by P. W. Child
“You don’t have to do that! My wife can do it!” Mihail shouted.
“I insist,” Nina mumbled as she entered the kitchen with the empty dishes. She hated Machos, not just for obvious reasons, but any time someone was being bullied or enslaved it chewed at Nina’s pretty little ass. In the kitchen she found Mihail’s wife sitting with a crust of bread by the stove.
“Oh, hello,” the historian greeted the washed out young woman with the fatigue in her eyes.
“Hello,” the woman replied in a heavy accent. She tried to smile, but she did not speak English and felt terribly inept next to the beautiful modern stranger with the dirty dishes. Nina looked towards the door to make sure they were all outside, and then she removed her bowl from the top and placed it on the table. Mihail’s wife’s face lit up at the sight of the bowl of goulash the stranger saved for her. Nina winked at her and the young woman muttered something in her language with a smile and lots of nodding reminiscent of a beggar receiving alms.
Mihail’s wife saw the circular wound on Nina’s arm, the scar tissue damaged by the recent tissue samples taken by the hospital. She gripped the historian’s arm and spat on it. Nina winced, frowning in confusion, but she could not pull her arm away from the skinny woman who was as strong as a bear.
“,” she told Nina, but Nina motioned that she did not know what that meant.
“Eee-evil,” the woman repeated with difficulty, and then proceeded to pull her face to depict a demon.
“Yes!” Nina said. “It was done by evil.”
Mihail’s wife nodded and spat on it again.
“Enough with the spitting, lassie,” she mumbled by herself, while the woman opened a pewter jar and pulled some kind of moss from it. She crushed the herbs in a big mortar she used for bread meal and placed it on Nina’s wound. Then she removed a large handkerchief she wore around her neck and bound it.
“Thank you,” Nina smiled. She was grateful for the help, but thought to get going before the woman spat on her again.
Outside they all settled around the table to find out what had caused Mihail’s reaction before lunch. He lit a cigarette.
“You will not find Petr, my friends. And I hope by whatever god you pray to that you don’t find what he brought back here,” he said.
“What?” Petra cried out. She felt her heart sank, knowing she made the trip for nothing.
“Petr is in the forest. He is lost to Hoia Baciu. And you should be thankful, you all, that you will never know him. The devil, that man!” he sneered and spat on the ground.
“Wait; wait,” Petra said, “Tell me about him. Tell me what happened. Please.” Her face implored him, and since she came so far he decided to oblige her.
“He was born here in Baciu. Lived here all his life. He went to the Czech Republic to work at a beer brewery or some factory in the 1980’s somewhere. Made friends with a group of men who were soldiers in the war. Germans, Hungarians, Czechs – they all drank together after work, you know?” he casually narrated, taking a long drag on his roughly rolled cigarette.
The group sat in dead silence waiting for him to continue.
“One of the Czechs there, his sister was a fortune teller, you know, those women who read your palm, look in that crystal ball and stuff like that. Now that woman,” he said with one eye pinched shut, “that woman - she taught Petr about the cards. She taught him how to tell someone’s fate.”
“Tarot cards,” Nina noted, and Mihail pointed at her in affirmation.
“He came back here, using those cards in Baciu village. With those cards he foretold futures, gave advice and in the end…” he took another lazy drag that had Nina almost jumping out of her seat to prompt him, “…in the end old Petr discovered that he had power over people by using the cards. So, he starts using them to work ill will around, manipulate the people, you know? They listen to him with the cards, so he uses the cards to make trouble from here,” Mihail roared, patting his heart with his hand. “He made trouble for his own goals, you see?”
“So what happened to him?” Sam urged.
“That woman who taught him the cards in Czechoslovakia, her brother who he worked with told Petr in a letter about the Nazis looking for the Black Tarot in Prague,” he nodded.
“Hang on, wait, the Nazis? When was this? In the war?” Petra asked.
“No, Petr is a young man. He was born in the 1960’s, but the Nazis were all over Prague and Plzeň and Brno looking for the cards…that was…somewhere in 1993 or ’94, I don’t know,” Mihail drawled.
Petra and Nina looked at each other.
“The Order of the Black Sun.”
“Nazis. Of course,” Igor chimed in.
Sam perked up, “So how does this have anything to do with Petr and how did he disappear?”
“Wait, wait, I tell you,” Mihail said in his slow way. Stefan chuckled at the party’s impatience versus the mechanic’s slowness.
“Petr heard about excavations at Zbiroh from this man he worked with, and that the Black Tarot was in that well, you know? The well behind the castle that they were digging around in? So he went there and he stole a lot of things with the cards and he brought them back here!” he motioned wildly, his emotions running high with anger. “And with him came another man who chased him, a Czech from Plzeň, but just before he caught Petr the Nazis found him. We think he got away, but never got all the cards back, except for a few. Now you are looking for them, too,” he frowned.
Sam’s mind ran like a diesel engine where he sat by himself. The Czech man from Plzeň who had been chasing Petr – it was all beginning to make sense in a wickedly eerie way. He recalled how he had chatted with the Czech curator from Plzeň about the good beer they made there while they were looking for the Nazi bunker in Nohra, where his colleagues had been executed a short while later. He looked at Petra Kulich.
She was white as a sheet. He knew she was thinking the exact same thing. It had been her brother who he had been on the excursion with and whose execution he had been forced to witness - the man who left the documents to her in his will, begging her to find the Black Tarot.
“Now what happened to Petr, then?” Igor asked with Nina nodding zealously in agreement.
“Hoia Baciu happened to Petr.”
“The forest?” Nina asked. Mihail nodded.
“It is well known that you do not go in that forest alone. Actually, you don’t go there at all. It is a place of strange happenings and evil, a place where even the trees bend their trunks against nature,” he told them with no amount of drama attached. His words ran their blood cold. “Petr is still there, but he is now part of the forest. Just a ghost with a living soul.”
“He is dead?” Igor asked.
“What is dead, my friend? Dead is sometimes the repeating of time, and not being able to walk out of it. You don’t have to blow out your breath to be dead. The haunted forest is not haunted by ghosts alone. It is a vortex of time and space where devils come through as if it were a door. Not even nature goes there. Everything is upside down, inside out, and the people caught in the net of its evil will never come out,” he warned. “Petr took the wicked deck of cards into Hoia Baciu to hide it from the Nazis, those bastards who chased him for it, and…poof…he was swallowed by the forest.”
The party sat dumbstruck. Each had their own thoughts, fears and theories. But Mihail the Eye was not done yet.
“Now Petr Costita is caught, walking the same time over and over. But with the evil cards he is trying to change fate. A demon dealer. From the mouth of ob…ob-livion…” he sought the right word, “…he is constantly arranging the tarot to change events, hoping he will come out again. But you cannot fight the devil with his own works.”
“Sam,” Nina said almost inaudibly, “caught in time, living it over and over?”
“Aye? What about it?” he asked.
“I have been having this insane déjà vu driving me crazy, remember?” she said with her eyes wide and terrified.
�
�You too?” Igor asked her. “I have been having it too. Every time it happens, I know what is going to happen, but I can’t stop it.”
By Petra’s reaction is was clear that they had all been suffering from those unusual déjà vu experiences. They were all caught in someone else’s repetitive nightmare.
“That is why the Black Sun is after the Black Tarot,” Nina sighed. “With the deck they can alter world events to their favor. But they need all the cards and they need the Dealer!”
“Oh my god, that means they could already be here,” Petra gasped.
Igor put his hand on her shoulder and rubbed her arm in consolation.
“There is trouble everywhere, Professor,” Stefan said. “We just have to know where to look. Sometimes it is right in front of you, so take care where you tread, hey?”
“You’re not helping, Stefan,” Nina snapped at the grinning guide.
“I’m just making some light-hearted comment, Dr. Gould. It is just so far-fetched, all this. I cannot help but make a little fun at it.” He shook his head and lit a cigarette.
“Mihail,” Petra suddenly said, “how much would you charge to come with us? Name your price.”
“Where to, Professor?” he asked, surprised.
“Hoia Baciu,” she said firmly.
“Fuck no,” he smiled. It was a smile of uncertainty and terror that played on his lips, but he considered it for the money.
“Mihail, that Czech man who was here was my brother. He is dead now, killed by members of the Black Sun, I think. Please come with us. I need you to see for me, to see what happened when he was here,” she pleaded.
“Professor, with all due respect, you are out of your mind,” he replied seriously.
“I’ll pay you well. Better than you can imagine,” she insisted.
“It is not worth my soul!” he retorted.
“You are a superstitious fool,” Stefan taunted him quietly. “I’m going.”
“Then you can stay there forever…with your friends!” Mihail barked at him. Inside the house the baby started crying. It was an ominous wail that announced things to come.
Cha pter 23 – The Reluctant Chosen
Heinz had left early to consult on a military base now used as a training academy for young troops to improve their physical and artillery training. He had been giving lectures on the advantages of discipline and knowledge, especially aimed at troubled teens and inmates at juvenile facilities. It had become a real problem with the stigma of Nazism, to maintain a balance between factions of young people perpetuating right-wing ideals while others were tipping the boat with their constant demonizing of all things in their heritage because of an education system that imposed guilt on modern generations for what happened in the Second World War. Heinz-Karl Heller would do everything in his power to correct this imbalance and he was only too happy to attend these seminars.
Greta made herself a cup of coffee, a strong one with lots of sugar, something she would never have done before. Since her collapse a few nights ago and her subsequent two day recuperation she had adjusted her habits somewhat to accommodate her new state of mind. In hindsight she sensed that the breakdown had been necessary for her to realize what was actually important and what her priorities really were. Starting with too much sugar in her coffee, she marched down the corridor to attend to her biggest concern right now.
No more was she going to kill herself for others. Yes, it was a good way to obtain much needed funding, but there were far bigger things going on that needed attention. Radu was first and foremost, but it was not because of Greta’s good nature or intentions. From the beginning he had never been her charge, regardless of all the trouble she went through to adopt him. Greta was happy that Heinz and Radu got along so well and perhaps that was one of the good things that came from her initial plan.
Holding her hand firmly on her abdomen, dressed in a long flowing dress instead of her usual suits or designer pants and shirts, Greta woke Radu for his day’s tutoring.
“Are you feeling better, Frau Heller?” he asked when he saw her sitting on his bed.
She caressed his forehead with her pale hands and smiled, “Yes, thank you, Radu. Now, hurry up and have breakfast so that we can begin, you hear?”
After his breakfast of toast and scrambled eggs prepared by the housekeeper, prescribed by Radu as being ‘the way Herr Heller makes it’, Radu made his way to Greta’s study.
She sat like a statue, looking straight ahead as he came in. Without looking at him she said, “Close the door, Liebchen.”
She did nothing to make him falter in his steps, but there was something amiss with her and Radu felt just a little afraid of his German mother. Never before has he had reason to feel this way, but on the streets of Cluj he had learned to trust his instincts.
“Sit. Arrange.”
Her voice was soft, but it didn’t sound warm, he found. She sounded soft in a weak and cold way, as if she was not entirely present, yet knew what she wanted. In front of him she had placed not one row of cue cards, but three, one above the other.
“How would you like me to arrange them, Frau Heller? From side to side or top to bottom?” he asked carefully and she picked up on his reluctance.
“Both, Radu. Make me an extraordinary story that would work in both ways,” she ordered, a frown forming between her eyes. Her left hand was on her stomach and the other was massaging the bridge of her nose. He proceeded to place the cards in different positions. There were pictures he had never seen before. No longer did he work with cars, balls and trees. Now the depictions were more sinister. There was a group of uniformed men in a row, each with his dress sword stuck in the next man’s chest. Another card boasted a green circle with bones strewn over the entire radius of it. Horses with red eyes quartering a king; an upturned plough in a field of dead crops and a card with a black circle and lightning bolts around it. The latter looked disturbingly familiar to the young boy. He remembered his own card, the one he stole from Greta Heller the first time he saw her. It depicted a similar black circle with tentacle-like tongues emanating from it.
A terrible feeling of iniquity crawled over Radu’s scalp. His little heart started pounding as he moved the bad cards into positions that would foretell a terrible fate, a tale of despicable events in sequence. By each placing the ominous oppression escalated, as if every card he laid out set something hideous in action somewhere in the world. Before he laid the final card his voice quivered, “Frau Heller, can I be excused for a moment?”
“Nein!” she snapped, her eyes dark and empty. “Finish!”
“But…I feel…” he tried to explain.
“I said finish! If you abandon the lesson now I will punish you severely, you little fuck!” she growled in her German accent. The young boy fell back in his chair, his hands trembling as much as his knees. Something dreadful swam through Greta Heller, like a Great White shark looking for prey.
Radu pushed the last card into its place, completing a most horrendous row of cards. Suddenly his body started to convulse and he fell from his chair. On his knees the poor child threw up all over the carpet in front of him, but Greta did not even stir. Her eyes only saw the formation of cards in front of her. She studied them as they progressed, shaking her head. Radu puked profusely, jolting his small frame backwards and forward as the spasms took his ribs. The housekeeper came rushing in to help him, but still the lady of the house sat motionless.
“Mein Gott! What is happening?” the housekeeper screamed as the boy vomited up blood when he ran out of stomach contents. She swept him up in her arms and raced through the house to summon the security people and asked them to get the Heller’s’ doctor while she called Heinz immediately.
In the meantime Greta remained inanimate in her chair. Her eyes welled up with tears, but she could not cry like she always did. Sorrow, regret and darkness filled her as she looked at the atrocious events in the cards Radu made for her. Under her hand the cancer sat in a hard mass on the under her skin
, a manifestation of her own deeds. Through her lips a forlorn whine emanated, but she could not move for the excruciating pain that slithered through her. Tears trickled down Greta’s cheeks and fell on the cards of the first row. On the table the most terrible things were depicted, fraught with an old evil that had survived the Second World War and gripped current times. Greta choked on her tears.
Radu was ready.
Heinz rushed home at the news of the boy’s suffering. There was no time to ascertain exactly what ailed him, because Heinz elected to first get home. When he arrived the housekeeper and doctor were seated next to Radu on his bed. His wife was nowhere to be seen. Charging into the child’s room, Heinz thundered at the doctor, “What is wrong with him? Tell me!”
In his bed Radu lay with his eyes shut, hardly breathing. Hands folded over his abdomen, the young boy slept, but he was sweating profusely so that his clothing clung to him and his hair stuck to his temples.
“Honestly, there is no sign of any fever or serious illness the likes of which could make him throw up blood, Her Heller,” the doctor reported. He shook his head and started putting away his equipment.
“Then how could this happen? Vomiting is one thing, but if there is blood in it…” Heinz contemplated.
“It does not make sense, unless he had an ulcer of sorts. But even that is a negative. I must admit that I am confounded by this,” the doctor said. “The good news is that he has no serious infirmity, no infections or viruses. His immune system seems strong too. I have given him something to sedate him for a few hours, after which I suggest you do not allow him to do any strenuous activities.”
“Thank you, doctor,” Heinz replied and shook the man’s hand. Knowing that Radu was now resting he approached the housekeeper to determine what exactly happened leading up to the episode. For some reason Heinz knew his wife would be of no help, if not the cause of the problem. Her strange behavior of late was enough to make him keep an eye on her; he did not want to provoke her suspicion as well about his distrust of her secretive phone conversations.
