—
WITH ITS TENS OF THOUSANDS of graves, Prague’s Olšany cemetery is a large village, a small town, in itself. I, Gepetta, have been there, and I know that something travels in that place, something passes among the trees. I cannot say what this traveler is, since we’ve never crossed paths, but what I’ve been able to see for myself is that in some of Olšany clearings leaves lock together and form shadowy bridges from branch to branch, and the barks of these bridged trees peel back to show a color that glistens with rawness and decay, sap and old bone. The Topols and Myrna followed this trail, switching wrestling arenas for about a month, scrambling through swathes of undergrowth, administering the occasional surprise fly-kick (no matter how many times it’s happened before, it’s always startling to be assaulted by a bush) before they discovered the little wooden devil. The wooden devil had been aware of them for weeks. She was carved of rowan wood, and she retained the opinions of trees: one of them being that it was best not to have anything to do with human folk. “Firstly, they cut us down,” Rowan said. “Secondly they’re all insane, though I suppose they can’t help that, being rooted in water instead of earth.”
—
THE WOODEN devil got a good laugh out of the ones who passed by, though. They were so funny she couldn’t even feel sorry for them. They tried so hard to keep track of time. Whenever they were together they couldn’t let sixty of their minutes pass without asking each other what time it was; as if time was a volatile currency that they either possessed or did not possess, when in fact time was more of a fog that rose inexorably over all their words and deeds so that they were either forgotten or misremembered. The wooden devil’s official duty was to guard the grave of an alchemist named Rowan Wayland. The grave was empty; in fact it was one of seven scattered across the continent, and the other six were empty too. As an alchemist, Wayland had liked the idea of implying that he’d excelled at his profession — this could only work if he left absolutely no evidence of having died. His plan had worked. Six centuries had passed and the residents of the streets surrounding the cemetery still didn’t feel they could rule out the possibility of his being around somewhere. Every fourteenth of July without fail the town council received a bag of antique gold from an anonymous benefactor; symbolic payment for Wayland’s burial plot. It was actually somewhat unlikely that this payment came from Wayland himself, since the main reason King Rudolf had ordered the alchemist’s execution was his failure to produce gold from base metal as promised. Wayland had good friends. They arranged for a wooden puppet to be buried in place of his body. The man himself had fled the Czech lands and lived to advance his career in other royal courts.
The wooden devil had been through a lot since she’d been discovered to be the grave’s sole inhabitant — she’d been waxed and lacquered and pegged to the earth, frozen, drenched, and dried out again. She’d even seen the traveler in the trees: “Spinning, as a wheel does.” The life in the wooden devil was slight and vague, only a little more than that possessed by inanimate puppets, but it was maintained by the fact that the first impression she gave was one of humanity. Graveyard visitors approaching the wooden devil from behind tended to mistake her for someone about the same age as Myrna Semyonova was at that time, and would confidently strike up conversation, though they were either sheepish or oddly repulsed when they discovered their mistake. At any rate this persistence of address cultivated a silent response. The wooden devil had a good vantage point, and served as secret audience to a few Topol-Semyonova wrestling matches. The devil was slightly worried that Myrna and the boys would make a nuisance of themselves once they found her. But there was one tree that the wooden devil thought of as her mother, because this tree had murmured soothingly to her when she’d still been coming up as sapling. That tree watched over her still, and murmured what the elder trees at Olšany always murmured:
“To pominulo; stejně může i tohle.” That went by; so can this.
The tree was right. This situation wasn’t unique. The children were most likely to run for their lives as soon as they saw her.
—
MYRNA SAW THE DEVIL before the Topol brothers did, and she approached without calling out. She read the name on the headstone and brushed a little lichen out of the devil’s hair. Her gentleness left the devil nonplussed. It was highly irregular for anyone to be curious enough about the feel of her to voluntarily touch her. And nobody had ever seemed quite so pleased by their findings.
The boys overdid their nonchalance, treating the devil’s shoulders as coat pegs. The girl’s front door keys were always falling out of her pockets, so she left them on the devil’s lap before chucking her under the chin and saying: “Thanks, Rowan.” A sequence of elaborate stretches followed, and then Jindrich and Kirill were ready to fight, with Myrna playing referee. It was a highly unusual afternoon for the wooden devil, who was intensely aware of the arm that Myrna had casually flung around her shoulders, as if they were friends who had come to that place together.
—
AROUND DINNERTIME the boys took their jackets back. But Myrna left her door keys, and didn’t miss them until she reached her front door and stuck her hand into the pocket of her jeans.
Her father was still at the theater, so the Topols took her in for the evening. After dinner Kirill adjusted the lamplight until he’d created the correct conditions for shadow play and Myrna put on a little show. Her makeshift shadow puppets quarreled among themselves, hands thrown up, what to do, what to do… a spoon-headed creature had suddenly appeared in their midst and befriended their youngest boy. I promised him he could live with us… The shadow mother forbade this. Absolutely not! Send this fellow on his way, son. The boy set up a tent in the garden and courteously asked the spoon-headed creature to enter and consider himself at home. The spoon-headed creature offered to go away, as he didn’t want to bother anybody, but the boy insisted. The shadow father was just puncturing the tent with a fork when the Topols’ doorbell shrilled. This was followed by urgent knocking and then the sound of very heavy clogs clattering away as fast as they could. Myrna and Mr. Topol ran out onto the street but all they found were ordinary soft-shoed citizens. The lights were on in Myrna’s flat; she knocked and waved goodnight to Mr. Topol, but when her front door clicked open, seemingly by itself, she knew that her father wasn’t at home. Her father was not a man to hide himself behind a door as he pulled it open.
She called out, “Dad?” anyway, but there was no answer. She only really started shaking when she saw her key ring on the hall table. She considered running to fetch Jindrich or Kirill or both, but she didn’t like to turn her back on that open door, and besides, Mrs. Topol had been complaining of an especially bad headache all evening and she didn’t know how many more times she could politely shrug off the woman’s surreptitious attempts to touch her before the situation became awkward. So she called Jindrich Topol on the telephone even though he was only a flight of stairs away; she talked about nothing and kept talking about nothing as she walked through the flat room by room. Everything was just as usual in every room except her bedroom, where, being well versed in horror story search procedures, Myrna looked under her bed last and found Rowan Wayland lying flat on her back, filled with loathing for keys. A key ring gets left in your care and you reject all responsibility for it yet can’t bring yourself to throw it away. Nor can you give the thing away — to whom can someone of good conscience give such an object as a key? Always up to something, stitching paths and gateways together even as it sits quite still; its powers of interference can only be guessed at. The wooden devil suspected keys cause more problems than they solve, so she followed Myrna with one plan in mind, to do her bit to restore order. Myrna’s home had seemed like a clever — and strictly temporary — hiding place. But with typical slyness the keys had let Rowan in and then been of no assistance whatsoever when it came to getting out.