Back | Next
Contents

HOW TO DEAL WITH WRAITHS

Martin Paytok


“What was your name again?” Ruml asked.

“Lenora,” the blonde replied emphatically. She was dressed as if she had walked into the Stará Paka SRS warehouse straight from the set of an action movie.

One of those crappy movies where the heroes wear sunglasses inside buildings and run away from the fire at the end, Basil, who was working a Saturday shift with Ruml, added to himself.

Ruml adjusted his cap with the word “Security” on it. “Well, look, Lenora, does this place look like a home furnishings store?”

The action star pulled her hand from the pocket of her leather jacket, pulled her sunglasses down to the tip of her nose, and looked at him as if he was something stuck to the sole of her shoe.

Basil knew what she was thinking.

She thinks it doesn’t.

The former factory complex on the edge of the village offered perfect cover. The dilapidated, multilevel building with its spray-painted facade and broken windows was hardly ever glanced at more than once, and the supporters of urban exploration were reliably deterred by the eight feet high fence crowned with rust barbed wire.

In addition, next to the gatehouse, where everyone was at the moment, stood a ground-floor square shack with the most innocent sign over the entrance proclaiming: Dairy Products. A yellowed leaflet, stuck with duct tape in the window, announced the imminent grand opening in a flowery font. It had been hanging there for eight years—exactly from the moment when the flooded Rokytka River washed away the locals’ excitement that they would finally witness the opening of the World of Chickens they had been promised for the last eleven years.

It could only be more inconspicuous with a banner saying: Nothing weird is going on here.

So when that woman suddenly walked up to the freight elevator, identified herself as an employee of Fantom, and announced that she came “for the bag of kingfisher feathers,” Ruml was thrown off a bit. Basil, however, took it with the grim stoicism of a man who had spent his best years handling objects that could suddenly grow a demonic mouth and bite off his hands. And he wasn’t even exaggerating.

Ruml cleared his throat.

“Why did you think you could get something like that here?”

“Your boss promised me that in exchange for letting him stare at me eating spaghetti carbonara.”

Basil rolled his eyes. That was the fourth girl this year.

“So much for the reason of my visit,” Lenora continued. “As for how I knew to turn this way . . . ” She didn’t finish the sentence. She just looked around and grinned. “I saw this idiot dragging that thing here from across the road.”

She pointed her thumb at the tall guy in a sweater and overalls who had been standing next to her the whole time. And next to him was a hand truck loaded with a crudely made dingy coffin tied with a rusty chain.

The guy shrugged his shoulders and explained in a chopped North Moravian accent, “I’m not going to drive a truck all the way to the yard for one box.”

“Of course,” Ruml nodded ironically. “That’s not what this yard’s for, is it?”

Basil smoothed his greying moustache and, in a raspy voice as rough as if his vocal cords were made of sandpaper, asked, “Do you have the transfer document for this?”

“Somehow I didn’t . . . get it.”

“What do you mean you didn’t get it?”

“They told me to bring it here. So I loaded it up and drove here.”

“Then take it back.”

“I drove here for five hours. I won’t take it back just to get a stupid paper, only to return here tomorrow. Can’t they send it to you?”

“Send it?” Basil’s younger colleague grinned. “Who do you take us for, postmen? This is a warehouse of paranormal material. If you think we’re going to take something from you without documentation that says how to handle it, you’re an even bigger idiot than Lenora here thinks you are.”

The driver shrugged again. “I threw it on the hand truck and didn’t notice any problems.”

Ruml shook his head in frustration, but didn’t argue further.

Basil tucked his hands into the pockets of his grey overalls and stared at the coffin. It was less than six feet long and, apart from the chains, looked quite ordinary. But so did a lot of the things they stored here, and none of them were really ordinary.

Ordinary or harmless.

He knew that to start treating them as such was the first step to getting into trouble.

Like the one with that deck of cards a year and a half ago.

“I have to make a phone call,” he finally announced.

“Go call whoever you want. Just make it quick, bitch. I have to go back to Ostrava today.”

Basil, whom nothing irritated more than people from big cities looking down on him, scorned him. “But you’re not in Ostrava, bitch. So act like it.”

The driver was visibly shaken by this level of Stará Paka hospitality.

Without haste, Basil loaded himself in the freight elevator, picked up the controls hanging from a cable from the ceiling, and turned to Lenora.

“Come with me. We’ll deal with you both at once.”

* * *

“How am I supposed to tell you the registration number when you have the papers?” Basil said into the receiver, and while he listened to what the other party had to say, his eyebrows formed a sharp angle. “Why should I care about some newbie? You know very well it’s against the regulations.”

Lenora slumped down in the uncomfortable chair where he had placed her in a small break room, and put her feet up on the other side of the table than she put her sunglasses. She knew the warehouse clerk’s name, because before the elevator grating closed behind them, he remarked to the other yokel: “We’ll be right back,” and the other yokel replied, “Sure, Basil.”

“Sure, blame it on us, that’s the best,” Basil muttered, hung up and dialed another number. “Paka. I’ve got some Lenora . . . ”

She wondered how many people in Czechia have such stupid name, and looked around the small break room in the meantime. Apart from a table with a phone and three chairs, its furnishings consisted of a cupboard, a small fridge, a microwave, a coffee maker, and a bulletin board, to which someone had pinned a note with a hand-scrawled motto next to the schedule of services: He who doesn’t work—shall not eat! He who works—shall drink!

That’s probably supposed to be humor. Haha.

“Couldn’t you do it from the gatehouse?” she said in a bored tone as the receiver rang in the fork. “Or, I don’t know, maybe by cell phone, like a human?”

“This connection is secure,” the talkative man replied. “The old man sends his regards. He says we’re supposed to cooperate with you.” He bent down, pulled out a drawer, tossed a clipboard on the table, wedged a pre-printed form into it, scribbled something on it with a pen, and then straightened up again. “I don’t have any feathers here, but I think I can find something else.”

He pushed her back out into the hallway with the elevator and sent her to the right. The concrete corridor, illuminated by sterile light of fluorescent bulbs here and there, stretched into the distance, lined along its length by dozens of doors, passageways, security gates, and wooden crates of various sizes with numbers printed on them. But they’d only gone past two or three rooms.

“Is this where all the funny things that we who are lucky enough to work outdoors occasionally come across disappear?”

“Hmm.”

“How big is this place?”

“That’s classified.”

She didn’t expect anything else. The State Regulatory Service people loved to act as tough guys.

Basil stopped by one of the smaller doors, fished an electronic card out of his breast pocket, and put it close to the obsolete terminal sticking out of the wall under a Talismans and Amulets sign. Red light shone on it.

“Electronic locks?” she wondered. “I mean, those things have to be out of order all the time in a place like this.”

“We didn’t design the place,” the warehouse clerk replied, as if that explained everything.

The terminal emitted a beep, the red light bulb went out only to turn green, the magnetic lock clicked, and the door swung open. Basil stepped through it, revealing to Lenora a view of a room not much larger than the phone booth where they’d camped earlier, but lined floor to ceiling with metal boxes like a bank vault.

He paused at the opposite wall and squinted at the numbers stamped next to the smoothed handles, then pulled one. The hinges creaked, the door swung open, and the clerk’s hand fumbled in the darkness beyond.

Talismans and amulets, Lenora thought. Real magic. No carnival props like Vlad was carrying around.

A triumphant smile spread across her face . . . and then froze when Basil pulled out a withered twig.

“What the hell is that?” she frowned.

“Alder,” said Basil, as if that explained anything. But her expression obviously said it all, so he added: “It protects from evil.”

“You’re kidding, right? I could have grabbed this somewhere along the road.”

“I don’t know. This one supposedly grew where some saint bled to death.”

“Supposedly,” Lenora sputtered, pointing a thumb behind her, to the opposite cell, where a golden pipe topped with a gaping dragon’s mouth protruded from the box. “You got some Chinese rocket launcher lying around over there, and you give me a piece of wood.”

“That’s a cursed Vietnamese sky rocket,” Basil stated dryly. “It would blow your creepy house to the moon.” He shoved a clipboard in front of her face. “Sign this.”

She was about to protest further, but when she saw the level of disinterest on his face, she just snorted and snatched that clipboard from his fingers.

“Tell your boss he can forget about another date after this.”

A holy twig, for Christ sake, she shook her head before writing her name in the bottom right corner, Vávra and Vlad will laugh their asses out.

* * *

The coffin messenger had a hard time going into the yard, but five minutes of turning around in a one-way street with the truck apparently seemed fine to him. Thankfully, Lenora had bothered to back her American car up to the gatehouse at least, so she was able to wave them off as soon as she gave them a cordial goodbye with a raised middle finger.

“Ostrava has no idea what this is or who sent it here,” Basil remarked. “Until they find out more, we’re supposed to quarantine it.”

“Amateurs,” Ruml snorted.

The driver finally managed to wedge the beeping truck into the drive, where Ruml condescendingly removed the barrier from his path, honked twice, and soon they were both watching its red lights disappearing into the autumn mist.

“Wait, quarantine? You know who’s there . . . ”

Basil threw up his hand, took one last drag from the finishing cigar, and ended its misery in the ashtray on the windowsill. “Are we expecting anyone else today?”

“Probably not. The shipment from Liberec will arrive on Monday at the earliest.”

“In that case, help me with this.”

He and Ruml had known each other for almost twenty years. Ruml had adopted the silent warehouse clerk less than a week after he’d joined, much to Basil’s displeasure, and had started deliberately scheduling their shifts so they could work together and he could pop in for a chat on his rounds. And usually it was just him talking. But Basil didn’t mind. He could manage a decent pretense of listening, even though he was internally dissociating.

The advantage was that during the one-sided conversations Ruml’s body worked on autopilot, which made it enough to hand him things and guide him to where they should be put.

Plus, he played chess.

Best friend I ever had.

The coffin was waiting for them exactly where the driver had left it. He had even left them a hand truck in his noble forgetfulness.

Ruml knocked on the lid and put his ear to it, but no one knocked back.

“Who do you think is in there?” he asked. “Or what?”

“Surely nothing good,” Basil grumbled, kicked the hand truck under and wheeled it onto the elevator platform.

“I’d like to have that optimism of yours,” Ruml said, pulling the grate behind them.

The elevator began its slow descent into the one hundred sixty feet depths.

“They could do something about this piece of crap by now; even walking down the stairs is faster.”

Basil was fairly certain Ruml wouldn’t really like the extent of his optimism. He complained about the elevator every time he rode it, each time simultaneously expressing faith that it would one day be replaced by a less outdated model. But he knew it was just a wishful thinking.

After all, they worked for the government.

When the lift finally reached the level of the concrete corridor, Basil pulled the hand truck out of it again and they headed into the four miles long maze that stretched below. The chain jingled like a xylophone on the way.

Ruml impressed him. He managed not to complain about why they hadn’t taken the car until almost the fourth turn.

On a normal day, their colleagues with heavier loads transported them through the tunnels on minitrucks, but Basil preferred to walk. He liked the quiet of the more remote parts. The idea that he could wander through them for hours and not meet anyone was comforting.

Not that he would wander often. After nearly twenty years, he was slowly finding his way around them better than on the surface. The last time he’d searched for an ATM it had taken him twenty minutes before he realized that he was not in Stará, but in Nová Paka, but say Cursed Books or Relics and Crucifixes and he knew exactly the shortest route to a given room.

Behind Unspeakable Horrors on the right.

It took them less than a quarter of an hour to reach the room with the Quarantine sign. It was located at the end of a dead-end arm of one of the adjacent corridors, making it the room farthest from the others.

It was one of the smaller ones in terms of size and had a double door entrance—also metal and also with an electromagnetic lock. These, however, were additionally lined with silver plates and painted on the outside with magical symbols and covered in runes, Latin, and Hebrew consonants. All in dried blood.

Basil drew the ancient sign in the air with his fingers and ran the electronic key through the terminal.

Click!

The decoration continued inside, where there was virtually no free space on the walls and ceiling. Where other incantations, protective images and prayers could not fit, specialists in exorcism and dark forces at least added some hieroglyphics.

The eggheads in the research department had designed it to keep any dangerous or otherwise problematic supernatural object inside. Except, of course, the one thing they really needed to keep in there.

A battered packet of mariasch cards, old and faded and a bit bigger than the modern standard, lay where it always had. On the floor in the center of the room, in the middle of a protective pentagram, flanked by five long-burning candles. It seemed harmless enough, but that’s what made it so dangerous. Even Basil, who preferred games in which strategy, not chance, was important, had only to look at it to feel a flutter in his stomach caused by the thrill of a gamble. But for the urge to pick it up and outbid someone for a few crowns to get the better of him, he would have to forget how things had gone wrong the last time someone had succumbed to its charms.

For the deck held something else besides the cards. A heavyweight among supernatural beings.

A wraith.

Specifically, a dead gambler from St. Peter’s Church in Poříčí, courtesy of his colleagues in Prague. All Basil would have to do was bend down and let him out like a genie from a bottle.

Except this genie only grants wishes to the suicidal ones.

The wraiths had a worse reputation among the Hunters than the Fey. Each was governed by specific rules, and since they existed due to the people’s belief in their existence, the usual means of combating paranormal threats showed intermittent effectiveness against them, plus the wraiths had their own off switch that had to be deduced during a confrontation. On top of that, they often played unfair.

Like, for example, the dead gambler who, when activated in the tunnels, would randomly move in clouds of smoke and challenge people to a game of mariasch. He didn’t care if his victim didn’t know the rules. Anyone who refused or didn’t speak up ended up in pieces. Anyone who said yes got screwed anyway, only they lost their money beforehand. On that day, there was a significant reduction in the number of employees at the Stará Paka warehouse. He was only deactivated by the head of maintenance, who had been gambling practically from the cradle. Once he was back in the box, they stuck him in, lit candles, smoked the room with scented sticks and hoped for the best. Or at least that no one would accidentally bump into him.

“They should burn it,” Ruml remarked.

Basil maneuvered the hand truck next to the entrance. “Don’t look at it and help me with that coffin. We’ll put it in the corner over there, next to the box.”

There could have been anything in it, and there was probably a reason it was lying there.

“Wouldn’t you rather leave it on the hand truck?”

“I don’t want whoever comes in after us to be confronted by it as soon as the door opens.”

“Some people would deserve it,” Ruml muttered, leaning over and lifting the lower end with his back, like a pro, and hissed. “Shit . . . ”

Basil tipped the other side on top of him and immediately understood why. It was heavy. Or rather, the chain that secured it was heavy. There couldn’t be much left of the corpse inside, if there was one, and if it was from the same era as the coffin itself.

He backed slowly into the room, careful not to disturb the pentagram in the process.

A careful step or two and . . . 

And then he flinched.

For when he refocused on his colleague, he found that his face had managed to take on the appearance of a red balloon ready to burst.

In his case, a vein in the brain ready to burst.

“Don’t . . . !”

“Shit!” Ruml gasped simultaneously and . . . 

Clang!

The heel of the coffin rumbled on the floor.

Basil didn’t wait for anything, dropped his part as well, jumped back, crouched down and covered his head with his hands.

Thud, thud, screech!

They both froze like models in a live painting. In the ensuing silence, all that could be heard was their rapid breathing.

They pretended to be statues for about a minute before Basil decided to assess the situation through the squinted lids of his right eye.

“Sorry,” Ruml whispered and showed him his thumb. “I got a splinter.”

Basil frowned at him.

The fluorescent light on the ceiling flickered and they both crouched again.

Ordinarily, they wouldn’t have found anything odd about it. Paranormal material sometimes leaked through insulation, and power outages were the first manifestation of that. But if this particular paranormal object was leaking . . . 

It could end really badly.

The fluorescent light stopped flashing.

“Perhaps we’d better go.”

They moved cautiously into the hallway, and Basil hastily slammed the door shut behind them.

“Jeez,” Ruml breathed, running a hand over his face. “That could have turned out badly.”

“You think?”

“Yeah. I already saw myself torn to shreds. What are the chances of avoiding him twice?”

Basil was about to remark something about idiots, but he swallowed it down.

“Let’s get coffee,” he said instead. “And take the damn hand truck with you.”

Ruml complained, but obeyed, and soon they were making their way to the break room, accompanied by the rhythmic squeak of unlubricated wheels.

Neither of them noticed that it wasn’t just the coffin that hit the floor of the quarantine room, but the padlock in particular—and that the shackle of the medieval-looking relic had popped out as if it had been waiting for that all along.

* * *

The fluorescent light flickered again. And because it was blinking, it looked like the coffin wasn’t opening, but that it was already open. Only the clang of the chain betrayed the movement. That and the cloud of dust that rolled out of the dark gap, which grew larger and larger with each flicker until . . . 

Thud!

The lid fell back on the coffin, but immediately rose again, this time more violently. The chain groaned, the end of it shot out from under the bottom, the dust swirled and the gap widened.

The room was filled with the irritating smell of a dried grave.

Something scraped against the wood inside, and then . . . 

Then four fingers without skin, flesh, blood vessels or blood slid out and wrapped around the edge of the lid like predator claws.

Knock, knock, knock, knock.

The jerk of a bony hand released the rest of the chain and flung the lid across the room as if it weighed nothing. Light poured into the coffin, revealing its ailing occupant. The spotted frontal bone, the empty eye sockets covered in cobwebs, the eternal smile of jaws stripped of lips and a few teeth, the ribs and vertebrae—all old, yellowed, desiccated, and dead.

And yet the joints creaked as the skeleton in the coffin sat up and looked around. Empty sockets stopped on a box in the corner.

Crunch, crunch, crunch.

With the next blink, it was no longer sitting, but standing, and not in the coffin, but beside it. The bones of its feet clicked on the floor like brand new half-shoes, and the phalanx bones pushed under the wooden lid with a squeak.

There were no bones hiding inside that box. It hid a small rumpled book with a dark cross emblazoned on the cover.

The skeleton stooped to pick it up, lifted it to its eye sockets, and looked at it for a moment before opening it, turning it pages down, and shaking it as if trying to knock the Holy Spirit out of it. It didn’t succeed, but it did knock something else out.

Suddenly the whole book shattered, the pages slammed shut, and another wraith materialized in that whirlwind.

She was a little taller than five feet, dressed in a nun’s habit and missing her head. There were broken blood vessels sticking out of her neck, pumping blood onto the white veil, and a severed spine. Blood trickled down the garment and dripped on the floor, leaving no dark red puddles.

The skeleton dropped the remains of the Bible back into the box and reached out to the nun, palm up. The nun pushed it away with a violent movement, grabbed its pale skull with her hands, and pulled. She slammed it back and forth and side to side, but the skull didn’t move.

Pale hands slid down to her hips and the nun’s shoulders slumped. The skeleton reached out its palm to her again. This time she didn’t push it away, merely pointed to where the human body usually didn’t end.

The skeleton gritted its teeth and turned its back on her.

* * *

Basil prepared two mugs and brought the coffee machine to life. Ruml, meanwhile, took a chessboard from his cabinet and spread it out on the table. They used to borrow one from Communications with the Beyond, but after that gambler debacle they’d decided to buy their own.

The empty gatehouse didn’t bother either of them. Most weekends, nobody came here. And if they did, any visitors could always ring the bell.

“Who’s playing white today?” Ruml asked.

“Does it matter?” Basil replied, watching as the coffee machine clanked, hummed and vibrated while filling the pot.

Ruml scratched his chin. “I think I started last time.”

“So I’m playing white.”

“In that case, I won’t stand a chance again.”

“Then don’t ask and keep them,” Basil said.

The coffee maker rumbled. Basil pulled the pot from it, poured the lifesaver in the prepared mugs, and put them on the sides of the chessboard where an army of white pieces waited ready for him.

“We’re not playing for the last time today, are we?” Ruml chuckled.

* * *

A bony leg crossed the edge of the pentagram. The bloody patterns flared, projecting a distorted shadow of its owner onto the ceiling. Nothing else happened. The skeleton stepped in the pentagram with its other foot, stopping near the deck of cards.

It watched it for a few seconds, head cocked to the side, then bent down and picked it up. A picture of a faded monster with its tongue lolling out returned its gaze from the worn deck. The skeleton raised its other hand and scratched the bottom edge of the box with the tip of its index finger—and as it opened, a stack of cards slipped out and scattered across the floor.

The skeleton ruffled them with its foot, but did not deal with them further. Instead, it turned its attention to the case. It shook it, and since nothing else fell out, it put it to its eye socket and peered inside as if it was a kaleidoscope. But there were no strange shapes hiding there. There was nothing there at all.

At least, nothing except black smoke, which rolled out with a hiss and enveloped the surroundings in an impenetrable cloud, but then immediately shrank and formed a humanoid shape. A few moments later, there was no trace of the smoke, and in the center of the pentagram stood a small, hunched man with a round head, bluish skin, receding hair and a moustache of a carnival magician.

On his narrow shoulders hung a rumpled undertaker cloak and he wore a black necktie. In his hand he held a deck, no longer held by a skeleton, and which probably again contained the cards that had disappeared from the floor.

“Hmph,” he grumbled at the sight of the pentagram in the middle of which he stood. He scratched his forehead, stepped out of it effortlessly, raised his crooked eyes to the skeleton, and hissed: “A game of cards?”

The skeleton held out its empty palm to him again. The gambler grimaced and laid a card on it. The skeleton raised it to its skull and studied it for a moment before tilting its palm to the side and letting it fall to the floor.

Just before the card touched the floor, it dissipated in a puff of black smoke. The gambler leaned in sharply, sniffed, and wrinkled his nose.

“Dead,” he stated.

The skeleton tilted its head and looked at what was left, or rather, what was not left of its earthly vessel. Then the wraiths looked at each other resignedly.

The gambler waved his hand angrily—but stopped mid-movement, for he had spotted the nun through his unreachable victim.

Poof!

He dissolved into smoke and puffed out in a new cloud in front of her.

“A game of cards?”

The nun turned to him stiffly. Maybe to check him out, maybe she was just intrigued by something behind him; it was hard to tell without her head. A stream of blood spurted from her throat directly on the Hebrew text on the wall. It was hard to tell if that meant: “Yes” or “No.”

The gambler raised his eyebrows questioningly and waved the fan of cards he had materialized in his fingers at her. The nun, like with the skeleton before, tried to rip his head off, and when that failed, she turned away from him and headed for the door. She paused in front of it, perhaps looking it over for a change.

Whatever she was doing, though, it took her about five minutes before she lifted her arm, the sleeve sliding down to her elbow to reveal a spotted, rachitic arm, and touched the door with her fingers.

The fluorescent light on the ceiling flickered, and with it the lights on the electromagnetic lock.

* * *

“Checkmate,” Basil announced lethargically after the last move.

“Meh,” Ruml grimaced. Lately, he was beginning to feel like he was the only chess player in the world who was getting worse with the increasing number of games he played. “You could let me win again sometime.”

“Again?”

“Yeah, like that time when . . . ” He frowned as he tried to remember. “That time when . . . ”

“You were playing with someone else, huh?” suggested Basil. “It wasn’t completely stupid, though. You replicated the Crazy Horse perfectly before the end.”

“What’s that?”

“1988, Millidge versus Kaniecki. It looked like Millidge was done, but then he shifted the knight to stand between his bishop and Kaniecki’s queen. Kaniecki threatened him with a rook from above, and Millidge . . . Well, he surprised everybody by taking his knight and jumping with it completely out of this clash.”

“No shit.” Millidge. That made Ruml feel a little better. “What good is the Crazy Horse for?”

Basil shrugged. “It’s useless. Kaniecki comfortably rode that tower all the way to one and checkmated him.”

Ruml sighed, stood up, and set about buckling on his belt with a pepper spray, a flashlight, a radio, a crucifix, a bottle of holy water, a garlic mallet, a yew stake, a kukri knife, a revolver loaded with a variation of bullets from silver to filled with powder from the bones of saints, and other equipment necessary to perform the duties of a security guard at the SRS. “You know what?”

“What?”

“I’d better go on my rounds.”

He could never tell if Basil was joking or if he actually found episodes like this from the world of chess interesting.

Or useful.

He didn’t slam the door behind him, but it was close. He headed back into the maze. Damn the rounds, he just needed to calm down.

He liked Basil, he really did. He almost saw him as an older brother.

An older, autistic brother who was completely oblivious to the fact that he was pushing someone over the edge.

Shaking his head, he bypassed the section simply titled Dolls, turned right, and stopped in front of the plain metal door leading to the staircase that descended to the Archives.

Technically, it was part of his rounds, but he didn’t bother to check it very often—and he didn’t bother today.

Rheumatism is coming fast and retirement is still far away. Gotta save your knees, right?

Instead, he turned the next corner and was already reaching for the handle of the restroom door, but . . . 

Flick, flick. Flick.

He looked up at the fluorescent light on the ceiling.

Flick. Flick, flick, flick.

The sign next to the nearest room said: Demonic Toys.

Just typical, he thought grimly, and instinctively rested his palm on the grip of his revolver. During his career with the SRS, he had never taken it out of its holster for any reason other than maintenance or to show it to someone. In fact, he was amazed at how all the trouble had eluded him. Not that he was complaining. But subconsciously, he knew his luck would run out one day.

But ninety-nine percent of the time, the flickering lights are the fault of leaking insulation, so it’s not going to happen today! he decided, leaning against the door to the restroom.

And he stopped there.

Ninety-nine percent of the time, he would have ignored it. Dealing with leaking protection wasn’t a part of the job of a security guard. That’s why the SRS employed professionals. The job of the security guards was to parade around and look menacing in case someone got some funny ideas.

Basically, we’re better-paid scarecrows.

Except today, maybe because of that mysterious coffin or the hilarious attempt to store it, he had a bad feeling about it. In fact, it was a really bad feeling.

“Shit,” he snorted, pulled out his revolver, checked to make sure it was loaded, flipped the hammer over to open fire with frangible bullets if necessary, pulled an electronic key from his breast pocket, and walked over to the entrance of the section that people were entering only when absolutely necessary and, at best, leaving it only without some fingers.

The red light bulb switched to green, the lock clicked, and a pale glow poured through the crack in the door onto his boots. Ruml took a deep breath and hesitantly pushed it with the barrel of his gun.

The hinges creaked, the gap widened, and he was presented with the view of a room not unlike the one Basil had taken Lenora to. It, too, was lined from floor to ceiling with solid crates, only larger in size and decorated with a plethora of protective markings. Perhaps not as much as in the quarantine, but almost.

Ruml knew that behind every crate lid, there was a little homicidal maniac. Plastic soldiers, knitted dolls, wooden figures, building blocks, stuffed animals, flashing robots—and of course the worst.

Possessed furbies.

He shuddered at the thought. And he shuddered a second time when he noticed that the lid of one of the boxes wasn’t fully closed. Cautiously, he crept over to it and reached for the flap. But he hesitated a few inches away from it and clenched his hand into a fist.

I swear to God, if there’s one of those furry monstrosities inside . . . 

A cold drop ran down his temple. He took a deep breath and . . . 

Screw it!

He fumbled for the lid, yanked it open and shoved his revolver inside, ready to put a bullet to anything that might try to eat him. But there was nothing lurking on the other side.

“Jeez,” he sighed, running the back of his hand over his sweaty forehead.

All right, all right, false alarm. A simple leak, nothing else.

He still had some luck left after all. With a relieved expression, he lowered his revolver, turned around and strode back into the hallway.

Where the skeleton was waiting for him, palm outstretched.

* * *

Basil was just refilling his coffee mug when the first shot was fired. Long story short, not much of it ended up in the mug, unlike the kitchen counter, the cupboard, the wall, the ceiling and Basil.

“Damn, what the . . . ” Basil dropped the pot, quickly rubbed the remains of his drink into his shirt, and ran out into the hallway, through which the thunder of the second, third, and fourth shots had already carried—and the other two arrived close behind.

Basil started to run, but slowed down at the first intersection. The echoes traveled far through the tunnels, and he had no idea where exactly the butthurt Ruml might have gone.

“Ruml?!” he bellowed. But only silence answered him.

Damn it, which way?

No, not complete silence. A barely audible thud came from somewhere. He jogged down the main corridor to the next intersection, called out to Ruml again, and again got no answer.

At least, no other than an emergency chemical lighting, immune to the presence of supernatural beings, which replaced the standard one with a loud click and flooded the complex with red light. And the nerve-wracking roar that immediately followed, which made Basil’s insides clench.

He didn’t try to call out a third time. He just ran. This signal was easy to follow.

He turned the corner to the next corridor, and from there to another corridor, and then passed Dolls and Archives. He knew what it meant.

That the gate to Hell was around the corner.

Just before he rounded it, a siren belatedly drowned out the roar.

It didn’t matter, though, because something liquid and sticky tickled under the soles of his work boots as he turned around another corner.

He didn’t see any demonic toys. But he saw Ruml. All over the place, like the spilled coffee.

Basil looked into the dead eye of the severed head that stared at him. “Oh shit. Not again.”

* * *

In the event of a leak of paranormal material, the protocol called for isolation of the entire facility. The shredded deceased took care of that by setting off the alarm. All exits were now blocked by an armored door with innards similar to the one in the quarantine room.

Certain creatures, such as wraiths, could theoretically still leave the facility, but fortunately they seemed to operate locally and couldn’t even get out of a simple maze without being led out by their pursued prey.

Whatever had caused Ruml’s death and the isolation, however, meant that Basil was stuck with it down here until the SRT team arrived. That gave him at least a few hours to follow his coworker’s example.

For as of last year, Stará Paka was administratively under the jurisdiction of Prague, 70 miles away.

And I’d be surprised if they wasted a helicopter on us.

The regulations clearly stated that in the event of a crisis, warehouse employees were obliged to seek safe shelter to await the arrival of the relevant specialists and not to attempt to leave the premises at any cost. If he wants to survive, he must somehow manage on his own.

Okay, step number one: threat assessment.

He took a deep breath of the air that tasted like rust, and with splashing steps, marched through Ruml’s entrails to the open door of the Demonic Toys section.

He had to force himself hard to look inside. But all it took was a cursory inspection to know that nothing had gotten out. The only open box had been in that state since last week, when the occult researchers had taken its contents.

He backed out into the hallway and slammed the door behind him. The siren died that instant, as if out of breath, leaving him in a silence broken only by the dripping of Ruml’s remains from the ceiling.

Well, this evaluation sucked.

There were thousands of things stored here that could do something similar to a human, and he could hardly take inventory now. On the other hand, everything had gone smoothly until now.

And today, all we’ve got was that chained coffin.

He needed to make a phone call. Get in touch with someone on the outside and find out what kind of bastard they sent them. Maybe there was a perfectly simple way to deactivate it or hide from it, but he needed more information to figure out a strategy.

Hopefully the line in the office will work.

He took the shortest route, but took barely two steps before something stopped him. At first he thought it was a part of the dripping Ruml ceiling painting, but once he focused on it, it didn’t match. It repeated periodically at about three second intervals, and it didn’t sound like drops falling into puddles. It sounded more like a water pistol.

Splash, splash. Splash, splash.

Basil pressed himself against the wall and slowly peered around the corner. For the first second, his brain couldn’t even put together what he was looking at. But he knew it wasn’t a water pistol. Against the red background loomed what looked like the silhouette of an overgrown penguin, with who-knows-what spraying from its head. That struck him as odd.

Paranormal fauna is stored in Turnov . . . 

But of course it wasn’t an overgrown penguin, and Basil recognized it as soon as the thing swung around and then suddenly moved halfway down the corridor at the speed of a rewinding videotape.

“Oh shit,” he whispered.

Splash, splash, came the reply, blood gushing from the neck of the headless nun, who moved again and came to a stop right in front of him.

Basil jerked, pushed himself away from the wall, and was about to make a run for it, but by then bluish rachitic arms, topped with broken nails, were reaching for him. He dodged them before they could rip out his throat. He tried to make a turn, but he took a wrong step, the soles of his boots, covered in a sticky stuff, slipped under him, and he fell into a pool of Ruml’s blood, reflecting the scene above it like a black mirror.

Ignoring the dull pain that spilled down his side, he rolled onto his stomach and tried to paddle as far as he could on the slippery surface. His palms slipped and his jumpsuit was heavy with blood, but he managed to lift himself up on his forearms on drag himself forward . . . right in front of her bluish, rachitic ankles.

“Oh sh—”

He didn’t have the time to finish as fingers with broken nails dug into his skull and dragged him across the floor as if they were going to rip his head off. And maybe not just “as if.”

Basil screamed, grabbed the cold knuckles and tried to pull them away, but to no avail. The nun shuffled stiffly across the floor, dragging him behind her like a rag. He groped around and tried to grab something, but all he could feel was the floor and the wall. The latter he felt with his nape first, when the nun slammed him against it.

For a moment, his eyes went dark, but not enough to lose consciousness. Before he could banish the blackout, the nun pulled him the other way.

Blindly he grappled around again, this time feeling something metallic in his palm. He picked it up, together with the severed hand still holding onto it. He pried the fingers off in disgust, pointed it above him, and pulled the trigger four times in quick succession.

The revolver clicked emptily four times.

You have to be . . . !

In a desperate attempt to at least put up some sort of defense, he flung it against the nun’s chest.

The revolver bounced and hit him on the forehead.

“Gah!”

Even that false attempt was apparently enough to anger the creature, because she twisted his head and sent him like a curling stone across the bloody pool to the remains of Ruml’s body.

Basil’s first instinct was to move as far away from it as possible, only before he could, he noticed something. Ruml’s duty belt. So, defying his primal instinct, he forced himself, pushed off, jump right between the severed legs and what must have been a pelvis, and slipped the belt onto his arm just before the nun reappeared beside him.

This time a skinny hand gripped him below the neck, lifted him with one quick movement, and pinned him against the nearest wall. He was left hanging just above the ground so he couldn’t brush against it with the tips of his boots, blood spurting from the nun’s neck in his face. In his face, his bulging eyes, and on his tongue, which was being squeezed out of his mouth by the crushing grip as he tried in vain to suck air into his throat.

The other hand shot up, only to have its fingers dig in his shoulder and pull him down. He felt like he was on a rack, and he knew his neck was bound to snap at any second.

He grabbed the first object on his belt that came to his hand and yanked it from its grip. It was a wooden stake.

Ha!

Sure, the headless nun wasn’t a vampire, but if there was one thing he’d learned on this job, it was that few monsters weren’t brought down by a stake driven deep enough into their chests.

He gripped it tightly, swung, and . . . 

And the stake slipped from his bloody fingers and rattled on the floor.

If he could have done that, he would have uttered a curse word, but since he had trouble even grunting, he didn’t utter anything and went back to pulling the rabbits out of the hat. His cervical spine crunched as the nun gave him the biggest stretch of his life. Something round slipped into his palm. He picked it up and . . . 

Garlic? Christ, if there could be anything less useful!

He dropped it and reached desperately for something else. He didn’t have the oxygen to continue being picky. He allowed himself to hope that whatever he pulled out would be worth it.

It wasn’t. As soon as he felt the glass under his fingertips, he knew he’d made the wrong choice. But he had to risk it; the pressure on his neck had practically smoothed out his wrinkles.

He could barely see over the blood in his face and the spots in front of his eyes. So he had no choice but to blindly swing and pour the vial of holy water down the nun’s throat.

So that’s exactly what he did.

A spray of blood spurted from her throat in what might have been a rasping cough, and the hand that had been digging under his jaw finally let go.

He landed on his ass right in a viscous puddle and it splashed everywhere. He rubbed his eyes with the inside of his collar and looked around. Surprisingly, he didn’t see the nun anywhere.

Interesting.

He doubted he’d be able to get rid of her for long, but he wasn’t going to look a gifted horse in the mouth.

He was sure he could find spare ammo on the belt. He looked around to see if he could see the lost weapon anywhere, but he didn’t, and he didn’t have the time to look for it. He rubbed the back of his neck, pulled himself to his feet with a muffled groan and a totally unmuffled creak in his knees, and limped away.

* * *

“I can’t tell you the registration number because I don’t have the transfer document,” Basil repeated patiently into the receiver. “And I don’t have the transfer document because your driver didn’t give it to me.”

“Our couriers always carry the handover document with them,” the curtly speaking woman on the other end dismissed his accusation.

“Apparently not always,” Basil said, holding the bridge of his nose. “Could you just take a look at exactly what you guys sent here this morning?”

There was a brief silence on the line, followed by a loud sigh and pounding on the keyboard. “We didn’t send you any headless nuns.”

“What about coffins?”

Clack, clack, clack. Like rain drops smashing against a tin roof. “A coffin with a skeleton in it, tied with a chain, yeah, I see it listed. But I can’t tell you much about it. Our operatives brought it back from Prague yesterday. The details are in the enclosed documentation.”

On the way to the office, he figured the nun wouldn’t be the only paranormal roaming the complex freely. After all, if holy water was enough to drive her away, the relic crumbs loaded in Ruml’s revolver would have to work too. He might have missed, but that didn’t seem likely given the nun’s modus operandi.

But a skeleton?

“In the documentation someone forgot to include?” he asked.

“I don’t know what to tell you.”

“How about what it says?”

“That’s classified information, and I don’t have access to that.”

Basil glanced at his reflection in the glass of the cupboard. He recognized himself only by his build; he couldn’t see much more of himself. His curly hair was plastered to his head with blood, still wet blood was drying on his face, his jumpsuit was soaked through like a sponge, and his boots were squeaking just from shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He looked like a used tampon—and felt about the same. He decided to pull a heavier caliber on the helpful lady.

“My colleague is dead, and it’s whatever came out of your box that’s to blame. I’d hate to end up the same way.”

The woman paused again and all that could be heard from the receiver was her breathing.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she finally uttered uncertainly.

“I wouldn’t dare ask more of you,” he assured her, and hung up.

A skeleton, he rolled over in his mind. No, nothing else had really changed since yesterday.

Could it have gotten out and activated something else in the process?

He remembered the pack of cards stored not two feet from the coffin, and his stomach did another somersault.

On the other hand, he hadn’t run into the gambler before, but a nun.

Which isn’t much better, but at least it means that if she didn’t come out of the coffin, her documentation must be here.

Having computers in the warehouse didn’t make sense given the leaks, so the staff got all the relevant information on paper. And all the files were stored . . . 

In the archives.

Just a few steps from where Ruml died. And where he almost died.

He figured he could barricade himself inside the break room. But then he denounced it as stupid.

Maybe if we had some instinct-driven beasts running around who don’t understand the concept of handles and rooms.

But the nun was at best a specter or a ghost, quite obviously exhibiting intelligence, and the skeleton, if it was indeed activated as he suspected, would be no different.

He scratched his wet moustache with a thumb and glanced at the sunglasses Lenora had left behind in the storage room. He wondered how difficult it would be for her to hunt down a headless nun.

It would probably be easy for her. She sure as hell wouldn’t even get dirty doing it.

But Lenora couldn’t help him, and he still didn’t know what had nearly torn his head off.

He went back to the table and found the archive key, a flashlight, and the small bottle of rum he’d gotten from Ruml for his birthday out of the drawers, along with a sampler of cigars.

He pocketed the first two items, took a big swig from the third, and headed for the door.

* * *

Headless Nun, proclaimed the label on the faded folder. Despite the flashlight he held in his teeth, Basil smiled, pulled it out of the cardboard box, pushed away the dusty bundles on the nearest table, slapped it down, and opened it.

The creeping journey to the archives had been surprisingly smooth, except for a small crisis when the clack of new half-shoes or walking sticks or something like that came to him from somewhere in the red corridors.

The metal door was followed by metal stairs leading one floor down, into the darkness of a large room where no one had bothered to install crisis lighting. The air was dry and full of dust that made his eyes itch and his throat scratch, and most of the room was filled with a shabby system of rolling shelves that could be bolted together to save space using control wheels, and between which, if one needed to get to a particular section, one had to create an aisle using the same process.

While Basil was torturing the poorly lubricated bearings, he nearly bled out of his ears—and at the same time got the impression that he was doomed.

He could imagine that the footsteps of a skeleton, for example, might sound like the clacking of new half-shoes, and he supposed he would soon find out.

But he didn’t. He heard nothing at all. Still, he made an aisle just wide enough for him to slide sideways into and possibly pull out one of the boxes on the shelves.

“A wraith,” he read on the cataloguing document inside the file. Of course it had to be a wraith.

He rubbed his eyes and turned the page.

“Indecent in life . . . Convicted of seducing a parish priest . . . Executed in . . . ”

He didn’t need to know any of that. He was only interested in two things: whether she manifested beyond what he had experienced, and how to deactivate her.

“She attacks people and rips their heads off, presumably in an attempt to replace her own. Can be temporary neutralized by using symbols of the Catholic faith, but deactivation only occurs when a ‘new’ head is acquired.”

“Thanks for nothing,” Basil grumbled, pushed the file away disgruntledly and circled the archive with his flashlight.

Roller chains, gears and steel rails, desks buried under stacks of boxes and stacks of papers. He could only dream of Catholic symbols.

I’ll have to stop by in . . . 

Crrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

A sharp, rattling sound, like an alarm clock going off nearby. It was a good thing he wasn’t holding a mug of coffee, because if he had, he would have spilled it again.

He rushed over to one of the desks and exhumed a ringing phone from under a pile of papers. The caller must have been very patient if they let the office line ring long enough for the machine to transfer them here.

“Paka,” Basil announced into the receiver.

“Ostrava,” the woman he spoke to first answered back, “Are you still alive?”

“I’m doing my best.”

“I managed to find some information on the coffin. You won’t like it.”

“Humor me.”

“It’s not much. Nothing definite, just that . . . ” She paused. “Just that the skeleton is . . . ”

She didn’t even need to finish the sentence for Basil to know what she was trying to tell him.

She’s trying to tell me I’m completely and utterly screwed.

“That it’s a wraith,” the Ostrava woman added uncertainly.

Basil didn’t know how to respond to that—and apparently neither did she, because the next thing that came out was a curt, “I’m sorry. Good luck.”

Then she hung up.

Basil stood there with the receiver, from which only a deaf tone was coming, still at his ear, his gaze fixed on the darkness, his brain focused on one thing.

There are two of them.

If he could get to Relics and Crucifixes, he would be perfectly safe from the nun and would only have to wait for the SRT team. Only there were two wraiths, he had no idea how one of them worked or if he could protect himself from it, and he didn’t have any means to find out?

At least I can choose to have just my head taken off, or all my limbs, he deduced grimly.

Not that he planned to do it, but he had to include it in his list of possibilities as a part of his critical assessment of the situation. Mainly because there weren’t more items on it at the moment.

The receiver was still beeping in his ear. Slowly, he returned it to the fork.

In his reverie, he hadn’t even noticed that the flashlight he’d been holding in his clenched hand all this time had been flickering, and that for a while now, the regular clacking of what sounded like new half-shoes or walking sticks had been echoing through the archive.

And that it was getting closer.

* * *

In a bizarre moment of mute shock, after forcing the strobe-impaired flashlight to point ahead of him, he and the skeleton remained staring at each other like a pigeon at an approaching cat.

It really was a skeleton. A bone skeleton made entirely of bones, somehow holding together, and covered from forehead to toe-joints in a glistening layer of drying blood.

Basil didn’t have to ponder for long whose blood it might be. His heart pounded in a way that seemed as if it would burst with every beat, and instinct told him to make a run for it.

Without moving his eyes, he shifted his focus from the skeleton to the door behind his back. A door that, like the wraith, loomed out of absolute darkness in flashes of white light, only to disappear into it again in a split second.

Basil had no idea if the skeleton was intelligent, but if it could, he couldn’t get past the skeleton to the door.

He focused back on it. Its eye sockets returned his gaze with a featureless emptiness, yet there seemed to be something conscious staring back at him from it. Perhaps the emptiness itself.

What could possibly work on a skeleton? Rheumatism?

Ruml had saved his life earlier with the nun, despite his unusual condition. But there was no corpse lying here, purely by chance equipped with the exact thing he’d need to cripple a skeleton. He noticed, however, that something gleamed on the table top. A pair of pointy office scissors.

That would have to do.

He checked to see if the wraith was about to do anything, licked his lips and took a deep breath—and lunged for them.

The skeleton gritted its teeth and lunged after him.

Fragmented by the flickering light, it looked jerky, like a sequence of images, many of which had been lost. Each pose revealed by a flash seemed to take too long, but at the same time it appeared a little closer each time. Suddenly, it was not standing three steps from the table, but right next to it, reaching for Basil’s hand.

The warehouse clerk jumped in front of it, swung his scissors and . . . 

And he stopped.

The skeleton didn’t continue. It didn’t lunge at him, didn’t try to grab him and paint the room with him. It just stood there, palm up, as if waiting for Basil to put something in it.

“What, what do you want? A coin for the ferryman?”

The skeleton gritted its teeth. Maybe it signified laughter, maybe disapproval, you couldn’t quite tell from its expression. But you could read it in its gesture as it turned its palm down, its outstretched fingers curling into five sharp hooks with a wince, and they dug into the table in a flash of light.

Crack!

Splinters shot from the tabletop—and only with that did the skeleton lunge at Basil for real. But the warehouse clerk did not hesitate. As the wraith lurched up, he took advantage of the change in its center of gravity, kicked in the table with his foot, and flipped it over.

Bones rattled on the floor and were covered by stacks of flyers. Basil dropped the scissors, walked over to the shelves and slid back into the space he had created between them.

In the flickering light, he kept himself oriented mostly by touch, and it showed. He bumped his forehead on the corner of the first slightly sagging box, which nearly sent him crashing on the floor. But he caught the shelf in time. If he collapsed here, he probably wouldn’t get up again.

Behind him came the sound of wood breaking and bones clacking. Two more steps, and on the third he was thrown backwards as if a parachute opened. But there was no parachute on his back.

“Damn . . . !” he huffed.

In the first second, panic flashed through him as he thought the skeleton had got him, but no, his overall just got caught on something. He reached blindly behind his back and . . . 

Dun, dun!

He cocked his head rather than turning it, and his breath hitched again.

The skeleton, unencumbered by such useless things as tissue, muscle, or fat pads, pushed itself headfirst in the passageway and dove after him like a spider after prey trapped in a web. It tore things off the shelves as it did so, each crash of bone against metal eliciting new and new rumbles.

Basil threw himself forward with all his weight, and a bolt, a nail, a sharp edge, or whatever was holding him, took its toll in the form of a piece of torn overall with a loud, “Ruuup!” and let him go. He staggered to the end of the shelves, where he was greeted by an even narrower gap between them and the wall.

For Christ’s sake.

He wasn’t sure he could fit in it, but he didn’t have many other options. He blew all the air from his lungs, pulled in his stomach, and pushed into it like a frog under a rock . . . and immediately regretted it.

As well-preserved as he looked for his age, thanks to his work, the fact remained that his tree-frog days were long behind him and he was slowly becoming an old man. In other words, a fat toad.

Moving through the gap squeezed the last of any oxygen out of him, and whether it was movement at all was up for debate. He felt crammed in there like a cork. But the rapidly approaching rumble gave him the motivation to do something about it.

He reached out, hooked his hand on the edge of the adjacent shelf and pulled.

And nothing happened.

Dun! Dun! Dun!

He pulled again, more strongly. As hard as he could.

He could feel the metal edge cutting through his fingertips, but still it didn’t move a millimeter.

Dun! Dun!

“Come on!” he grunted.

A skeleton emerged from around the corner.

Dun!

“Come on!” Basil grunted again, gave one last tug, and . . . 

The pressure eased, just as the wraith attacked.

Sharp phalanges flashed just past his face, but missed. Instead, smooth as razor blades, they cut through the overalls and the skin on his arm, and slammed into the wall. The plaster exploded in a white cloud.

Basil collapsed on the floor with a scream. Despite the pain, however, he immediately pulled himself up and slid into the next aisle, a few inches wider, allowing him to move more freely in it. Not by much, but enough that he was able to stand. Thank goodness, because the skeleton wasn’t stuck in the narrow gap.

The warehouse clerk grabbed the nearest box and threw it under its feet. The skeleton stepped over it, and as it shifted its weight on the trapped leg, it slid underneath it like it’d stepped on soap.

Crash!

Basil knocked two or three more to the floor and slid out of the space between the shelves. The thought of escape flashed through his mind, but he dismissed it.

It’s too fast. I have to paralyze it first. At least for a little while.

The solution offered itself.

He shoved the flashlight between his teeth, took the steering wheel on the side of the nearest rack with both hands, and swung it toward the aisle. The gears groaned and the space he had just emerged from began to shrink. Only it was about as fast as wading through snow.

In other words, it didn’t go very well.

The skeleton managed to shake the box off and stand up. But it immediately stepped into another one and slipped again. This time it didn’t try to get up. It bent its elbows and started crawling out on all fours over the rest of the obstacles behind Basil. The transformation into a monstrous, overgrown and unnaturally moving spider was complete.

Basil was turning the steering wheel as hard as he could. His arms were burning and a saw of pain was cutting into his left one. He gritted his teeth and kept turning.

He could feel his wounds opening up more. He could feel blood trickling down his arm and sweat running down his back. A dun dun dun sounded through the aisle, approaching too fast! And he knew he didn’t stand a chance. He wouldn’t make it. That the skeleton would finally get close enough to him to do to him what it’d done to Ruml, and . . . 

Dunvrrrrrzskriiiiiiiip!

And nothing.

“Shit,” he hissed in relief. He gave one last try, but the rack didn’t budge. He wouldn’t fit through that gap and it looked like the skeleton wouldn’t make it either.

At least not right away.

There was a rustling and creaking sound as it wriggled in there, but Basil possessed enough intelligence not to attempt to peer inside. He just turned around and . . . 

A bony hand shot out of the gap and fumbled for him.

He didn’t manage to jump away this time. Fiery pain shot through his forearm as sharp fingers dug into it like predatory claws.

“Aaaah!” he wailed, dropping to one knee. The flashlight fell out of his mouth and rolled aside. In the flickering light, something glittered on the floor.

He braced his foot on the shelf and tried to wriggle out of the skeleton’s grip, but it didn’t let him. It was as if a pair of pneumatic pliers were about to snap his arm off.

And that’s exactly what it’s planning! First this arm, then the other, then everything else!

He shot a glance around to see if he could find anything that might help, but no. Just that shiny thing.

Screw it!

He reached for it, the metal cold on his bleeding fingers.

The scissors!

The realization put a half-crazed smile on his blood-covered face. He picked them up, thrust them right between the wraith’s wrist bones, and gave them a good twist. The pneumatic pincers loosened as if he had cut invisible tendons. The bony fingers opened and the button they had ripped from Basil’s sleeve clinked on the floor.

Basil rolled aside, picked up the flashlight, and pulled himself to his feet with the aid of the table.

The skeleton groped on the floor, the blades sticking out from under his palm, carving deep grooves in it with an agonizing screech. It was only when Basil kicked the button between the shelves that the hand disappeared, and peace once again reigned in the archive.

The regulations may have made it clear how to behave in this situation, but this was the second time today that death had reached for Basil, and he wasn’t going to wait to see if it would happen a third time.

So screw it. Time to get out.

All that was left was to figure out how to do it.

* * *

The SRS functioned like all state institutions—through skillful psychological bullying, which not only distracted from the steadily deteriorating work conditions, but also drove the employees to such a disturbed state of mind that they did not believe they could be better off elsewhere.

That, and through having enough duct tape.

The fact that the word “state” appeared in the institution’s name, however, meant that it had to abide by certain rules. Among them, that there must be a freely accessible first aid kit in the workplace and all employees must be properly trained on how to use it.

In other words, Basil reasoned, to avoid the state institution being held legally liable, only workers with an OHS certificate are allowed to have their heads ripped off.

At the moment, though, he was mainly interested in the first aid kit.

It was hanging just outside the door to the restroom, and he didn’t even bother to rummage through it. He plucked it off the tiled wall and dumped its contents in the sink. Needles of pain ran through his body with every movement, but it warmed his heart to know that he was finally getting a chance to capitalize on the hours and hours of first aid classes he had to take every year. That he knew exactly what to do. That he could treat a potentially life-threatening injury like an expert.

And that’s exactly what he did—he unscrewed the cap from a bottle of antiseptic, poured it directly into his wounds, making the pain in his cut fingers and mangled arm much more excruciating, and covered it all with band-aids.

Now for the escape, he thought, as soon as he stopped gritting his teeth, cleaned his hands and face and tied the sleeves of his half-undressed jumpsuit around his waist.

The elevator is without power, but there is a ladder to climb up the shaft. But how to get into the cabin?

When the alarm started, access was blocked by a door inlaid with ceramic plates bearing regularly updated protective verses and bathed in the tears of the Archbishop of Prague, on which a giant eye drawn in virgin blood fixed its potentially scorching gaze on newcomers. The door only opened when the alarm went off, and that could only be done from the outside. The stairs were secured by a similar barrier even at the top; he would certainly not get through those, and the only other alternative was to dig his way out.

He leaned against the basin and stared at the red swirl rotating above the drain.

Layered armor . . . 

He could hardly open something like that with a crowbar. He’d need a proper welder, or maybe thermite. Something that could cut or burn through.

Something that would blow the door to the moon.

In sudden realization, he looked up at the mirror and stared in his own eyes.

“Yeah,” he muttered between the thoughts that flew through his head, “that might work.”

A triumphant grin played on his lips as he did so—but it didn’t last long after he headed back into the dark corridors.

The cursed Vietnamese sky rocket, in the form of a shiny, though now red rather than golden dragon, was still in the same place: in a box in a room opposite of the break room, where the warehouse workers put material that was not in acute danger of coming to life and killing everyone, and which was therefore in no hurry to be processed.

The paradox of the situation was that if he had rushed to process it, he could have picked it up in one of the unlocked cells on the way and would never have been in the situation that awaited him.

Or maybe I would be, but at least I would have been holding the most powerful flamethrower in history.

But he was holding nothing but a flashlight. A flashlight that thankfully managed to start blinking again before he walked into the arms of a hunched guy in crumpled clothes.

Flick, flick, flick.

Promptly, he turned it off, quietly reaching the corner and peering cautiously in the main tunnel.

His stomach twisted and the world rocked with him like a boat on the ocean.

The dead gambler walked back and forth in front of the elevator, one hand smoothing his mustache, the other shuffling his cards and repeating neurotically, “A game of cards? Shall we have a game of cards? What? What do you say? A game of cards?” There was an occasional poof as he disappeared in a puff of black smoke, only to materialize again a few steps away.

Basil stepped back so the wraith couldn’t see him and ran a palm over his face.

Of course, this one must be here too. Because nothing can be easy around here.

He might have cursed, but he felt like a deflated balloon. With the nun and the skeleton, he used all his luck, but the gambler?

Luck had never saved anyone from him.

As soon as the gambler notices Basil, he’ll end up just like Ruml, if not worse.

With a quiet sigh, he slumped in a squat and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

Ruml, his favorite colleague, who had been buying him his favorite brand of rum and cigars for his birthday.

And to whom I always gave the pickle coffee the vendor recommended because I never thought to pay attention to what type he was actually drinking.

What did he really know about him?

That he suffered from a fear that he would one day perish under an avalanche of possessed furbies.

He rubbed his eyes.

At least that prediction hadn’t come true. Though it’s hard to say if he would have appreciated it. Either way, he’d be eager to kick the ass of that idiot who brought that damn coffin without papers.

Basil could still do that for him.

All right then.

He shook his head, took a deep breath, pulled himself to his feet, and looked out toward the elevator again.

“A game of cards! A game of caaaaards!” the gambler moaned. Poof, poof, poof!

But that wasn’t all. He was already pulling back when the familiar splash, splash, splash, splash was added to the mix, and the nun shuffled in the red light from the darkness behind the lift.

Basil clenched his jaw. In the end it didn’t matter, though; the original plan flew out the window. Maybe if he could lure them somewhere. Use the way they operated against them . . . It would have to work long enough for him to get to the surface, though. He didn’t like the idea of a wraith puffing into the elevator.

But that would require a trap—and more importantly, bait. Or three, rather, since each wraith was interested in something different, and while there were only two currently in his way, he wasn’t going to risk them being replaced by the skeleton after a successful diversion.

Fortunately, Ruml could help him with that.

* * *

The problem with the gambler was that the SRS staff had long been unable to pry any information about his origins from folklorists, beyond the legend of a churchman from St. Peter’s church with a passion for mariasch who was deprived of all his opponents by the plague. One evening, he supposedly have asked in the morgue if the dead would play with him, and they got up and granted his wish—or at least carried it out before they all fell to the ground at midnight. Probably including the gambler, who had haunted that place from then on until the Prague staff sent him to Stará Paka.

Of course, the story lacked any grounding in reality, and no dead churchman found in the cellar of the church in question was mentioned in any relevant historical documents. In this, the gambler was no different from other wraiths. Unlike them, however, it was impossible to find a way to turn his behavior against him. His creation did not involve trading a soul to Hell, a connection to any religion, or even occult rituals, and although he was dead, he was not technically speaking, undead.

While the nun’s mechanics were documented quite clearly, the only thing that could be said for sure about the gambler was that he liked cards and that only a few people survived his offer to play, whether accepted or declined. Which, at the same time, was more than Basil had been able to find out about the skeleton.

He realized that what he was about to do was risky, perhaps even ill-advised or downright foolish.

But still better than doing nothing.

It’s been almost two hours since the alarm went off. Despite emergency regulations, the SRT team was in no hurry, and the chances of him being accidentally cut off by one of the paranormals again were steadily increasing. So, foolishly or not, as Basil made his way, heart pounding and a cardboard box in hand, through the middle of the hallway directly to the gambler, who had once again become a lonely guardian of the elevator while Basil had been making certain arrangements, he only had one thought:

That he finally understood what Millidge had been up to.

If he’d fooled Kaniecki enough, he could have ended the game within two moves.

And while it didn’t quite work, none of the wraiths were chess grandmasters, so Basil might have been able to pull it off.

“A game of cards, a game of caaaards!” the gambler was shouting, shifting back and forth briskly, scratching his head with a clenched fist as he did so. “Hhhh, a game of cards!”

Maybe he’s trapped in a loop and will soon deactivate without an outside prompt, Basil thought. Of course, by then the dead gambler had already noticed him and didn’t bother with puffing over this time.

“Shall we play a game?” he grunted right in Basil’s face while waving a deck of cards. “What? What do you say? Just one game!”

In the red light, he looked like he’d bathed in blood too, and the smell of carrion wafted from his mouth, equipped with shark-pointed teeth instead of the standard ones, overpowering even the acrid smoke.

Basil’s insides protested. Their owner swallowed hard.

“Come on, man!” The gambler cut a smile worthy of a less than honest insurance man. “What do you say?”

What does he say? He’d rather say nothing.

But since that’s not a good response either, I guess I’ll have to say something after all. So he put the box on the floor, took a deep breath, cleared his throat, and . . . 

“Screw you,” he said—and with that, he fumbled for the deck, snatched it out of the surprised wraith’s hand, and ran off with it.

He really must have surprised him, at least as far as he could tell from the fact that almost three seconds had passed before he could hear an angry “Hhhhhh!” behind him, followed by a machine-gun poof poof poof.

Basil didn’t look back. He ran like the sky was falling on him, the floor was caving in beneath him, and his lungs were about to burst. He ran, seeing every cigar he had ever smoked before his eyes.

At the third intersection, he darted to the left, into the next corridor, which was no different from any of the others. Except that there was a minitruck waiting for him with a doorless cab and a spinning orange beacon. The beacon started to go off in the presence of a wraith, but the diesel engine kept purring.

Basil jumped behind the wheel, stepped on the accelerator and sped into the depths of the warehouse at a deadly speed of fifteen miles per hour.

Crazy horse, bitch!

* * *

Poof, poof! Poof, poof, poof! Poof!

Screech!

The vehicle careened out of the turn so hard that it was a miracle it didn’t flip over. Basil clutched the steering wheel as momentum tried to throw him out of the cab. The minitruck shuddered beneath him as if it was about to crumble. The beacon and the halogens flashed frenetically, yet he didn’t let it slow down. In the rearview mirror, he could clearly see the red phantom approaching and receding again—and receding only as long as he kept the throttle to the floor. Fortunately, he continued down a long straight corridor.

If he could, he would have jammed the pedal even lower, maybe through the floor. But he couldn’t, so he had no choice but to squint his eyes and hope for the best.

But still, better to get a head start than . . . 

He didn’t finish the thought, because just then the room he needed to hit appeared in front of him. The door secured by wedges was wide open, but the passage was just wide enough for the tractor to fit through.

Basil didn’t dare slow down. He either gets through, or he won’t have to worry about the wraiths anymore.

He gritted his teeth, gripped the steering wheel tighter, and . . . drove through.

The storage room marked Miscellaneous was the largest storage space in the complex. It covered nearly half a square mile and its innards more than anything else resembled a game of jenga out of control. Crates of all materials and sizes were stacked to the ceiling on massive shelves. Side by side, behind each other, stacked neatly on pallets and sticking over the edge, some perfectly stable, others held in place only by an absolute abuse of the laws of physics. Exactly how many crates there were would probably be impossible to trace even in the archive, and each box held paranormal material inactive long enough to be labeled safe.

Basil jerked the steering to the left to avoid hitting a support column, and tried to straighten it again. The tires squealed, leaving a wavy trail behind them as the front and the rear of the vehicle swayed side to side, but the minitruck keep going. Right up to the pyramid of boxes blocking most of the path in the middle of the room. He stomped on the brakes right in front of them. Thanks to the preparations he made in advance, he knew they were empty. But the momentum tossed him mercilessly on the steering wheel anyway, the back of the car skidding as if it was on ice, turning him sideways and . . . 

Eeeeeecrrrrh!

The smell of burnt rubber, the dull ache in his ribs, the jerk as if someone wanted to knock every bone out of him. He collapsed in the seat, his thinning curls caressing the strut supporting the shelves just inches from his fragile skull.

His heart pounded, his muscles quivered, and his thoughts mulled over each other in his head, but the purpose of his visit here shone like a neon sign in the dark night above all that mess. And even if it didn’t, his reminder was still in his hand.

He slid out of his seat like an earthworm and collapsed to the floor, but immediately braced himself against the fender, pulled up on his feet, and staggered over the remains of the pyramid.

He wasn’t as fast as he would have liked. The sides of his chest throbbed and he couldn’t take a full breath without feeling pressure somewhere inside, but he didn’t stop. Though he couldn’t hear the gambler, he knew he was on his way. Good thing he was only a few steps away from his destination.

Once he reached the folding table he’d set up with three chairs before the chase started, he opened the deck of cards with trembling fingers and quickly dealt for a three-player mariasch.

Before leaving again through the opposite exit, he sacrificed two more seconds for one last thing. “Sorry, buddy,” he said to Ruml’s head, which lay on the coffee table next to a pile of plastic buttons.

* * *

When the gambler appeared in the storage area just a short while later, accompanied by proper sound effects, the minitruck was dying, and the wraith’s presence didn’t help. The halogens flickered, a swarm of sparks erupted and went out, the engine breathed its last breath and the space was swallowed up by blackness and silence.

The gambler looked around, but did not see the bag of meat that had robbed him of his cards. He felt, however, that at least the tool of his trade was not far away.

Poof, poof!

The aisle stretching between the rows of shelves was empty, but roughly in the middle . . . 

Poof, poof!

As soon as he saw what was laid out on the table, an expression of pure malice spread into a cruel smile. Ignoring the head, watching him with its one remaining eye—a trickle of blood, oily and black as ink, oozing from the cracks of its torn off lower jaw—he picked up the empty box and reached for the cards as well, but just before he could scoop them up, the wail of hinges rang through the room. He turned his head sharply in that direction.

Nothing happened for a few moments. Then the headless nun emerged from the shadows. The gambler grinned, reached for his cards again, and this time was disturbed by a sound from the other side.

Clack, clack, clack.

The skeleton didn’t take its time with its arrival and went straight to investigate the table. The nun followed it, and soon they were all gathered around it, sizing each other up for some time. Then the skeleton held out its hand, from which the knife was still sticking out, and raked the buttons in a not entirely controlled movement.

The gambler, who still hadn’t picked up his cards, straightened up, tapped the ones lying in front of him with his forefinger and grunted, “Bet.”

The skeleton ignored him, scooped a few in its palm and raised them to its eye sockets. Or at least it tried to, only for the gambler to come over and knock them out of its hand.

“A bet, I say!” he snapped, picking up the cards prepared beside the pile of buttons and shoving them between the bones of the skeleton’s fingers instead.

The skeleton let them fall to the floor and gritted its teeth, but by then the nun, touching the squinting head with her rachitic fingers, had already attracted the gambler’s attention.

The gambler’s left hand flickered like an attacking snake, nails digging in her forearm. She tried to pull away from him, but he wouldn’t let her. Her upper body twisted menacingly in his direction and a stream of blood spurted from her throat.

Splash.

The skeleton reached for the buttons again, its forearm grabbed the gambler’s right hand again. “First, a game.”

The coffin’s occupant didn’t seem to agree though, because its arm jerked with such force that it pulled close the gambler, who took the nun with him, who, like a tube of tomato paste squeezed too quickly, spilled blood all over everyone.

And then it went fast.

The nun wrapped her fingers around the gambler’s neck, the skeleton bit his face, and the three of them collapsed in a heap on the table.

The flimsy piece of furniture broke. Cards, buttons and Ruml’s head flew around and the fighting wraiths fell to the ground.

Just as he landed, an open door entered the gambler’s view. The last thing he saw before he lost his view again was a red-lit silhouette, the one he had followed here earlier, retreating down the corridor.

* * *

Basil ached with every step. Even his every breath hurt. But he knew he couldn’t slow down—and that if he got out of here, he’d have to stuff something green down his throat every now and then, because by the time he reached the elevator, he was nearly hyperventilating.

But he got there and nothing came up to paint the hallway with his guts, which made him conclude that his plan had worked. He allowed himself three or four breaths, and after that he kicked the box, which rattled disapprovingly in response, closer to the armored door and limped into the office, where he equipped himself with work gloves and Lenora’s sunglasses, and . . . 

He sighed.

The chessboard was still spread out on the desk.

Basil had never considered himself an overly sentimental person. Things just were, or they weren’t. People came and went. But Ruml somehow managed to find a loophole even in this.

“Ruml, dude,” he sighed, but decided to leave the internal struggle for another day, preferring instead to pick up the chessboard straight away, gather the pieces into it and stuff it in the back pocket of his overalls.

The cursed sky rocket was waiting for him. He pulled it out from under a pile of other objects and examined it. Up close like this, it looked perfectly ordinary. More than that, it looked cheap. The dragon’s mouth was made of a not very detailed plastic casting and the golden body was covered by glossy paper. It measured over two feet in length and maybe five inches in diameter, but it weighed no more than two pounds.

In short, there was nothing to distinguish it from the ordinary pyrotechnics one could buy at any market.

Except, of course, that it burned its marketplace with such heat that in the end you couldn’t tell human remains from melted sneakers.

He grinned.

I never said it was a good plan.

He returned to the corridor, took up a position about five meters from the armored door, and put on Lenora’s sunglasses. The already low visibility turned to near absolute darkness, but he didn’t expect it to last long. He pointed the dragon’s mouth directly in front of him and struck a match.

The incendiary cord, which he could have sworn hadn’t hung from the sky rocket a minute ago, sputtered like an angry cat and vanished with a hiss. A streak of smoke rolled out of the hole left by it and pinched his nose. And then . . . nothing.

Basil shuffled his feet.

“What the hell?” he muttered, shaking the sky rocket, but it didn’t seem to have any effect. He grunted in frustration, moved his glasses to his forehead, and . . . 

And it turned out that maybe something was happening after all, because suddenly, everything was happening.

The dragon started shaking in Basil’s hands so hard he nearly dropped it, its mouth glowing green and shooting out not only equally colored flames, but most of all an irregular sphere, green around the edges, completely white inside, hot as a small sun, leaving a rippling trail in the air behind it, whizzing by at the speed of a speeding car.

In a blinding flash, it splashed across the top of the door. Basil was enveloped in a heat wave that baked his mucous membranes, cooked his lungs, and peeled off his skin—or at least that’s how it felt. It heated the alloy in the affected area to the point that it began to melt.

Basil bared his teeth in a triumphant smile and pointed the sky rocket lower.

Whoosh!

The moisture from his gums evaporated and the sweat that was running down his face never reached his chin, but another ball splattered just where he needed it. And a third one, too. And a fourth one right next to it.

The metal boiled, hissed, bubbled like gas escaping from a swamp, and dropped to the floor. The tunnel was filled with stifling, radiant heat and the stench of burning. Basil’s head throbbed, his eyes burned, and the world rippled before him, but he didn’t let up. Unless he needed to adjust his course of fire, he didn’t move, just watched the magical fire burn through. The glowing depression became a fist-sized hole, and then it grew into a somewhat narrow but large enough hole for a man to squeeze through.

Basil waited for the sky rocket to spit out the thirteenth, usually last, projectile. The edges of the hole in the armor glowed orange and smoke rose from the dragon’s mouth.

“I suppose that would do,” he stated, his vocal cords rubbing together like brake pads as he spoke. He took off the sunglasses, staggered slightly unsteadily to the storage room, stuck the sky rocket where he’d taken it from earlier, and made his way to the elevator.

But he had barely taken two steps when something stopped him.

Something he hoped he had managed to escape.

“What about our game of cards?”

* * *

“Last chance,” the gambler warned him, standing a few feet away, almost exactly in the same place where Basil had robbed him of his deck of cards.

The warehouse clerk sighed in resignation, lowering his shoulders. He really hoped the diversion would work and it wouldn’t come to this. A chess player, however, has to think a few moves ahead to be able to react just in case things don’t go according to plan—and that’s exactly what he had done with the purring box.

He didn’t want to do it. No one deserved this, in his opinion.

Not even a killer wraith.

But the gambler gave him no choice. He couldn’t bring him to the surface.

They’d tried nearly everything to eliminate him: silver bullets, explosives, showers of holy water, ancient rituals, exorcism . . . but not something as cruel as being swallowed up by an avalanche of possessed furbies.

Which was exactly what came out of the box after Basil had knocked it over with his foot.

About ten multicolored furry owl-bat hybrids, whose bodies were often chosen by the dark forces as their Earth suits because they weren’t so different from their own, rolled across the floor with a panicked “Boo, boo!” But soon they were using their three-toed feet to lift themselves up.

The gambler watched them curiously.

The mechanical eyes, which certainly did not have any light bulbs from the factory, yet shone like searchlights, returned his gaze.

“Ya, ta, ra, ta, ra, ta!” the furbies proclaimed in unison, pricked up their ears and ran forward.

The wraith grinned and turned to Basil. That was a mistake. For as soon as he opened his mouth, the first of the little demons leapt right at him. He tried to shake them off of himself, but the sharp beaks held firm, slicing through clothes and skin.

Poof, poof!

The gambler disappeared and reappeared a few feet away—to his and Basil’s surprise, still surrounded by the attacking toys.

“La, la, la, la, la,” the ones still marching on the ground started, and scattered after him.

The gambler backed up in front of them, still trying to get rid of the ones that had already mounted him. He spun on the spot, pounding on them, trying to tear them away, even throwing himself against the wall to crush them, but to no avail. And others were coming.

Basil didn’t wait for what would follow. He’d seen plenty of unpleasant things today, but he didn’t need a mental picture of this one.

Careful not to touch the hot metal, he crawled through, lifted the door in the cabin ceiling, grabbed the edges, and pulled himself up the shaft.

In the entire history of the universe, there was nothing more pleasant than the cool air that enveloped him. Unfortunately, he couldn’t stop to savor it. Too many people died because they stopped trying just before the end, and he wasn’t about to become one of them.

The rungs of the ladder clinked under his heavy boots as Basil started to climb.

“Pam pam, brm brm brm!” echoed behind him, accompanied by the worst scream he’d ever heard.

* * *

The problem with the Vietnamese sky rocket was that it was cursed. And that its fire sequence might usually end with the thirteenth projectile, but it wasn’t 100% reliable.

So the explosion, followed by a green flash that lit up the shaft, didn’t surprise Basil much. But he sped up anyway, just in case.

Except for his injured arm and the throbbing pain in his ribs, it went surprisingly well. No one chased him, he climbed steadily, and soon he had to agree with Ruml.

Even this is faster than that stupid lift.

If only he’d known how much faster it was going to be.

He was almost at the top when a second, bigger explosion came and shook the ladder. And not just that. The whole complex had shaken. His bleeding left hand slipped off the rung. His right hand held on, but as his own weight swung him around, he saw what was happening below him.

“Oh shit!”

The shaft was engulfed in flames. Green waves spilling over each other, vivid, wild, expanding, glowing like high-temperature plasma, and climbing dangerously fast behind him.

With a groan, he pulled back and tried to squeeze the last of his strength from his aching body and turn it into the best performance anyone had ever given in short-distance ladder climbing.

There were barely ten rungs left. The flames began to melt his soles.

Five rungs.

Three.

Last one.

No sooner had he rolled over the edge and curled into a ball than a column of unnaturally colored fire shot out of the shaft and burned through the ceiling and into the first floor.

And from there, probably higher.

* * *

The firefighters were late—but still not as late as the SRT team, which still hadn’t arrived. Basil sat on the curb by the gatehouse and watched the warehouse burn. The fire was, of course, green. He assumed he was going to get yelled at for both; he just didn’t know what would have pissed them more.

On the other hand, if some people did their jobs properly, none of this would have happened, so they can kiss my ass.

He spat into the grass, poured the rest of the tea from Ruml’s thermos in himself, and fished around in his overalls. The cigars had taken their toll during the previous escapades, but he found the aluminum case hiding one of the cigars his friend had given him a few months back.

He smiled reluctantly, freed it from its plastic wrapping and lit it. Dry tobacco aroma filled his mouth.

“Don’t you worry,” he muttered as the smoke came out, “I’ll find that guy, even if I have to go all the way to Ostrava for it.”

I’ll probably have plenty of free time now anyway.

He wondered what he could do in that case. Maybe find a new hobby?

Or a girlfriend.

As if on cue, an engine roared from the driveway, and a foreign car he hadn’t seen in nearly three hours—as well as the person who would be getting out of it—came to a screeching halt in front of the barrier. At least, that’s what he thought, until the driver got close enough for him to make out her features under the bloody paint.

“You’re not Lenora,” he stated.

“I’m not,” the person said, sitting on the curb beside him. “I’m Jolana.” T-shirt, jeans, a lithe figure. Could have been thirty at most, more likely less; he couldn’t tell through the red crust.

“Basil,” he introduced himself. “Rough day?”

She grinned and nodded her chin toward the building, which was slowly beginning to collapse in on itself. “Compared to yours, probably not so much.”

Well, he’d managed to set the bar pretty high on that one.

“Who did this to you?” he asked.

“A domovoy, a falling ceiling, Lenora exploding,” Jolana calculated on her fingers. “In that exact order. And you?”

“Wraiths.”

“Really?” she opened her eyes wide. “As in plural?”

“Yeah. A dead gambler, a headless nun, and a button-collecting skeleton. The order doesn’t matter.”

“Credit where credit’s due,” she said approvingly. Then she paused. “Buttons?”

Basil shrugged. “At least, that’s what it looked like to me. It kept reaching out to me like it wanted something, and it ripped one off.”

Jolana frowned. “That almost sounds like the begging skeleton from Karolinum. Although that one pulls money off people.”

Basil took a thoughtful drag from his cigar.

Yeah, that made a lot more sense.

“Prague people,” he snorted.

Jolana fumbled in her pocket, and when she pulled out her hand, she was holding an alder branch. “I brought this. Lenora came back with it from you instead of feathers. I don’t know what it’s for, but she devoted her last words to it. I suppose it’s important.”

Basil shrugged. “She wanted something against the chorts. That usually works on them.”

“Not so much against falling pianos.”

“Yeah, as you would expect.”

Jolana shook her head and scrambled to her feet. “You’re the closest place. I thought I could report what happened in Jilemnice here, that maybe you’d take over, but . . . ” She gestured eloquently to the flames shooting from the roof. “But I’d like to hear that wraith story sometime.”

He watched her walk back to the car, and was surprised that he wanted her to stay. That for once he’d appreciate the company, even if it was in the form of a complete stranger and just until someone from the SRS finally comes to scold him.

“Wait,” he shouted after her before he could stop himself.

“Huh?”

He pulled a checkered box from his pocket and waved it in the air.

“Do you by chance play chess?”


MARTIN PAYTOK (* 1993)


Some people you just like at first sight. Unfortunately, Martin is not one of them. As a joker with a very specific type of black humor and a horror fan, he needs to be given some time as an author to have a chance to get under your skin. And if he gets there, we can guarantee you won’t forget him.

He spent a number of years writing about games and movies for inGamer, CDR, Bloody-Disgusting, XB-1 magazine’s website, and magazines SCORE and Pevnost. Meanwhile, his love of all things decadent bears clear influences and fascinations with Donald E. Westlake, Garth Ennis, and the whole Kulhánek action school. This is also evident in his first printed story, The Best Enemy in anthology Fantastic 55 (Fantastická 55, Hydra, 2013). This was followed by a few other delicate pieces in collections like One Step Before Hell (O krok před peklem, 2018) from the world of Hammer of Wizards; God of the Black Forest (Bůh Černého lesa, Gorgona Books, 2018); and Beauties and Aliens (Krásky a vetřelci, Epocha, 2021). The author has not neglected genre magazines, where he has shone with his short stories like Hard Night (Pevnost, 9/2019) and Professionals (Pevnost, 9/2020). In both cases, these were heavyweight pieces with horror motifs and dark jokes.

Just a year later, he added his first novel, Curses for Everyone (Prokletí pro všechny, Epocha, 2021), a noir detective story with several fantastical themes, including a serial killer with a bag full of meat cleavers, a talking puppet, and a strange artifact. And it was a scene of one closed door and a few knocks from this book that catapulted him into the MHF ranks.



Back | Next
Framed