The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 17 Page 16

  Furling the umbrella, I stepped inside.

  An intruder, I walked along a hall that seemed no older than 1900. I told myself: I’ll look down this central hall, past these gilt-framed paintings of Hradcany Castle and St Wenceslas Square; and afterward, I’ll return to my hotel, and wait for word to come again from Hastrman.

  The hall was silent. The parquet tiles smelled of recent waxing. Doors stood open onto dim halls, where lurked desks and chairs. One was clearly an academic classroom, with steep seating.

  All of which conflicted, somewhat eerily, with the history of Fastuv Dum. Walking this hall, I was walking through a 12th-century edifice, one which, like most of Prague’s historical structures, was untouched by the bombs of World War II.

  At the end of the hall, I found, on my right, a narrow door marked with a vivid graphic symbol: a flight of stairs.

  And I followed.

  Sklepeni, they are called – those vast, barrel-vaulted cellars of old Prague.

  I ducked under a stone lintel, into the first of several chambers receding into the dark.

  Here was Fastuv Dam’s ancient past.

  I pulled off my gloves, put them in my right pocket, then took the flashlight from my left. I shone its beam across cracked flagstone, over stacks of boxes, brooms and buckets.

  In the corner was a pile of potatoes, sprouting pale tendrils.

  Faust, I recalled (to distract myself), had not fought Mephistopheles here in the cellar; rather, the battle had been waged in the attic, and the unfortunate alchemist was snatched up through the ceiling, leaving a hole that had remained for decades afterward, refuting any attempt to patch it.

  In the next chamber was an active boiler. I hesitated, feeling the warmth on my face and hands. It woke me, somewhat. I nearly turned around, nearly headed back up the stairs. Instead, thinking of Tyn and Emauzy, of Tycho Brahe and the tomb, I ducked into the next chamber. Tipped in the far corner were dozens of black iron rods, as tall as me or taller, baroquely detailed in golden Rudolfine motifs. Lightning rods.

  Smelling the old iron, I hesitated again, drawn by a rod’s similar pattern to my ring. Then I continued on, under another vaulted arch, to find an old man seated at a card table, beneath a bare light bulb.

  He looked as startled as I. Frozen, wide-eyed, with a spoon halfway to his mouth. He had white brows and a burnished, high-domed forehead. He wore blue overalls and was sparrow-thin.

  Striving for a non-threatening tone, I said, “Dobry vecer, Pane.” I shut off my flashlight. “Mluvit Anglicky?”

  After a pause, he nodded. “Speak little.” His voice was faint.

  I told him I was an American, and a teacher. This seemed to relax him slightly. He set the spoon back into his soup.

  I pointed at him, “You – custodian?”

  He rose from his chair – the scrape of wood on stone echoed sharply – and gestured in the direction I’d come, back to the stairs. “Prosim.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “Kde katakomby?” I pointed at the floor. “Katakomby?”

  He froze, squinting.

  I took out my notebook and flipped to the map I had drawn. His eyes had followed my right hand: the ring.

  Lips parted, he stared.

  The intensity in his eyes, somehow, gave me strength.

  I held it up. “Recognize?”

  He licked his lips. “Ano.”

  I pointed to the map and the sketch of the catacombs.

  Nodding, he turned from me, limping further into the chamber, toward the next one. Trading the notebook for the flashlight, I followed, through another chamber of old boxes and barrels, into another with a lower ceiling.

  “Tam jsou,” he said, pointing. “There.”

  I shone the flashlight past his shoulder. A lip of grey stone rose from the flagstone, with oaken doors laid in its face.

  He pulled a cord overhead: a light bulb shone on silver hinges shaped as stylized spiders. The hasp was a baroque silver eye. A black rod was laid diagonally across.

  He hesitated, until I gestured that he should continue.

  The hasp, it seemed, was not locked. With both hands, he lifted the lightning rod. Dust stirred as he set it aside.

  I had to help him lift the doors. The wood squeaked sharply, echoing behind us, and below. I coughed at the acrid dust. A moment later I smelled the sharp, moist odor rising with it.

  A stairway of crumbling stone descended, down and around, out of sight.

  I set my umbrella on the ground. I pulled out my wallet, and withdrew a thousand crown note. “Wait.” With a slight shake to my hands, I tore the note in half, and handed half to him.

  I pointed to the 12 on my wristwatch. “Til midnight.”

  He seemed to understand.

  Lev, such a world exists.

  The ancient steps coiled downward, for longer than I expected. I had to crouch under the chill stone, and climb down and around, until the steps ended on slick, algae-stained rock.

  In my flashlight’s gleam, there were no visible footprints.

  How long, I wondered, since someone had come down here?

  The air was close, fetid. Treading carefully, I found myself in a barrel-vaulted chamber. Old stone to the right and left. In accordance with the map, the tunnel stretched north, growing more narrow; and southward.

  I began to walk southward.

  For those first hundred paces, the passage remained narrow enough: with outstretched arms, I could touch the walls on either side. But within another hundred it widened. I felt a moist breeze on my face and hands.

  I passed square outlines on either side, and remembered the legends of unlucky folk sealed into casements.

  Under my boots, the algae thinned. Soon I was walking on mostly bare stone.

  I listened, expecting voices. Emauzy church, after all, was no more than a quarter mile from Fastuv Dum; voices should resonate in these acoustics.

  The path began to descend, however subtly.

  Soon after, my shoe slapped the first puddle. It sparkled in the flashlight’s beam. Ahead, an inch of water covered the floor.

  The tunnel widened into a vaulted space, remnants of the earliest city, pierced by grey stone columns.

  The water was nearly to the top of my boots.

  Slogging through, I thought of storm clouds, of lightning striking the Rudolfine spires of loftiest Prague, and the energy surging down here into the dark, dwindling in these primeval spaces, in solitude, the tiniest portions of those distant storms playing over slimed rock and sediment, in spaces lit now by the darting glow of my flashlight. Then, variously, I thought of the stone face peering out of Tyn’s doorway, and of Prague’s population of gargoyles and statues that must tremble, however slightly, with the thunder, joined to the same ancient stone sunk into the bedrock around me as this space – this space which opened up even further: the underside of the Emauzy church.

  And there came a sudden keening sound, tremulous, high-pitched, echoing up and down the chamber, suddenly dropping into the range of a human voice, in imitation of – in parody of – a familiar melody.

  Rusalka’s Aria to the Moon.

  Unable to stop myself, I walked toward it.

  How to write rationally about what happened next?

  Ascribe it to a dream, or a nightmare.

  Staggering along the tunnel – being drawn along – by a keening sound that might have been an incantation not unlike music.

  My flashlight flickering, dying.

  Standing in darkness. A darkness alive with silvery ripples.

  Shaking the flashlight. Opening it with trembling fingers, removing the batteries, reinserting them. A faint glow kindling when I turned it on, but quickly fading.

  I called out, “Pane Hastrman?” My voice echoing sharply. Then, in the dark, a sudden greenish glow, close by. Stench – burnt ozone, as I lifted my hand to ward off the glow, only to find it was the ring.

  I tried – not really thinking, I suppose – to shake it free. Then looked past
it, to what the quivering green glow revealed: close to the ground, in the water, something scraping, rattling, as it approached. A vague shape at first, at the edge of green light, and the harsh rattle was its breathing.

  Milovana.

  Or, as I would later translate it, “Beloved.”

  She – it – lay in the water, scales glinting, huffing in pained exhalations, her eyes, vertically-irised, widening with something like adulation. As her head lifted, dark-nippled dugs lifted out of the water.

  She shuddered there, coiled.

  This daughter of Earth and Darkness. No longer quite as beautiful as she’d been in Tycho Brahe’s day.

  I stepped back – stumbling – tripping. Struck the water with my shoulder, a loud splash, as the chill water invaded my clothes. The ring was lost but for its erratic green glow beneath the surface. The rasp and shudder of her breathing, as she scrabbled closer in the veering light, as I lifted my hand out of the water.

  And—

  —as I gazed toward the creature – a premonition of Bosch’s underworld—

  Her teeth, gleaming in the ring’s glow, were sharp like a moray eel’s. Talons were equally sharp. I shook my head, found my voice, croaking, “No, no,” pushing myself up, stumbling backwards – catching my boot in a swirl of green cloth that was a long coat, that was Hastrman’s coat, and the silvery weed on the surface of the water his high-collared shirt, just below his pale blue eyes peering up, under the Medusa wreath of his hair.

  I tripped, fell backwards. Another anguished cry, an instant before her talons, or teeth, struck.

  And the only light – my luminous green – toppled into the water, strangely burdened. Two fingers bobbed on the surface.

  Pain was remote. Her wailing cry was all that mattered, as I stumbled backwards. It chased me through the dark as I staggered bleeding, growing fainter, merging with Vltava’s thrum, the crazy stutter of my boots on the rock and a painful thud as my knees hit the stairs below Fastuv Dum.

  “Vodnici,” the caretaker whispered, eyes wide. He wrapped a cloth around my hand, tightened it, and when the bleeding had slowed he returned to the trapdoor and struggled it shut, then laid the Rudolfine iron atop it.

  I tried, in subsequent years, to delude myself.

  Dawson – who arranged my swift, confidential medical treatment – never fully accepted the story I had concocted, the same one I would later tell to Genevieve, and, still later, to Margaret. At the Prague airport, I passed easily through Customs. I saw no sign of the StB agent; I doubt there had ever been one.

  I’d already begun doubting what I had seen.

  It was the beginning of a process. Walling up, covering over those memories, as solidly as the katakomby of Nova Mesto.

  I remember how, during my holiday visit to your house, while showing Erel my mother’s Folio of Fra Angelico, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and Bosch, I felt a twinge of unease, ascribing it to those childhood nightmares.

  In 1994, when the soprano Gabriela Berezkova drowned in the Vltava at the age of thirty-six, I was able to push aside the troubling thoughts. In 1996, when Margaret died in the Elbe river off Saxony, I accepted the official explanation, that the sightseeing boat had struck some rocks, and those same rocks had forced the horrific injuries to my wife’s body, alone among the drowned passengers, a hundred miles north of Prague in the Elbe, not far after its junction with the Vltava.

  In 2002, when the Vltava flooded its banks, I watched images of Sharpshooter Island on CNN.

  That night, I dreamt of its oak-lined paths lost under the roiling waves, and of my Rusalka and her Water Sprite swimming graceful in the cold currents beneath the Legion Bridge, gazing up through the churning rain-struck surface at the human faces peering blindly down.

  The next day I dug out my water-logged notebook, and read it with an open mind for the first time in years. And began reconstructing events.

  I was the one, Lev – I am now certain – who ignited Erel’s interest in Prague.

  The stories I told that winter day, of Rusalki and Vodnici, stayed with him, I’m certain, as did the memory of those paintings. In a way similar to my own experience, I’m sure they had an influence, however subtle, in his choosing Medieval History as his major in college.

  From the newspaper account, I know that in his last email, which he sent from the café near Tyn, he said he was planning to wander the river bank that day, and explore the New Town as thoroughly as he did the Old Town.

  Three weeks ago, only days after Elizabeth wrote of Erel’s disappearance, I received a package, circuitously, from Prague.

  Perhaps you have already opened the box, unable to wait. If not, do so now.

  The ring is more tarnished than I remember.

  Lev, research the inscription and the symbolism yourself. Also, have your police forensics test the reddish cast that stains the ring. It looks too recent to be mine.

  By the time you receive this, I will not be here.

  Milovana is waiting.

  You must keep Elizabeth at home: do not let her go in search of her brother.

  Milovana is waiting.

  I do not expect Genevieve to believe much of this letter. Perhaps neither will you.

  You will no doubt have questions.

  I will not be there to answer them.

  With utmost regret and sadness,

  Stephen

  CAROL EMSHWILLER

  I Live With You

  and You Don’t Know it

  CAROL EMSHWILLER WAS BORN in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She grew up in France, where her father was a professor of linguistics, and she currently lives in New York City, where she teaches writing at New York University School of Continuing Learning.

  For many years married to the famous science fiction artist “Emsh”, she did not begin writing until she was thirty and her first novel, Carmen Dog, was published in 1988. Since then she has followed it with Venus Rising, Ledoyt, Leaping Man Hill, the Nebula Award-nominated The Mount and the young adult novel Mister Boots. Her acclaimed short fiction has been collected in Verging on the Pertinent, the World Fantasy Award-winning The Start of the End of It All and Other Stories, Joy in Our Cause: Short Stories, Report to the Men’s Club: Stories and the recent I Live With You, which takes its title from the disturbing, Nebula Award-winning tale that follows.

  A recipient of the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2005, since the mid-1960s Emshwiller’s stories have appeared in numerous anthologies. However, she admits: “This is the first time I’ve been in a horror collection. I never thought I would be.”

  I LIVE IN YOUR HOUSE AND YOU DON’T KNOW IT. I nibble at your food. You wonder where it went . . . where your pencils and pens go . . . What happened to your best blouse. (You’re just my size. That’s why I’m here.) How did your keys get way over on the bedside table instead of by the front door where you always put them? You do always put them there. You’re careful.

  I leave dirty dishes in the sink. I nap in your bed when you’re at work and leave it rumpled. You thought you had made it first thing in the morning and you had.

  I saw you first when I was hiding out at the bookstore. By then I was tired of living where there wasn’t any food except the muffins in the coffee bar. In some ways it was a good place to be . . . the reading, the music. I never stole. Where would I have taken what I liked? I didn’t even steal back when I lived in a department store. I left there forever in my same old clothes though I’d often worn their things at night. When I left, I could see on their faces that they were glad to see such a raggedy person leave. I could see they wondered how I’d gotten in in the first place. To tell the truth, only one person noticed me. I’m hardly ever noticed.

  But then, at the bookstore, I saw you: just my size, Just my look. And you’re as invisible as I am. I saw that nobody noticed you just as hardly anybody notices me.

  I followed you home – a nice house just outside of town. If I wore your clothes, I could go in and out and everybody would think I wa
s you. But I wondered how get in in the first place? I thought it would have to be in the middle of the night and I’d have to climb in a window.

  But I don’t need a window. I hunch down and walk in right behind you. You’d think somebody that nobody ever notices would notice other people, but you don’t.

  Once I’m in, right away I duck into the hall closet.

  You have a cat. Isn’t that just like you? And just like me also. I would have had one were I you.

  The first few days are wonderful. Your clothes are to my taste. Your cat likes me (right away better than he likes you). Right away I find a nice place in your attic. More a crawl space but I’m used to hunching over. In fact that’s how I walk around most of the time. The space is narrow and long, but it has little windows at each end. Out one, I can look right into a treetop. I think an apple tree. If it was the right season I could reach out and pick an apple. I brought up your quilt. I saw you looking puzzled after I took the hall rug. I laughed to myself when you changed the locks on your doors. Right after that I took a photo from the mantel. Your mother, I presume. I wanted you to notice it was gone, but you didn’t.

  I bring up a footstool. I bring up cushions, one by one until I have four. I bring up magazines, straight from the mailbox, before you have a chance to read them.

  What I do all day? Anything I want to. I dance and sing and play the radio and TV.

  When you’re home, I come down in the evening, stand in the hall and watch you watch TV.

  I wash my hair with your shampoo. Once, when you came home early, I almost got caught in the shower. I hid in the hall closet, huddled in with the sheets, and watched you find the wet towel – the spilled shampoo.

  You get upset. You think: I’ve heard odd thumps for weeks. You think you’re in danger, though you try hard to talk yourself out of it. You tell yourself it’s the cat, but you know it’s not.

  You get a lock for your bedroom door – a dead bolt. You have to be inside to push it closed.

  I have left a book open on the couch, the print of my head on the couch cushion. I’ve pulled out a few grey hairs to leave there. I have left a half-full wine glass on the counter. I have left your underwear (which I wore) on the bathroom floor, dirty socks under the bed, a bra hanging on the towel rack. I left a half-eaten pizza on the kitchen counter. (I ordered out and paid with your stash of quarters, though I know where you keep your secret twenties.)