The fourth-floor hallway smelled like cabbage and stale tea, was unpeopled and noiseless save for the occasional TV murmuring behind closed doors. It must have been around midnight, most of the building’s tenants asleep. I reached 414 and found the door slightly ajar, dim light from inside spilling out into the hall and onto my feet.
I knocked.
I called Hannah’s name.
When there was still no answer, I pushed the door open and stepped inside. A pair of black dress shoes sat in the foyer. The hardwood floors were pitted and scarred and cold underfoot. I could feel the breeze even before rounding the corner. A gauzy curtain billowed into the room, and a double window opened outward onto a Juliette balcony overhanging the street. For one sickening moment I thought of the art gallery curator’s plunge, but as I moved into the living room, I saw Bob Hannah sitting at a kitchen table. Its surface was empty but for an accordion folder stuffed with papers and laying on its side. Hannah had his back to me. Slumped forward, shoulders bunched. He somehow looked smaller asleep, his body coiling inward, limbs receding inside his black suit.
“Hello?” I called. “Door was opened.”
When he didn’t reply, I moved closer and was just about to give his shoulder a gentle shake when I stepped in something warm and sticky. Scrambling sideways I lost my footing, and my hand shot out for his chair to try to regain my balance. No such luck. I fell, and the chair toppled backward and Bob Hannah tumbled out of it, landing next to me with a muffled thump. I would have been eye-to-eye with him, his face just inches from my own, except Bob Hannah no longer had a face.
Bob Hannah no longer had a head.
I kept staring at the space where it should have been, sure that I was looking at everything wrong somehow, that it was a trick of perspective. That all those dark shapes pooled on the floor around me were shadows and not blood. I crabbed backwards and heard a low sound somewhere between a mumble and a growl. The sound rose to a shriek, and my head swiveled to locate its source before I understood its source was me. Blood was all over my suit, my pants, on Prague Unbound, on the bottom of my feet. Still viscous, warm to the touch. Whoever killed him couldn’t have done it long ago.
Meaning the killer was still in the apartment.
I started for the front door and my hand was on the knob when I stopped. If whoever did this was still here and wanted to kill me, the time would’ve been either when I first walked in the room or when I was flailing around in Hannah’s mess.
But that’s not why I suddenly realized they’d left.
There was cake on the floor, next to the shoes.
A spongy cake with cherries, about half of it left. Bublanina cake, Hannah had called it.
The cake box was nowhere in sight.
Before consciously formulating the thought, I realized what had happened. The killer had buzzed me in then left down the stairs as I came up the elevator. Now he was somewhere on the streets below, walking around with an innocent looking cake box under one arm. Bob Hannah’s head was no longer in the apartment—it was in that cake box.
I must say sitting next to a cake can make you incredibly hungry.
I put on the shoes left by the door, figuring I’d track less blood around that way even though my prints were already everywhere. And just in case I was wrong about the killer being gone, I went to the kitchen and started looking for a knife or some other weapon, but all the drawers and cupboards were empty. I spotted a heavy iron poker standing next to a small fireplace in the living room and snatched it up, gauging its heft as I started moving through the apartment. Making a sweep of the place didn’t take long. Besides the kitchen and living room area, there was only a bedroom and small bathroom. Bob Hannah had lived modestly to say the least. No TV, no stereo, just a small alarm clock at his bedside blinking 12:21. No actual bed, just a pillow and an Army Surplus sleeping bag with strips of duct tape suturing its nylon wounds. Bob Hannah had hung no wallpaper, framed no pictures, magneted nothing to his refrigerator door, stacked no mail on the kitchen counter. In his bathroom, a single bar of soap on the sink, one hand towel on the rack, one full roll of toilet paper in the dispenser. No bath towel, no shampoo, no toothbrush. Not even monks lived with this level of austerity.
Something was wrong about this whole set up.
Scrawled in heavy marker on the brown accordion folder on the table was the outline of someone’s right hand. Pages crammed inside were separated by tabs labeled with bizarre, obtuse headings—Revenge Upon Don Julius and The Slime of Revolting Passions . . . The Skeleton of Jánský vršek . . . Inside the Mirror Maze . . . Death Beneath the Blossoming Hawthorn . . . Murcek Curios and Antiques . . . Edward Kelley Chronology. There must have been fifteen or twenty such dividers, but aside from the name Edward Kelley, none held any meaning for me. If the killer was Martinko Klingáč or one of his henchmen, why would they have left this behind? Maybe they’d searched everything and found what they needed. But still, why waste time rifling through the contents of the folder? Why not just take the whole thing?
None of this was making sense.
Then came the sound of screeching brakes, doors being slammed, rushed footfalls on the pavement below. I moved to the opened window and looked down just in time to see five policemen come dashing into the building. There was a sixth one too, but he’d given up dashing sometime after he gained pound number two hundred and seventy-five.
I shoved the accordion folder down front of my waistband. Unbound I shoved in the back, the remaining glass granules from Soros’s windshield raking against my skin. I took off my jacket and lashed it around my waist to keep everything together, and then pushed aside the balcony curtain. Green and white police cars were parked at angles in the middle of the street, lights spinning overhead, the cars themselves empty.
I stepped out on the faux balcony, an outcropping that protruded nearly a foot and was fenced in by a thin iron railing that rose to my waist. Looking down, an identical balcony stood outside the apartment beneath. Hoisting myself over the gate was clumsy going with all the printed matter I had girding my midsection, but in a few seconds I was on the other side. I crouched as low as I could, and then kicked out my feet, letting my body dangle. At full stretch I was still six or seven feet above the balcony below. From there, I’d have to drop two stories to the street. The police started pounding on Hannah’s door. They yelled a couple times and then came a crash like a cannon shot as they kicked the thing in. I closed my eyes, opened my fingers, and dropped.
The Woeful Saga of Kelley and Was-Kelley
Glaucous and fixed in the black firmament of a midnight sky, the moon alights upon five dead men and one dead woman and a dead child of indeterminate sex, their bodies piled haphazard and lime dusted at the bottom of an open pit outside the gates of the village Most. The earth is hard with frost, and scant soil has yet been heaped upon them. A plague is upon the village, and the gravedigger who left his task unfinished is at this hour drunk and insensate, asleep under a mantle of untanned sheepskins inside a derelict construction at the edge of the makeshift cemetery.
Into this night’s congealed blackness, a figure of apparitional white clamors out of the earth, emerging from the burial pit and falling to the ground, trembling like an infant yet to draw its firstborn breath. His garments and closecropped hair are streaked with quicklime and are incandescent under the moonlight. Moments after his materialization, he rises to his knees and commences to brush and shake the substance from his person, and a cloud forms about him as if he were dissolving into the ashes of his creation.
The man has for two days been dead.
A suicide formerly known as Edward Kelley.
One of his legs is wooden below the knee and the other recently fractured in three places above the ankle. The encasing flesh is swollen and discolored, and the poorly set bone beneath has yet to commence knitting itself whole. Two of his ribs are broken, and the left side of his face is blackened with alkaline burns. Where his ears should be are shriveled whorls of
purple.
What he is now is yet to acquire a name.
What he is now may best be understood as Was-Kelley.
The man crawls over rocks and sodden leaves, over fallen trees, over bracken and frozen mud and through the darkness of the forest until he reaches the edge of a highway not two carriages wide and deserted since day’s close. Exhausted he lies prostrate and cold, a cold like he has never known but that will remain in his bones forever more, day or night, in sun or shadow. Under the fixed glaucous moon, he lies delirious and whispering a single name as if in blasphemous prayer.
Madimi. Madimi. Madimi.
Fifty miles distant, Prague awaits. Fifty miles distant, the Rudolf Complication his to reclaim. Was-Kelley watches the stars above recede, watches the road and the forest and waits for a sign from Madimi, the little spirit girl who has chased him from his home, who has earned and lost him a fortune, who has engineered his rise and his downfall, become his salvation and his damnation alike. Madimi, Madimi, Madimi. The little girl who is now his master.
Was-Kelley cannot remember when first he laid eyes upon her. It happened some fifteen years previous while gazing at Dr. John Dee’s shewstone—a slab of convex, polished obsidian plundered by the Spanish from the Aztec race, an instrument of murderous pedigree. Other spirits had answered their call—Uriel, King Camara, Prince Lasky’s guardian angel Jubanladec, Medicina and Galvah, Gabriel and Nalvage and Zadkiel—but it was Madimi who came most often, appearing as a six-year-old girl but announcing herself a six-thousand-year-old angel who spoke every tongue known on Earth and some long vanished from it. Was-Kelley no longer remembers those startling visions Madimi revealed—four sumptuous and belligerent Castles, out of which sounded Trumpets thrice. Three Ensign Bearers, each with the ancient name of God writ upon their banners. An East the red of new-smitten blood, a West green like the skins of dragons. Eleven Noblemen in Rich Sables. Seventy-two White Lilies with bowed heads, a Man on Fire and naked unto his paps, an Italian Bishop carrying an iron chest containing black wax and a dead hand.
Kelley knew then this spirit Madimi was no angel.
But still he heeded her words as Madimi drove Kelley and Dee from English soil, warning the crystal-gazers that their friends in Elizabeth’s court were but worms in the straw who conspired mightily and were preparing to arrest them on charges of witchcraft. The animated corpse that is now Was-Kelley lacks power of recollection to summon the night Mortlake was stormed by an angry mob incited by tales of the dark happenings inside. He cannot recall how finding the crystal-gazers gone they had turned their wrath onto John Dee’s instruments of divination, destroying his alchemical lab and his astronomical apparatuses and burning down his library.
To Bremen, to Lubeck, to Lask, and to Krakow they fled, a harsh winter forcing them to hire five and twenty men to clear the icebound road ahead. During their journey, Madimi revealed a vision of Mrs. Jane Dee dead in her petticoats, her face battered in, and of maid Mary being pulled from a pool of water half drowned. She summoned Dee’s stillborn children and made of them marionettes engaged in dances whimsical and lascivious. Dee would endure these horrors in hopes of unraveling cabalistic mysteries at any cost in his quest to unite the manifold sciences of Nature, still believing this spirit whose counsel they had gained was an emissary of God.
In Prague they’d gained favor of the pale, wanton King by promising him the Philosopher’s Stone. When they’d failed to deliver, Dee hastily fled back to the ruins of Mortlake, but his skryer Kelley was captured at an inn in Soběslav, imprisoned in the castle Křivoklát, manacled and fed horsemeat pushed through a fist-sized hole in the wall while he awaited questioning by Master Executioner Jan Mydlář.
If there be any mercy in Was-Kelley’s resurrection, perhaps it is that he doesn’t remember those three days with the Master Executioner. Locks shorn so as not to be enmeshed in the gears of the rack he was stretched upon. Prodded by hot iron poker, invaded by pear of anguish, all the while the rack’s wheel revolving notch by notch like the gears of some infernal clock. Was-Kelley doesn’t remember those long weeks of solitary and starved convalescence in a dark oubliette afterward, only to learn that six months hence, the Master Executioner and his dread instruments would return.
It was then Kelley had tried to escape from a high castle tower, tearing what remained of his clothes to fashion a crude rope measuring some twelve feet in length in hopes of lowering himself seventy feet to the ground. His pathetic conveyance snapped, and Kelley had plummeted before landing with a calamity registered by none save the rats scurrying through the heaped refuse at the tower base. His left leg crumpled beneath him, and blood issued through every orifice. Moonlight pooled in a shallow puddle of his own micturition. Edward Kelley had begun to pray.
Madimi, Madimi, Madimi.
She answered his call. She revealed to him a vision, a plan with which he might win the King’s favor afresh and prolong his own wretched life. She told him he may yet be spared, but it would come at a price. She demanded he aid her in unleashing onto the world a miraculous timekeeping instrument that granted its wearer eternal life. Thus in a vision of blood and shimmering piss was conceived the Rudolf Complication.
Upon seeing Kelley’s splayed form the next morning the guards first guessed him dead, but the castle physician found no major damage had occurred save to his left leg, whose bones were broken in so many places the flesh was rendered a gangrenous mass in need of immediate amputation. The limb was sawed off and cauterized, replaced with a length of wood. Six months later he was again placed upon the rack, albeit with one less limb to be secured. I know not the secret of the Philosopher’s Stone, Kelley confessed when the Master Executioner began the session. But perhaps I can interest his Majesty in a watch?
Morning and the sun rises pale and distant over rolling hills of snow-dusted trees. The resurrected Was-Kelley lies shivering and waiting for his sign from Madimi, and soon enough it comes. A gypsy caravan pulled by an emaciated horse with ashen hide scarce sufficient to cloak its bones arrives juddering down the narrow highway. The carriage makes slow progress through the forest, but the driver cracks no whip and issues neither threats nor entreaties into the ears of his skeletal nag. The sound of its hooves falling upon the frozen road is muted by the thin mantle of snow thereupon, and naught else is audible for miles. All at once the mare stops and the caravan creaks and groans as it is brought to a halt. The horse stands in contemplation of the obstruction in the path before him, and his nostrils send bursts of vapor into the cold winter air.
Was-Kelley looks up at the gray underchin of the nag. He takes in the caravan and the driver upon it. The motionless rider sits with a damask stitched of many cloths covering his head and a moth-eaten crimson blanket wrapped around his frame. Aside from a mossy black beard hoary with frost, his features cannot be countenanced. Only his hands are visible, the wagon reins lashed and knotted around one wrist, while his opposite fingers bear rings as large as goat eyes and cling to a lump of stale black bread.
Was-Kelley brushes against the horse as he struggles to his feet, and the nag lurches and whinnies as if snake bitten. Was-Kelley tries to calm the animal but it rears, front legs wheeling at the sky. When the horse comes down, the reins jerk taut, and the gypsy driver is tumbled from his carriage perch. He lands in a graceless heap but does not cry out nor attempt any movement. One naked eye gazes skyward, the other already picked clean by carrion. Beneath the beard the man’s face is swollen and his neck black with buboes. A victim of the plague. Inside the carriage, his passengers are likewise unmoving and silent, and Was-Kelley understands they have been travelling dead upon this road for hours or days, understands that Madimi has brought them here. Like him they have become her servants.
Was-Kelley searches the man’s garments and finds a stag horn–handled dagger lashed to his waist and a sow’s ear coin pouch around his neck. He takes both into his possession and then wobbles to a stand with the aid of the high wagon wheels. Peering inside the coach
he finds three women so withered and wild in their attire that they look not like inhabitants of the earth and yet are on it. Each corpse is swathed in a refulgent pandemonium of color, and each looks more lifeless than the last, as if the bodies had been arranged by the hour of their death. Was-Kelley opens the caravan door, climbs into the vacant carriage seat opposite these fellow travelers, and settles in for a long journey. The whitish sun moves unhurried across the sky as the gray nag snorts and the cart shudders into motion. Fifty miles distant, Prague awaits.
CHAPTER 11
My brother broke his leg when he was seventeen, the year my mom left us. Fractured his fibula just above the ankle. Paul said he and some of his friends had been playing football, that he went up to catch a pass and just came down wrong. It was a Saturday night in late December while we were on Christmas break, and there were six inches of snow on the ground. Not the fluffy kind, either, but the week-old, frozen-solid and sculpted-by-the-wind variety. Snow nobody in their right mind would play football on. And though my brother’s friends were often not in their right minds, they would never be out tossing a pigskin around in December when they could be holed up in somebody’s basement, huddled around a bong while listening to Soundgarden.
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