Vodník

  Disturbing.

  And I could breathe underwater.

  Someone was on the riverbank. I recognized the long hair and the dress: Lesana, the girl from my last water vision. My body moved toward her, my legs trailing behind me, with only my hands touching the riverbed, the rocks smooth and cold on my fingers. I breathed out, and a stream of water came out of my mouth, not bubbles. I was like a living garden hose.

  As I got closer, I saw she was holding a flower. She had no shoes on, and her feet were dirty, with dried mud going clear up to midcalf. A shapely calf, at that. Lesana stepped toward the river and threw the flower in.

  I reached out a hand ever so slowly, inching it out of the water and toward her leg. She stood there, apparently oblivious to my presence. Was I invisible? Instead, she gazed at the flower as it drifted away, carried by the current of the river.

  My hand got closer and closer. Two feet away. One foot. With a lunge, it shot out and grabbed her by the ankle, and I jerked backward, throwing her off balance and into the water. I tried to stop myself, but I had no control. I plunged my other hand into my suit jacket and came out with a lidded teacup.

  Lesana thrashed in my grip, water flying every which way, but I was too strong for her. Inhumanly strong.

  I focused on her with an almost clinical attitude. As if I wasn’t killing her, just observing. My hands began to tingle, and I had a feeling of . . . something, moving from her and into the cup.

  Lesana struggled even more. With one hand holding her and the other holding the cup, I had no way of defending myself—a fact she noticed. She changed her efforts from fighting in general to beating my face and gouging at my eyes.

  I cried out and let go of her ankle. She was on the attack now, not trying to escape, but increasing her assault. Coming straight on at me, I got a good look at her face, and my body froze. No doubt it was Lesana: that nose was a dead giveaway.

  She punched me in the face. I snarled and bit her hand in response.

  Lesana jerked in pain and swam backward.

  I let her go.

  Then someone had their arms around my chest, and my head was above water. I floundered, trying to touch something—anything—solid. I managed to clutch at my rescuer, in the process almost sinking both of us. It wasn’t until I had the edge of the pool in my hands and was being pushed up out of the water that I realized it was Katka who had saved me. The BGs were nowhere to be seen. No one else had come to help me, but then again, I had only been in for a moment before Katka had come to the rescue. Her skin was even darker wet, her hair plastered back against her scalp. When she smiled at me—seeing I was all right—her teeth were a stark white against olive skin.

  She was out of the water in an effortless push. “Trying to learn how to swim?” she asked.

  I didn’t think I was in a mood for humor, but I found myself laughing anyway. It was such a relief—each breath going into my lungs and bringing sweet air with it. I was alive. Actually, I must not have been that close to drowning, after all. I wasn’t coughing up water, and I’d never really felt myself breathe any in. It took the two of us a moment to realize people shouting and pointing to the middle of the pool. A boy was floating facedown. He couldn’t have been older than ten.

  A couple of lifeguards were already on their way to him, paddling for all they were worth. I surveyed the pool area. Sure enough, on the opposite side, I could just make out the form of a woman dressed in black, the sun glinting off the scythe in her hand. “She’s there,” I whispered to Katka, and nodded toward the apparition. “Zubatá.”

  Katka looked, but she couldn’t see anything. “Any sign of the vodník?” she asked.

  I had already been searching, but I shook my head. “No one in a suit and top hat.” This was more than morbid, talking about the poor dying kid as if he was already a statistic. The lifeguards had reached him by now, and they were bringing him back to the side, pulling his motionless body behind them. The boy’s face was out of the water, his eyes shut and his mouth lolling open. “Isn’t there anything we could do to help?” I asked.

  “You’ve already seen Zubatá,” Katka said. “She doesn’t show up for fun. The boy is dead. Just watch and see if anything strange happens. Trust me. These people will only get angry if Roma try to help with a drowning. Let the lifeguard do his job.”

  From what we’d experienced the past two weeks (especially the incident with the poor girl at the fountain), she was probably right. The lifeguards had the boy by the side of the pool and were administering CPR. Somebody cut the techno music, and the pool went silent. Everything was just like you would expect to see it, with the exception of Zubatá walking over to stand by the side of the scene, her scythe at the ready. Now that she was walking, I saw that her black outfit was really just a long cloak. Underneath it, she was wearing a plain white dress. Maybe all black all the time got old after awhile. It was hard to tell her age. She had raven black hair without a hint of gray, but she didn’t seem young. Not wrinkled, but still. Old. A bright white light came out of the boy’s mouth to float in the air above him. I couldn’t make out its shape or size—the light was too intense to see clearly, like a marble-sized sun, floating in the air.

  “Do you see that?” I whispered to Katka.

  “Don’t talk,” she said. “Tell me about it when it’s over.”

  Zubatá reached down to grab it, but before she could take it, the bright light—the boy’s soul?—started swirling back down, sucked into an in­vis­ible vortex. At first the movement was slight, and then it increased, the light spiraling more quickly until it exploded.

  Death didn’t take the change well. She scowled at the boy and swept her scythe down at him.

  It passed right through one of the lifeguards, to continue on unchecked through the boy’s body. Nothing happened. The lifeguard just stood there, watching the other perform compressions on the boy’s chest.

  Zubatá tried a couple more times, but it was like watching a coach in a baseball game kick dirt at the umpire: more a gesture of protest than actually getting anything done. She eventually turned, took a few steps, and disappeared with a swirl of her cloak.

  The lifeguards kept trying until the paramedics arrived and took over. The two men stood up—one of them tall and strong, the other shorter and more average, though we were too far away for me to make out any real features. They watched as the boy was loaded into the ambulance, then the taller one walked off, his shoulders slumped as he went back to his post. The shorter one glanced around, walked over to pick up a bag that had been sitting on the ground near them, and then he walked off as well. The other lifeguards were closing down the pool. Not that they needed to do much: people were streaming out of the gates, packing up and leaving en masse.

  “Well?” Katka said. “You’re staring like a fish, so you must have seen something.”

  I shook my head, and the two of us went back to get our stuff. “Give me a second,” I said. We’d just seen a boy die. Even after seeing the roller skating accident two weeks before, I wasn’t ready for this—especially not on top of that strange water vision I’d had while I was drowning.

  Katka was too anxious. “What did you see?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, remembering. “There was this bright light that came out of the boy. Zubatá went to take it, but she couldn’t get it. It . . . exploded. She tried to scythe the kid a couple of times, then she walked off and vanished.”

  “That sounds strange,” Katka said. “Maybe the lifeguard managed to save the boy’s life. Maybe he’ll get better.”

  I shrugged. “With two lifeguards so close, you’d figure the kid would never have drowned in the first place.”

  Katka stared at me. “Two?”

  “Yeah. Both of them were—”

  “Tomas, there was only one.”

  “No,” I said. “There were two.” I scanned the area. The bigger lifeguard was back in his chair, but the shorter one was gone. “Maybe he went inside, or he’s off duty now. H
e had a bag with him, and he might—”

  “A bag?” Katka asked.

  “Yeah. So maybe he was done for the—”

  “That was the vodník.”

  It was those sorts of thoughts I was trying to avoid. “He wasn’t in a suit.”

  “Don’t be an idiot. Vodníks can change. Maybe they learn to adapt. You said he had a bag—it must have had his teacup inside.”

  Now that I thought about it, Zubatá might have been trying to slice the lifeguard with her scythe instead of the boy. And her scowl could have been directed at him, as well.

  “How did you fall into the water?” Katka asked.

  Honestly, that fact had slipped my mind right then, even though I was still drenched. “I—someone pushed me.”

  Her voice was grave. “Vodník.”

  I was quiet for a moment, then said, “Come on. There’s about a hundred people here who would love to see the Roma kid take a dunk. Why does it have to be the vodník?”

  She didn’t answer. As I thought about it, it did seem to be too big of a coincidence, me getting pushed and then a boy drowning right after.

  “So he tried to drown me, and when that didn’t work, he took the kid?”

  Katka nodded.

  That meant the whole bit about trying to save the kid’s life—crouching by the lifeguard’s side and doing lifeguardly things—had been to trick me. To make me not suspect anything. If I’d spoken up, could I have changed things? And had the vodník stolen that soul from Zubatá? That couldn’t make her happy. What sort of creature taunted Death?

  “Well,” Katka said after I didn’t speak. “That proves that. A vodník. I knew there was no such thing as a Roma curse. Now, we just need to think of a way to stop him.”

  Right. And while we were at it, we should just find a cure for cancer and the common cold. Something told me there’d be no “just” about this.

  Despite their human appearance, vodníks have more than a little amphibian in them. They can go without water for quite some time, but sooner or later, they need a good dousing. Even then, tests have shown it takes more than three years for one to actually die from lack of liquid.

  The next morning, Katka called to see if I wanted to go into town with her to see a movie. Some classic she said I’d love. And maybe some foreign film would be just what I needed to take my mind off everything that had happened at the pool. Dad hadn’t been able to get the home theater thing working yet—something about a delivery delay on the surround sound. (We had the big screen, but who actually uses the tinny speakers on a TV set?) Going out to the movies would be cool. A bit of needed familiarity.

  As I got ready to go, I could hear my dad typing away at his computer. He must have heard me open my bedroom door, because his typing stopped and he peeked out from his office.

  “Up already?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Yeah.”

  “Going out with Katka?”

  Something about him—the set of his shoulders, the tone of his voice—sounded off. “To the movies. Why?”

  “Just wondering.” He paused, thinking. “If you were going to write a book, what would it be about?”

  I blinked, stunned. Dad never asked for help with his writing. Usually he squirreled it away until he was ready for people to evaluate it, but for him to ask for suggestions in the middle of something he was working on was unheard of. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Neither do I.” Dad paused, then ducked his head back in the office. A moment later, he was standing in the doorway, fingers massaging his temples. “I’ll admit it. I’ve come to an impasse.”

  “What have you been working on since we got here?” I asked.

  “Garbage. Nothing’s flowing. I started a piece about a talking alpaca, but it took me nowhere. I tried another one, about archaeologists battling the spirit of Matúš Čak in catacombs beneath the castle. Too derivative.”

  Talking alpaca? Dad was really getting desperate. I swallowed, a pit in my stomach. “Why not, uh, try to write a book about us?”

  “What?”

  “You know. A family’s house burns down and they move to Slovakia.”

  “Too depressing,” he said.

  “But that would just be the background. You could make it about the son, who starts having strange things happen to him when he gets there.”

  Dad checked the main door, as if he were worried Mom might come in. He faced me again. “What’s going on?”

  “Huh?”

  “Two weeks at a pool every day? That’s quite out of character for you, and judging by your hair yesterday, you actually went in the pool. What have you been up to?”

  I thought about telling him all of it. The vodník, Ohnica, Zubatá—just getting everything off my chest. But what would that have done? We couldn’t afford to move back to America—not after having spent all our insurance money investing ourselves in Slovakia. And even if we found a way to move back, I didn’t want to. I liked hanging out with Katka, and Trenčín was cool—even taking into account the Bigot Gang. I mean, it had been more than two weeks, and I hadn’t watched more than a handful of movies. At home, I sometimes averaged two films a day, more in the summer. The castle was incredible, I had a new best friend, and I was finally getting the language down. Why should I let some watery loser force me to move again? So all I said was, “Nothing.”

  Dad gave me a flat expression. “Really?”

  I nodded.

  Silence.

  “But you’ll tell me if something does happen,” Dad said. “If you’re in trouble or anything.”

  I nodded again.

  More silence.

  Dad stepped back. “Okay. If you need anything, just holler. I’ll be in the back, slamming my head against the wall.” He returned to his office, and I went to finish getting ready.

  Because really, what could Dad have done? Called the police? Picked up witchcraft to try to deal with the vodník? This was something I’d have to do on my own.

  For better or worse.

  Katka showed up fifteen minutes later. I paused to yell bye to my dad, then ducked out before he could add any errands. I was already supposed to pick up bread, and that was enough in my book.

  Once we were safely away from the apartment, I spoke—in Slovak, of course. We were all Slovak all the time now. “I . . . I had this sort of vision thing.”

  She looked over at me, her expression neutral. “Vision thing?”

  “Actually, it was the second one I had. The first one was in the shower. The second was yesterday, in the pool. With everything that happened with that kid, I forgot to tell you about it.”

  “What did you see?”

  “In the first one, it was like I was this eight-year-old boy, hanging out with his sister. We were in a boat, and then something snatched me and pulled me into the water. In the second vision, I think I was a vodník. I was in the water, and I tried to grab the sister. She fought me and got away.”

  “And this all happened to you in the shower and the pool?”

  “Yeah.”

  We were quiet for a while. Katka seemed quieter than normal. Subdued. Overhead, the sky was overcast, and thunder rolled in the distance. The park was empty except for a couple of homeless people lying on benches.

  Katka spoke first this time. “I have no idea about that. But these visions haven’t harmed you, correct?”

  “Harmed, no,” I said. “Disturbed, yes.”

  “Then maybe we focus on the real vodník first, and worry about shower visions later.”

  I shrugged. “All right. What do we do about the vodník?”

  We headed into the tunnel that crossed under the main road. Some­one had used it as a toilet. Recently. I kept an eye out for the Bigot Gang, but so far so good.

  “They need water to stay alive,” Katka said. “We could use heat lamps, or lock him in a sunny room. He’ll evaporate.”

  “Evaporate.” Was she serious?

  She nodded.

  “Isn’t ther
e some easier way?” I asked. “Like silver bullets or a stake through the heart? Evaporation sounds like a . . . Bond villain’s plan.” I finished the sentence in English, unsure how to express it in Slovak.

  “What?”

  “Too complicated and likely to fail.”

  Katka sighed. “You and your movies. This is real life. Our folktales are much less violent than your American action films—at least as far as vodníks are concerned. In the tales, they are basically friendly and mischievous.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Right until they drown you.”

  “But even then, vodníks are just doing what they do. In our stories, the make-believe creatures are the way they are. They do what they are made to do. It is the people—the humans—who are good or bad. There are no stories about vodník slayers, so I’m having to make it up from bits and pieces.”

  “What about their bite?” I asked. “Is there something bad associated with it, like with vampires or werewolves?”

  “Not that I know of. There are no stories about vodníks biting, but then again, I never talked to someone who actually saw one of the creatures—or was one, or whatever. So maybe all the stories are wrong.”

  We were both quiet again. This vodník problem was too large to deal with, and I don’t think either of us was ready to tackle it, now that we’d had time to think. Imagining saving the town from a curse was one thing; figuring out how to actually do so was entirely different. We were out in the fresh air now, and a fat drop of water splashed down in front of me. “Come on,” I said. “We can talk more inside when we get to the movies.”

  Katka didn’t respond, and I glanced over to see her holding her head and frowning. “Katka?”