Storm Wolf (39 page)

“The dill. The holly,” thought the maid. “If I can get a handful of those and press them against the
vlkodlak
, perhaps that can restore him.” She edged away from the other servants, toward the pots growing the natural repellents of werewolves and witchcraft.

The
vlkodlak
shook his great head and slowly clambered out of the wreckage of furniture. Books tumbled from the shelves. His great head swaying from side to side, the wolf took stock of his situation. The maid was reaching for one of the small twigs of dill left in the pot when he must have noticed her movement on the periphery of his vision. With another howl, the wolf flew over the heads of the servants, out the door, and down the hall. The maid heard him dashing further down the stairs and into the kitchen, then crashing out into the courtyard behind the house. If she hadn’t seen the transformation, she would never have believed what she saw next. From the window, she caught a glimpse of the wolf climbing into the air above the wash basin and water pump. The wolf circled the house and, heading for a large bank of clouds in the distant sky, vanished above the castle.

Hours later, Alexei found himself human again. In the gathering dusk, he was sitting on a bluff overlooking the Vltava River. His knuckles were scratched and bleeding, his knees bloody. He had no clear memory of what had happened after escaping from Timotej’s house that morning. Only hazy impressions of angry storms and spirits, one hateful devil on a horse with eight legs particularly consumed with vengeance and bent on the destruction of Prague. He reached an aching arm to brush the hair from his eyes and discovered his shoulder was cut deeply as well. The movement was agonizing.

The evening was growing chilly as the sun hid itself. He shivered and realized that he was sitting there naked. He shivered again, afraid he would be seen and perhaps arrested. He glanced around.

The bluff on which he sat was a shady knoll, overgrown and seemingly abandoned. The city, its gaslights twinkling as they were lit, spread out below him. He could see the St. Agnes Cloister on the opposite bank to his right and the twisted alleyways of the Jewish Quarter near the convent. The spires of Our Lady of Tyn soared opposite the Astronomical Clock tower, and together they presided over the Old Town Square. There, above the grandest and most beautiful city he had ever seen, Alexei felt totally alone.

He stood and slowly walked along the edge of the cliff, keeping to the shadows and hedges as best he could. He discovered he was in a park, and families that had been taking an afternoon stroll were making their way back to their homes. One well-dressed gentleman, seeing Alexei hiding in the bushes, came over and saw the naked, bruised, and bloody man crouching there. Without a word, the gentleman removed his frock coat and draped it over Alexei’s shoulders and then stepped away. Alexei anxiously thrust his arms through the coat sleeves and, buttoning it as best he could, nevertheless remained clearly naked and bruised. He understood why the few other people he did encounter in the park skirted around him. It grew more crowded as he made his way along the streets toward the bridge, but still everyone pretended not to see him. To acknowledge his presence, to admit that such a man walked beside them, would demand some response from even the most inhumane and hardened of hearts among the city dwellers. No one was willing to take that kind of responsibility; to acknowledge one beggar would make it that much more difficult to ignore the next one, and the one after that as well. Where would it end? Better not to acknowledge the presence of the first beggar at all.

Alexei came to Mostecká, the street that led away from the bridge and up the hill. The cobblestones were rough against his bare feet. He turned toward the bridge, jumping aside as an omnibus rumbled past. The Gothic-style gaslights on the balustrades of the bridge twinkled and shimmered in the gathering gloom. Consumed with his own sorrows, he barely noticed the odd quality of the darkness: not simply the absence of sunlight and the coming of evening, but a dark-greenish cast to the heavens as if portending a great storm gathering beyond the horizon.

He walked along the bridge slowly, as if intending to cross to the Old Town, but with no clear destination in mind. He could hear the water rushing past the stone supports of the bridge in the shadows below. The statues of the saints along the sides of the bridge loomed above him.

He came abreast of the oldest statue on the bridge, that of St. John Nepomuk, whose body had been cast into the river from this point after his martyrdom. The bronze images of the base glinted where countless fingers and lips had venerated the images of the saint, Mother Church, and the faithful canine. Alexei, who knew only that such veneration was said to invoke the saint’s protection and bring good fortune, allowed himself to be pushed by the current of the people who milled about the bridge. Finding himself face to face with the statue, he leaned forward and kissed the images as well. The metal was smooth and cold. The crowd jostled him as children, eager for their turn, cried to their parents. He stepped aside and, waiting for the next omnibus to pass, made his way across the bridge to the less crowded south side of the bridge.

He passed St. Ludmila and her shield, depicting the martyrdom of her grandson Wenceslas. He paused at the statue of a priest and angels, overhearing someone comment that it was Francis Borgia, whose sister Lucretia was one of the most infamous women of the Renaissance. He looked across the bridge towards the statue of John the Baptist and back towards its mate on his side of the bridge: St. Christopher. Christopher and John, standing near the midpoint of the bridge as guardians and sentinels of the river, had been placed there because of their shared association with Christ and water: John had baptized Christ in the River Jordan while Christopher, a fourth-century martyr, was said to have been converted as a result of carrying Jesus (in the form of a young boy) across a raging flood. The statue of Christopher, a silhouette of a stone giant standing above Alexei, carried the boy Jesus on his right shoulder as he leaned on the staff he carried in his left. Alexei peered up at the two serene stone faces staring into the sky.

Alexei felt sick. Such peace would never be his again. He had slaughtered his neighbors, destroyed his family, and was at the mercy of the unpredictable transformations into the werewolf. He couldn’t even be sure that he had killed no one in Prague during his seizures by the wolf magic, since he had such dim memories of most of what had happened during those times.

“It should have been safe there,” Alexei said to himself, rocking as he leaned against the balustrade, wrapped in the coat as best he could manage. “It should have been safe, in his house, in his study. Grandfather sent me here, to find him, to find Timotej, to deliver me from the
suteksäija
…” He shook his head in resignation. “But even the great
kouzelnik
cannot help me. Three times he tried and three times his charms failed. Even as he was performing the great exorcism… the werewolf appeared.” Alexei paused, reluctant to face what he suspected was the truth. “I even doubt he truly knew the magic of the old ways.” Timotej had failed him. Did that mean his grandfather
had failed him as well? That was too terrible a possibility to even consider.

“I did everything you told me to do, Grandfather.” Alexei was speaking out across the river, hoping his grandfather was somewhere near, able to hear him. “I used the skin only for the most terrible storms. I saved my plough horses only because I could not bear to let them be ripped apart and eaten by the wolves. I came here because you told me to leave home and advised going south and west. I trusted Timotej because I was sure that you would guide me to the magician who could rid me of the werewolf. I did everything only as you said to do. Why then is everything so wrong? Why has it all gone so very, very wrong?” He buried his face between his forearms and wept.

He remembered Grete’s smile. He remembered the laughter of their children, climbing into his lap or as he hoisted them aloft to ride on his shoulders. He remembered his deep sense of contentment sitting together with Grete in the dark, listening to the children sleeping.

Passersby saw the man huddled in the coat, his shoulders heaving and great sobs racking the air. They circled around him lest he suddenly lash out at one of them in his madness and grief. Darkness settled on the bridge. The flames of the gaslights pricked the night around Alexei.

The sobs slowly subsided and another sound—dim, distant—pricked his ears. From beyond the hills, behind the Strahov Monastery, over the Hunger Wall it came. Alexei felt his stomach twist into ever more painful contortions. A lone wolf howled at the moon.

“No!” he cried between his tears. Alexei saw his beloved Grete and their children, torn and mangled and bloody, as he had left them when he fled Estonia. He saw Spīdala, who had trusted him to keep her safe and not devour her when the Master of Wolves denied him anything else to eat. He tasted the milk she had stolen from cows’ udders to sustain him. He saw her torn and bloody corpse as he fled from the Master of Wolves. “Not again! Not here! Not now! Not—ever!” He clambered up the stonework, dropping the coat on the cobblestones.

“I will see you again, Grete!” he promised. “I will hold you and our children—together—once again! If you will forgive me…” He was suddenly unsure that Grete would want to see him again or that the children would do anything more than spit at him. Trembling, he stared into the rushing current below. “What if they refuse to forgive me?” he asked.

“If I had been brave, I would have done this a long time ago,” he chided himself. “I would have joined Grete immediately… I should have done this rather than run away from home! I would have asked her forgiveness immediately and… and…” His tears began again.

He stood beside St. Christopher for a moment, and before anyone on the omnibus working its way from the Old Town to the Little Town could do anything more than draw a breath or blink their eyes, he jumped.

Water sang in his ears. He coughed and choked as the river filled his mouth, his throat, his lungs. “Free!” A single word roared in his head. Free of the wolf magic. Free to be reunited with his wife and children—if they would forgive him. A single light pierced the darkness and he saw Grete high above him, reaching down to him. He raised a hand to hers, to clasp her hand and pull himself into the light with her.

“Think you to escape my dominion so soon?” a cold voice whispered in his ear, cutting through his mind like ice and steel. He saw a cloaked and hooded figure out of the corner of one eye. He glanced aside to see better, reluctant to take his eyes from Grete high above him. He felt the long cloak slowly wrapping itself around him in the river, then suddenly hands closed around each of his thighs, pulling him down deeper into the current. He fought and kicked, struggling to reach the light and Grete. His lungs burned hotter than any fire he had ever felt. His chest felt as if it would explode. He could see nothing of who spoke or clutched at him. The hands yanked him down into the cold and bitter darkness of the river. His head snapped back, striking the base of one of the stone supports of the bridge. The light above him winked out and the vision of Grete vanished.

Timotej jerked awake. Ever since that horrible night—was it really little more than a week ago?—when he had been awaked by the werewolf crashing into his bedroom, he had slept fitfully. When he had attempted the exorcism in his study, and parts of the man had changed into wolf and back again, the vision before him had seemed like an Impressionist’s nightmare come to life. The paintings of Monet, Cezanne, and Degas that he had seen on his travels to Paris and across Western Europe were embodied in that creature. Colors and textures, fur and skin rippled and merged one into the other and back again. In the face of his failure and the terrifying vision, he had run screaming from the study, seeking anyplace the creature might not find him. Though the werewolf had escaped while he hid in a cabinet in the cellar, the visions and the sounds haunted him until one of the servants found him, still sobbing, long after the werewolf had left. Ever since, he had been expecting another visitation. None of Timotej’s servants had seen the werewolf since that Sunday and none of them could say where he had gone or that he would not return. They all now, on the maid’s advice, kept sprigs of dill or rue or holly in their pockets, lest the werewolf reappear. Timotej hung numerous bundles of the herbs around his bed and above all the doors and windows of the house, but still was unable to shake his mortal fear that the werewolf would return to either exact his vengeance or complete the exorcism. Timotej was not sure which would be worse: being attacked by the creature and being forced to fight it or being confronted by it and being forced to admit that he knew of no other, more powerful exorcistic rite that might banish the werewolf from Alexei’s life. Fear and nightmares engulfed Timotej, but it never occurred to him to fear for his servants or his fellow townsfolk. The creature could be anywhere, stalking anyone, but Timotej feared only for himself.

It was dark. Very dark. What had awakened him? He heard it again. A cannon fired into the night. He struck a match and lit the lamp beside the bed, knocking over the half-empty cup of wine he had sipped to help him fall asleep. He looked at the pocket watch he always left on the table. It was four o’clock in the morning!

“They said a flood might be coming,” he muttered as he clambered out of bed. The Vltava’s water level had been rising. There had been rumors and reports of great storms and flooding further up the river. There had been announcements that the citizens of Prague ought to prepare for a deluge, and the storms had arrived a day or so ago. But the flooding must have swept up the river very suddenly if the cannon at Vyšehrad was firing to warn the townspeople. Timotej hustled across the floor and peered between the curtains into the night.