Vodník

  “Andricka,” L’uboš said.

  “Right,” I said.

  L’uboš grunted. “Finding a grave that old . . . very difficult. And I’m not even sure Andricka was the name of this girl. It’s only a legend I heard, one of many. Based on fact, maybe, but how to tell?”

  I nodded at the phone. “Right. But I’ve been haunted by this girl’s ghost, so I’m pretty sure it’s a real legend. You said she died in the late 1700’s? Are there graves that date back that far in the city graveyard?”

  “Possible.” He trailed off, apparently deep in thought.

  I cleared my throat. “I heard we might want to check the archives?” I held my breath, hoping he knew something about this.

  “Of course!” L’uboš said. “If this is an event that really happened, and is not just some legend, then there is a place that would have it written down. The city chronicle.”

  “Great,” I said. “Where’s that kept?”

  He grunted again. “The most recent years are at the Trenčín city museum, but for something so old, you’d have to go to the Slovak National Archives in Bratislava.”

  The archives. Bingo.

  “Is there any restriction on who can view the chronicle?” Dad asked.

  “It depends. Bureaucracy, you know. Sometimes, they let you in with no trouble. Other times, you need to have what you need in writing and wait a month for them to approve it. Stupid.”

  I broke in. “So we just call down there, ask someone to look it up for us, and that’s it?”

  “Tomas,” my dad said. “It’s not that simple.”

  “Hold on a sec,” I told my uncle, then muted the phone and asked my dad. “What do you mean?”

  “You can’t just call up a librarian and wave a wand. It would take time to find this out. Archives that old aren’t going to be digitized, and they’re not going to be indexed. We’d have to search them, page by page.”

  This was a nightmare. It didn’t happen this way in movies. If this were a movie, my father would have conveniently been studying grave locations for the past few months as research for his writing, and he would have led us straight to the grave. Then again, if this were a movie, Nazis would probably be in there somewhere too. Or ninjas. I unmuted the phone. “My dad says we need to go down there in person. Will they let us see them?”

  “If we are lucky, yes.” L’uboš said. “But they are closed now. It’s Sunday. No one will be there.”

  “What?” I said. “We can’t wait clear till tomorrow.”

  “You must,” my uncle said. “Finding the right volumes on your own would be impossible, and you can do nothing if you break in and they arrest you.”

  “Then we’ll try the cemeteries in person,” I said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  L’uboš was silent for a moment, then said, “Come and pick me up. I will go with you.”

  “But Katka,” Dad started.

  “Can only be saved by this,” L’uboš said. “The doctors can do nothing, and I can do nothing waiting here. I’d rather be with you two, trying to get something done.”

  “Fine,” I said. “We’ll be there soon.”

  Dad and I rushed out to the car and were speeding through the streets of Trenčín in no time.

  “It’s for things like this that Google was invented,” I told my dad on the way over.

  “It’s for things like this that we still need librarians,” he said. Trust Dad to never miss a chance to put in a plug for his profession. He was in his element, sure and confident. “Don’t worry, Tomas. We can do this. I’m sure of it.”

  After that, the drive over to see Katka was as silent as it got. I had lost all the optimism I had felt when I found the crystal basin. There was too much left to do and not enough time to get it done. If it hadn’t been for that cursed vodník, I would have had plenty of time. I could have helped Katka with the potion, and taken the time to find Lesana’s grave. Of course, when the vodník had given me the recipe for the potion, I hadn’t thought finding the grave would be an issue.

  The hospital was straight out of a horror film, full of long corridors and unfriendly people. There was no central reception area; Dad had to ask when we parked what section to go to, and once we were there, we had to walk up and down the halls searching for the right room. Even after calling L’uboš and getting directions, we still got lost twice. The whole building had that sick taste unique to old folks’ homes and hospitals: antiseptic, dirty bodies, and death.

  L’uboš was waiting for us outside the room. When he saw us, he walked over, his shoulders slumped and bags under his eyes.

  Dad hugged him, and for a minute I was worried L’uboš was going to fall down where he stood. I’d never thought I’d see the day when my dad was the stronger of the two of them. Right then, seeing my father comforting L’uboš, I had a flash of real pride.

  “Can we go in and see her?” Dad asked.

  L’uboš nodded and turned around to go back into the room. A large part of me didn’t want to follow him. I didn’t want to have a picture in my mind of her in this place, helpless. But if I didn’t go in—and I failed tomorrow—then I wouldn’t have a chance to see her again. She’d want to know I came. I swallowed and entered the room, a nauseous feeling deep in my stomach.

  Katka lay on a bed in a room with five other patients; there weren’t even any curtains separating everyone into their own spaces. Her eyes were closed, her cheeks sunken. She didn’t look anything like the girl who had become my best friend over the summer. She seemed dead.

  This was too much. I ran down the hall to a bathroom we had passed, barely making it into a stall before I threw up. I stayed there for a few minutes, trying to get myself under control. If I let myself, I was going to start crying, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stop. Someone came into the room and walked over to the stall I was in. A flowing black robe and staff peeked underneath the door. I opened up to see Morena grinning down at me.

  “It’s not easy, is it?” she said.

  I was too depressed to even want to argue. “Come to gloat?”

  She sniffed. “Gloating’s not my style, boy. I show up for the victory, then go on to the next one. I just saw you were in the neighborhood and thought I’d drop in between appointments to see how things were going.”

  “Yeah, well, they’re not going, but I’m sure you knew that already, didn’t you?”

  Morena snapped her fingers, and a three legged stool appeared behind her. She perched on it, leaning her weight forward onto the pole of her scythe. “I think you’ve been doing a marvelous job, if that makes you feel any better. I haven’t had this much fun in ages, and I mean that literally. Throat lozenge?”

  I shook my head. “Do you know where she’s buried?”

  “The water girl?” Morena asked, then sniffed. “I suppose I could look into it, if I really wanted to. But I don’t. Better to see what you come up with on your own.”

  I didn’t say anything to that. The woman was a sick, twisted person, with no regard for human decency.

  She cleared her throat. “I could end it now, you know.”

  “End what?”

  “Katka. I could take her now, if you’d prefer. It’s close enough to her death time that I’d just have to fill out some extra paperwork. It’s been so much fun watching you struggle, that’s the least you’ve earned.”

  “You’ve enjoyed watching me struggle?” I said. How could she just dismiss people’s lives so easily?

  “You don’t watch sports much, do you?” Morena asked.

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “I love sports. Especially your American football. You can get it over here, you know. Not all the games, but enough. I think it exemplifies everything I like about the human race. Your drive to win at all costs. There’s nothing as good as a comeback, and that’s the one sport where a comeback—a victory over seemingly impossible odds—is always a real possibility, right up to the very end. I don’t even care if the team
I’m rooting for is beaten by that comeback. It’s a joy to watch.”

  I wiped at my mouth, trying to get the foul taste out. “This isn’t football,” I said.

  She grunted, then stood up. “Well, duty calls. Just remember. Life is very much a game, at least in my way of thinking. I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

  She walked back out of the room. A stranger came in moments later. “You going to use that, or you just resting?” he said.

  I stood up and flushed, then washed my hands, rinsed out my mouth, and left the bathroom. Mom, Dad, and L’uboš were sitting around Katka’s bed, but they stood when I walked in.

  I tried to resist it, but my eyes kept getting drawn to Katka. Mom came over and gave me a hug. “I’m sorry, Tomas.”

  I nodded and cleared my throat. “We should get going.”

  L’uboš grunted, then went to his daughter and kissed her gently on the forehead before whispering something to her, standing, and striding out the door.

  “Good luck,” Mom said. “I’ll stay here with her.”

  I turned from her to Katka, then the other patients in their beds. It wasn’t right; a person should at least be able to die among family, not with strangers. I went over to Katka and took her hand. I squeezed it, then set it down on the bed again. She seemed dead already. If I’d told her dad what was going to happen before, then at least they would have had time to say good-bye . . . But that hadn’t been my choice to make.

  “Mom,” I said, catching her eye with a gaze I hoped was confident. “Eleven fifty-six, tomorrow night. If she lives past then, you’ll know we succeeded.”

  I left the room.

  The graveyard was across town, over in an area named Juch. It was about as pretty as it sounded—meaning not. The buildings were massive Communist housing projects that stressed cement and straight lines and kept windows to a minimum, like they were made of giant, square Legos. The cemetery parking lot was shared by a convenience store. Classy.

  We got there at seven and spent a good two and a half hours of daylight and dusk walking up and down the rows of graves, but we didn’t have any luck. The graves in Slovakia were much better taken care of than I was used to: neat and orderly, with lots of flowers. Each grave had a large upright marker, but instead of burying the bodies, they kept them in stone boxes lying on the ground next to each marker. It made each grave look like a twin-sized bed, complete with headboard, which made me feel sort of like we were searching a large dormitory or furniture store instead of a cemetery.

  I remembered being in Lesana’s crypt—not just a normal grave—but L’uboš pointed out that her body might have been moved at some point, so we were stuck looking at everything, just in case. No “Lesana Andricka” or anything like that on anything, although L’uboš continually reminded us that legends change, and there was no guarantee the name attached to the legend was correct.

  “I’ll know it when I see it,” I kept saying. I had been in the place in one of my visions, after all. I knew her first name was Lesana. I had seen the monk begin to carve it. That was a start.

  But the longer we went with no success, the more depressed I became. If the grave wasn’t here—if it was in some basement, or off covered in vines in the woods—then we’d never find it.

  The evening wore itself out. I was so focused on our task that it was only when I caught myself squinting to make out a grave name that I realized the sun had set and night was well on its way to falling. Even then, I kept pressing, only stopping when L’uboš came over and put a hand on my shoulder.

  “It’s not here,” he said.

  “But I haven’t—”

  “No,” he said. “You have. This is the second time you’ve gone through the cemetery. We should go home and sleep.”

  I shook my head. “I can sleep tomorrow night after this is all over.”

  L’uboš sighed. “And if tomorrow, when we are at the archives and have an actual chance of discovering the grave site, you fall asleep? What then? No. Wandering in circles now won’t do us any good. We go home, and in the morning you complete the potion and we go to the archives.”

  He had a point, no matter how much I didn’t want to acknowledge it. I surveyed the cemetery. In the falling dusk, crickets were out and the area seemed peaceful—until I realized Katka would be here in a few days if we failed.

  Robes are dry-clean only. We have a standing account with Paul’s Dry Cleaning, a little place in New York over in Chinatown. Failure to use this union-approved cleaning facility is punishable by Birth.

  I had my alarm set for five a.m. Sunrise was at 5:56, and I didn’t want to miss it. I shouldn’t have worried; I couldn’t sleep. Why was it that on all the days when it didn’t matter if I had a full night’s rest or not, I got one, but whenever I knew the next day was going to be important—and that I needed the sleep—all I did was toss and turn? I eventually gave up, choosing to spend my time searching the Internet for clues that might help us the next day.

  I didn’t find any.

  At 5:15 a.m., I was out the door and heading to the canal, cherry wood cup in hand and ready to complete the potion. It was brisk out, and I was wearing a light jacket.

  I got to the bridge, moved the garbage can into place, and fished around for the basin. It was right where I had left it. Why had I feared it wouldn’t be? Probably because everything else in my life had gone wrong, so why not that too?

  When I turned, basin in hand, the Bigot Gang were standing at the top of the hill, silhouetted against the city. How in the world? I thought about running, but I couldn’t—not without risking spilling the potion everywhere. A wave of adrenaline washed through me, my heart rate quickening. Embrace the fear. Use it. A glance at my watch showed me I had thirty-four minutes until the potion had to be completed. If I missed that time, then I’d have to start the whole thing over from scratch. And we didn’t have that kind of time.

  I started walking back to my apartment, sticking to the lower path. It was still dark down there, and I hoped they’d miss me in the pre-dawn gloom.

  The BGs came down to meet me, splitting up to surround me.

  “What are you doing out so early, Gypsy?” Draco asked, his voice snide and particularly Slytherinish.

  “I’d like to know the same thing about you,” I said, still walking.

  Jabba reached the path in front of me and folded his arms, standing there like the Balrog. Draco was behind me, and Gollum to my right on the hill. The only way out was the canal.

  “Your kind isn’t so bright,” Gollum said, then snorted up a particularly large piece of nose blockage. “I saw you yesterday, slinking around and looking suspicious. I followed you. Lost you for a bit, but I found you again at your apartment. What in the world was the crazy Gypsy up to? You and your Yankee father were right by an open window while you talked. It was English, but I caught enough. You’re not the only one who can speak English. Going on about completing potions at dawn. Some sort of superstitious black magic? I thought you were dead.”

  “They’re like roaches,” Jabba said.

  I clenched my jaw and took a step forward. “Leave me alone.”

  Jabba shoved me in the chest, the water in the basin splashing. Some of it spilled over the side.

  “Not until we teach you a lesson,” Draco said, taking a few steps closer to me.

  Gollum coughed, then smiled slyly as he took out a small bottle of lighter fluid. In front of me, Jabba was lighting a cigarette.

  “Afraid of fire, aren’t you?” Draco said. He was right behind me. So this was their master plan. Burn the Gypsy.

  And suddenly the fear was gone, turned into anticipation. They were messing with the wrong Gypsy.

  But I had to get them away from that basin. I set it on the ground, then tried to run between Gollum and Jabba. I got about five steps before Jabba caught my arm and twisted it behind me, then grabbed the other. I might have tried one of the moves L’uboš had taught me, but I didn’t want to get away. Not this time. Running
away from a group of guys who practically stalked you only delayed the inevitable.

  I had to do something more extreme, keep them scared of me until I knew enough self defense to protect myself no matter what. Thanks for bringing the lighter fluid, boys.

  Draco had left the basin lying on the ground untouched, thank goodness. We were now huddled in a bunch about ten feet away from it. I struggled, pretending to try to escape, but really just doing my best to get us farther away from the potion. It earned me another five feet and a punch to the face from Gollum.

  “Stop struggling,” Draco said, “and we might go easy on you. Put your ugly arm forward.”

  Jabba manhandled my scarred arm, making me hold it out. Draco nodded to Gollum, who took the lighter fluid and squirted it all over my jacket arm. How could people do this to another human being?

  “They burned one of your families in the east.” Draco took out a lighter and clicked the flame to life. “I read about it online. The whole house up in flames. Be glad we’re not doing that to you. This won’t kill you. Probably.” He nodded to Jabba, and the brute released me right as Draco touched the fire to my doused jacket arm.

  It ignited with a whoosh.

  I screamed and whirled in circles, always away from the basin. I waved my burning arm, acting like I was trying to put out the fire in a panic, though it only made it brighter. The Bigot Gang backed away from me, Gollum glancing up the hill toward the city, but down here this early in the morning, no one could see us unless they were already on the path.

  When I was far enough away from the basin, I stopped screaming. Stopped running in circles. Instead, I stood to my full height in the middle of the path, blazing arm at my side, where it caught some of the rest of my clothes on fire. I lit up the path in the pre-dawn twilight, where Draco and the rest stood there in confusion, their eyes wide, a frown on Draco’s face.

  “Seriously?” I asked, my voice calm. The fire guttered on my clothes, flames eating the fabric greedily. It was just mildly warm, though the lighter fluid smelled pretty awful. “You were going to burn me? What was next on your plan? Drowning?” I smiled and held my burning hand in front of my face, watching the tongues of flame pulse up and around it. I made a fist.