Someone must have tidied them into the side road. Most of the body was a shattered pile of red and white, but the head and half the left shoulder formed a single item propped on top. David was about to point around the corner when the object shifted. Still grinning, it toppled sideways as if the vanished neck had snapped. The wind was moving it, he told himself, but he wasn’t sure that his grandmother ought to see. Before he could think how to prevent her, she followed his gaze. “It is him,” she cried. “Someone else mustn’t have liked him.”
David was reaching to grab her hand and lead her away when the head shifted again. It tilted awry with a slowness that made its grin appear increasingly mocking, and slithered off the rest of the debris to inch along the pavement, scraping like a skull. “He’s coming for me,” David’s grandmother babbled. “There’s something inside him. It’s the worm.”
David’s mother was hurrying along the street ahead of his grandfather. Before they could join his grandmother, the grinning object skittered at her. She recoiled a step, and then she lurched to trample her tormentor to bits. “That’ll stop you laughing,” she cried as the eyes shattered. “It’s all right now, Davy. He’s gone.”
Was the pretence of acting on his behalf aimed at him or at the others? They seemed to accept it when at last she finished stamping and let them usher her back to the house, unless they were pretending as well. Though the adults had reverted to behaving as they were supposed to, it was too sudden. It felt like a performance they were staging to reassure him.
He must be expected to take part. He had to, or he wouldn’t be a man. He pretended not to want to go home, and did his best to simulate enjoyment of the television programmes and the games that the others were anxious his grandmother should like. He feigned an appetite when the remnants of Christmas dinner were revived, accompanied by vegetables that his mother succeeded in rescuing from his grandmother’s ambitions for them.
While the day had felt far too protracted, he would have preferred it to take more time over growing dark. The wind had dropped, but not so much that he didn’t have to struggle to ignore how his grandmother’s eyes fluttered whenever a window shook. He made for bed as soon as he thought he wouldn’t be drawing attention to his earliness. “That’s right, Davy, we all need our sleep,” his grandmother said as if he might be denying them theirs. He suffered another round of happy Christmases and hugs that felt more strenuous than last night’s, and then he fled to his room.
The night was still except for the occasional car that slowed outside the house – not, David had to remember, because there was anything on the roof. When he switched off the light the room took on a surreptitious flicker, as if his surroundings were nervous. Surely he had no reason to be, although he could have imagined that the irritable buzz was adding an edge to the voices downstairs. He hid under the quilt and pretended he was about to sleep until the sham overtook him.
A change in the lighting roused him. He was pushing the quilt away from his face so as to greet the day that would take him home when he noticed that the illumination was too fitful to be sunlight. As it glared under the curtains again he heard uncoordinated movement through the window. The wind must have returned to play with the lit sign. He was hoping that it wouldn’t awaken his grandmother, or that she would at least know what was really there, when he realised with a shock that paralysed his breath how wrong he was. He hadn’t heard the wind. The clumsy noises outside were more solid and more localised. Light stained the wall above his bed, and an object blundered as if it was limbless against the front door.
If this hadn’t robbed David of the ability to move, the thought of his grandmother’s reaction would have. It was even worse than the prospect of looking himself. He hadn’t succeeded in breathing when he heard her say “Who’s that? Has he come back?”
David would have blocked his ears if he had been capable of lifting his fists from beside him. He must have breathed, but he was otherwise helpless. The pause in the next room was almost as ominous as the sounds that brought it to an end: the rumble of the window, another series of light but impatient thumps at the front door, his grandmother’s loose unsteady voice. “He’s here for me. He’s all lit up, his eyes are. The worm’s put him back together. I should have squashed the worm.”
“Stop wandering, for God’s sake,” said David’s grandfather. “I can’t take much more of this, I’m telling you.”
“Look how he’s been put back together,” she said with such a mixture of dismay and pleading that David was terrified it would compel him to obey. Instead his panic wakened him.
He was lying inert, his thoughts as tangled as the quilt, when he heard his grandmother insist “He was there.”
“Just get back in bed,” his grandfather told her.
David didn’t know how long he lay waiting for her to shut the window. After that there seemed to be nothing to hear once her bed acknowledged her with an outburst of creaking. He stayed uneasily alert until he managed to think of a way to make sense of events: he’d overheard her in his sleep and had dreamed the rest. Having resolved this let him feel manly enough to regain his slumber.
This time daylight found him. It seemed to render the night irrelevant, at least to him. He wasn’t sure about his grandmother, who looked uncertain of something. She insisted on cooking breakfast, rather more than aided by her husband. Once David and his mother had done their duty by their portions it was time to call a taxi. David manhandled the suitcase downstairs by himself and wheeled it to the car, past the decorations that appeared dusty with sunlight. His grandparents hugged him at the gate, and his grandmother repeated the gesture as if she’d already forgotten it. “Come and see us again soon,” she said without too much conviction, perhaps because she was distracted by glancing along the street and at the roof.
David thought he saw his chance to demonstrate how much of a man he was. “It wasn’t there, Granny. It was just a dream.”
Her face quivered, and her eyes. “What was, Davy? What are you talking about?”
He had a sudden awful sense of having miscalculated, but all he could do was answer. “There wasn’t anything out here last night.”
Her mouth was too nervous to hold onto a smile that might have been triumphant. “You heard him as well.”
“No,” David protested, but his mother grabbed his arm. “That’s enough,” she said in a tone he’d never heard her use before. “We’ll miss the train. Look after each other,” she blurted at her parents, and shoved David into the taxi. All the way through the streets full of lifeless decorations, and for some time on the train, she had no more to say to him than “Just leave me alone for a while.”
He thought she blamed him for frightening his grandmother. He remembered that two months later, when his grandmother died. At the funeral he imagined how heavy the box with her inside it must be on the shoulders of the four gloomy men. He succeeded in withholding his guilty tears, since his grandfather left crying to David’s mother. When David tried to sprinkle earth on the coffin in the hole, a fierce wind carried off his handful as if his grandmother had blown it away with an angry breath. Eventually all the cars paraded back to the house that was only his grandfather’s now, where a crowd of people David hadn’t met before ate the sandwiches his mother had made and kept telling him how grown-up he was. He felt required to pretend, and wished his mother hadn’t taken two days off from working at the nursery so that they could stay overnight. Once the guests left he felt more isolated still. His grandfather broke one of many silences by saying “You look as if you’d like to ask a question, Davy. Don’t be shy.”
David wasn’t sure he wanted to be heard, but he had to be polite and answer. “What happened to Granny?”
“People change when they get old, son. You’ll find that out, well, you have. She was still your grandmother really.”
Too much of this was more ominous than reassuring. David was loath to ask how she’d died, and almost to say, “I meant where’s she gone.”
Perhaps David’s mother sensed this was the opposite of comforting, for she said “I think it’s like turning into a butterfly, David. Our body’s just the chrysalis we leave behind.”
He had to affect to be happy with that, despite the memory it threatened to revive, because he was afraid he might otherwise hear worse. He apparently convinced his mother, who turned to his grandfather. “I wish I’d seen Mummy one last time.”
“She looked like a doll.”
“No, while she was alive.”
“I don’t think you’d have liked it, Jane. Try and remember her how she used to be and I will. You will, won’t you, Davy?”
David didn’t want to imagine the consequences of giving or even thinking the wrong answer. “I’ll try,” he said.
This appeared to be less than was expected of him. He was desperate to change the subject, but all he could think of was how bare the house seemed without its Christmas finery. Rather than say so he enquired, “Where do all the decorations go?”
“They’ve gone as well, son. They were always Dora’s.”
David was beginning to feel that nothing was safe to ask or say. He could tell that the adults wanted him to leave them alone to talk. At least they oughtn’t to be arguing, not like his parents used to as soon as he was out of the way, making him think that the low hostile remarks he could never quite hear were blaming him for the trouble with the marriage. At least he wouldn’t be distracted by the buzzing and the insistent light while he tried to sleep or hear. The wind helped blur the voices below him, so that although he gathered that they were agreeing, he only suspected they were discussing him. Were they saying how he’d scared his grandmother to death? “I’m sorry,” he kept whispering like a prayer, which belatedly lulled him to sleep.
A siren wakened him – an ambulance. The pair of notes might have been crying “Davy” through the streets. He wondered if an ambulance had carried off his grandmother. The braying faded into the distance, leaving silence except for the wind. His mother and his grandfather must be in their beds, unless they had decided David was sufficiently grown-up to be left by himself in the house. He hoped not, because the wind sounded like a loose voice repeating his name. The noises on the stairs might be doing so as well, except that they were shuffling footsteps or, as he was able to make out before long, rather less than footsteps. Another sound was approaching. It was indeed a version of his name, pronounced by an exhalation that was just about a voice, by no means entirely like his grandmother’s but too much so. It and the slow determined unformed paces halted outside his room.
He couldn’t cry out for his mother, not because he wouldn’t be a man but for fear of drawing attention to himself. He was offstage, he tried to think. He only had to listen, he needn’t see more than the lurid light that flared across the carpet. Then his visitor set about opening the door.
It made a good deal of locating the doorknob, and attempting to take hold of it, and fumbling to turn it, so that David had far more time than he wanted to imagine what was there. If his grandmother had gone away, had whatever remained come to find him? Was something of her still inside her to move it, or was that a worm? The door shuddered and edged open, admitting a grotesquely festive glow, and David tried to shut his eyes. But he was even more afraid not to see the shape that floundered into the room.
He saw at once that she’d become what she was afraid of. She was draped with a necklace of fairy lights, and two guttering bulbs had taken the place of her eyes. Dim green light spilled like slimy water down her cheeks. She wore a long white dress, if the vague pale mass wasn’t part of her, for her face looked inflated to hollowness, close to bursting. Perhaps that was why her mouth was stretched so wide, but her grin was terrified. He had a sudden dreadful thought that both she and the worm were inside the shape.
It blundered forward and then fell against the door. Either it had very little control of its movements or it intended to trap him in the room. It lurched at him as if it was as helpless as he was, and David sprawled out of bed. He grabbed one of his shoes from the floor and hurled it at the swollen flickering mass. It was only a doll, he thought, because the grin didn’t falter. Perhaps it was less than a doll, since it vanished like a bubble. As his shoe struck the door the room went dark.
He might almost have believed that nothing had been there if he hadn’t heard more than his shoe drop to the floor. When he tore the curtains open he saw fairy lights strewn across the carpet. They weren’t what he was certain he’d heard slithering into some part of the room. All the same, once he’d put on his shoes he trampled the bulbs into fragments, and then he fell to his hands and knees. He was still crawling about the floor when his mother hurried in and peered unhappily at him. “Help me find it,” he pleaded. “We’ve got to kill the worm.”
DAVID HERTER
Black and Green and Gold
AS DAVID HERTER EXPLAINS, “ ‘Black and Green and Gold’ is an exercise in sinister epistolary narrative, inspired by Robert Aickman, Gene Wolfe and Angelo Rippellino’s wonderful Magic Prague. It’s the first of several projects sparked by my 2004 trip to the Czech Republic.”
The author’s dark fantasy novella, On the Overgrown Path, about the composer Leos Janácek, was released by PS Publishing, and he has recently completed The Luminous Depths, a time-slip featuring Karel Capek and an ill-fated production of Rossum’s Universal Robots. Also forthcoming is One Who Disappeared, about expatriate Czechs in Hollywood, circa 1950, which ties all three novellas together.
Herter is nearing completion of two full-length novels: Dark Carnivals is an epic horror-fantasy set in 1977 suburbia, USA, while In the Photon Forests is a prequel to his first novel, Ceres Storm.
DEAR LEV,
You will find a small package beneath this letter. Do not open it, please, until you finish reading.
This is about Erel, of course. Elizabeth wrote me. Don’t blame her for this transgression. She has attempted to maintain the lines of communication, even in these difficult times.
She says her brother hasn’t been heard from since March. At the library, I found the May 5 article in your hometown paper with more details. I’m writing for reasons that will soon become apparent.
I too have been to Prague. You may have heard this from Genevieve. (Regrettably, Gen and I have never been as close as Erel and Elizabeth. On the few occasions when she asked me to recount the details, what I told her was not quite the truth).
This was in 1986, three years before the Communists were swept from power. I was working for the University, in the same department where I met Margaret a year later. Visas were more difficult to obtain back then. Pleasure trips, such as Erel’s, would have been discouraged. The Statni Bezpecnost (StB) scrutinized every visitor, even a dull academic such as myself. Truth be told, I was in the employ, part-time, of a governmental agency, one that routinely took advantage of travelling scholars. The job was low-level, but I expected scrutiny. While leaving Czech customs I was sure I’d spotted the StB agent assigned to keep tabs on me – sloppy black hair, bad teeth, rumpled brown suit. When I joined a queue for the cabs he was right behind me. As I departed, he stubbed his cigarette beneath his shoe and said, with only the slightest of accents, “Enjoy your time in Praha.”
I would not see him again until days later, at Sharpshooter Island, but I felt certain he intended to make his presence known that first day.
During the drive into Prague, I remember rolling down the window to cool my face. The city of a hundred spires, it’s rightly called. I saw it through a wintry haze, with the cold breeze cutting at my eyes. The green and grey river, and the grey and white snow, out of which rose a forest of cathedral-haunted structures, black and green and gold.
My hotel was in the Smichov district, south of Mala Strana – the Small Quarter – and the castle, southwest of all the well-known sights across the Vltava river.
This trip was my
That first day, Lev, as I walked to the Institute, I felt eyes upon me. The sensation became so intense I had to stop and look over my shoulder. The snowy sidewalk behind me was clear. The only audience was above-ground, set in stone: gargoyles and placid faces peering down from the lintels.
Even here, the ancient city watches with ancient disinterest.
Lev, this is my first attempt to detail it. I’m having to find my way into the telling.
I should say this was my only excursion into Eastern Europe. Previous trips had been confined to London and Copenhagen. No doubt the exotic surroundings had over-stimulated me: I’d been transported into the realm of a spy novel, causing me, for instance, to believe the man at the airport was StB, something of which I was never entirely certain.
The Institute – its full title is the Stepan Institute for Historical Studies – was a mixing pot of European and American scholars. Several were in the employ, discreetly. We rarely mingled outside of those dusty stacks of books. I had legitimate research in Prague, in addition to various queries I would make on behalf of the agency. Apart, I tried enjoying the role of tourist.
The second afternoon, after a morning spent with rare holograph manuscripts of Nezval and Seifert, I followed the river north through Mala Strana to the base of Hradcany Castle. Prague is a lure to the walking tourist, but I resisted the urge to climb the ancient steps. I was forty-six, many years past my Army days. This was February; the temperature hovered just above freezing. The smell of soot and sulfur was folded into the frigid air.
Though I was enthralled by St. Vitus Cathedral and its blackened, crenellated spires lifting against the clouds, I worried about catching pneumonia. I had no wish to experience the local health care. So I found a nice vantage on Karluv most – the Charles Bridge – from which Hradcany seemed to sit upon a storybook hill, with the quaint red tile roofs of Mala Strana sprawling down to the Vltava. Watching it, I contemplated the legends of the mad Emperor Rudolf II and his ever-changing entourage of astrologers, astronomers, charlatans and crackpots, who had flocked to this city in the 16th century, when Prague was the center of the Holy Roman Empire.
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