by Pavel Mandys
A circle made of marl; the outside natural, the inside sculpted. Preliminary dating—the tenth century. It was being analyzed by the interdisciplinary team. They had a hunch that there was something else underneath it.
Perhaps some thread.
“What happens if they do not let it be?”
“What do I know? Maybe the end of the world. But seriously—the energy there is very strong. You saw what happened to that poor soul.” She stood up.
“How did you get in here?” I repeated my first question.
“You have heard of telekinesis. Lock tumblers—that’s child’s play.” She shrugged. “I was sure about coming here. I knew you were not home.”
“Seriously?”
“Yep, I have a gift. When I want to, I know where a person is.”
Well, that was something: a telekinetic who knows how to open locks, and a psychic to top it off. An exquisite piece had just been added to my collection of crazies.
She marched out of my apartment and I closed the door behind her. Just to make sure, I secured the door with the chain. But even that would not be a hurdle for a telekinetic.
I returned to the kitchen and put the kettle on to make coffee. Then my eyes wandered to the chair. And there, peeking from behind the cushion, was a ring of keys. One key was flat, very simple, the kind used to open hanging locks. Many such locks are used on construction sites to secure the perimeter fences.
I smiled. I had almost started to believe that there was something to her telekinesis and psychic powers—and here she was, the same kind of con artist as all of those I had met before her.
Then it hit me—what the keys meant.
* * *
I was debating with myself whether or not to tell on Turková when Orlík called. That was quite a relief. I harbored no sympathies for her, and in addition, those rumors about her slapping me were true. But then again, I did not feel like making accusations against some girl who did not weigh more then an empty bag of cement. Orlík asked me if I knew anything about Vavřinec.
I hadn’t seen him for a good fourteen days. I told him so. “Listen,” I added, “that Turková, that crazy girl from the Trace, she—”
“I couldn’t care less about her right now. We’re looking for Vavřinec. It’s clear now that he syphoned off at least two million. He has a lot to explain. Once we’re done with him, we can talk about Turková.”
Okay then, I thought as he ended the connection. I tried. I had mixed feelings. I had not accused the girl, but on the other hand, there was the death of a human involved. Orlík did not believe it was an accident. Was it murder? If yes, then the perpetrator had to get inside somehow and then out. Through that lock.
I was pondering all of this while examining a small piece of tin on the key ring.
My thinking was interrupted by a phone ringing. I looked at the display—an unknown number. But the voice I recognized right away. It belonged to Turková.
“You’re looking for Vavřinec,” she said to me.
She was really getting on my nerves. “Listen, how did you—”
“I know where he is. Don’t ask how I know, I simply know it. The main portal in the St. Nicolas Cathedral. In half an hour.”
I checked the display. “Wait, it’s seven thirty—”
But the connection was already dead.
* * *
I arrived five minutes late. She was standing in front of the locked door, a tiny figure in jeans and orange tennis shoes and a jacket with a hood. When she noticed me, she only nodded. She did not comment on my late arrival.
“It’s locked,” I noted. I pointed to a sign on the door. It closed at four p.m.
“It depends,” she replied, and leaned her shoulder on the door. It opened. The evening Mass, I thought. A suffocating silence, permeated with the scent of holiness, was coming from the interior of the church. We slipped inside. She closed the door behind us and pointed to the left.
“Here,” she hissed.
I looked up. The frescoes by Kosmas Damian Assam were lost in the darkness. The crystals on the chandelier in the form of a czar’s crown gleamed in the dying daylight. There was no time to look around, and I hurried behind the small person heading for the confessionals to the left of the entrance. She slid into the first row and waved at me to follow her. Carefully, I inserted my head inside. At that point, the girl was pushing her palms against the wooden wall. It gave and revealed a passageway. A light flashed in her hand—the LED on her cell phone. The white light twinkled, revealing a narrow hall. We entered. The passageway door closed behind me with a rasp.
The hall was not long, and at the end, instead of a secret passageway, there was an ordinary door. In the small cone of the LED light I glimpsed an aluminum doorknob with an ugly plastic covering. I reached into my pocket and felt for the keys I had found on the chair. The girl, however, couldn’t care less about any keys.
What was behind the door I knew very well—a large palace staircase landing—there, in the corner, the construction site begins. Soon we’d see the hanging lock.
It really was there, in its place.
It occurred to me—had she finally noticed she lost her key chain?
She aimed the light on the lock. I took out the keys from my pocket, fingered the flat tin one.
“These keys . . .” I tried to insert it into the lock. It did not fit.
“These keys are from my grandma’s cottage. I left them on your chair. I knew they would confuse you, I enjoy a bit of entertainment too.”
She took them from me and tucked them into the back pocket of her jeans. She simply clasped the lock in her palm. A metal click sounded. She released the lock, it opened, and we entered. She closed the door behind us and with the cone of LED light looked for the switch.
The glare of five halogen lights hit our eyes used to the dusk—as if we were suddenly standing on a podium, actors in a pitiless farce.
In the middle of the room there was a cement mixer, and from that hung the body of the construction manager, Vavřinec. Something rumbled in the machine and then it turned on—perhaps it was connected to the switch, that was my first thought. In the following moments, however, I forgot all about the switch and electrical circuits.
The mixer was on and the body was being tossed around like a puppet.
“The Circle,” breathed Turková, and pointed with her finger.
From beneath a fragment of the floor, a circle segment composed of marl stones jutted out. In the sharp light of the halogens the stones shone, contrasting with the unearthed soil—maybe it was natural stone? The stones slowly yellowed and then turned red. They radiated warmth. From the corner of my eye, I glimpsed movement. I turned, and at the last moment I dodged a shovel. Nobody had thrown it at me. It started moving by itself, circling the working mixer.
We could hear sounds. It occurred to me that these were the sounds which the night watchman had heard before he woke up Vavřinec. One after another, boxes with tools came loose, the covers opened, and trowels, hammers, and tacks started flying. Sifters and pails and mortar tubs lifted off too. They all circled the mixer, and I noticed they were aligned with the circle of marl stones.
Stones that were arranged by human hands, in the times when Christianity hadn’t yet reached the Czech basin against the flow of the Elbe and Vltava; when it hadn’t yet conquered the Moravian Gateway. Arranged during the pagan times when no one knew about Thessaloniki and Cyril and Methodius.
I froze. Adéla Turková was standing beside me, her face white and eyes ablaze.
I read books about telekinesis and poltergeists, I myself had written many articles on the topic—half skeptical, half apologetic—written in the spirit of, I do not believe but I hope I will see.
Now I saw it—it was in front of me. Frightening, and at the same time intoxicating. I felt the vortex carrying me with it.
I turned toward Turková.
“I believe you now understand . . .” she began.
Then there
was a bang. One of the water risers cracked, then another one. Water started to flood the room. The chaos increased. The items had ceased to rotate in a regular pattern; the order was lost; suddenly, there was just an ungraceful mixture of heavy tools intended for masonry work. I staggered among the junk. A few times I stumbled and fell, then something hit me in my back. In the water maelstrom, I saw a dancing female figure. Adéla Turková seemed to be rejoicing in the disaster; I thought I could see a look of excitement on her face.
Then the lights went off, but not the sound. I fell down, and something metallic and terribly heavy dropped on me and pushed my head under the water.
I lost consciousness.
* * *
I came to in the intensive care unit. Orlík was standing beside the doctor and a nurse.
“What about the girl?” I asked him.
“Which? Our friend Adéla Turková? I have no idea what’s with her. Should I find her so that she can bring you a bouquet of flowers? Or possibly a flask?”
“What’s happened to her?”
“What should have happened to her? Your friend Vavřinec is not doing well. Actually, extremely bad. He’s dead. Well, at least he’s out of his pickle, that’s a way to look at it.”
He was watching me.
“I’ll wait. I’ll wait until you’re better and able to talk about all of this reasonably. I am very much looking forward to it. Right now, I can’t make any sense of it.”
* * *
Sensible explanations didn’t start until two days later, with the help of my lawyer. He listened to my account very politely. I understood very well how he felt. I used to listen this graciously to the tales of poltergeists and dancing things.
“I see it like this,” he said, when I was done and he’d had a moment to think. “You visited your friend, the engineer Vavřinec. He confided in you about his work-related problems, and you advised him to talk to his superiors, or alternately to the police. You met at a secluded place—in his office—so that you wouldn’t be interrupted. There was a breakdown of the water system, the lights turned off, and Vavřinec, unfortunately, lost his life. Or is the story different?”
“Something like that could have happened,” I replied.
Write it down, sign, stamp.
* * *
It took a long time before I was brave enough to visit the former Jesuit Palace in the neighborhood of the St. Nicolas Cathedral. The restoration had progressed a lot; artists had replaced the construction workers. They were arranging those beautiful tiles in the form of hexagons, squares, and triangles; decorated with lions and griffins.
“What did you do with the marl circle?” I asked them.
“What marl circle?”
“It was right here.” I gestured toward an area with dark soil and seemingly natural rock.
“Nothing like that was here,” they reassured me. “It would be in the documents otherwise.”
I wished them the best and was about to leave, but then I stopped short. There was a small figure leaning against the doorframe, in a jacket with a hood—a tiny, thin girl.
“How did you get out of it?” I asked.
“I know to be where I am needed, and I know not to be where I am not needed,” she said.
“And the marl circle?”
“What marl circle?” she replied, and left the building.
I haven’t seen her since.
________________
Author’s Note: The Jesuit Palace, now the seat of the mathematics and physics departments of Charles University, truly does closely adjoin the St. Nicolas Cathedral, and in its basement, in 2003, there really were discovered the remnants of the St. Wenceslaus Rotunda. With the help of a public collection, the remarkable historical site is being restored and reconstructed in a dignified manner. For more information, please visit http://www.naserotunda.cz/, or http://www.naserotunda.cz/en/about-project. You will not find the information included in Peter Wagner’s statement. It is certain, however, that pedestrians walking around in the evening can hear strange sounds coming from inside the building, and that the magistrate of Prague closed the traffic on the Malostranské Square in case a rapid intervention of an unknown nature is needed to combat equally unknown powers.
The Cabinet of Seven Pierced Books
by Petr Stančík
Josefov
From time immemorial, a disparate figure has been roaming through the Prague ghetto. Nobody knows how old he is, but even the elders know him as an old man. Nobody knows his name anymore, but everybody knows about his curse. Nobody talks to him, nobody pities him. If someone wants to be exceptionally cruel, then they will give him some spare change or food.
* * *
Our story began on a Friday evening, the twenty-first day of the month of Cheshvan in the year 5626 counting from the creation of the world—in other words, the tenth of November, 1865 AD, exactly when Rabbi Flekeles was singing the tenth verse of Psalm 92 for the second time: “But my horn shalt thou exalt like the horn of an unicorn.” Golem entered the Old New Synagogue, yelled out horribly, and exploded all over the walls.
In the synagogue, they all should have been used to such things by then. Because a long time ago—back when the cavaliers would wear Spanish “virgin” pants with a raised velvet flap for their penises, and Prague was the capital of the Holy Roman Empire—Prague’s own Rabbi Low, by uttering the name of the Lord, reenacted the creation of man from clay. Since he was not a perfect creator, his creation was not perfect either; it had a whole lot of strength but not much for brains. Therefore, the rabbi called him Golem, a.k.a. Dummy. One day, precisely when the rabbi began the Sabbath in the synagogue by singing the psalm, Golem went mad and started to destroy everything within reach. Rabbi Low ran outside, transmuted the broken Golem back into a mound of clay, then returned to the synagogue and sang the psalm one more time as if nothing had happened. From then on in the Old New Synagogue, at the beginning of each Sabbath, Psalm 92 has been repeated twice and so—as has been mentioned already—they should have been used to such things. But they were not, and they all shrieked in horror.
* * *
To solve this case, Commissioner Durman was summoned. Not really due to his detective skills, but more likely because he was nearby. More specifically—no other policeman was available.
Things went so-so during the day, but at night the police were afraid to go into the Jewish ghetto. The police superintendent Leopold von Sacher-Masoch himself was trying to win his force over; first by promising them an extra dose of office rum and new feathers for their hats, then by crudely scolding them and threatening them with reassignment to a rathole outpost. But it was all for nothing. Between dusk and dawn, patrolmen would circumvent the ghetto by a good distance, and it didn’t even occur to them to enter it. In the dark, no laws applied in the ghetto—penal or physical.
The order mandating Jews to live only within the walls of the ghetto hadn’t applied for a long time, but the ghetto remained. Those who could afford it had left to live in a better part of the city; only the poorest were left behind, plus various other wretches who filtered into the ghetto from all around the city. The ghetto had become a magnet for misery, madness, and crime; it became the final stop on the line, and there was no going back.
Alongside the ordinary poor souls, there were crooks, kabbalists, cheats, hucksters, mystics, pessimists, lusty murderers, ghost-hunters-for-hire and their demons who hadn’t found their way back to the astral world, black and salon magi, wounded poets, old angel-hunting women, late alchemists, abstract painters, perpetuum mobile inventors, honey counterfeiters, Lilliputian prostitutes, forgers, cannibals (due to hunger or preference), door-to-door hypnotizers, and other lost beings lived there.
The problem was that nobody had ever drawn any reliable map of the ghetto. Maps of Prague that were precise for every other part of the city were of no use within the limits of the ghetto, because any and all streets led only to or from elsewhere. It was easier to get lost following the
map rather than not following it. In addition, it was not clear where exactly the mistake had occurred. Somebody alleged that the surveyors had become intoxicated by hallucinogenic vapors from the gutters while working, or they were bribed by the degenerate Lithuanian prince Kazimieras Trupello—the father of Central European crime, who had been hiding for years from the authorities in Prague. Somebody else believed that the blueprint of the ghetto was fluid and ever-changing because it was a huge living creature in the form of a city, gestating there long before the founding of Prague.
* * *
Commissioner Durman, unlike all of his colleagues, loved the ghetto. It was a stone’s throw from his bachelor pad in a small, flattened house built between two gothic buttresses of St. Anne’s Church. He frequented pubs every evening after work—of which, per capita, the Kingdom of Bohemia had the most.
The ghetto’s hygiene, the saying goes, was iffy. The streets had no pavement, only layers of stomped dirt, excrement, and refuse. The water and sewer systems hadn’t infiltrated the ghetto. In wells, there was more bacteria than water. Those who—after they had been weaned off breast milk—didn’t immediately start drinking alcohol were almost guaranteed to contract cholera or typhoid.
Therefore, there were not only pubs in the basement of every building, but almost everybody brewed their own beer or distilled their own liquor, and so there was always something new to discover in this area.
Restaurants in other parts of Prague had already adopted large steam beer brewing machines, and the ginger-colored liquid started to taste somewhat the same everywhere.
And while waitresses in Prague refused to let the regulars slap their butts—because the members of the Society for Women’s Rights (“Kazi”) had convinced them that men were always trying to enslave and demean them—to the hostesses from the ghetto (still called wenches), butt slapping was welcomed because it was concrete proof that the woman in question was liked by men. In addition, it helped circulate the blood in her tired limbs.
Thus, Commissioner Durman was automatically assigned all the ghetto cases. Just like now, when they found him in the picturesque Albatrosses pub, right by the synagogue where he was tasting a local specialty: an ale brewed from malt smoked in beech wood, which gave the beer a beautifully smoky aftertaste.