Vodník

  “Who else?” I said. “Can you let me in?”

  She ducked into the room, and a few moments later, the main hall light came on, and Katka was pattering down the stairs. She opened the door, ran out, and hugged me. “You’re alive!”

  I wasn’t sure what to do, so I hugged her back. On the one hand, she was family, but on the other, all I was wearing was a lab coat. She pushed back from me.

  “I knew you weren’t dead. Or, I didn’t want to believe you were. I just . . .” She hugged me again, tight, and she didn’t let go. I stood there like a lump, feeling guilty and not sure why. After a few more moments, I realized Katka was shaking. Crying.

  “Come on,” I said, and patted her on the back a few times. “Let’s go inside.”

  She just kept shaking. “It’s been so horrid. You have no idea.”

  I had just freed myself from a morgue. I thought I had a pretty clear idea of how bad things could be. “Let’s go inside, and you can fill me in.”

  This time Katka pushed back and nodded. We went inside and into her room, both of us walking as softly as possible. I could hear Uncle L’uboš’s snores coming from his room as clearly as if he were sleeping on the couch.

  Once the door to Katka’s room was closed, I turned to her, holding the lab coat tightly closed. “Before we talk, would you mind getting me some clothes?”

  Katka smiled and wiped at her eyes. She disappeared, and when she came back with some of her dad’s clothes from the laundry, I could tell she’d taken some time to clean herself up too. Her face was less puffy from crying, for one thing.

  She left again while I got dressed, and once that was taken care of, we got down to business. I started. “How bad is it?”

  “What?”

  “Your sickness,” I said. “How bad?”

  “Bad. Everything is bad. Tours have dropped off completely at the castle. No one will come, and we don’t know why, and the Germans . . . That doesn’t matter, though. What happened to you?”

  I shrugged, trying to take it all in. “I’m not sure. I went down the well and met up with Lesana down there. We found the spring, and—” I gasped. “The vial. Did you get it? What about the potion?”

  “Don’t worry,” Katka said. “I’ve been working on it. I kept notes. What happened then?”

  “The vodník let all the water into this tunnel we were in, this water monster attacked me, but I managed to get away and get you the vial. The last thing I remember was getting sucked down into the well. I woke up at the morgue. What day is today?”

  “The twenty-third. Or I guess the twenty-fourth, now.”

  My jaw dropped, my mind not quite comprehending. “The twenty-fourth? Of August?”

  She nodded.

  “But my toe tag,” I said. “I was brought in the thirteenth. I couldn’t—”

  Katka smiled grimly. “I promised I wouldn’t let them bury you alive, remember? I had to use every bit of persuasion I could, but I got them to put off the burial. It helped that my health has been getting worse so quickly.”

  “We only have two days?” I said. “What are we going to do? What am I going to tell my parents?”

  Someone gasped behind us. “You’re back!”

  L’uboš was standing there, his hair and beard all over the place and looking more like a tumbleweed than a person. When had he stopped snoring? “Don’t just stare.” He walked over and hugged me so hard I thought my lungs would pop. “You are safe,” he said. “That is good. I must admit, I began to think Katka was mistaken.”

  I managed to find my voice. “What—”

  “I told him,” Katka said. “About the vodník.” Her eyes added, And nothing else. So no one knew about Katka’s impending demise still.

  Great.

  “We must go tell your parents now,” L’uboš said. “When Katka told me there was a chance you would recover, I was doubtful. But I believed enough to convince your mother. Still, I could not tell her why. She . . . will not take this well.” He ran a hand through his hair, then signaled for us to follow him.

  I’d like to say that the reunion was a happy one, full of swooning and laughing and back slapping.

  I’d also like laser vision and the ability to fly.

  Mom fainted when she saw me. Fainted. As in, my dad had to catch her. Dad took things better. He just got all bug eyed and confused. It helped that he had his hands full with my fainted mother. It gave him something to do to keep from getting overwhelmed.

  So the reunion was delayed somewhat while we moved into the living room and put my mom on the couch, then coaxed her back into the land of the unfainted. Dad sat next to Mom on the couch. Katka was sitting by me on the floor in front of them. L’uboš leaned against the wall by us, his arms folded.

  While we waited, I noticed the TV was back from repairs. At least there had been one good thing about losing all those days.

  That’s when the questions came.

  Not huge questions. Simple ones. Like, “How did this happen?” and “How did Katka know?”

  I’m not a good liar. In fact, I suck at it. And I knew if I started telling any piece of the truth, the rest of it would come out right after. “I—we—Katka? We need to tell them.”

  “No,” she said.

  “If we don’t, there’s no way we’ll get the potion done in time,” I said.

  Dad said, “Potion?”

  “Come on, Katka,” I said. “Less than two days. We can’t do this alone.”

  She stared up at her dad, who was now frowning at her with an uncertain expression. Then her shoulders slumped, and she nodded. When she spoke, her voice was barely audible. “Fine.”

  At last. I took a deep breath. My mouth dried up. Three sets of eyes drilled into mine. “Um . . . I haven’t been entirely . . . honest with you the past few months.”

  It would have helped if they had responded somehow. A simple “What are you talking about?” would have been nice. Instead, they waited silently for me to continue. It would be easier to take this in stages. First the visions, then the problems with Katka. I took a breath and spit it out.

  “There’s a vodník trying to kill me.”

  Sometimes it’s amazing how simple it is to state complex problems. Even then, I figured their response would be one of confusion, or denial, or shock—anything but what I got.

  Outrage.

  “No!” Mom shouted. Shouted. She stood up. “No! This is not happening again.”

  “Quiet,” L’uboš said. The walls might be concrete, but the neighbors could still hear shouting, especially in the middle of the night. “Whether we want it to or not, it is.”

  She shoved her finger in his face. “You. You knew this was happening. You encouraged it.” Her head whipped back to me. “Tomas, you’re delusional. It’s the only—”

  Dad tried to take her hand and pull her back down to the couch. “Maybe we should let him tell us a bit more.”

  She stopped and frowned. Behind that anger, I thought I saw a good dose of fear too. “Explain,” she said.

  I stood up and snapped back at her, “Oh, sure. Now you want me to explain. Now it’s suddenly all okay, since I have your permission. What is it with you? Do you know how much easier things would have been on me the past few months if it weren’t for you freaking out and going all silent whenever anyone came close to giving me answers? Each way I tried, you’d cut me off ahead of time. You and your idiotic ‘no talking about it’ rules.”

  My mom stepped toward me. “Those idiotic rules are for your own damned good.”

  “Maybe I should decide what’s for my own good and what’s not. Ever think about that?”

  She sputtered a few times, then shook her head and turned away, apparently too furious to talk. It served her right.

  “Okay,” I said, trying to calm down. Where to begin? “The first time I noticed something was the night we arrived.” It took a while to go through it all, mainly because there was too much for me to keep it straight. I’d be talking ab
out Ohnica, only to jump to Starenka, and then that made me think about Morena (being careful to avoid any mention of Katka’s situation yet), and each jump was followed by a slew of questions from Dad and L’uboš: what things looked like, how they spoke. Mom, on the other hand, clammed up. It took a while for Dad and L’uboš to notice, but eventually they saw what was happening, and their questions died.

  Mom was crying and shaking her head. “It’s happening again,” she said.

  No one spoke. “What is?” I pleaded. Seeing her cry like that made all my resentment at her shrivel. A little.

  She cried harder.

  L’uboš cleared his throat. “He should be told.”

  Mom closed her eyes and nodded. It seemed like that agreement took even more out of her. She shrunk in her chair and kept crying.

  On the other hand, my father and uncle sighed at the same time; a heavy load had been taken off their backs. “Tomas,” L’uboš said. “Remember when you and Katka asked me what happened to your grandmother?”

  So that’s what this was all about. Finally. “Yes.”

  L’uboš went on. “I told you some then. Now I can tell you all. When I was ten, my father died. My mother was a hard worker. She did her best to keep the family together, and she succeeded for the most part. When I was sixteen, things began to change. She lost interest in her work and began having complaints from her supervisors. But this was Communism, so nothing changed at first. Many people didn’t work hard—it was normal. Then, my mother told us something. She was seeing things. Creatures. Not just seeing them, either. Talking to them.”

  Mom stopped crying now and watched her brother, a stony expression on her face.

  L’uboš continued. “I thought she was only telling us stories. These sorts of things did not happen, speaking with dwarves and vílas. But it was not make-believe to her. In fact, this other side of her took over her life. And then she was murdered by one of these things.”

  Mom scoffed. “She was mugged, kidnapped, murdered maybe, but not by some fairy tale, L’uboš. If she hadn’t been delusional, she would still be with us.”

  “No,” L’uboš said. “You didn’t talk to her like I did. You didn’t want to believe. Didn’t want to investigate. Instead you threw yourself into school work. But I studied. I’ve researched. I talked with our mother about who she thought she was talking to. This was real. Maybe the same vodník who has been talking to Tomas is the one who was speaking with our mother.”

  “We don’t need more of this,” Mom said. “Tomas needs to see a doctor. A psychiatrist. When she went, they said it was hereditary. Remember all the tests we were put through, L’uboš?”

  “Mom,” I said. “I’m not crazy. I know what I’ve seen.”

  “It’s not possible,” she said.

  “Wrong,” L’uboš said. “It’s the only explanation.”

  Mom frowned. “Unexplained things happen all the time. That doesn’t mean fairies cause them.”

  I got up and went to my room. Deep in my closet, underneath the clean clothes pile, was Death in the Modern Day. I brought it back to the room and plopped it on the kitchen table. “Then how do you explain that?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “That popped up in the middle of the street one day while I was out walking. Morena sent it. If I were crazy, how would that explain things appearing out of thin air?”

  Then I realized, Oh crap. They’d only see a dictionary.

  Mom picked up the book and leafed through it. “That’s silly,” she said. “Anyone could have written this. Look at these silly pictures. Cartoon reapers?”

  Dad took the book from her, his brow furrowed in confusion. “What do you mean? It’s a dictionary. Of course anyone could have written it, but what does that matter?”

  Well, that was a strange development. I hesitated, but then pushed forward. “What do you see, Mom?”

  Dad handed it back to her. She folded her arms and refused to take it. “A dictionary. Just like everyone else.”

  “You can see them too,” L’uboš said. “Just like Mama.”

  “That’s silly,” Mom snapped. “Just because I see some stupid book about death doesn’t mean—”

  “No,” I said. “It’s only visible for people who either can see the mythological creatures on their own or who have taken a potion to let them.”

  “Then it just means I’ve inherited this insanity too. But we don’t have to give into it, Tomas. We can—”

  “Dana,” Dad started, half sitting up from the couch.

  “You know what, Mom?” I said. “It doesn’t matter what you think. Because we don’t need to be arguing about this. If you think I’m nuts, then we’ll see. Katka’s going to die in two days if I don’t save her.”

  That brought shock all around. And silence. “What?” L’uboš said. He sounded hollow, like someone had just punched him in the stomach, hard.

  I hung my head. “I found out from Morena when Katka’s going to die. If I can find a substitute soul before then, then Death will spare her.”

  He sat back in his chair, all the blood gone from his face.

  Mom plopped down on the couch next to Dad, whose jaw was still slack. Katka had her head in her hands. Her shoulders were shaking.

  I felt like I had to say something—do something to fill the silence. “That’s where I’ve been the past two weeks. The vodník said he had a plan to help. If we released a water spirit, since she used to be human, that would fill the contract. But then he tried to kill me, and things got . . . complicated. But if we can release the water spirit, then we can still fulfill the pact. Katka will be saved.”

  It didn’t seem to matter to anyone. Mom and Dad were confused, Katka’s shoulders were only shaking harder, and L’uboš seemed to have popped. All the words in the world wouldn’t fix this. We had to start doing things.

  “Where’s the potion, Katka?” I asked. “We can finish it, and—”

  Mom spoke. “You’re really seeing these things?”

  “That’s what I’ve been saying, Mom. And if we don’t—”

  “It’s why we moved in the first place,” she said. It didn’t seem like she realized anyone else was there. Her hands fiddled with the hem of her blouse, her eyes frozen open. “When you had the accident, and we knew what had happened to Babka, we had to move. But then the fire, and the insurance. We shouldn’t have come back. We should have sacrificed. Stayed poor. Then we wouldn’t have had to risk losing you.”

  I moved to sit next to her, trying to snap her out of it. “But if we’d done that, I wouldn’t have found out about Katka. And now we still have a chance to save her. I’m not dead, okay? The vodník tried to kill me, and he failed. That makes me stronger.”

  She blinked, then looked at me. “How?”

  “It’s a long story. I’ll explain later. But this doesn’t have to be like with Babka. This can be a good thing. We can save Katka’s life.”

  Mom shook her head. “When I lost my mother, I thought life couldn’t get worse. But if I were to lose you too . . .”

  “Not going to happen,” I said. “I’ll teach that vodník a thing or two. You’ll see. But we need to focus on Katka.” I turned back to my cousin. “Now, where’s that—”

  Katka’s head shook once more, and her whole body fell over. Her eyes were rolled up into her head, and she was twitching.

  When filling out paperwork, please at least use a red pen. Writing in blood, while not strictly necessary, is always appreciated.

  When everyone heard me cut off, it didn’t take more than a moment for them to realize what was happening. We went into panic mode, L’uboš snapping out of his stunned state to get his daughter on the floor on her side while Mom cleared space for them. Dad called the paramedics.

  Usually when she had a seizure, she came out of it soon. I told myself that, while the seconds ticked by. L’uboš whispered to his daughter and stroked her forehead. Dad sat next to Mom and rubbed her back. Time slowed down. It
was taking too long. Any second, Katka would be back with us.

  But if anything, the seizure got worse. She went from mildly twitching to full spasms, her arms flailing at her side. L’uboš held them down, still speaking to her in a calm voice. “It’s going to be okay,” he said. “I’m here. I’m here.” His lower lip was quivering, the movement causing his whole beard to shake.

  She’d come out of it. She had to. I didn’t know where the potion was, or what still had to be done. I couldn’t do it alone. Why hadn’t I been pay­­ing more attention to her earlier? I’d thought she was just crying. I was too focused on how I was feeling. Too angry with my mom. This was all my fault.

  It wasn’t until the paramedics arrived that I had to face the facts. Time hadn’t slowed down. Katka was still deep in her seizure, for far too long.

  “She’ll come out of it, right?” I asked Dad as we watched L’uboš and Mom drive away with Katka in the ambulance.

  He licked his lips. “I don’t know. That looked like staticus elepticus. Permanent seizure. It’s exactly what happened to her mother before she . . .” He took a deep breath. “Tomas, you said we can fix this. What do we need to do?”

  “This is my fault,” I said.

  “What?”

  “It’s all my fault. She didn’t want to tell people what was happening. If I hadn’t forced her to help me with the potion, then maybe she wouldn’t have been so stressed out. Maybe she wouldn’t have gone into that seizure, and she’d still be fine. What if what I did pushed her over? What if she dies because of me?” Instead of massaging my burn, I found myself rubbing the bite mark, where a new scar had formed.

  Dad hugged me. “It’s not you,” he said at last, letting me go. “She’s been sick for a long time. But if you’re right, and there’s a way to help her, what do we need to do?”

  I took a deep breath and nodded. “First, we need to find that potion. Until we’ve got that, I don’t know what we can do. It should be outside somewhere, open to the elements. Also, Katka said she’d been taking notes on the potion. It’s a little complex, and if we mess it up, it might not work. So we need to find those notes.”