Come Hell or High Water: The Complete Trilogy

by Stephen Morris

  “Yes, but she must have been burnt by the crowd in what was, in effect, a lynching,” Wilcox interrupted. “To my knowledge, there are no records that indicate anyone was ever tried and burnt here for witchcraft.”

  “She must have been the woman we saw in the fire. When the vision began,” Peter pointed out.

  “Yes, but she was calling on someone or something,” recalled Alessandro. “What was the name?”

  “Svetovit.” Fr. Dmitri provided the name invoked by the witch in the fire.

  “Yes. Svetovit. She wanted him to bring all their nightmares to life. Presumably all the nightmares of the people responsible for her death,” Victoria reminded the others. “All the nightmares of the inhabitants of Prague.”

  “Right.” Theo looked around the group. “If the woman in the fire invoking Svetovit was the witch, then who was the woman in white we saw when the fire parted? The one holding all those implements?”

  Wilcox spoke up. “My background is in classical mythology and my first thought is that she might have been the genius of Prague, the guardian spirit of the city.”

  “But what was she holding? What were all those things?” Sophia wondered aloud.

  “Well, it is common knowledge that every occult practitioner needs four standard implements, each associated with one of the four elements of earth, air, fire or water,” Sean announced with a smug tone, still smarting from his refusal to walk back to the hotels with the others. “Those implements—sometimes even called the ‘elemental tools’—are the basic tools of magic and are the chalice or cup, the staff (which most of us know as the ‘magic wand’ of a fairy godmother), and the athame, which is a sword or dagger. The fourth is the pentagram or pentacle, the shield inscribed with a five-pointed star.”

  “I recognize those!” interrupted Victoria. “Those are the four tarot suits as well: swords, cups, wands and pentacles!”

  “Yes. They’ve come down to us in the four suits of a deck of playing cards, too: spades, hearts, clubs, and diamonds,” agreed Wilcox. Sean bristled at being interrupted and seized control of the conversation again.

  “As I was saying, if the four magical tools are required for occult work, I’m assuming that there are four magical tools which are the patrimony of all Prague. It was those which the city’s guardian spirit was holding and which were apparently taken from her, perhaps to unleash Svetovit’s vengeance against the city.”

  “Not ‘were taken’ but ‘are in the process of being taken’ from her,” corrected Peter, reaching for another slice of toast. “The ritual we saw performed by George and Magdalena must have begun the process of stealing the four magical tools of Prague. Since the city is still standing, the tools can’t have been stolen yet. As they struck the altar with their knife, the athame, they seemed to be attacking the genius, the city herself, to begin wrenching those things from her grasp.”

  “Yes,” Theo broke in. “There seemed a confusing shift between past and present and future throughout the course of the vision. As well as between metaphor and reality. Such as, is this guardian spirit of Prague a real entity or just a metaphor?”

  “I rather suspect she is a real entity,” replied Alessandro. “She must exist, on some plane or in some dimension, but the tools must be physical, must exist on our plane, in our dimension, and it seems—from the vision—that the power of those tools must be able to be harnessed either to protect the city or destroy it.”

  “Just like the tools that Magdalena and George used.” Peter pointed out the similarities of those portions of the vision. “Magdalena’s tools can be used to either work white magic or black magic.”

  “But she would never really use them for black magic. So she must not realize that what she’s doing is black magic.” Victoria leapt to her friend’s defense. “She would never use them for black magic, especially not against the whole city!”

  “Well, then, what was she doing in that ritual?” demanded Wilcox. “If it wasn’t black magic, then…”

  “What were they doing in that ritual?” Fr. Dmitri spoke up again. “I recognized some of what they were doing. George poured out a few drops of what looked like wine, wine full of clumps and a sticky mass of spices. At least, that’s what it looked like from where I was standing. It is an image of God’s judgment against mankind—in Psalm 74 or 75, I think—that the righteous drink a delightful cup of delicious spiced wine but that the wicked will be forced to drink and then drain the bitter dregs of that cup. Casting coals from a censer onto the earth is also a sign of God’s judgment, taken from both the psalms and the Apocalypse. The Book of Revelation, that is,” he added. A few confused faces cleared. “They were enacting ritual judgment and condemnation of the city by these actions. Certainly black magic, if you ask me.”

  “Did they take any other rituals from the Bible?” asked Victoria. “After all, I think Magdalena said that George is a priest. What did she say? A Jesuit, I think.”

  “Well, the interplay of past-present-future is actually very biblical, yes?” Fr. Dmitri told her. “The Book of Revelation, the Apocalypse, is especially written from a very unstable point-of-view, timewise. That’s one thing many people always misunderstand when they try to interpret it. It tells the same story, many times over, each time from a different point of view or vantage point, not simply telling one story in a linear fashion from beginning to end. As far as that goes, everything they did with the chalice and censer and the confusion of past, present, and future was biblical ritual twisted to perverse ends.”

  “What about the water they poured into the chalice and then to the ground?” asked Sophia. “Is that a biblical sign of judgment also?”

  “Imitative magic,” announced Sean, as if simply using those words explained everything. The announcement was met with a momentary pause.

  “That was an old ritual enactment of a flood. Splashing water, lots and lots of water, from a cup onto the earth was the way to summon a storm or flood.” Peter said, glancing at the Irishman and then away as he expanded Sean’s announcement of imitative magic. There was another pause as the group considered their discussion thus far.

  “So they have summoned a flood to destroy Prague?” Victoria finally spoke up. “Is that why the river has been rising? But it’s been rising for weeks. But there hasn’t been a flood here for… since I don’t know when!”

  “Well, maybe not simply summoned a flood but certainly a flood seems to be a part of whatever they are planning,” Alessandro offered as everyone stared into their coffee. “It seems to me that a flood would certainly be among the nightmares of Prague that might be unleashed.”

  “The newspeople and weather forecasters have been talking about flooding in Central Europe for weeks,” Wilcox announced. “I doubt that—”

  “Doubt that they could be responsible for all that?” Fr. Dmitri cut him off. “Never underestimate the dark power of those intent on destruction. It is the good people underestimating the power of evil that allows evil to gain strength.”

  “Remember the Nazis?” his wife added. Another hush descended on the table.

  “Well, what else was going on in that vision?” Alessandro broke the silence. “This Svetovit the witch was calling on. Who was he?”

  “Who is he, you mean,” Peter corrected, rubbing the many folds beneath his ample chin. “It seems apparent at this point, does it not, that he is, not was, a power to be reckoned with.”

  “And he is dangerous. Not just to Prague.” Sophia spoke up again. “After destroying Prague, don’t you remember how the vision showed that nothing seemed to prevent him from rampaging across Europe? He was destroying everything recognizable about the Western world.”

  “Beijing. Beijing was there also,” Peter pointed out, shaking his butter knife toward Sophia and scattering bread crumbs across the table. “And Mecca. Not just the so-called Western world. He seems intent on destroying modern civilization.”

  “The name sounds familiar to me,” Theo confessed, pulling the conversatio
n back to the identity of Svetovit. “But where I know it from escapes me.”

  “He was—should I say, he is—the old devil worshipped atop the castle hill,” Fr. Dmitri announced.

  “Hold on! Wait a minute!” Wilcox angrily broke into the priest’s explanation. “Just because he was worshipped on the castle hill—before Christianity arrived, right?—doesn’t mean that he was a devil. Isn’t ‘devil’ an outmoded and dated religious construct to apply here? Why not just say that he was the old god worshipped on the hill? Why attach the ‘devil’ label and make him out to be so wicked? Because that’s what the ancient Christians did when they arrived here? They only called Svetovit a devil in order to malign the competition!”

  “Because some of the old gods were devils.” Sophia leaped to the defense of her husband. “You might think ‘devil’ is simply an old idea but it is a true thing. Can you deny that there is real evil in the world? Some of those devils might have been merely spirits or demons, in the ancient Greek sense of incorporeal entities, but some of them—like Svetovit—were truly devils in the Christian sense. Didn’t you see him unleash the nightmares of Prague to destroy the city? Any spirit that would want to destroy the place where he was worshipped must be a devil!” She glared at Wilcox, who squirmed in his seat. He gave a dismissive rumble and looked away, unsatisfied with her answer but not thinking her worthy of an argument.

  “Well, he was a particularly vengeful and angry deity,” the priest offered by way of explanation. “He was a proud spirit and always looking to avenge slights to his honor. Any spirit that proud and demanding must be a devil, as far as I am concerned.”

  “Proud and vengeful, I understand,” Wilcox snapped. “Eager to destroy the city that rejected him makes sense. But why would he then go on that rampage against the rest of the world? How does that make sense? For either an old god or an old devil?”

  Tense silence answered him.

  “Might it make sense because he is so proud, so vengeful that he wants to be worshipped by more than just the residents of Prague?” Victoria suggested at last. “If he was the chief god of the Slavic peoples as well as the chief divinity here in Prague, must he not want his power and dominion and worship extended as far as possible? Anything that stands in the way of that worship would have to be eliminated, yes? Like Ghengis Khan or Atilla the Hun? Or the Nazis?” she added, echoing Sophia’s mention of the Third Reich.

  Wilcox was still unhappy but did not pursue the matter. Instead, he asked, “Well, in that case, maybe you think we should all just say our prayers and let you perform an exorcism up on the hill? Isn’t the Christian God supposed to be all-powerful?” Several people around the table bristled uncomfortably.

  Fr. Dmitri sighed. “Well, prayer is certainly one very important weapon in fighting a devil like Svetovit. But it is not the only weapon. Any struggle against any devil demands action as well as prayer and we must act if our prayer is to have any effect. Jesus fought the devils and healed, you know, not just with prayer but with direct commands to the devils and anointings with mud and spit. When Jesus healed the blind man with mud and spit, he was using a folk magic remedy. The apostles used handkerchiefs and bandanas to heal the sick, yes? Theirs was a very active battle with evil that demanded very real physical action as one aspect of the spiritual struggle. It is the same here. We must act.”

  “But magic?” Alessandro asked. Sean’s eyebrows arched as Alessandro questioned the priest but Alessandro’s tone was that of honest curiosity. “It seems that we must fight fire with fire—you know, fight magic with magic. I was surprised the other night to hear you say that Tarot cards had once been used as a legitimate way to discern the will of God. Is that your attitude towards magic as well?”

  Fr. Dmitri opened his hands as he answered, as if inviting the others to join him in his opinion. “This was, in fact, to be the subject of my paper at the conference. In general, what is the relationship between magic and religion and, in specific, what is the relationship between magic and Christianity? Well, it seems that if we look at the history of this relationship, the activities that came to be called ‘magic’ were often those considered religions ‘foreign’ or ‘exotic.’ More often, the acts called ‘magic’ were simply illegal religious practices. In my paper, I cite one Russian canon which stipulates that the recitation of a certain text by a priest is a ‘prayer’ while the recitation of that same text by a layman is a ‘spell!’ So the distinction between religion and magic appears to be an artificial one. Furthermore, much of what most modern people—even faithful Christians—now consider magic was once considered the scientific, legitimate manipulation of the world and its natural processes, all of which had been created by God. Not unlike our using the natural properties of certain molds to make penicillin. So, if white magic works, it should not be rejected out of hand. It should be used the same as any tool God has provided for the benefit of humanity… like modern science and medicine. Such a tool should be used especially in cases like this.”

  He folded his hands and looked at his knuckles. “That is the one-paragraph summary of my paper.” He looked up, his fingers still interlocked. “Jesus did tell us to be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves. So, if black magic is used against Prague, it is only fitting to fight back with white magic.” He grinned at them all.

  Victoria spoke up, apparently curious to hear more about the history of her own city and its past involvement with the supernatural. “If Svetovit was worshipped on the castle hill, is that why the castle was built there? And the cathedral? I always wondered how they decided to dedicate the cathedral to St. Vitus. Is it because his name Svaty Vit sounds so much like the old god’s?”

  “Precisely,” Fr. Dmitri said. “That is why the cathedral was dedicated to St. Vitus in the first place. Svaty Vit and Svetovit sound almost identical, yes? It was a way for the Church to appropriate the site of the old worship and replace it with Christian worship.”

  “All right, then. He was the god worshipped where the cathedral was built. He was angry and vengeful. But what, in particular, was he the god of?” Theo asked.

  “He has often been identified with Perun, the chief of the pre-Christian Slavic pantheon,” the priest explained. “He was a god of thunder and lightning and fire, of storms and war and fertility. Life and death were his to give or take, yes? Svetovit was the principal pre-Christian deity worshipped here and was apparently still worshipped by those—like that woman in the fire—who rejected Christianity.”

  “How do you know all this?” interrupted Alessandro. “You’re not from around here. Why should you know so much of the local legend about this god?”

  “I am not so much interested in Svetovit as I am in St. Vitus, whose veneration replaced that of Svetovit. I have cousins from Estonia as well as Serbian cousins on my mother’s side,” explained Fr. Dmitri, “and St. Vitus’ Day has always been an important holiday for the Serbs. It was on St. Vitus’ Day in 1389 that the Ottoman Turks conquered Serbia at the Battle of Kosovo.” He paused. “Besides, I am a priest.” He smiled at Alessandro and chuckled. “It is my business to know these things about gods and saints and devils.”

  “What else do we know about Svetovit?” Alessandro wanted to know.

  “We know that he rode a great horse, a white horse with eight legs, like the horse of Odin, and that he had four faces that each looked in another direction,” the priest went on. “The figure of the horseman that appeared over the city—after George and your friend Magdalena,” he nodded to Victoria, “poured out the dregs of the spiced wine and the coals of judgment against Prague—must have been Svetovit. The nightmares of the city were unleashed, if you recall, as he charged down the hill toward the bridge.”

  “So George and Magdalena have unleashed Svetovit and he has begun destroying the city?” cried Victoria in alarm. “The old god has already arrived? What can we do then? If he is already here, there is no time left! It is already too late!”

  “Hush, child. Calm yourself.�
�� Sophia, the priest’s wife, reached across to pat Victoria’s hand.

  “Really. The situation is dire enough without making a scene here in the hotel,” grumbled Sean.

  “No, Svetovit has not arrived yet,” the priest reassured Victoria as he ignored Sean. “They have done what they can to awaken him but not in a very traditional or efficient manner. But perhaps it was the most efficient way that George could think of.” His voice dropped as he seemed to be thinking to himself aloud. “No. Not very traditional or efficient at all.”

  “Why do you say that? What would be, as you call it, the most efficient and traditional way to summon Svetovit?” Theo asked.

  The priest seemed to consider his words carefully before answering. “Svetovit was worshipped by the sacrifice of a coal-black rooster. These roosters were said to have always had their throats cut on the hilltop where the cathedral now stands.”

  “That must be why I noticed so many decorative roosters in the old building carvings in Prague! Especially here on the castle side of the river,” Sophia interjected. “Black roosters for Svetovit.”

  The priest glanced at his wife and then continued. “Obviously, George and Magdalena could not sacrifice a rooster where the cathedral is. I suspect that they could not sacrifice a rooster at all because live roosters—especially coal-black ones—are so hard to come by these days. Unless you have a farm, the only roosters and chickens available to most people are already dead and cut up and in a supermarket’s meat case—wrapped in Styrofoam and plastic!”

  “So, what was it they were doing to summon Svetovit?” asked Alessandro.

  “They were clearly performing a ritual of judgment and condemnation.” Sean had become impatient with the priest. “A ritual in which they slew the genius of the city and poured out condemnation and wrath against Prague. Awakening Svetovit would be one result of that but the ritual was not aimed only at awakening Svetovit.”