Vodník

by Bryce Moore

  “You’ve got to ask yourself one question,” I said, going for my best Clint Eastwood. “Do I feel lucky?”

  I took one step toward the gang, and Gollum and Jabba took a step back. Draco, on the other hand, rushed me. I hadn’t seen that coming. He barreled straight into me, and we thudded to the ground, rolling around. But where the flames weren’t hurting me, Draco didn’t have that protection. I punched him in the side, a quick small jab that left a burning imprint on his shirt. He landed several blows on my kidneys, the pain sharp and clear. We tussled some more, each of us fighting for position, until I got my burning right hand free and placed it right over his face, pushing him away. I felt his skin sizzle where my hand made contact.

  He screamed in pain, the truth of what was happening finally sinking in. He pulled back, and I let him go. He frantically brushed at his face, and the fire went out. A hand-shaped burn covered his face, the skin red and black, but it had missed his eyes, I thought. They were wild with terror, and he stumbled back away from me, running into his cronies. That was all the encouragement Jabba and Gollum needed. They grabbed Draco by the arms, turned, and fled up and over the hill and out of sight.

  I grinned. I felt like the Human Torch, only cooler.

  Of course, extinguishing flaming clothes is still a bit of a bother. And if I didn’t put them out soon, I’d have another nearly-naked walk home ahead of me. I beat my arm against my side, then ended up rolling around in the dirt some to finally get the flames out.

  I’d melted my watch. So much for knowing exactly when dawn was. It still wasn’t quite light yet, though the horizon had started to pinken.

  It didn’t matter. I’d complete the potion the second a beam of sunlight hit me. That was as close to the definition of “sunrise” as you could get.

  I waited there, the cup carved from cherry wood in my left hand, the basin in my right. My jacket had burned completely through on my right arm, and I was covered in dust from the ground, but I completed the potion right on time.

  I dipped the cherry cup into the basin and drew it out full of dirty water with some chunks floating in it that I was pretty sure were bird crap. It didn’t do anything. No explosion, no bright flare of power, no confidence-boosting noises to show it was complete. Time to go back to the apartment.

  L’uboš was waiting for me inside. I nodded to him. He frowned at my appearance, but I shook my head. “Just a bit of trouble. I took care of it.”

  He shrugged and held out some saran wrap and rubber bands. “Put this on top of the potion.”

  Dad met us at the door, dressed in a shirt and tie. He glanced at L’uboš in his T-shirt and jeans and me in my burned jacket. “Are you okay?” he asked me.

  I rolled my eyes. “I’ll explain on the way. Let’s go.”

  “No,” Dad said. “If we’ve only got one chance at this, we’re going to have to dress to impress.”

  Where did parents get those lines? Was there some book they all had a copy of? He had a point, though: we were going to a research institution, and we wanted to make sure they let us in. L’uboš and I hurriedly washed up and changed clothes. My skin wasn’t hurt at all from the BG’s little stunt, but my burnt clothes had left black smudges all over me. I didn’t have time for a full shower, but with a bit of water and soap, I was at least presentable. My uncle looked like a bear in a suit, with his beard bursting out of the collar. How impressive could we be? A kid and a caveman? Good thing Dad was so sharp in his suit. We packed ourselves into the clown car and headed off to Bratislava. The archives opened at eight. We were right on schedule. An hour or two to find the grave’s location, an hour and a half back home, and we should be done with all of this before noon.

  As long as there were no more hiccups.

  Not many other cars were on the road; most people in Slovakia t­raveled by train or bus. But even with the drone of the engine, I was too wired to go to sleep. L’uboš, on the other hand, dozed off. The man was way too pragmatic.

  “What’s it like?” Dad asked after a while, speaking over L’uboš’s snores.

  “What?” I said.

  “Seeing all these things. Talking to them. What’s it like?”

  “I don’t know. Strange. Cool. A real pain.”

  “I’ll bet it was frightening at first.”

  I nodded. “No kidding.” Terrifying was more like it, for some of it, at least—though I wondered whether I’d found it scary when I was a little kid. I still had no memories of that time period, despite all I’d learned in the hunt for answers to Katka’s problem.

  “I wish you’d come and talked to us about it.”

  “I tried, but you and Mom shut me off every time. I didn’t want to cause problems.”

  Dad cleared his throat. “You’re not a problem. Never. I’m sorry we weren’t more available to you. I’m sorry we . . . I’m sorry. Maybe we could have come up with a different solution together, if your mom and I had been more available to you.” He hesitated. “Do you regret coming here?”

  I didn’t even need to think about it. “Not a bit.”

  That seemed to satisfy him. “Get some rest if you can,” he said. “I’ll wake you up when we get there.”

  I settled in for the drive, but sleep stayed far away. Every time my eyes started to drift shut, the image of Katka lying helpless in her hospital bed came into my head, and I jolted awake again.

  One way or another, time passed, and then Dad was tapping L’uboš on the shoulder. “There it is,” he said.

  My uncle grunted and sat up. In front of us was the complete antithesis of a castle. The building was as big as one, but it was shaped like four giant vertical books held together by a horizontal one. The architect must have been as high as Mount Everest when he designed it. “That’s it?” I asked.

  “Ugly, huh?” Dad said.

  “No kidding.” Now that we were there, the ball of anxiety grew bigger in my stomach. If we didn’t get in . . . or if we couldn’t find what we were searching for, then it all ended now. We at least needed some sort of a hint to proceed.

  “You two are my research assistants,” Dad said. “Let me do the talking. Okay?”

  L’uboš and I nodded. Whatever worked.

  We parked and walked into the building. This one at least, unlike the hospital, had some signage showing us where to go. In no time, we were standing in line at the archives desk. We’d thought we’d get there early enough to be first in line, but there were still three people in front of us, all of them looking bored to be there. Even worse, the guy behind the desk seemed like he was about as happy to be there as he would be to shove toothpicks under all his toenails. He gruffed his way through the line, turning away two people and pissing off the one he helped. And then we were up.

  “And?” the guy said.

  Dad cleared his throat. “Yes. I’m here to study the population increases in Trenčín from 1600 through 1850.”

  The man sniffed. “America?”

  Dad smiled. “Yes, how’d you know?”

  “Your accent is horrendous. These books you need to study, they are for a scholarly paper?”

  Dad nodded.

  “Then I’ll have to ask you to fill out an application to request them. They’re far too old and fragile for us to simply lend them out to anyone.”

  “How long will that take?” Dad asked.

  “It shouldn’t be more than a month.”

  I felt my stomach drop. L’uboš cleared his throat to say something, but Dad frowned. “A month? Just to corroborate some facts? I’m sure it won’t take longer than a few hours.”

  The man shook his head. “Not possible on such short notice.”

  “The conference I’m presenting at is next week,” Dad said. “I need the information today. Can’t you make an exception?”

  If anything, the man became more sure of himself. “You Americans can’t expect to waltz in here and do whatever you want. There are rules.”

  L’uboš practically growled, and Dad had to
reach over and put a hand on his arm to keep him quiet. Dad sighed. “I’d like to talk with your manager.”

  “I am the manager.”

  “Who do you report to?” Dad asked.

  “He’s not here.”

  “What’s his name?”

  Now the man seemed less sure of himself. “There’s no need to—”

  Dad leaned forward and read the man’s name tag. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a notepad and started scribbling. “Your last name?”

  The rest of the people in the line were beginning to edge forward for a better view, and the man glanced at them, then licked his lips and looked back at my dad. “What was it you needed again?”

  Within fifteen minutes, we were waiting in a private room for someone to bring the Trenčín city chronicle. “How’d you get around that guy so easily?” I asked my dad.

  He smiled at me. “I’ve had coworkers like that guy. Some people think they own the world as soon as you put them behind a desk. Usually they get away with it, but there aren’t many librarians who are stubborn or brave enough to put up with a patron who gets belligerent. Push too hard and we call security. Push the right way, and we fold. I mean, come on. We’re just librarians.”

  I smiled back. Thank goodness he had been there. Adults don’t treat belligerent teenagers with the same sort of respect. Maybe there were times when being a librarian was cool.

  L’uboš certainly seemed impressed with Dad. My uncle laughed and slapped him on the back, saying, “Very good. Very.”

  The books came—tons of them, each three inches thick. Each time one plopped to a table, another cloud of dust billowed into the air until there was so much you could taste it. I checked the clock. 8:45 a.m. Dad went right to work, examining each book to get a sense of its contents. “She supposedly died in 1796, correct?” he asked.

  L’uboš nodded.

  “All right,” Dad said. “We’ll start there. Much later than that, and I would think the story wouldn’t be a legend—people would know it as fact. I’m betting it’s earlier. Tomas, you take 1796 and go forward to about 1810. I’ll work back from 1796, and L’uboš can go from 1750 forward. If someone finishes sooner and we still haven’t found anything, then they start helping the others. Okay?”

  The chronicles were boring reading. There were maps of the city, lists of prominent citizens and what they did from year to year, discussions of flu outbreaks and floods. How much so-and-so inherited from his uncle. Pretty much everything that happened of importance in the town, they wrote down. “Why do they keep all these records?” I asked.

  “State law,” L’uboš said, his nose still in his book. “I suggest you start by looking for Andricky in the list of prominent citizens. If we can be sure when they lived in the area, then we’ll be able to focus our search.”

  It was a good idea, in theory. In practice, it didn’t pan out. It wasn’t that Andricky was a common name. There were few enough of them that it wasn’t like looking up all the Smiths in a phone book, but there weren’t any with a daughter named Lesana. And no stunning records of anyone being buried alive jumped out at us. Between the three of us, we had processed over a hundred years’ worth of chronicles, and it had taken two hours, even pushing ourselves to go as fast as we could.

  I slammed another book closed in frustration.

  “Stop that, Tomas,” Dad said. “If we start mishandling their books, they’ll kick us out, no matter what we do.”

  “This is ridiculous,” I said, rubbing the bite scar on my hand. “We haven’t found anything.”

  “We just need to be more thorough. The legend could have the date wrong. Hurrying us up won’t help—we might miss something important.”

  “But we’ve already skimmed through the entire century,” I said. “And it’s past eleven. We only have a little over twelve hours before—before it’ll be too late. And we still need an hour and a half to get back to Trenčín and find the stupid grave in real life. Finding it on paper won’t do us any good. What if the building’s locked? What if the grave is in a different country, or off hidden in the woods? What if—”

  “What do I always tell you?” Dad said. “When you have a big task, focus on getting one thing at a time done. It’s the only way.” He handed me another book. “The more we talk about not having time, the less time we have. Keep searching.”

  I read those books until my eyes bled. They were handwritten, and although they had been neatly scribed, there was only so much Slovak cursive you could read before everything began to blend together.

  The more time it took, the more often I checked the clock. Noon went by. So did one o’clock. I felt like I was in the open book test from hell, and of course it was timed. L’uboš and my dad, meanwhile, were like machines. They stayed focused and on task.

  I sat back again. “I’m not even sure I’m seeing what I’m reading anymore.”

  Dad sat back as well. “Maybe we need to have lunch. We’ll think better on a full stomach.”

  That didn’t feel right, either. I grabbed another book, and flipped through it casually. Some of the chronicle pages had some pretty well-drawn sketches. I didn’t want to give up, and going to have lunch would sacrifice a lot of time, but I also didn’t quite have it in me to keep trying to do what seemed so pointless. We’d never—

  I froze, staring at the page in front of me.

  Dad noticed my surprise and leaned forward. “What is it?”

  L’uboš heard this and glanced up as well. I tapped the picture I was looking at. It was of a small city house, sort of what you’d expect Sleeping Beauty to stay in when she was slumming it as a peasant. “This house here. I’ve seen it before. This is where Lesana lived.”

  Dad took the book and stared at the picture. “How can you be sure? Did she show it to you?”

  “It was in one of the visions. I’m sure. This is it.” I read the caption below it. Mierové Námestie 17, 1718. “Peace Square,” I said. “That’s where the plague pillar thing is, right?”

  Dad nodded. “Let me see the book for a moment.” He leafed through to the map of the city, and then pointed out number seventeen. “That’s it. It’s two or three houses down from the church. But it’s listed here as being empty.”

  It took us a bit to piece together what happened. In 1710, half the city died from cholera. In 1716, another third died or moved away. The place was a death trap. A new family didn’t move in until 1719, but the ch­ron­icle said they did extensive renovations on the house before they entered, including altering the facing.

  “That can’t be them, then,” I said. “That was the house she lived in. Who lived in the house before?”

  Give my dad a whiff of the right direction for information, and he’s a bulldog. He ripped through the chronicle like a man obsessed. In five minutes, we had a clearer picture. Before the cholera struck, the house had been in the Laurinsky family for almost a century. They were wealthy merchants who had been important in the city until they were wiped out by cholera.

  “So we had the wrong name all along,” I said.

  “It gets better,” Dad said. He peered at me over his glasses and tapped on the page in front of him. “Lesana Laurinská died in October of 1709 and was buried in the family crypt under the house.”

  “Under the house?” I asked, closing my book and pushing back my chair. I still couldn’t get used to the idea of people who weren’t serial killers burying their dead in their basements.

  “Don’t complain,” L’uboš said. “This makes finding the grave easy. Most of the current buildings are still resting on the original foundations. Some of them date back into the 1600s.”

  “Wait,” I said. “One of those stores in that square has a crypt in the basement?”

  Dad stood. “Maybe more than one.”

  “So what are we going to do?” I asked. “Indiana Jones our way down into the catacombs?”

  We rushed out the door, leaving the books behind. Dad answered. “Sounds like a pl
an. There’s a hardware store just across the square. We can pick up a sledgehammer there if we hurry. If not, we’ll have to break in and steal one.”

  Never underestimate the value of a good sledgehammer. In most situations, they’re even better than duct tape.

  The race back to Trenčín was intense. Dad pushed our little two-door as fast as physics would allow, the doors shaking hard enough I thought they might fall off. We were behind schedule, and we all knew it.

  Then we hit traffic.

  Slovak roads aren’t exactly designed for high speed car chases. In America, freeways crisscross the country. Anywhere you want to go, you can drive fifty-five or higher to get there, for the most part—usually on roads that are in fairly good repair. Slovakia had freeways that started and then ended fifty miles later, going back to country lanes. The government was trying to build the freeway network, but it took time and money. The freeways in existence weren’t particularly wide—two lanes at most, with not a whole lot of shoulder.

  All of this is just to say that when we hit that traffic, we didn’t have any other alternatives. It was wait it out or nothing. My dad groaned in disappointment. L’uboš slammed his fist into the dashboard. I sat back in my seat, stunned. The traffic would clear soon. It had to.

  Or not.

  As it turned out, the traffic jam was from two semi trucks jackknifing in the middle of the road. It took us five and a half hours longer to get back to the city than we’d planned. Where was the good luck when you needed it?

  By the time we got to the city, it was almost nine o’clock. Three hours left. Dad parked the car right in the city center—L’uboš had a special parking pass—and the three of us ran the rest of the way, me carrying the potion. With each step, it sloshed against the saran wrap, but the rubber bands held it tight to the cup. I hoped it didn’t spill.