The Vyšehrad Drowned

5. Wiedergänger

Craggy, brown rock shelves rose almost straight up on either side of him. 

As Perun's newly opened eyes travelled upwards through the murk, he took in the sharp stone ledges and the water plants that clung to them in bulky clumps, waving gently in the breeze.

Could he say breeze? Wasn't this the bottom of the river?

Perun found himself standing on a narrow, sandy corridor that ran like an erratic footpath through a stony landscape, and ended, not in a wall, but in a darkness infrequently illuminated by blue, yellow and white flashes. 

Gradually, his mind made sense of what he was seeing: he was in a ravine. A deep ravine even lower than the bed of the river.  A few fish swam languidly past his head, as if he were merely a part of the rock.  He reached out a hand and brushed his fingers over one of their bodies, smooth and as warm as the water. They seemed not to notice. 

Perun dropped his hand.

A soft, orange-yellow light began to grow behind him, bringing his immediate environment gently into view.  Perun turned to see the monster holding up a metal lantern in one of its webbed hands. Where the wick or candle would have been, yellowish liquid in a glowing cylinder bubbled like boiling water.  

The monster didn't speak. It contented itself to float a few meters away from Perun, watching him intently. 

The speckled skin of its arms and wrinkled underbelly that ran all the way up to its chest reminded Perun of the two baby crocodiles he kept in a large terrarium in the lobby of one of his nightclubs. The babies remained motionless a great amount of the time, leading guests to think they were stuffed or made of pottery when they didn't respond to taps on the glass of their cage. Only when a hunk of meat landed in the terrarium did they dart to devour the morsel almost faster than the eye could follow. Screams and spilled drinks were often the result. 

The memory should have made him smile, or a sharp indication of danger should at least have prickled his scalp, but Perun felt nothing. His head was as murky, as full of fish and debris as the water around him.  

He turned his gaze from the bubbling lantern and the monster, who remained just as motionless yet watchful as the babies, and inspected the walls next to him. 

It took him a few moments, but the outlines of kettles began to stand out from the rocky wall. Hundreds and hundreds of rusty, iron kettles with round bellies and high sides placed where the rock jutted out, forming a natural shelf.

Instead of lids, their tops were covered with mesh grates made of slender metal strips.  Small hands – what at first glance looked like doll hands – curled around a few of them, as if there were people inside holding on. Perun took a slow step towards the line of kettles snaking up the wall, and then another. He peered carefully into one that was slightly below his eye level. 

Three small faces turned upwards to look at him. Not the faces of dolls, human faces. His first impression had been right. They weren't river creatures similar to the monster who had . . . was he dead? The heads of two of the people inside the kettle were covered with curly, white wigs and the other one wore a patched and faded dress of the kind Perun had only seen in paintings with cracked, syrupy varnish.  

"What are they?" The question escaped Perun's lips before he realised he had spoken.

"My collection. The souls of those who thought drowning themselves was the cure to all their earthly woes. Good thing for me they were wrong."

Perun eyes roamed over the walls. There were so many kettles, some quite small, some much larger, all filled with living people shrunk to the size of dolls, but breathing water just like himself. He turned and looked at the monster, hoping for more of an explanation. It smiled at him, showing off its shark teeth that glistened like polished ivory in the lantern light.