Come Hell or High Water: The Complete Trilogy

by Stephen Morris

  He did not see what else he could do.

  “But it’s almost empty!” exclaimed Sean, examining the shaker.

  Victoria felt herself blushing, and was glad the room was dark. “Some salt is still left,” she insisted. “If we use that, in combination with the other herbs, then at least it is something we can fight with!”

  “Yes, I agree,” Sophia quickly agreed. “But what might be the way to use all these herbs to their best effect?” She gestured at the table.

  “Let me get my books.” Victoria darted to the living room and brought back a handful of simple magic she had attempted with Magdalena. She announced, “We can look up the best combinations of the herbs I have and mix those with the salt.”

  “That’s one possibility,” agreed Dmitri. “But perhaps we should leave the salt out of that mixture and save the little salt we have to make a circle in which to burn one last tarot card along the route. We should pick one of the cards, a card that can stand for all the others perhaps, and burn it to release its power. Maybe at the end of the Road, at the castle gates?”

  “But that wasn’t the end of the Royal Road, was it?” asked Sean. “Wouldn’t the cathedral, where the king was crowned, be the real end? Shouldn’t we burn the last tarot card in a circle of salt in front of the doors of the cathedral?”

  Despite the dimness of the kitchen, Victoria couldn’t miss Dmitri’s emphatic nod. “An excellent plan, Sean! Excellent!”

  “Let’s get to work!” Victoria began to unscrew lids from jars, holding them close to the candle to see which herbs were in which jars. “We should start sprinkling this as soon as we can, right?”

  “Wait! Wait!” Sean held up his hands. “If we want to be sure this plan has as much chance of success as possible, we should capitalize on every weapon at our disposal!”

  “Yes, that is clear,” Sophia agreed. “How is waiting going to accomplish that? George may already be doing something, something out there in the dark, to capitalize on his success!”

  “No, Sean is right,” Dmitri was forced to agree. “Immediate action might not be the most productive.”

  “How could that be?” demanded Victoria.

  “In traditional Celtic lore, black magic always gains the ascendency during the night,” Sean explained. “It is daylight which gives good magic the upper hand, intensifying and magnifying its effects. If we want this mixture of herbs to be as effective as possible, we should sprinkle it on the Royal Road in daylight. At sunrise. Or maybe just a little after sunrise, so that the daylight has clearly overcome the night.”

  Sophia and Victoria, seeking each others’ eyes in the dark, slowly nodded in agreement.

  “That does make sense,” Victoria finally agreed.

  “But we should still mix the proper herbs now, yes? So that we are ready in the morning?” Sophia interjected.

  “Yes, yes indeed,” agreed Sean. “We should do all we can now to prepare.”

  Dmitri brought a large bowl from where it sat on a shelf near the sink and set it on the table. Consulting her books by the candlelight, Victoria directed the others, advising which herbs were associated with protective magic, and the jars were either emptied into the bowl or set aside.

  Just before midnight, using the yew bundle and a few cuttings from the shrub, which George deemed appropriately cypress related, Magdalena drew a circle in her garden, as she had when conjuring Halphas and Flauros—it seemed so long ago now, so many things had happened since then! Her life had changed in so many ways! The green candle (“appropriate for attracting devils,” she remembered, chuckling at the Church’s readiness to ascribe devilhood to all the spirits it did not consider appropriate to invoke) already sat within the area to be circumscribed by the ritual circle, flickering in the dark.

  “Remember to make the circle large enough.” George’s voice floated quietly out of the shadows next to her. He had already instructed her to draw the circle from right to left and told her that the most efficacious way to perform the circle making was if they were both already “sky clad,” naked and vulnerable to the powers they were about to call upon. Their clothes had been laid aside indoors, neatly folded on Magdalena’s bed.

  The circle drawn, the candle burning, George touched Magdalena’s shoulder and she felt excitement course through her as never before.

  Stars hung in the sky over the swirling eddies of the river as it gorged itself on the Prague zoo. Animals that could scurried away from its embrace. Birds fluttered their wings and scampered through the air to higher branches as the water licked the refuges they had settled on for the night. Several of the birds were unable to get high enough to escape the rising water and drowned. The lone zookeeper listened for the cries or roars of distress that would signal one of the hippos he was monitoring had been trapped by the water, ever hunting for more victims. No one within the zoo, man or beast, truly slept that night. Every living creature might have dozed, but their occasional shallow slumber was always punctuated by nightmares of the water coming to swallow them, as it had already swallowed so much of the zoo.

  Water continued to devour the zoo, finally discovering the top of the wall that surrounded the seal enclosure. At first, drips and trickles of river water kissed the top of the wall. Quickly the drips were more daring, progressing from kissing the top of the wall to licking it. Then, no longer satisfied with licking the top of the wall, the tongue of the river toppled over the wall, tasting the length of it on its journey into the pools of water below.

  It was not long before the bulk of the voracious river was cascading into the seals’ enclosure, mingling with the pools that had always been the seals’ home. The river’s gluttony was not sated until the water of the pools had completely intermingled with the water of the river, flowing into the main streams of the flood and forging a bridge over the wall for the seals within.

  As relentlessly as the river consumed the zoo, it continued its exploration of the tunnels and underground alleyways of the Old Town. Just as the river had found, and filled, the subway tunnels and stations, it also made its way further into the sewer tunnels and discovered the medieval tunnels that had served as hiding places for those who had resisted the Nazi occupation of the city. The relentless river seeped through cracks in medieval mortar and chewed at medieval stone, clawing its way into the ancient underground halls that snaked below the Old Town Square and extended like the tentacles of an octopus throughout the neighborhoods around the square. Old buildings and homes, their basement and subbasement entrances to these tunnels long bricked over and forgotten, saw the tiny rivulets trickle in from the tunnels.

  The streets of the Jewish quarter around the Old-New Synagogue, set back from the river but lower than more modern streets in the area, were quiet except for the echoing footfalls of one man who stumbled home from the mountain of sandbags he had helped erect along the riverbank. He blundered down the steps that led to the ancient synagogue, intending to turn down a side street toward his apartment. But he heard a muffled gurgle as he passed the sewer grates and manhole covers.

  He shook his head, refusing to believe his ears.

  Inside the Old-New Synagogue, the old stones and wooden benches kept their silent vigil around the bema where the Torah was read each Sabbath morning, as it had been for centuries. Dust motes occasionally drifted down into the sanctuary, unseen by human eyes in the night. The echoes of prayers sung over the centuries reverberated as well, unheard by the ears of the living. This night seemed no different from any other night in the seven hundred years the synagogue had stood there.

  But this night was different. The gurgles of water beneath the streets became louder, undeniable, inescapable. Then, in addition to the sound of running water came the scraping of iron against stone as the water pushed up from below and attempted to dislodge the manhole covers and escape into the streets. Here, in terrible mirror-like fashion, the magic of Magdalena’s yew-and-horsehair asperges in the Little Town across the river was reflected in the streets su
rrounding the synagogue. Drawing the water up to the surface, pulling it further and further into the city and away from the river, the destructive power of Magdalena’s sprinkling exerted itself as Magdalena was gripped in the ecstasy of the hieros gamos for the third time.

  A clatter rang out. One of the manhole covers was thrown aside by the water. The river, freed from the constraints of the medieval tunnels and modern sewers, burst onto the cobblestones and quickly submerged them. The water tumbled down the street and passed the entrance to the synagogue, swirling as it pooled and regathered its strength, wavering in which way to go next. It hesitated, as if unsure where the tastiest, most delectable morsels of the neighborhood might be found. It looked like a snake, testing the air with its forked tongue for the presence of its prey. Then it struck.

  Throwing itself against the door of the synagogue, the water tumbled down the stairs into the lobby where the synagogue ticket takers, Aviva and Milka, had attempted to keep Magdalena from the attic the Sunday before. No more able to stop the flood than the women had been to resist Magdalena in her efforts to retrieve the rabbi’s staff, the table where the women had been posted was knocked aside by the river. One fork of its tongue crept into the sanctuary while another fork lapped the bottom of the stairs leading to the attic.

  At the top of the stairs, the ghost of Rabbi Judah ben Loew, creator of the Golem, was awakened from his uneasy slumber by the sound of the flowing water below. Robbed of his staff, he was unable to do more than clench his fist and shake it at the water below as it invaded the synagogue.

  Within the yew-drawn circle in her garden, Magdalena lay on her back, spent. George attempted to roll off her and onto his own back, but she clutched him more tightly. Her fingernails dug deeply into his shoulders, gasping for breath. Slowly her gasps subsided and her inarticulate whimpering began to sound more like words, though George could not understand the Czech she seemed to be muttering. But he was finally able to extricate himself.

  Kissing her hand, he pulled her to her feet and together they stumbled into the apartment to collapse beside each other on the bed.

  The sirens and alarms of the police gradually filled the air of the Old Town as the stars winked out above the now-silent Astronomical Clock. Men, women, and children who had collapsed in their beds a few hours ago, exhausted with the work of sandbagging the town but thinking they would be safe, heard the sirens in their dreams and nightmares. No one was sure if they were awake or asleep. Some thought they could hear water running in the pipes and only realized it was running in the streets when they peered out their windows.

  Police using bullhorns made their way slowly up and down the streets around the square where Fen’ka had met her death, announcing, “Evacuation! Evacuation! All residents of the Old Town are hereby ordered to evacuate their premises!” Officers began ringing doorbells and pounding on doors. “Evacuation! The flood has reached the Old Town!”

  Early the next morning, only a couple hours after coming in from the garden, Magdalena woke George. She made a small pot of coffee, surprised there was still gas in the pipe to the stove, as the electricity was still out. George retrieved the caged black rooster from the back garden as Magdalena put the horsehair and yew bouquet into her bag with a ball of twine and scissors as he had instructed. Then they set out, away from the river and the great stone bridge. She took George down a small lane that branched off the main road.

  “If we go along the side streets,” she explained to George, “and come at the castle from behind, we will have to skirt the edge of the flood but we’ll be right at the Daliborka Tower.” He followed her through the confusing maze of alleys and lanes, the rooster on the luggage trolley bumping along the cobblestones behind him. Magdalena finally brought them to the base of the great staircase that rose up the hill to the back of the castle, as she had done the morning that Professor Hron had sent her shopping on Golden Lane and she had encountered Madame de Thebes, the tarot-reading woman executed by the Nazis for predicting their downfall. She prepared to flash her university identification at the guards at the gate at the top of the stairs. She was ready to explain that she was bringing a distinguished American visiting professor with her, though she was unsure how she would explain the rooster. But there were no guards standing at the open gateway.

  “I am afraid they have more pressing concerns this morning,” George pointed out, nodding his head down the hill behind them toward the flood. Magdalena agreed, her smoldering anger at the academics for having endangered the city with the flood they had conjured now burning white-hot again, and led him into the courtyard within the castle precincts.

  George glanced around the small courtyard. “Which way now?” he asked.

  “It is in this direction.” Magdalena pointed and led him up and down a series of short staircases and through other small courtyards, finally stopping in a small weed-infested courtyard where the stones were crumbling beneath their feet. A tall, wide archway rose before them, a length of chain stretched across it at knee height.

  Magdalena glanced behind them and towards another alleyway that led further into the castle precincts.

  “All the tourists begin at the front entrance of the castle,” she whispered excitedly to George. “On a normal day, none of them would get this far into the castle for several hours.”

  “But today is not a normal day,” George agreed. “There will be no tourists at all, I suspect.”

  Magdalena looked around nervously again. “But I feel like a spy, breaking into an embassy or something.” She giggled.

  “Is this it?” George asked, pointing at the chain across the archway. Magdalena nodded, pointing to a small sign posted where the archway met the wall of the courtyard: “Daliborka Tower,” it read in English.

  “For the tourists,” Magdalena pointed at the sign. “The signs are always in English.”

  “Shall we, then?” George walked briskly to the archway and stepped over the chain. Magdalena, after one last nervous glance around the courtyard, hurried to the chain and followed George over it.

  Victoria got up to make tea for her guests early the next morning. Even with their plan to sprinkle the herbs along the Royal Road and use the last bit of salt while burning the last tarot card in front of the cathedral, worry and anxiety had made it impossible for her to really sleep during the night, and she’d noticed the others were restless in the night. Coming into the kitchen, Victoria found Dmitri sitting on a chair, staring out the window at the dawn slowly creeping in.

  George and Magdalena stood atop a broad, shallow flight of steps in what seemed to be a square vestibule, open to the weather from the courtyard but with a ceiling of crumbling stonework inside the arch. At the bottom of the steps, a short, narrow wooden door was set in the wall on their left.

  “The cell is through that door?” George indicated the door with the yew tied with horsehair. Magdalena bit her lip and nodded. They made their way down the steps with the rooster in its cage, and George examined the door.

  The wood was old, very old. It was rough and weather-beaten, great splinters breaking off it. Two studded bands of iron held it together, and a small opening, protected by a few thin iron bars, was set near its top. A ring of iron was set midway down the right side of the door, opposite several pair of great rusty-iron hinges.

  “I don’t see any keyhole,” George muttered, squinting at the area near the ring handle. “Does it lock from the other side? Is there another entrance?”

  “No, this is the entrance,” Magdalena explained. “There was probably a way to barricade the door on the other side, but this part of the castle was considered too secure to need many locks on the interior doors. We just need to pull it open.” She reached for the ring handle and tugged.

  Nothing.

  “Let me,” George offered, giving the yew to Magdalena. Taking the iron ring in both hands, he leaned away from the door and pulled. Joists grunted and wood creaked. George paused, panting with the effort, and tried again. Wood scrap
ed against stone and the door inched open.

  “When was the last time anyone came in here?” he asked, gasping for breath again.

  “It has been closed to the public for some time,” Magdalena repeated what she had told him the previous night. “But I would have thought other researchers, or perhaps curators, would have seen that it was maintained.”

  “I… guess… not,” George grunted, pulling on the door again. The hinges suddenly cooperated and it swung wide open, the rough wood scraping the stones they stood on.

  Magdalena looked back toward the top of the steps they had come down. “Will the noise have alerted any guards who might still be here?” she asked.

  “No, I think not,” George reassured her. “They would be here by now if it had.”

  “I guess you are right,” she admitted, surprised at how nervous and guilty and giddy and excited she felt. She turned back to the door, which George was already stepping through. She hurried after him, leaving the rooster to watch the steps behind them.

  Inside the door, another flight of steps led down further into the tower but these steps were much more narrow and rough as they twisted in their descent. George and Magdalena made their way, dragging their hands along the rough walls beside them, and nearly tumbled into the room at the bottom of the stairway.

  It was a shock to Magdalena’s eyes to step into the half-light and shadows of the small room. The only illumination was the filtered daylight that struggled through the open door above and behind them. Shadows flanked the walls, though she recognized rough stonework walls, a low ceiling supported by stone arches, and deeper shadows hanging along the vaulting. A variety of iron implements, used in centuries past to encourage prisoners to confess, were scattered along the walls. A low cauldron or brazier faced the door on a low stone platform. Magdalena shivered, but whether it was because the stone walls kept the room several degrees cooler than the air outside or because she knew what these tools had been used for, she could not say.