Vodník

by Bryce Moore

  A brick sailed through the window, shattering the glass, hitting the table and crashing to the floor. Katka and I screamed and leaped back. I rushed to the window. The street was empty, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out who’d thrown that.

  The Bigot Gang was upping the ante.

  I hefted the brick. If that had hit one of us, it could have done serious damage.

  When my parents came home, Katka and I took the blame for the broken window ourselves. We’d cleaned up the glass and ditched the brick. Getting my parents all worked up was only going to complicate matters. We needed free run of the city in order to complete this potion in time, and my guess was my parents wouldn’t exactly give their blessing to city trips if they knew three hooligans were out for blood. So I suffered through a lecture on being more careful and responsible, then agreed to pay for the broken window myself. Maybe the BGs would feel like they’d taught me a lesson now and stop there.

  I hoped.

  It’s better to feel like you’re doing something than to sit around and feel helpless. Tours at the castle had slumped off to the point they were almost nonexistent. L’uboš let us go to “on call” status, since sitting at the castle staring at the empty entrance gates was about as unproductive as you could get. Normally, I’d have stayed there anyway. Better to be at the castle than putting up with the crap we took in the town when people identified us as Roma. But now we had a Mission, capital M. A special purpose.

  The first thing we needed to do was find out where we could get everything. And what was a virgin spring? Katka helped me with some of the other terms. That’s how I found out that a Dubak mushroom was this type of mushrooms Slovaks all went crazy over. They used it in soups. Mushroom hunting was a national pastime in Slovakia (which said something about Slovaks), but it made getting that ingredient much easier.

  Katka took a trip into town and came back not only with a cup carved from the heartwood of a cherry tree (bought from a local Roma woodcarver) but also knowing where we could get our walnut.

  “Persian walnut is the common kind,” she said. “And the trees usually live about 65 years, but the man at the carvers said he could get us some nuts from older trees, though he was curious why.”

  For the crystal basin, we found one L’uboš had inherited from his mother—Babka. It was sitting in a cabinet gathering dust, so we didn’t think anyone would mind if we used it.

  Although we had success with most of the items on the list, some things were more difficult to find, like the thyme harvested under a full moon. We’d missed the actual full moon by one day, and there wouldn’t be another one until September. I failed at astronomy. Have you ever tried going to a grocery store or farmer’s market and asking when their thyme was harvested? It’s not like people write these things down. We got a bundle of herbs we were 85% sure had been picked at the right time, but we couldn’t be certain.

  It would have to do.

  And then there were all the other problems we were facing. For one thing, my bite wasn’t healing. I didn’t mention it to Katka—she had enough on her plate already—but no matter how much I disinfected it or cleaned it, the teeth marks stayed an angry red, the skin around them puffy and swollen. But it didn’t seem to be getting worse. At least not at first.

  One night as I was getting ready for bed, I was sitting in my room changing the wrap. I had to do it when I was alone, since my parents thought all I had done was sprain my wrist. The Ace bandage I used to keep the bite hidden wasn’t perfect for treating the wound, but it was better than the questions that would come if either of my parents saw it. A thunderstorm was raging outside, rattling the windows now and then. We’d had rain for the past two days.

  When I took the wrappings off, they were wetter than usual. I examined the bite more closely.

  The wound was seeping water.

  Over the course of a minute, I watched a bead of water form, grow larger, and then run down my hand and onto my wrist. I steeled myself and then tasted it. Just water.

  I sat back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Another bolt of lightning flashed outside, followed by a rumble. The air smelled like ozone.

  For the last few days, I’d been doing my best not to think about the vodník’s attack. I had wanted to put it behind me: the bite, the vodník, the un-drowning. If the wound had been getting better, maybe I could have ignored it. But leaking water? How serious was it? Would it have any Rasputin effects? Only if it almost killed me first.

  It didn’t help that the only person I could think of who had been bitten by a vodník was now a water ghost hanging out at the castle. In the vision I’d had of Lesana when she died, she’d had her hand bandaged too. I didn’t know how much time had elapsed between the attack and the confrontation with her father, but was it the bite that had killed her? Or rather, waterfied her? The more I thought about it, the more I decided it had to be.

  I went over the events I’d seen in the water visions. Girl gets bit by vodník. Girl gets weak and faints, apparently dead. Girl gets buried alive. Girl is now water spirit, hundreds of years later.

  Time to check Death in the Modern Day. With no small amount of page flipping and index checking, I came across something that seemed to apply. As usual, it was buried in the footnote of some obscure reference that only loosely had anything to do with vodníks, which is why I’d missed it the first thousand times I read the cursed book. Apparently the vodník could steal souls by biting, not just teacups. After describing everything right down to the bite seeping water, the book listed some symptoms: dizziness, weakness, and apparently a tendency to fall into a fake death that could take a month to recover from. Then it talked about potential cures.

  If they’re already too far gone, I’d suggest giving them up as a lost cause. Totally curing them requires a potion made by a mortal able to affect both the magical and the physical plane, which is almost always too much of a bother to try. If you manage to reach the victim before the bite’s effects have gone too far, try having them drink a teaspoon of pig urine mixed with a teaspoon of salt each day for a week. That should do the trick.

  So maybe that’s why the vodník wanted me to do the potion: I was the only route he had to get Lesana into a soul-stealable form, since I was “special.” But that didn’t account for why he had bitten me. Was I feeling dizzy? I could just picture me fainting and getting buried alive. Had the vodník done this on purpose? He knew what could happen—he’d done it to Lesana already.

  Another sentence in the same paragraph caught my eye. A vodník is made when a child is drowned. So the vodník hadn’t been trying to collect me when I was five—he was trying to make me one of him? Beyond creepy.

  Don’t get me started on the pig urine.

  I got up, wrapped my hand up in the bandage, grabbed an umbrella and some shoes and walked over to Katka’s. It helped living so close to your best friend. She answered the door in her pajamas, brushing her teeth. After jerking her head to signal I should come in, she disappeared into the bathroom to finish. She had the windows open, and the apartment had a damp feel to the air.

  “What’s up?” she asked when she came into the living room.

  I didn’t say anything—just took off the bandage.

  She sat down next to me on the couch and leaned over to check the wound. “Uh-oh.”

  “It gets worse,” I said, then got out the book and opened it to the right page. “Read.”

  She grunted after she was done. “You’re right. Definitely worse.”

  “Well?” I said. “What if that happens to me? Those aren’t good options. Either I ‘essentially die’ or I get buried alive.”

  Katka smiled, but I could tell she was forcing it. “Don’t worry, Tomas. I won’t let you be buried alive. Besides, medicine has advanced. Everyone will know you’re not dead.”

  I wasn’t so sure of that. “But what about becoming a water spirit? I can’t do that.” It would be like a person scared of heights being transformed into a falcon, or someb
ody scared of spiders becoming a tarantula.

  “That’s what the pig urine is for.”

  I shuddered. “Where are we going to find that? The book only says that works if you start it in time. What if it’s too late? What if—”

  “Then we already have a cure for that,” Katka said. “It’s what the vodník’s having us prepare for Lesana, right?”

  “Yeah, but Lesana’s dead.”

  “Tomas, I don’t know the answers. Tomorrow, we’ll find pig urine. They must have it at a farm, or a butcher’s. Or at least, they can get some. All they need is a pig. Then you’ll start drinking. And we can make two potions from the vodník’s recipe, just in case. Finally, if you fall down like you’re dead, I’ll be sure to tell the doctors you’re not. What else do you want me to do?”

  “But don’t you get it?” I said. “This doesn’t just hurt me. What happens if I faint or die or whatever before the potion’s finished? Even if I recover, I could lose weeks. A month. What if I wake up, and you . . . you’re . . .” I couldn’t bring myself to say it.

  Katka sighed and repeated, “What else do you want me to do?”

  “Maybe we should go to our parents.”

  Katka bit her lip in thought. “Maybe we should. But what would happen then? Your mom doesn’t have a good record of handling these visions well. Your dad, what could he do? If we tell my father, it will only worry him. I saw him go through that with my mother. I do not want my last days with him to be like that.”

  Her last days with him. That was a sobering thought. “We can try Ohnica again.”

  “Why?” Katka said. “We don’t know if we can trust her to begin with, and we know what she’ll say anyway. Build her a house fire so she can get her powers back. Are you ready to do that?”

  Not hardly. At last I shook my head. “You’re right. I just wish . . .”

  “Get some rest,” Katka said. “Everything’s worse when you don’t have enough sleep.”

  That sounded like good advice. But once I was alone in my room, I couldn’t stop thinking. Everything was going wrong. We had less than three weeks until Katka died, I was being manipulated by a vodník, I was going to turn into a water spirit, and I had to drink pig piss to top it all off. Couldn’t it at least stop raining for a few days? Sleep was a long time coming.

  In the morning, the sun woke me. No rain. I was tired but optimistic, a mood only slightly damped when I headed over to Katka’s, and she already had the pig urine. At least when it was combined with salt, its original taste was overpowered.

  Then again, it’s the thought that counts.

  Eight glasses of water and four rounds of mouthwash later, we focused on finding out about virgin springs, with little luck. The vial was all set and ready to go—we had gotten one and I had breathed into it as soon as I woke up for three days straight. One of those breaths had to count as the morning’s first. We spent a couple hours skimming through every page of Katka’s fairy-tale books and the folklore section in my living room, but it was nowhere to be found. The vodník wouldn’t show at the castle, and there was no sign of Lesana, either. If they disappeared like this, how would we even find her grave? I made a mental note to ask either of them the next time I saw them. Better safe than sorry.

  And did I mention that our TV had broken? Something to do with the LCD light. It was under warranty, but I was going to be without it for at least two weeks. My practices with my uncle’s friends (L’uboš was still away on his jousting tour) were my only release right then, giving me a chance to work out my frustrations. I’d been doing it long enough now that some of it was becoming second nature. Falling was a lot easier, that was for sure. But I also knew the basic moves enough to start to be able to choose which one was best for a specific situation. When L’uboš came home from his trip, he’d be pleased.

  Even the Internet let me down. It took all of five seconds for me to learn two things. The first was that doing a search with “virgin” in it isn’t the best idea in the world. The second was that Virgin Spring was a movie by Ingmar Bergman. Neither of these gems of knowledge helped. When I stood up from the desk after my Internet search, the room tilted. I stumbled sideways, right into the desk, almost knocking the computer over before I caught my balance. After I let go of the desk, it still felt like the room was spinning, but it was manageable. Was that pig potion working or not?

  Maybe a short rest would help. I staggered over to my room and opened the door.

  The old granny—Starenka—was waiting by my bed.

  Virgin springs grant healing powers to the first human to drink from one. Of course, since this power is used up in the drinking, almost no virgin springs are still in existence. This is a good thing, since killing a human who has taken a spring’s virginity can be a real pain in the ass.

  It’s about time.”

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “You summoned me. I came.”

  “I summoned you forever ago.”

  Her eyes narrowed to a sea of wrinkles. “Don’t disrespect your elders, boy. I’ll smack you so hard on the head you’ll be comatose.” Her voice was low and gravelly. She poked me in the stomach with her cane.

  Now that the shock of her appearance was wearing off, the dizziness returned. I went to my bed and sat down.

  “Hasn’t anyone ever told you to stand for company?” she said. Another poke.

  I slapped at the cane. “Stop that. I’m dizzy.”

  She hobbled closer. With me sitting and her standing, we were just on eye level. Her face was a wrinkled prune, but less purply. “Why do you insist on making things difficult for me?” she asked.

  “Huh?” My mind had still been on prunes.

  “That’s the problem with today. Ever since they invented airplanes, everyone’s too busy being busy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She sniffed. “At least you can make coherent sentences now. Much better than repeating ‘You don’t want’ over and over like last time. What I mean is that I did my best to help you earlier. Everything was ready, but you refused to listen.”

  “I couldn’t understand you. I—”

  “That’s my fault? What do you expect me to do? Learn English?”

  “No, I—”

  “To make things worse, you summon me and then scamper around faster than I can keep up. The castle, the canal, city center, back home. Do you think I jog at my age?”

  “I—”

  “Don’t you know anything?”

  “No,” I said, giving up. The dizziness was making me nauseous.

  She nodded. “At least you admit it. Let me tell you how it works. You need help, and I come and give you what you need—usually information that makes it possible for you to complete your quest. It’s the way we’ve been doing things for thousands of years. It’s my job to know you’re in trouble. It’s your job to be easily found.”

  My jaw dropped open. “So that’s it?”

  “What?”

  “You’re just going to tell me what to do to fix things?”

  She shook her head and smiled with a glint in her eye. “It can’t be that easy. But I’ll tell you two things that will help. First, a virgin spring is a spring that hasn’t been found by humans before. Second, the vodník knows where such a spring is, and if you dump enough salt in his well, I’m pretty sure he’ll show up to answer any questions you might have.”

  I leveled my best “get real” stare at her. “I’ve been at home plenty. I check my email. I have an answering machine. Did you have to meet me in person? Couldn’t it have been a bit earlier?”

  “Don’t push it,” she said. “I’m old. That makes me right. Oh.” She snapped her fingers. “And here’s this. You didn’t want it before, but no doubt you’ve changed your mind.” She reached into her cloak and took out a bundle of herbs. “Thyme harvested by the light of a full moon. Now stand up and get to work. Don’t be so lazy.”

  “I’m not being lazy. I’m sick. The vodník bit me.”


  “What?” she said. “Where?”

  “On my hand.” I unbandaged my hand to show her the seeping wound.

  She tsked loudly. “Damn foolish of you to let him bite you. Damn lucky that you’ll be going to a virgin spring soon.”

  “I’m taking pig urine and salt for it,” I said. “That’s supposed to—”

  “Pig urine? Do you know where that stuff comes from? Just drink some of the virgin spring. One of its properties is that it grants the power to regenerate. With the wound this far gone, pig urine’s just going to give you indigestion. Idiot. Get to that spring tomorrow, or you’re going to be sorry. You’ll die for sure, and then what good will you be? Even as it is, if you don’t get it soon enough, it’ll be lights out for you for a few weeks—maybe even a month. Get to it in time and follow the vodník’s directions precisely, and you have a chance of fixing everything.” She tottered out of the room. I blinked a couple of times, then checked the herbs in my hand. Dead or unconscious for a month? Not good.

  So much for resting. And drinking pig urine.

  I got up and went over to see Katka, telling Dad on my way out that I’d be eating with my cousin that evening. Mom had evening duty at the ESL school, so we were in scrounge and forage mode. Dad just grunted when I told him. Writer’s block.

  When Katka opened the door, I handed her the thyme Starenka had given me. “I got the answer.”

  She didn’t take it nearly as well as I thought she would. “Tomas, you look terrible. Come in and sit down.”

  I went in. “Didn’t you hear me? I know what the virgin spring is.”

  Katka nodded, then ushered me to the couch. “We can talk about that in a minute. First, there’s something I need to show you.”

  “What?”

  “See what I found.” Katka reached down by the end of the couch, picked up a dusty book, and handed it to me.