The Seven Churches: A Gothic Novel of Prague

1

I talk of the new season.

Spring has come in winter. Snow in the branches

Shall float sweet as blossoms.

T.S. Eliot

It was a beautiful early November morning. All through October a lingering Indian summer had kept autumn at bay until, with a flick of its wand, the first sharp frost numbed the city into immobility. Not half a year had passed since the end of the Modern Age; now the metropolis was bracing itself for the coming winter. As the days closed in and the cold crept under fingernails, factory chimneys exhaled their hot fetid breath and window-panes glistened with condensation. But they were the fumes of putrefaction, the sweat of death. For all the smart new façades and fast cars - the city’s make-up and jewellery - this stark truth was best disguised by the unchanging trees in Charles Square, some a year old, some a century, some as old as the millennium itself. Yet everyone saw it coming. Many averted their eyes in dread and yielded to the onslaught of that final autumn, as the three-headed hound lunged headlong at the ancient city of Prague, its three ravenous maws devouring any living being that dared venture forth at this late hour of human history. The massacre was merciless.

That was last year, before everything changed. Then came the Age of Mercy.

*

A low, pale sun crept over the hospital wall and caught in the cobweb tops of the maples. Slowly, almost grudgingly, it warmed the icy air heavy with the smell of fallen leaves that covered the whole pavement. In Kateřinská they were no worse than in other years, but in Viničná they formed a great rustling dune all down the street, obliterating asphalt and cobblestones alike. Gone was all certainty of terra firma. Every step was an adventure into the unknown that left an ill-defined and vaguely ominous footprint in the russet drifts. But wading through a leaf-filled street can be dangerous - as dangerous as walking on a frozen river.

Cleaving the yellow sea and dodging the swirling showers of ochre, vermilion and umber, I made my way up Vĕtrov Hill towards Karlov. By now the street had become a canyon, its sheer banks formed by the hospital wall on the left and the Museum of Mankind on the right. In my mind’s eye I followed it over the crest of the rise, spanning the valley beyond and leading, inevitably, to the church. Here the devout pilgrim needs no guide.

An ambulance drove past, then another and, after an interval, a third. Not many really. In the old days, when I still wore a uniform and came this way not simply for pleasure, I had usually counted more. Then you could stroll up this quiet street, far from the haunts of drug-pushers and money-changers, and never meet a soul. What brought me here now? Habit perhaps, or the pleasure of a walk at dawn that promised more from the day ahead than the inevitable click of a light switch at dusk. But who would want to dash through the New Town in a wailing ambulance, disturbing the sublime peace of the morning?

Viničná Ulice is almost three hundred yards long and dead straight, affording an unobstructed view from one end to the other. I was no more than halfway up the street when I spotted a woman walking a short distance ahead of me. How had I not noticed her sooner? It gave me quite a start, as I had thought the street deserted. The small stooping figure, though far from decrepit, seemed to be making laborious progress. She had short grey hair, a brown overcoat and - that indispensable accessory of elderly ladies - a brown shopping-bag. I slowed down so as not to startle her. This proved unnecessary: despite being knee-deep in leaves she walked surprisingly briskly.

As she waded through the gold-and-scarlet tide she kept glancing at the ochre wall on her left, as if on the look-out for a red street-sign or some other aid to orientation. She was not a local then. I noticed she was wearing large spectacles that concealed the entire upper half of her face. As I watched she turned her head, stopped and peered inside an open gate leading into a yard on her right. At that moment there appeared over the gatepost, directly above her, the massive tower of St Apollinaris with its pointed roof. It looked like a mischievous monk waiting to pounce on any hapless pilgrim to the church. I was on the point of shouting a warning when I realized that the shimmering air was playing tricks with my eyes.

The woman hesitated and walked on. And now my first hallucination gave way to a second: the rustle of her footsteps in the leaves no longer seemed to come from some way ahead but from close behind me. Though I was sure no one was following me I turned my head. The street was deserted. On the roadway tyres had traced black lines in the snow; the silence, now that the sirens had died away, was more profound than ever. A gust of wind stirred the leaves and the tracks disappeared.

Laughing at my own jumpiness I turned to continue on my way. But the small woman was nowhere to be seen. She must have turned into Apolinářská, either right towards the church or left towards the Magistrale, the freeway that bisects the city. Or had she carried straight on down the old steps to Albertov? Would she have dared?

Vĕtrov Hill is an inhospitable place and treacherous to those foolish enough to succumb to its beauty. The wind rushes up Viničná and Apolinářská, creating where they meet a whirlwind like a small tornado. On more than one occasion it has whipped off my cap and hurled it over a fence or under a car, and the rain always caught me unawares here with nowhere to take shelter. Today those two bullies were at work elsewhere - possibly across the valley - but Vĕtrov had another trick up its sleeve: just before I reached the junction I tripped on a hard object hidden in the leaves, scuffing my shoe and stubbing my toe painfully. I pushed aside the leaves with my foot to reveal the broken paving. The square-cut greenish stones were laid in a geometrical pattern. Many were missing. In the grey cracks fluttered a few bleached blades of grass - a pale memento of summer.

At the crossroads, where once stood the Poisoned Chalice - a notorious public house frequented by students and criminals - I turned right and, not for the first time, was astonished by the brilliant colours of the flowers in the garden of St Apollinaris’ Vicarage. Perhaps they bloom in memory of the now-vanished hostelry and those generations of regulars who used to stagger out at closing time to water them through the slatted fence. I know a bit about flowers, but I have never managed - at least not with any certainty - to tell the difference between dahlias and asters. I admire both. Tall asters, those last constellations of declining summer, grew there in bright profusion. That morning I recalled those words and let them jog my memory. I don’t know who wrote them or when I read them, but now they reminded me and dispelled all doubt. The next time you pass St Apollinaris’ Vicarage, remember that those spiky heads behind the fence are asters. Names are important.

Out of habit I raised my eyes from the red and mauve flowers to the mighty walls and dark windows of the church. Approached from this side St Apollinaris’ seems like an impregnable fortress, too close for comfort, and you quicken your pace as the towering mass of masonry threatens to crush you with its countless - yet precisely counted - blocks of stone. Better than this eastern aspect is the view from the south side: here you can take in the whole church, which now appears in a brighter, friendlier light. Not until you see the building from the south-east, however, can you appreciate the whole of the tower, nave and apse in all their splendour. Indeed, though the church was until recently badly neglected, you would be hard put to find its equal.

My gaze wandered up the buttresses and over the leaded windows with their pointed arches. Time had taken its toll on the walls of the apse: the ochre rendering, turning green and patched with moss near the ground, bulged where the damp had penetrated, forming fragile insect-infested pockets. Moisture glistened on the bare stone buttresses scarred with cracks, where over the years lichen, soot and decaying matter had lodged. Spiders crawled out of crevices into the warm sunlight. In the recess of one tall window sat a brown cockroach. It seemed to have just woken up and taken fright at something.

In bygone times the place had known other denizens. The but tresses that still held up the walls had once supported flimsy roofs of bundled faggots, in whose shade the destitute, in the hope of alms, had held out their leprous hands to artisans, clerks and merchants on their way to mass. They, too, had their guild and defended their miserable hovels against newcomers from the countryside who had nothing at all. Of the beggars not a trace now remained, yet the Samaritan spirit of the place lived on: not far from the church was a centre for drug addicts - the lepers of the twentieth century.

But this morning no one was out and about; no one dared venture forth into this blinding light. Apolinářská was empty and silent. No congregation flocked to the church, which was closed for repairs. All was as usual. Except for one thing: in the open space outside the ugly concrete infant school across the road, beside a statue of a kneeling girl, a second figure had appeared.

It was the woman who had been walking ahead of me. Still clutching her brown bag, she stood gazing at that stylized representation of innocent childhood. I saw her lips move. Perhaps it reminded her of something. I drew closer. The unusual sight of a person conversing with a statue was disquieting. Quite forgetting I was no longer in uniform, I quietly walked up to the woman and asked if she was in need of help.

She pointed to the statue. ‘That’s not possible …’

What was not possible? The awful building? Or the institution it housed? The nearby Poisoned Chalice, the scene of several infamous murders, had been pulled down long ago and replaced, in a more enlightened age, by - what else? - a school for infants! (But can the genius loci be exorcized just like that?) Yet the look of wide-eyed astonishment on the face of that woman with her spectacles and shopping bag expressed not indignation but panic. It occurred to me she might be mad. Maybe she was on her way to the doctor’s or the psychiatric clinic just up the road and had forgotten where she was going. Lost in familiar memories, she had lost her way in unfamiliar streets.

Again I addressed her, as gently as I could. ‘It’s only a statue. If you’re going to the doctor’s and you’ve lost your way I can take you there.’

‘Can’t you see?’ she snapped, turning on me angrily. ‘Don’t you know what kind of flowers those are?’

My suspicions were confirmed: the woman was raving mad. All the same I glanced at the crumbling concrete statue. All that remained of the left arm was a rusty wire. On her head, which was wet with dew and darker than her body, the maimed girl wore a crown of bright-yellow flowers - no doubt left there by some other, living girl, a girl of flesh and blood.

‘They’re fresh,’ said the little lady with the spectacles. ‘Someone picked them this morning and made them into a garland. A garland for a stone virgin. How on earth … ? I know for a fact these flowers only grow in the spring.’

‘I expect there’s a simple explanation,’ I reassured her. ‘There’s an institute just down the hill, some kind of genetic garden that belongs to the university. They’ve probably developed a species that flowers in autumn.’

She looked at me as if I was the crazy one, not her. ‘Oh yes? Show me who could do a thing like that and I’ll go down on my knees and pray to them! That is a medicinal plant, young man, and a very rare one. Not that it means much to you, I’m sure. It only ever flowers in early spring.’

Childhood memories flashed through my mind: walking with my grandmother, picking yellow flowers; honey, cough syrup; old wives’ remedies.

I took a closer look. The little lady stepped aside to make room. Carefully, I reached up and removed the garland from the girl’s head. For a moment I held it in both hands, turning it this way and that. And then I sniffed it. Suddenly the name came to me: coltsfoot.

I was still gazing down at the garland when I was startled by a loud crash followed by an ugly metallic sound. It came from somewhere above me - out of the air, out of the sky. Then all was quiet again. I looked up from the flowers still dangling from my fingers. I was alone with the statue - the old lady had vanished. Again I heard the sound, clearer this time, its strange, irregular tones reverberating all around: ding DANG, ding DANG … Yes, there was something odd about it, something different. Up in the church tower the bell was ringing, horribly out of tune. I glanced at my watch. It was eight forty-five. My blood froze: the church was closed yet someone was ringing for mass.

I am not a hero. I went to the clinic near by and called the police from the doorman’s booth. Automatically I dialled my ex-boss’s number and was secretly relieved when his secretary, rather than my ex-boss himself, answered the phone. Four minutes later a patrol car arrived with two officers, both of whom I knew. The excruciating din of the bell continued unabated.

Finding a side door ajar, we entered the church. Through the dirty windows of the apse a murky light filtered into the nave - here even the daylight was in need of renovation. There was no one about. The altar was thick with dust, the organ loft a dark tangle of cobwebs. We made for the shadows below the gallery and, feeling our way and following the sound (by now the din of the bell was quite deafening), found the door that led up to the belfry. It was unlocked. Beyond the door the stairs were in pitch darkness. One of the policemen flicked on his cigarette lighter, and we took the first flight of steps three at a time. Soon the flame was redundant, paling into invisibility in the white shafts of sunlight streaming down from above.

At last we came out under the timberwork that held the big bell. The noise was unbearable - a moment longer and all three of us would have leapt from the belfry windows just to get away from it. The air was thick with whirling dust, and what with the blinding splinters of light glancing off the walls we could at first see almost nothing. All we could make out clearly was the outline of a gigantic spider swinging to and fro on a long strand of web. Was it a ghost? Or a puppet to scare away children? The answer was much simpler. What we saw hanging there was a human being - the wretched victim of some nocturnal monster, now transformed into a monster himself. There was nothing particularly frightening about the figure, but what had been done to it was terrible. The man jerked about like a marionette, now dancing on his hands to the music of the bell, now crawling up the walls, now swinging back into empty space like a fish wriggling on a hook, hurtling this way and that with each beat of the iron clapper. One of his legs was attached to the bell by a rope.

We rushed forward, but the bell’s momentum plucked him out of our reach and dashed him once more against the opposite wall of the bell-chamber. As the living pendulum swung back towards us we grabbed the poor man by the arms and held on to him until the angry clapper was finally subdued, rocking like fishermen on a choppy sea as his body gave a final lurch, first left, then right, before the bell finally came to rest. Our ears ached, our heads ached; we ached all over.

The policemen held him while I cut the rope. The bloody head lolled level with our chests, the eyes tight shut, the face ashen. The only sign of life came from the feebly groaning mouth. We laid him gently on the floor: he was unconscious. First we checked his breathing, then we felt him carefully all over and pulled up his shirt to see if there were any signs of contusion. One of his ribs looked as if it might be broken, or at least cracked, and he probably had concussion - caused by the relentless battering against the stone wall - but his condition was evidently not hopeless. One of the officers called the station on his radio and asked them to send an ambulance.

That was all we could do. It was not until I had mopped my face with my handkerchief and straightened up that I saw just how brutally the man had been turned into an involuntary bell-ringer. We had assumed the rope had been simply looped around his ankle, but to our horror we now saw it had in fact been threaded through his leg, disappearing into an ugly wound between his ankle and Achilles tendon and causing a horrible swelling in the surrounding skin and tissue. On the other side the rope came out like a thread from the eye of a needle and was secured by a double knot. There was hardly any blood, but the skin around the wound was rapidly turning purple with a few darker bluish patches.

From outside came the wail of a siren followed by a clatter of feet on the stairs, and the ambulance men appeared in their red overalls. Though clearly shocked at the sight of the man, they lifted him on to a stretcher without a word, fastened the straps and carried him down the steep steps. I told the policemen it looked as if someone had been swinging the man just before we arrived and quickly gone into hiding. He could not be far away. We searched the octagonal belfry and climbed the ladder into the conical loft above it. Then we opened the shutters to make sure no one was hiding on the ledge outside, but it sloped so steeply that only a monkey could have found a foothold on it. My suspicion remained unconfirmed, though I could not rid myself of the feeling that we were not alone in the tower. The policemen made a few notes and left. My statement could wait - after all, I was a former colleague. I searched the whole place again. The only way out of the belfry was the staircase by which we had entered. It was a total mystery - like the freshly picked coltsfoot in November.

2

Qui vive?

’Tis I, Time Past, who stand at your door,

your friend and guardian

and admonisher.

Richard Weiner

The history of my misfortunes began on the day I received my name - or, rather, the day I was born. Or was it nine months earlier? Or perhaps it all began with the birth of my father, the man whose hideous name I was later to inherit.

My parents never wanted me. For my sake they consolidated the mire of their relationship into the rock of matrimony. The excesses into which as an adult I was insidiously lured are simply the logical outcome of that misunderstanding. To my mind there is nothing so pitiful as marriage in the twentieth century, and I count myself lucky to have reached the end of that ghastly era as a bachelor. No doubt this was only because I was able to turn back in time, to escape into the past with its secret stories. Not all of them can still be told; only the worthwhile tales survive. My own story, itself now a thing of the distant past, is one of the most remarkable.

I shall begin with a memory, still vivid to this day, that encapsulates my childhood - a memory of an outing my father treated me to on my eighth birthday. At the time we lived in the town of Mladá Boleslav, in the heart of a region steeped in history - though our home was on a modern housing estate. Every year my parents took me on holiday to nearby Mácha Lake. Each time we talked about visiting the picturesque castle that lay on our route, and each time we put it off until the following year.

Until, that is, my eighth birthday and my father’s surprise announcement: a trip to Bezdĕz. I was allowed to sit in the front of the car, where the seatbelt conferred a greater sense of importance than any general’s sash. I was happy. Not even my father’s grumbles about my mother, which at the time were becoming ever more frequent, could dampen my spirits. I simply ignored him, determined to let nothing spoil my day. Forgetting I was there, he gave vent to his spleen.

‘Mother’s just lazy. That’s the real reason she lies around on the sofa all day. She should bake me a cake, not you - who’s she trying to fool? She couldn’t care less about you. You’ve been pestering us about that bloody castle for four years now, and who ends up taking you? Your dad, of course. The things I do for you!’

His knuckles were white as he gripped the steering-wheel and argued with my absent mother. He reached across for a cigarette and seemed surprised to see me there beside him, huddled in my seat under a seatbelt that was far too loose for me (those were the days before inertia-reel belts). With a laugh he ruffled my hair. My scalp burnt under his touch as if he’d scratched me.

When the engine started emitting strange noises his mood grew even worse. He slowed down, cocking his head to listen, then undid my belt and told me to get into the back and press my ear against the seat-back, behind which was located the engine. I heard nothing out of the ordinary - but then my mind wasn’t entirely on the job, since we were at that moment passing through Bĕla Pod Bezdĕz. Between the last houses of the village, beyond fields of wheat, two olive-green hills could be glimpsed in the distance, atop the higher of which stood the white castle - a sight I had no intention of missing.

Retribution for my indifference to the workings of the engine awaited me at the car-park below the castle. My father refused to leave the car until he had found the cause of the knocking noise. As he poked about under the bonnet I ran to and fro between the car and the first stone gateway at the foot of the hill. Through it passed an ancient roughly paved track that wound steeply up to the castle. The baking-hot slabs of broken stone made me want to lie down and snuggle into the cracks between them, the way you snuggle into a duvet. Then Father could walk right past without seeing me.

He spent an hour examining the car. No fault was found, nor any means of stopping the knocking. So when my father simply smiled at me and shrugged I could hardly believe my eyes. I was so thrilled I could have hugged him - except I knew he didn’t like being hugged. While he was packing up his tools the village clock struck eleven. It was oppressively hot, and we were plagued by mosquitoes. My father announced that we could now set off for the castle and took me by the hand. His fingers were covered in oil, which I suspected he wanted to wipe off on mine. Guessing my thoughts, he laughed. I let go of his hand and darted off like a hare, quivering with rage and impatience.

Father puffed his way up to the castle in the sweltering heat and arrived at the third gate exhausted. At this point one enters the castle fortifications and the forest gives way to prickly scrub; on one side, built on the bare rock, a crenellated wall leads up to the Devil’s Tower. In the meantime I had been up to the ticket desk at the top gate five times and five times run back - each time disappointed at his slow progress. On the way I passed lots of people, all of them coming down, it being nearly noon. We were the only ones going up. I was delighted: we would have the castle all to ourselves. I’d always thought of it as mine.

My hopes were dashed by a man with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his evil-looking face who was hanging around by the hut that served as a ticket office. From here a wooden paling, about ten yards long and higher than a grown man, extended to the first of the beech trees at the top of the north side of the hill, closing off the area below the last gateway with its heavy oak door. To see the view you had to either retrace your steps and peer though the treetops for a glimpse of Břehyň Pond and, beyond it, Mácha Lake or, as I discovered only later, carry on to the south side of the second courtyard, from where you could see the village of Houska, with Říp Hill in the distance behind it and - perhaps once a year, in windy weather when the sky is streaked with cirrus - the spires of St Vitus’ Cathedral in Prague.

I decided to slip round the paling and look north. Clinging to the splintery planks at the very edge of the drop, I had no sooner left the area designated to the public than the man with the cigarette grabbed me by the arm and shouted, ‘You’re not allowed there!’ His voice was brusque and harsh with a foreign accent.

I turned to him with a start. His hair was slicked down with a dead-straight parting, which, along with his square-cut moustache and fake-leather belted jacket, gave him a bizarre and rather fearsome aspect. I had no idea why he was so offended.

At that moment my father appeared. I expected him to have a go at the fellow, but, instead, with a nod in my direction and a roll of his eyes, he hustled me off to the ticket office in silence. There he told me in an angry whisper not to talk to anyone. I glanced at the man with the cigarette. He was watching us, his eyes narrowed in inexplicable suspicion verging on contempt. Today I know what that look was: it was the look of the twentieth century.

Armed with our tickets, we entered the small door set into the gate and found ourselves in the first courtyard. Relaxing his grip on my shoulder, Father explained in a kindlier tone that a few miles north-east of here was an airport - a Soviet airport - and that the purpose of the paling and the guard was to prevent people from looking in that direction and taking photographs. I objected that it wasn’t the airport I was interested in but Ralsko, a hill even more precipitous than Bezdĕz, on top of which stood a lopsided ruin that bore a chilling resemblance to a dilapidated throne. On it, as I had long known, sat an invisible giant - arms resting on the crumbling walls, legs dangling down the steep hillside - who kept watch over the ancient lands of the Berks of Dubá and thus over my own home in Boleslav. What did I care about airports and Soviets? Compared with my guard, theirs was a pathetic joke.

But my father was no longer listening. Coming down the steps from one of the castle doors was a beautiful woman - today I would call her a girl, but at the time she seemed old and unattainably adult. She greeted my father and, seeing that there were only two of us for the tour, laughed and said at least we’d soon get it over with. We hardly knew where to look first: at her long eyelashes, rosy lips and fair hair; or her slender figure clad in a short yellow skirt, green T-shirt and waist-length faded denim jacket. Sheep-like, we trailed after her through the tumbledown halls and blackened kitchens, concentrating mainly on those bare legs and feet in their loose, slapping sandals, which echoed loudly through the empty banqueting-rooms. She drew our attention to the Gothic windows with their stone tracery, the floral motifs on the capitals and corbels; but I was incapable of raising my eyes, which remained riveted on her ankles, and it was left to my father to evince any interest of an architectural nature, though he, as I was well aware, was even more smitten by our guide than I. The girl was young, totally modern and seemed quite out of place amid those grey ruins; yet she moved through the place as naturally as if she were the lady of the castle herself, bringing it to life with brilliant colour. The bulging walls and piles of masonry competed with us for her favour: wherever she stopped they fell silent and, like us, made a show of listening in rapt attention.

Despite our failure, indeed our inability, to take in what she was saying, we pretended to be knowledgeable about history, trying to outdo each other with what we hoped were interesting and occasionally witty questions and observations. Needless to say, Father won: he earned looks of appreciation, while all I got were a few indulgent glances. Furious, I tried all the harder to show off how grown-up I was, until Father was obliged to reprimand me and apologize to the girl. She, however, simply went on nibbling at a blade of cat’s-tail grass, half opening her lips in a smile of amused condescension and revealing her moist white teeth. For a moment I imagined I was that lucky blade of grass, exploring her lips and tongue, and the dazzling afternoon sun was suddenly eclipsed.

Piqued, I decided to keep my distance. How dare he tell me to shut up! It was a clear abuse of adult authority. I hadn’t meant to be cheeky - just witty. Spotting an old stone tub full of rain-water at the foot of a nearby wall, I began extolling the virtues of medieval plumbing and with a wink asked our guide if that was where she took her showers. It was a feeble joke, but at the time it struck me as the height of waggish sophistication. Father told me if I didn’t stop being a nuisance he’d take