by Sarah Perry
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
MELMOTH. Copyright © 2018 by Aldwinter Ltd. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Originally published in the United Kingdom in 2018 by Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of Profile Books Ltd.
FIRST U.S. EDITION
Cover design by Peter Dyer
Cover illustrations © Rively/iStock/Getty Images (leaves) © SashaFoxWalters/iStock/Getty Images (birds); © Vectorig/iStock/Getty Images (birds); © Potapov Alexander/Shutterstock (birds)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Perry, Sarah, 1979–author.
Title: Melmoth : a novel / Sarah Perry.
Description: First U.S. edition. | New York, NY : Custom House, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018029870 (print) | LCCN 2018032295 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062856418 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062856395 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780062856401 (paperback) | ISBN 9780062856425 (international edition) | ISBN 9780062859686 (large print)
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Romance / Gothic. | FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Occult & Supernatural. | GSAFD: Gothic fiction.
Classification: LCC PR6116.E776 (ebook) | LCC PR6116.E776 M45 2018 (print) | DDC 823/.92—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018029870
Digital Edition OCTOBER 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-285641-8
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-285639-5
Version 09272018
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1 The Eger, as I knew it then, has lost its German name, and is marked on the map now as the Ohře. An old joke goes: the Ohře must surely be the only warm river in the Czech lands, since ohřát means “warm,” but when I swam there as a boy I always came out shivering. It runs to what is now called Terezin, but which I knew as Theresienstadt.
2 In 1786, at a meeting of the Bohemian Scientific Society, a curious object was introduced to general knowledge. A green translucent kind of stone found solely in the Moldau valley, it was named the moldavite. Because it looks so very like green glass, they thought perhaps it was caused by forest glassmakers throwing broken pieces in the river a thousand years before. But science has done away with this story, and tells us these stones are shattered pieces of a meteorite that struck the Nördlinger Ries fourteen million years ago. The finest specimens are bright, transparent, and have a fern-like form resembling hoar frost on a window. The Moldau being now called the Vltava, the stone is more properly known as vltavín. I prized mine above any other possession, and lost it when I was thirteen.
3 Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor, born in 1316, called Wenceslaus in honor of that one Good King, chanced on a hot spring while riding in the Bohemian Forest. Finding the waters there beneficial to an old wound in his leg, he caused a small and beautiful city to be built there beside the springs for the good of his court and companions. It became a glittering city on the banks of the Eger, with Art Nouveau colonnades many metres long where ladies walked between high white pillars. Great men came and took the waters: Beethoven, Gogol, Paganini; also Purkyñe the anatomist, who discovered the gland that secretes sweat, and who once, having taken nutmeg, hallucinated for days. Water poured steaming into bronze bowls from the bronze mouths of sea serpents; in the colonnades were clocks like the clocks in a city railway station, and bronze plaques bolted to the floor declaiming the temperature of the water in degrees Celsius. All these remain; the great men are gone. In maps and on road signs the name is gone also, and we must call it Karlovy Vary.
4 Anežka Hruzová, a young Catholic seamstress of only nineteen years, was found on April Fool’s Day in 1899 with her throat cut. There was blood pooling in the forest where she died, and blood on the stones around her, and on her clothes, which were torn. Leopold Hilsner—a young Jew, a wanderer with a child’s intellect—was arrested on hearsay. At a show trial it was insinuated that the girl’s murder was part of a Jewish conspiracy to kidnap Christian children, and use their blood for obscure and devilish rituals. Sentenced to death, Hilsner was able to hear from his prison cell the carpenters building his gallows. He was pardoned in time, but never forgiven.
1 On 27th May 1942 Reinhard Heydrich—Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, the Butcher of Prague—was wounded when waiting men threw a grenade into his car. Himmler’s own physician tended him; but his body was full of pieces of horsehair upholstery driven in by fragments of steel. These festered, and one week later he fell sick while eating his lunch, and died the following day. First it was proposed that a tariff of ten thousand Czech lives should be set against that single German soul. But this was impracticable: who’d man Prague’s munitions factories if the workforce was so depleted? Instead the town of Lidice, a little north-west of Prague, was chosen as the scapegoat. Military trucks took every man and boy to the village orchard, where blossom had begun to cede to the fruit. Here they were shot in groups of five; then, for efficiency’s sake, in groups of ten. The women and girls were sent to the camps. Lidice’s orchard, church, homes and outhouses were burned to the ground and their remnants ploughed into the soil. When after the war a handful of the living returned they found nothing but a levelled field on which grass had begun to grow. (Once the war was ended, some German villages were awarded the same treatment. It is for this reason that I cannot return home to the village by the Eger where I was born, for not a stone of it remains: there are only the lindens on the riverbank, and somewhere in the soil, I daresay, the moldavite I lost.)
2 The Red Cross sent a young man to visit Theresienstadt and make a full report. He found that all was well. The population had all it needed: a school, a playground, a court for those who fell foul of the law. But it was nothing but sauce poured on spoiling meat. They’d watched a boy run up and pluck at the Commander’s sleeve and say: “Uncle, tell me it’s not canned sardines again for dinner—we are all so bored of it: let us have something else!” and watched him rewarded for his pertness with a silver coin, when if only they’d looked they might have seen all the teeth loosening in his starving
head. The camp was not overcrowded, they said. It was not, because ten thousand prisoners had been transported away the preceding week, to Auschwitz, where there was no witness.