealed in a bubble of air, and the springs of the deep were the water from above and under the earth that God allowed to burst forth and flood the world. To punish the wickedness of mankind.”
“Because he was sorry that He had made mankind, because they had become so wicked,” corrected the upperclassman.
Come Hell or High Water: The Complete Trilogy Page 102
