Vodník Page 2

  What if I had been awake? I could have put out the fire right when it started. Or called 911 earlier. It didn’t seem right that something that had such a big effect on our lives could have been stopped so easily. Why hadn’t I stayed up later that night?

  Each morning I woke up in the hotel, confused about where I was. I’d lost everything I had. My Indiana Jones box set. The original Star Wars poster Dad had got me for my twelfth birthday. The huge hard drive I’d taken days to back up all my movies on—gone.

  Forever.

  Once they let me go back, I went through the last week of school in a sort of muffled daze. I’d asked the principal, Mr. Hannigan, not to announce anything about what had happened. What was the point of letting my “peers” know the freak had been in another fire? They would have just increased their jibes. Having a huge disfiguring scar across your whole right arm and chest doesn’t do wonders for your social life, in my experience. As it was, I still got hit in the neck with a spitball during first period (physics with Mr. Hubble) the day I returned. Classy.

  People didn’t like me, no matter what I tried. Each new year, I’d do my best to make conversation with the guys in my classes. (With girls, I was lucky if I could string a sentence together longer than three words without stuttering.) I’d force myself to try to branch out. It never worked. They were all Scary Movie, and I was The Exorcist.

  American high school wasn’t something I’d miss when I grew up, and that bugged me. It was something I was supposed to love. Where was my Breakfast Club moment? My Clueless clique? I wasn’t even a Pedro for any Napoleon.

  My mind kept drawing to what Mom had told me about Slovakia over the years. It had been Communist. It was mostly white, and people had a thing against Roma, which was one quarter of my heritage. Roma. That was the PC way of talking about Gypsies. I thought being a quarter Gypsy was cooler than being a quarter Roma. No one at school had a clue what Roma meant, but people thought Gypsies could tell fortunes, had dark good looks, and helped a hunchback now and then, if they felt like it. They were people from grand, adventurous stories.

  Despite only being a quarter Roma, I was olive skinned like my mom. Would the Slovaks hold my skin color against me?

  Would I have a thing against them?

  All I wanted was a place where I was accepted and fit in, where I could live a normal life. Someplace where I wasn’t so self-conscious about my burn, and where I found some good friends.

  Was that too much to hope for?

  By the time I’d endured a white-knuckled airplane trip over an entire ocean just waiting to drown me, I was willing to settle for a long sleep and a promise that I’d never see the ocean again. And don’t get me started on the layover from Hades and the encore plane ride. When we landed in Bratislava, it was pitch black outside, despite my watch telling me it was six in the afternoon. I didn’t want to see another plane for years. My legs ached, my eyes were parched, and my head felt crusty, like teeth that haven’t been brushed in weeks.

  The airport was a quarter of the size of the mall at home. The rental we ended up with was like a clown car. There wasn’t enough room in the trunk for our luggage, so I was stuck in the back seat with a suitcase as big as me. Did I mention the car only had two doors and smelled moldy?

  “See?” my dad said. “This is much better than the plane ride.”

  “You’re in the driver’s seat,” I said.

  Mom laughed. “It’s only an hour and a half to Trenčín.”

  I grunted and leaned my head against the window, doing my best to zone out while the miles rolled by. I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, Dad was saying my name.

  “Tomas. Tomas! Wake up. We’re here.”

  I opened my eyes and blinked.

  Dad had stopped the car next to a large ghetto-ish five-story apartment building. It wasn’t well-lit, but from what I could make out, the whole thing was made out of gray slabs of cement. “What happened?” I asked. “Did the car break down?”

  Mom cleared her throat. I was getting pretty sick of that sound. Any time my parents made it, bad news followed. She turned around and smiled. “This is where we’re going to live. Isn’t it wonderful?”

  I checked out the window again. Wonderful wasn’t the word that sprang to mind. Commie project housing was closer. I was rather proud of my restraint, though. All I said was, “In an apartment?”

  “Not just any apartment,” Dad said. “One of the nicest apartments in the city. Only ten minutes from the town center and right by the canal. It’s going to be great.”

  Was “right by the canal” supposed to comfort me? It was like telling someone with arachnophobia that their house had plenty of spiders nearby. “Okay,” I said. Maybe it was better on the inside. Or maybe I never should have agreed to move to Slovakia.

  Mom got out, and after some fumbling around, I flipped the switch that leaned the front seat forward, letting me out too. Dad locked a big yellow bar to the steering wheel. “Get all our bags. We’d better not leave them here.”

  I glanced up and down the street. Not a soul in sight. None of the windows even had light coming from them. I had to ask. “Who’s going to steal it? A squirrel?”

  “Just get your bags, Tomas,” Mom said.

  “Whatever.”

  We tromped up to the main door of the building. It was battered and scraped, and it could have used a new coat of brown paint. I would have preferred taking my chances sleeping in the car instead of risking my life by going into that place this late at night.

  I surveyed the area while Dad was still fumbling for his keys. Across the street from us, there were some trees and a small playground, then a small hill that must have blocked the canal from sight. Thank goodness for small blessings. No other buildings, and the air smelled fresh, for a city. At least we weren’t crowded in on all sides. The moon came out from behind the clouds, casting everything in a silver light.

  Someone stood between the trees off to my right, watching us. I stared back, and that’s when I noticed I could see a reflection of the moon off the person, almost as if they were made entirely out of water. Could I see through them too? A chill ran down my spine. The person—thing?—flicked out its hand toward me, and a fat drop of something cold and wet landed right in my eye. I jerked my head back and blinked to clear my vision. When I could see again, the person was gone. Another drop of something landed on the sidewalk next to me, and then another. Rain. Maybe going inside was a better idea. I was obviously too tired, and if I didn’t get some sleep soon, I’d start seeing the things my dad worried I’d seen before.

  Dad had unlocked the door, and we went inside. A set of stairs went all the way to the top, with landings at each level, each with two apartments. “Where’s the elevator?” I asked, my voice echoing off the walls.

  “Not so loud,” my dad said in a hushed tone. “There isn’t one. Our place is this one on the left.” He locked the main door behind us, then opened our apartment and turned on the lights.

  I went in with low expectations, but I was still disappointed.

  The entryway had bare walls and worn flooring tiles. There was a hall to my right, and a small room to my left. The walls were plastered, but they still looked like cement, and the plaster was cracking. Strangest of all, the whole place had twelve foot ceilings. It was a hole, but it was trying to be a high-class hole, at least.

  Mom was beaming. “Wonderful.”

  Dad nodded. “Just like old times, huh?”

  I dropped my bags and walked down the hall. It led to another small room and the living room. Or, the living room, dining room, and kitchen, all jammed into a space as big as our kitchen had been. The fridge was ancient, the stove seemed ready to blow up if we tried to use it, and the floor was linoleum that was old enough to apply for Social Security. Someone had laid out bread and cheese on the table, I assumed in preparation for our arrival. There was another bedroom off the living area.

  I faced my parents, who were grinning and
holding hands. “We can’t live here,” I said.

  Their smiles drained away. “Come on, Tomas,” Dad said. “It’s not that bad.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It is.”

  Mom came up to me and hugged me. “Give it a week, a bit more furniture, and some paint, and you’ll see what we see. I promise.”

  I gaped at her. “Mom, no offense, but it’s going to take a whole lot of paint to make this place be a quarter as good as our house was.”

  That brought silence. Curse it. I hadn’t meant to say that, but it was still easy to forget home was nothing more than charred timber.

  Mom forced a laugh. “Get ready to sleep. Your room is down the hall on the right just as you come in. We’ll worry about getting the place more livable in the morning.”

  “It’ll be great,” Dad said. “Just picture it. A big screen TV on that wall. Surround sound speakers there and there. Couch right here. The room back in the hall will be my office. You’ll love it, Tomas. Trust me.”

  Maybe it could work. But I was tired, and Dad’s enthusiasm wasn’t exactly contagious right then. I couldn’t help thinking that agreeing to move had been a mistake. I rolled my suitcase into my room, which did indeed have a bed, although it was hot as an oven in there. I cracked the window—no air-conditioning. Outside, the rain had picked up and was now pelting the ground in earnest. At least it brought some cool breezes. I rifled around until I found my toothpaste and toothbrush and headed to the bathroom. Another problem—no toilet.

  “Mom!”

  She came in after a moment. “What’s the matter?”

  “Where’s the toilet?”

  “It’s the next room over.” She stepped out and pointed. Why did an apartment as small as this one devote two whole rooms to something that only needed one?

  “What’s it doing there?” I asked.

  “It’s just the way they do it here. Look at it this way. You won’t have to wait to go to the bathroom when someone else is in the shower. If you think of it, it makes more sense than how they have it in America.”

  “Seems dumb to me.”

  Mom stomped her foot on the tile. “Would you drop it? Do you realize this is the city—the country—I grew up in? It’s so much better than it used to be. If you ever had to experience what I had to go through. My family had to wait ten years to get a car. Three-hour lines for toilet paper. No fresh fruit. We . . .” She shook her head and left without another word. I felt about two inches tall.

  I stood there for a moment and then went about getting ready for bed by rote. Before I knew it, I was lying down with the lights out, staring at the ceiling and touching my burn while I suffered through AC withdrawal. Mom was right. Maybe I had been thinking too much about myself. They had given me the choice of coming here or not, and this was what I had chosen. I would have to live with this, even if my bed had no springs and my room was a quarter the size of my old one.

  Whether I liked it or not, there was no going back.

  Vodníks have an aversion to fire or heat of any kind, and if left without a source of water, they have been known to drip to death. They are allergic to salt, which acts as a mild irritant. They do their best to appear harmless, and many an Assassin has fallen prey to them over the years.

  Time to get up.”

  I opened my eyes, then squinted against the sun. My room had a big window, and only some sort of lace thing for a curtain. Dad was standing by my bed. “What time is it?” I asked.

  “Eleven. We’ll have to hurry if we’re going to make it.” He went to leave.

  “To make what?”

  “You’ll see.” He closed the door behind him.

  A large part of me wanted to go back to sleep. When I checked my watch, I figured out why. It was 5:00 a.m. back in Pennsylvania. If it hadn’t been for that promising tone in my dad’s voice, I would have closed my eyes immediately. As it was, I stumbled up and headed for the shower. If I had to face the day and the public, I could at least look half decent doing so. Of course, once I realized that the shower was some sort of handheld thing, a simple baseball cap was more tempting. Still, when you have a disfiguring burn that covers your whole right arm, you need every little bit of better-looking you can get, even if it involves water.

  I got in the shower.

  How did a guy who was deathly afraid of water manage to clean himself on a daily basis? Uncomfortably. It had taken a lot of parental persuasion (and a great deal of mocking at school), but there came a time when I’d had to acknowledge that deodorant could only do so much. Weekly showers couldn’t cut it anymore, and I had to up it to daily. Never baths, though. And always as fast as I could get it done. Which turned out to be not so fast that morning.

  Sixteen years of experience cleaning myself wasn’t enough to prepare me for how to do it when one of my hands was always occupied with the showerhead. Water kept spraying everywhere, and it was only a matter of time before I hit my face with the stream. My eyes flooded; my ears even got doused. I gasped, and everything went strange.

  Really strange.

  With a sound of rushing wind and a flash of blinding white, I wasn’t in the shower anymore. I was in a fat white eight-year-old body that had never been mine, sitting in a boat on a river—a river!—I had never seen, and I was wearing clothes that came straight from Ye Olde Medieval Faire: a white shirt, white pants, black vest, and a white coat—all of it with enough colored embroidery to keep a room full of grannies going for a year. The coat alone had multicolored flowers stitched along every seam and pocket outline.

  “Where to?” someone said.

  A white girl—maybe sixteen—was sitting across from me. She was dressed similarly, just with an apron and skirt instead of vest and pants. All white.

  I leaned back and kicked my feet up, getting precariously close to the river. “Let’s just float,” I said. “The wedding will last forever, and there’s nothing to do anyway.”

  What was happening? My phobia was somehow dulled. Normally I think I’d be hyperventilating if I found myself in a boat. Still, all that water was making it hard for me to concentrate.

  The girl leaned back as well, tilting her head up to the sky and smiling. She was pretty. Long brown hair that fell well below her shoulders, with eyes that matched the river and a nose that was just a size too big. She glanced behind her at the shore, then said, “I told you we’d find something to keep us busy.”

  I laughed, my voice high and piping to my ears. “Busy, or beaten if whoever owns this boat ever finds us.”

  She opened one eye to peek at me, the blues in her embroidery making her eyes seem brighter. “Beat us? They wouldn’t dare. Besides, it’s bound to be some stuffy merchant who wants to pander to Father anyway. They’d be overjoyed to let his two children go out for a ride. Why worry?”

  “Right,” I said. “Well, shouldn’t we see if there’s anything interesting in this thing?”

  “Steal?” she asked.

  “No. Borrow.” There wasn’t much in the boat. A quick search turned up a solitary leather satchel.

  “Anything?” The girl had sat up and was leaning forward to see what I came up with. Not much, unfortunately. Some hard rolls and a sausage, a few handkerchiefs, and—

  “Look at this!” I had caught a glimpse of something shiny and went after it. She leaned even closer and smiled when I took out a gleaming bracelet. It was made of polished copper fashioned into a series of flat tight spirals.

  “Beautiful,” she said.

  So was she. Why did I have to be her fat prepubescent brother in this dream? I held the bracelet out to her. “For you.”

  She took it with a grin and a gleam in her eye. “You shouldn’t have. It’s—”

  The boat hit something in the water and sent the two of us rocking. The girl’s expression changed from mischief to worry, and I clenched the side of the boat. “Sandbar?” I asked.

  She shook her head and scouted behind us. “The river’s deep at this part. There shouldn’t be any—”


  The boat rocked again, tilting so much that water splashed inside. Part of me—the not-an-eight-year-old-boy part—was still freaking out from all that water. “We didn’t hit that,” I said. “That hit us.”

  “Ondrej, what are you talking—”

  “Something hit us. Something big.”

  She went for one of the oars and passed it to me. I took it one-handed, not willing to let go of the boat with my other. She hefted the second oar, ready for a swing. And then we waited.

  Nothing.

  The breeze riffled through my hair. Birds chirped in the distance. Nothing broke the surface of the river. Maybe it had just been something on the bottom after all. A sunken ship? In a river?

  After a moment, the girl leaned over the water, peering down.

  Something grabbed me by my coat and jerked me backward. I screamed in surprise and the oar clattered to the boat bottom, but I held tight to the gunwale, so that instead of being pulled out, I was still half in when the girl whirled to see what was happening.

  She gasped in surprise and lunged over to beat at whatever had me. All I could see were two grimy wet hands gripping my coat and pulling as hard as they could. This was human?

  A spout of water shot out from behind me and hit the girl right in the face, pushing her off balance and back in the boat. One of the hands let go of my coat and pried at my fingers, its flesh cold and soggy, with sharp nails that dug into my skin. I yelled and jerked my head back to knock the thing in the face, but I was in a kid’s body. I was no match for it.

  It got my hand free just as the girl was getting up from where she had fallen. She had time for a final swing of the oar, but it went wide. “Lesana!” I yelled, and then was wrenched back over the gunwale and into the river.

  The last thing I saw was the girl’s panicked face, and then a hand covered my eyes, and there was only darkness and water.

  And coughing and sputtering.

  I was back in the shower, blinking my eyes and shaking my head free from the water that had hit me in the face. I put down the showerhead and grabbed my towel and just stood there, staring at the wall.