The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 17

by Stephen Jones

  The Charles Bridge is pedestrian-only. That day, I was the only stroller among a bustling crowd, pausing before each of the thirty-two statues. Some were splendorous, some malevolent, blackened with age and soot.

  I was standing beside St. John of Nepomuk, and had turned away to look southward at the oncoming currents when I first noticed the island. Not Kampa Island beneath the bridge – which is not quite an island – but that slender, true island to the south called Strelecky Ostrov, or Sharpshooter Island; once, it had served as residence for Rudolf’s mercenaries.

  In winter, bare oak trees fringed the shoreline. The interior was damp parkland, with an Italianesque structure on its south shore.

  The Vltava rushed past it, grey and green.

  Years later, during the 2002 flood, CNN showed images of the swollen river from nearly this same vantage: the current thundering past, full of broken timber, and Sharpshooter Island lost entirely under the waves.

  That crucial day, I behaved as a tourist would – as no doubt Erel did.

  Black and green and gold, I wrote above, about my first impression of Prague. As I wandered Stare Mesto – the Old Town – I found other vivid colors predominating, the reds of roofs, the pale pinks and blues of the tenement faces, the silvers and grays of cobblestones. I walked north to the Jewish quarter, wandering the crooked, claustrophobic streets. The river was an able marker; it was impossible to get lost for long. South in the Old Town Square, I found the statue of Jan Hus, the Protestant Reformer, holding court amid the Counter-Reformation surroundings. The Old Town Hall’s Astrological Clock, such an attraction to tourists today, was mostly unattended as it chimed the afternoon hours and processed its figures of Death and the Apostles. I was drawn past it, to the Church of Our Lady Before Tyn and its pair of grey stone, black-topped towers, whose steeples resembled – somehow – witches’ hats. Though many consider Tyn a jewel of Prague buildings, I was struck by its architectural melancholy. History speaks of horrors wrought in its shadow, such as the scores of political prisoners executed in 1437, when the stones near Tyn ran ankle-deep in blood; or the dozen young women hanged for witchcraft (more specifically aquamancy) in the summer of 1626, their bodies left out to desiccate, then beheaded, with the heads thrown into the Vltava.

  My mother owned a 19th-century folio of Mediaeval and Renaissance paintings by Fra Angelico, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and Bosch. (She bequeathed it to Genevieve – I remember looking through it with Erel on that winter holiday at your home in 1998.) Staring up at Tyn, I recalled my first views of its pages – how the paintings had sparked a frightening sense of displacement in my child’s mind; their grotesque imagery, in faded tempura and oils, depicting a world seemingly at odds with the history books, hinting, however subtly, at some strange underlying reality in the veracity of their nightmarish details.

  Tyn is where the astronomer Tycho Brahe is buried. Curious to see the tomb behind the altar, I followed the gallery through the Tyn School (a later construction) to the church door, only to find it locked. I was alone, yet not alone. In a fissure beside the Gothic arch a small stone face, round-cheeked, sullen – remnant of some earlier architecture, perhaps – peered out. Its ancient eyes seemed as unable to believe the sight of me as I of it.

  I apologize if this seems a digression. But I thought of Tyn after learning (from the newspaper account) that Erel’s last email was traced to the Hasek Café, just down the street from Tyn and the astronomer’s tomb.

  I had to rest my hand.

  Since I’m an able typist, I sometimes forget how important the fourth and fifth fingers are to handwriting.

  I trust you can decipher the clarifications printed above that scrawled last sentence.

  There is a point to make. I will attempt to reach it now.

  On my wandering walk, I found myself at the grand concert hall on the Vltava – the Narodni Divadlo, or National Theater. Glittering in green and gold, it projects a grandly linear profile amid all the baroque architecture, its rounded roofline like an elaborate cake festooned (there is no other word) with pickets of gold trim, and fronted with statues. The most prominent is a charioteer ready to launch his steeds into the sky.

  A poster advertised Antonin Dvorak’s greatest opera, Rusalka. Earlier, at the Rudolfium Hall north of the Charles Bridge, I had paused before his statue – Dvorak was a favorite composer of mine. Now, I was pleased to see a performance scheduled – such was my luck – at seven o’clock that evening.

  I bought a ticket, and spent the intervening hours at the restaurant across the street, the Kavarna Slavia.

  I had been briefed about its reputation as a well-known rendezvous for both dissidents and State Security, but that afternoon its Art Deco interior was nearly deserted. I took a table by the tall windows overlooking (or actually, underlooking) the Divadlo. Nothing remarkable happened, yet I would soon wonder – with staggering ignorance, Lev – if it was there that I piqued the interest of the dissident community.

  The National Theatre was as grand inside as out, with three tiers of balconies and boxes, green and gold, over a floor of burgundy-velvet seats. On either side of the stage loomed Grand Boxes decked with full-size statues of Nereids holding back velvet curtains. Overhead, a fresco continued the Grecian theme.

  I had secured a perfect seat: sixth row center. The audience was slightly drab and dour, the men in unostentatious dress attire, the women only slightly more glamorous.

  The chandeliers dimmed.

  Polite applause greeted the conductor.

  I will not recount the plot. Genevieve used to mention your fondness for Mozart and Rossini; perhaps it extends to Dvorak. At any rate, you’ll find a synopsis in the Grove Encyclopedia in your library. Rusalka is a water nymph who falls in love with a human, and the opera is a sad one. What opera isn’t? The music, however, is plangent and lovely. When the unseen orchestra began to play the tentative, tremulous prelude (however ominous Dvorak intended it) the warm strings seemed to chase the chill from my bones.

  Rusalka was sung by Gabriela Berezkova, who was then at the height of her tragically short career. I was close enough to see her Botticellian eyes widen as she sang of her dreamed-for lover. In her first act aria, the famous Aria to the Moon, she seemed to be singing to me alone, so perfect was my seat. The performance was sublime. At intermission, when the rest of the audience departed for the lobby, I approached the orchestra pit. I remember placing my hand on the decorous rail, feeling the regard of those gold Nereids on either side, as I looked down.

  Below, two musicians – a double bass and a trombone – were chatting in fleet Czech. The pit seemed older than the theater, all the gilt and gold beauty relenting in its depths to drab functionality. Wooden music stands held the scores. Beyond the conductor’s podium, empty chairs huddled in the gloom, against a wall whose blackness recalled to me Tyn’s towers.

  At the opposite end a door led offstage. Its pale light was broken, momentarily, as those last two players exited the pit. Somewhere backstage, a flautist was practicing her lines. Notes drifted up and down, as I leaned further over that gold rail, and caught a sharp scent of – perhaps mildew. As though a pipe had broken from the cold. Nonetheless, it was appropriate to Rusalka’s lake.

  Leaning forward, my hands tightening on the rail, I felt a sudden wave of dizziness, and a sense of—

  To treat it realistically, Lev, I would say it was dizziness brought on by the day’s exertions. Yet a swoon might be a better term, with all it implies. I experienced a number of heightened sensations. My heart began beating rapidly. I felt light-headed, my skin grew hot, I gained a sudden awkward erection – kindled somehow by that river smell, in the air before me, there by the gold rail. And a sense of movement close by, in my dizziness. Of something very lightly touching my shoulder, my cheek.

  I do not speak of ghosts, nor wish to imply their presence. Nor did I think of ghosts then.

  I steadied myself, even as my vision became blotchy – as if those dark spots had detached
themselves from the Tynian shadows of the pit. I straightened, blinked, regaining my composure. Slightly shaken, I returned to my seat. I was able to blame the arduousness of the afternoon’s walk: I chided myself for over-exertion.

  The remainder of the opera, though no different in quality from before, felt somehow diminished. True, Gabriela Berezkova sang with melancholy sweetness as her human lover died. There was the expected sense of sadness as she returned to her lake. The audience responded with two curtain calls. But I was unmoved. My thoughts were elsewhere.

  When the lights came up, I waited for most of the crowd to file out, then followed, more slowly.

  Once in the hall, I headed in the opposite direction, surprising myself. I found a door marked Zakulisi – Backstage. As I neared it, it was swung wide by a tuxedoed man clutching a violin case. He gave me a distracted glance, and held it open before striding down the hall. Trying to look sure of myself, I stepped through. I wandered a warren of rooms, wondering what I hoped to accomplish. Luckily, everyone was distracted; their duties done, they were heading home.

  Was I trying to find Ms Berezkova’s dressing room, here to pay foolish compliments to the singer? Even as I asked myself the question, I was descending a stairwell. After a few wrong turns I entered a storeroom of instruments which led, via a tall narrow door, into the pit.

  From here, the Tynian blackness had become drab grey.

  I stood for a long moment, remembering the strange sensations. I looked up to the gold rail, which seemed a greater height from this angle against the dim, impossibly remote fresco.

  The predominant odor was not Rusalka’s lake but overused stage lights.

  I walked behind the chairs, to the harp, drawn to a grating in the floor.

  Leaning close to the black-metal I smelled the sharp, fetid odor, nearly as intense as it had been earlier. Yet easily explainable. Ground water, seepage from the Vltava.

  The Theater sat upon its banks, after all.

  I remained crouching over the grate, listening to its seashell-like echo. Then, staring down, I had that shivery feeling one gets when, alone in the dark, one imagines a face has been there all along, unseen, looking back.

  I rose, put a hand to the harp to steady myself (creating a faint resonance, as though all the strings had just given the slightest of shudders). As I re-entered the store room I nearly collided with a worker come to collect the leftover scores. Startled, I said, in Czech, “Lost. I am lost.”

  I had to show my passport, then the Institute’s card, then I was escorted out.

  While crossing the bridge to Smichov, I felt another wave of dizziness. I stumbled to the rail and vomited over the side. Dolorous church bells echoed through Stare Mesto. I remember looking over at the glittering Narodni Divadlo, waiting for another heave which didn’t come. Coughing, I glanced at the opera house, and downward, noticing, level with the river, a stone pier carved into the stone shore, with a portal and a window which looked sealed shut.

  By the next morning, the strangeness of those moments in the opera house had receded. I was well rested. I promised myself not to make any more day-long treks through the city.

  But I remembered the pier. At the Institute, I asked about it.

  A colleague told me it was a remnant of a 17th-century fisherman’s port, predating the National Theater and most of the nearby structures.

  Eager to feed my curiosity, he pointed me to several excellent volumes.

  The Old and New Towns had nearly as vivid a history below ground as above. Prague, like most ancient cities, is built-up with layers of accretion; the earliest catacombs date back to the original settlements that grew a thousand years ago along the Vltava. In the Middle Ages, the pier had connected to alleys and sidestreets that had been subsequently covered.

  Krejci’s Praha legend a skutecnosti (1872) and Heinholz’s Stara Praha (1906) tell several vivid tales of this underground realm, such as the histories of Charles Square and Fastuv Dum.

  The Square, three miles south of Tyn Church in Nova Mesto (the New Town) was once called the Cattle Market, built around a mysterious ancient rock topped with a cross. The charlatans who flocked to Prague during Rudolf’s reign set up shop there. It became a breeding ground for black deeds and blacker spirits, a place of executions, where corpses were dropped through trap doors into a snarl of underground passages; and those same passages (according to legend) were home to myriad secret and alchemical societies.

  Hapless victims, so the legends say, were walled up alive in underground casements.

  On the Square’s southern edge sits Faustuv Dum – Faust House, dating from the 12th-century.

  Edward Kelley, the alchemist, lived there in the late 16th century, conducting experiments at the behest of Rudolf II. During Kelley’s diabolical tenure, and after, the legend grew: that the palatial estate had been the last home of Doktor Faust, and the site of his final battle with Mephistopholes. Hence, Faustuv Dum.

  My fifth day in Prague, while studying drier texts at the carrels, I heard the bell ringing downstairs. Moments later our German-Irish attendant Jacob whispered that I had a visitor.

  Drop-ins were rare; I knew nobody outside the Institute.

  In the previous days, Lev, I had discharged my duties to the agency: a series of modest inquiries at local embassies and (surprisingly) a book store. My expectation, as I descended the stairs, was that this visitor was somehow connected to those duties. Or was perhaps my unseen StB agent.

  Instead, a derelict waited in the foyer.

  “Dobry den,” he said, barely looking up from his boots. He was bald but for straggles of grey hair, with weak, rheumy eyes and a palsied shake to his hands.

  He said my full name, though he pronounced my first as Stefan.

  “Yes,” I replied. “Ano.”

  He held out a slip of green paper. I took it.

  It bore a message, crudely lettered: “Stephen Madison: Strelechy Ostrov, east shore, 16:00. Hastrman.”

  Hastrman?

  Though the name seemed vaguely familiar, it wasn’t somebody I’d dealt with in recent duties.

  “Nashela,” he muttered, moving toward the door.

  I held up my hand. “Wait. Prominte.”

  He hesitated.

  “Who is this Hastrman?”

  He shook his head, and looked from me to Jacob. “Nerozum’m,” he said. I do not understand.

  Hovering at the door, Jacob translated my question, and quickly asked a follow-up. “He says he wrote the note on behalf of an old gentleman, one he has never seen before, down by Legion Bridge. He was paid a hundred crowns to deliver it.”

  The derelict shuffled out. With evident relief, Jacob closed the door.

  Paul Dawson was my contact at the Institute.

  I found him in his attic office, and dropped the note on his desk, beside his tea. He deemed it of slight – but only slight – importance. “State Security doesn’t use bums,” he said. “What about those folk you were squeezing at the embassy? Friends of theirs?”

  “Perhaps. But I don’t think so.” I was thinking of that afternoon, days ago, in the Kavarna Slavia, and wondering whether there had been any significant moments there.

  Dawson said, “Hastrman – might be a person’s name, or might be one of the dissident groups, but this isn’t their modus operandi. You willing to go?”

  I said I was.

  There was that thrill, Lev – the excitement of being drawn, seemingly, into a spy novel.

  “I’ll run the name through our books, see if something comes up.” He offered to have a colleague tail me, but I declined. “Keep a record of everything said. You know the drill.”

  Near the appointed hour, clad in my winter coat, hat and gloves, I trudged down to the Vltava’s banks.

  Snow had been shoveled from the sidewalks.

  There was something spiteful about those cobblestones. They seemed to take pleasure in catching the heel unexpectedly; each step was a slight betrayal of what the eye had expected,
reminding me that I was not Prague-born.

  As I neared Sharpshooter Island, I realized I didn’t know how to reach it. By boat? Could one rent a boat so late on a Saturday – a day when even the coffee houses were closed? With equal swiftness, I noted that the Legion Bridge, which crossed the island, dropped a steep staircase to the surface.

  Descending it, I studied the narrow length of somber parkland, as would any good spy. Snowy grass, benches, paths, all deserted. To my left, the sun set over Old Town, casting long shadows.

  In the distance, lights shone in the Italianesque structure. Closer, massive oaks shrouding the shore spoke of utter emptiness.

  Rain would have been appropriate. There was an underwater ambience to the island, sitting so low beneath the banks of the Vltava.

  I crossed the field, passing several baroque-iron lamps, and a lone statue of a nymph with demure down-turned eyes. I approached a bench beside a sprawling oak. A concrete breaker hid the shore, where waves were chortling on stone.

  I brushed off the loose snow and sat. Across the river the National Theatre shone in the waning sunlight. I was in view of the stairwell and the surrounding park: My mysterious contact would have to find me.

  I took the note from my pocket, and read it once more, pondering those inquiries I’d made at the embassies in Old Town and the book store in the Jewish Quarter – routine questions (squeezing, as Dawson called it).

  Across the river, church bells tolled the hour.

  When I looked up, an old man was standing beside the wall.

  He was tall, broad-shouldered, with long grey hair, and had the sharp eyes and nose of a Slav. He wore a green coat over a silvery, high-collared shirt. “Dobry vecer.”