The Combinations, page 123
upended chairs — a burrowing through drifts of sleet, emerging on the far side
by the Tower door — a long thin four-legged silhouette against the wall, regal
glint of eye peering back, teeth nattering, time to get a move-on, m’boy, shake a leg,
make tracks — head down across the threshold, gone. An emissary perhaps, some
rat Virgil to guide him into the underworld, down the sibylline windings
beneath the Tower stairs. Once more Němec felt the key in his pocket,
hardening his resolve — haha — took a last piss in the snow & retraced his steps
inside.
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Where one stairwell ended, another began. After a single turning it came to an
archway with a wooden staircase, handrailed, tending steeply to a storeroom
quarried beneath the house — the room was stacked with old paint tins,
kerosene drums, bits of unrestored furniture, window frames, a rusted boiler,
other rubbish. Němec groped for the lightswitch. Wedged beside the storeroom
entrance, an upturned basin on a pile of vegetable refuse half-concealed a rat’s
nest. A sharp hiss as he passed — then another. Sentries posted. Proceed
cautiously so as not to alarm these guardians of the Lower Rat Kingdom. Two
steps in advance, a stray shadow pressed to the wall — an outrider creeping side-
on, Egyptian-style, tail pointing one way, head & hindquarters the other,
ghosting him — where it led was a dark gap in the masonry beneath the wooden
staircase. The outrider cast a last furtive glance around & disappeared, lower-
brain stealth navigating the subterranean murk — where the gap was, a heavy
grating rested on a pair of iron hinges fixed into stone. A gibbous eye glinted out
from it, split down the middle — an antique padlock. Němec took the key from
his pocket & tried it in the lock — it turned reluctantly — the padlock slipped
from its recess with a dull clunk. On ahead, a general skirmishing of rat-feet on
flagstones — some hastily dispersed convocation of the Hidden Orders —
signals relayed down into the sewers, where perhaps ancient rat descendents of
the First Fathers still dwelled, survivors of who knew what heresy from times of
yore — forced underground, among waste & effluent, salvaging what little
dignity there was to salvage of a life now trampled into mud — bits & pieces of
the Old Pre-Scripture, desecrated icons, a splinter of the True Cross, a shekel
from the Temple of Jerusalem, Hanukah tallow, a cracked psalter, tesserae of
stained glass, a chip off the Rock of Ages, the braid from a bishop’s stole, a
rabbi’s yarmulke, a muezzin’s turban… this secret horde reciting their fable, writ
in a cuneiform of four-fingered scratchings, prisonhouse graffiti, counting the
days from the Gen. to Rev. — labyrinths of sacral inkblot jottings, their Book,
the One True Rat Almanac, its intricate rhizomes of matrilineated descent from
the Ur-Tribes, back before the dawn of the first princely Přemyslids, of
Nezomysls & Křesomysls, of Boleslavs red-haired pious & cruel, down down
down all the way to this most profane of present epochs, the founding of the
first Rat Democracy, the Great Betrayal, the Rat Riot of ’, the Exodus of ’,
the forty-year Rat Resistance… Deeper still, concealed in granite seams
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dropping away to molten schist, the forbidden Apocrypha, taken down in times
when Earth itself was still young, recounting fables more primitive, disquieting
— intoned by the priestly caste in low tectonic frequencies, which are the
immemorial resonance of a Pre-Palaeolithic, Jurassic, evolutionary God-instant
when, so-to-speak, everything began — monads of bacterial sludge in its eons-
long journey of becoming this noble & wise four legged Muroidea, rattus
rattus…
Němec heaved & the grating swung heavily inwards on its hinges. Flakes of rust
came away in his hands. The storeroom light sputtered out. There was a heavy,
penetrating, all-pervasive silence. He stood still, holding his breath, listening,
unable to discern any sound. And then, through the silence, the low thudding of
blood in the veins, the static hiss of the nervous system. He felt through his
pockets for the torch & switched it on: in front of him lay yet more steps,
Piranesi-like, disappearing into blackness. He locked the gate behind him &
began his descent. Cobwebs & tangled electrical wires. A dead lightbulb screwed
into the ceiling. Racks & bottles. This, then, was the winecellar. He wondered
how the Prof ever managed to get down here & back up again. The cellar itself
was approximately rectangular in shape, about five metres wide, but the far end
could’ve been anything. The racks were wooden, arranged close to the steps &
reaching almost to the ceiling. The bottles lay under a patina of grey dust.
Němec pulled one out at random & brushed the grime from its label. Lagrima.
Tears of Eurydice. Real Companhia Velha — Institudo por Alvará Régio de
— Providentia Regitur, & all that. The Prof’s secret hoard.
Just above eye-level, in the middle of the adjacent wall, Němec’s flashlight
caught the extruding capstone of an archway long-ago filled in, from where the
cellar floor sloped to the right, behind the bottleracks. The slightest tremor
might send them all tumbling like dominos. He drew a map in his mind to set
the bearings: Castle, Monastery, River, the gardens under Petřín Hill. Behind
the capstone could’ve been anything, the foundations & buried crypt of old St
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Thom’s, perhaps, long-abolished, but who knew what remained? A faint shiver
agitated Němec’s spine. He might, even then, have been standing on once-
hallowed ground. The madman in the belfry, bones in the basement.
He tapped the wall: solid stone. He edged clockwise through the narrow
spaces, following the slope of the floor. The shadows extruded. The place was
like a maze. Finally a space opened, littered with a jumble of rusted metal hoops
& decayed wine barrels, with a table & a single chair set in the middle of it. On
the table lay a rusted corkscrew, a half-melted candlestick, a chipped glass full of
calcified dregs, bottle-grit & dust. The bottle racks formed a kind of perimeter
around it, open on one side, with a damp-eroded slab of wall facing. Němec
played his torch across it: a faded checkerboard pattern, frescoed into the
crumbling plaster, emerged from the darkness by concentric facets, like tiles at
the bottom of a fountain. Chipped-away layers of overpaint revealed a
patchwork of x-inch squares, marked-off in turn by a palimpsest of
carpenters’ & electricians’ gridwork, shorthand notations, measurements,
symbols for a construction that’d been given up before even begun.
Set off to one side of it, a line of exposed red brick revealed where a
second doorway had also been walled-up. Němec tapped at the bricks with the
workmen’s heavy chisel — a faint, dull, hollow sound came back, almost an
echo. He gouged the pointy end into the mortar & it came away like powder,
sifting onto the ground. It seemed as good a place as any to begin. He pulled
over the chair & set to work. The chair groaned under his weight, dust blew
between his legs then settled in the torchlight. The brickwork made sounds like
piano strings muted with rubble. After an hour or so a hole had opened up large
enough for him to poke first the flashlight, then head (sans chapeau) &
eventually, a tight squeeze, the arms & shoulders. Another half-hour of work &
he made it through comfortably. The effort was rewarded with a long vaulted
passageway made of burnt brick. He stood there dusting himself down, taking it
in. Could this be the entrance to one of those tunnels that legend had
catacombing the City?
Such tunnels existed already in the Middle Ages, in turn carved from ancient
sewer ducts, catacombs, wells driven down through bedrock to mythic artesian
springs, mineralised with the fossil remnants of Ice Age anthropods. Time &
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legend rendered these places mysterious. Sibylline grottos, alchemical caverns,
Rabbinical laboratories, Rudolf’s secret storehouse of portents & potions,
unmarked mass graves, plague cemeteries, wells & sewer traps, irrigation
channels for the Stromovka carp ponds, siege defences, drainage ditches,
dungeons & escape routes, salt mines & primitive particle accelerators, Masonic
lodges, Jesuit judas-holes, bolt-holes, glory-holes, Wagnerian crypts &
Nietzschean creeps, Nazi bunkers, partisan peepshows, Soviet silos, fallout
shelters, subterranean harems for the Party elite, crisscrossed, backfilled, re-
excavated, sealed against pandemic, unsealed against pogrom, lost, forgotten,
suffocated, drowned, collapsed under a cumulative inertia only to be reconquered
in the dark hours of Man’s faltering estate by their most native & rightful
denizens — the Moldau Rats — or whatever remained of that once noble tribe:
last of a once-dwindling Underground now again resurgent in these prophetic
End Times of their oppressor’s ebb, impervious (now that The Hour was finally
nigh) of admonishment or dissent, united with a great tenacity of purpose & the
sense of manifest rat destiny, All for One & One for the Species!
While the Fall of the Third Evil Empire* played-out in the streets, these
éminences-grises of the Novus Ordo Seclorum did convoke their ancient &
long-lapsed Grand Synod in reconciliation of the old factions, divided by points
of law secular & ecclesiastical many years obscured by the mists of sectarian
strife & subjugation — once were adversaries, now triumviral brothers-in-arms,
seizing the revolutionary hour, all-for-one & one-for-all, affirming in solemn
unison the Secret Conventicles of Grace, Predestination & the Four Vows —
Obedience, Poverty, Chastity, Conformity — swearing undying fealty to the
Regulae Societatis Ratu, the Vindicae contra Tyranos, the Perinde ac Cadaver,
mutually bound in sacred missionary vigilance against all species of Heretic,
Janissaries, Templars, Assassins, Pharisees, Moloch, the Plague of Egypt, the
Flood, Balaam’s Ass, etc…
Slinking away on the periphery of these orgies of piety & revindication of
the New Old Law, the lone figure reincarnate of mad Rudi, exiled & wandering,
shunned king-in-name-only, Leer of the thrice-divided pre-Fall rat realms,
rumoured of ancient annals, seer, alchemist, Celtic druid — ghostlike presence
still haunting the consciences, perhaps, of today’s triumvirs & tomorrow’s
turncoats, architects of the restored Rat-Publicum, flags aflutter, choirs &
cheerleaders, armies marshalled, orations of soaring optimism, this national
* Even rats can count. [:]
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awakening, temper democratic, destiny manifest, the great dawn, etc. — a relic, this
Rudi-the-Rat, an anachronism, as out-of-place here as a Wittelsbach at a bar-
mitzvah, unburdened by cares of state, crawling towards that final death —
‘They flattered me like a dog and told me I had white whiskers in my
beard ere the black ones were there… When the rain came to wet me once —
and the wind to make me chatter — when the thunder would not peace at my
bidding, there I found ’em, there I smelt ’em out…’
Kindred spirit of the lost, the afflicted, the visionarily deranged — that’s
him now, stalking along the cellar floor, clambering old-man-tired atop the
heaped rubble, up on stick-spindly hind legs, in the pierced middle of the wall,
eyeing that strange silhouette with the stick & hat — eh, Charlot! — & catching
the beam of Němec’s torch like scintillating stagelight, transforms from a rat in
chiaroscuro to a veritable Olivier casting a giant’s shadow against world’s (or at
least a bottlerack’s) vainglorious backdrop — standing there with arm
outstretched, draped by purple-trimmed toga, pointed finger, in pose most
Caesarean,* astutely copied from knock-off plastercast reproductions (a true
thesp at heart, our Rudi), eyes grey-red, sniffing the air, which way the wind’s
draughting, etc. — & in high oratorical voice, as once upon the Forum’s steps,
saying —
‘Follow me, kiddo…’
Pitterpatter of rat-foot receding down the passageway — a pause, eyes glinting
in the torch’s mottled cone, peering back, head over shoulder, one last come-
hither beckoning of the royal hand & then gone from the light. What caused
Němec to hesitate? What held him back? The air, he noticed, had grown thick.
Beads of sweat stood out on his brow. He felt suddenly exhausted by the effort
of breaking through the wall, his adrenaline spent. His back & arms ached. His
head weighed a tonne. From somewhere very remote he thought he heard a
voice, echoing up the passageway. He lay with his head on the cold ground to
listen to it.
* The true Romani never having made it this north far, held at bay always across the centuries by
the eponymous Boii of La Bohème, as extinct now as their peninsuline foes, only pale clerical
understudies in scheming priest-garb calling themselves Holy, as Rudi himself more than any
ought to know. [:]
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Little by little, a disturbed sleep took hold of him. Time stretched out &
shrank. In the dream into which he fell, Němec saw again the deadman lying
inside the Monastery gate, the quaking mass of dead body like a gob of chewed
fat. A sinister cadaveric fluid the colour of intestinal scoria oozed from beneath
the corpse & down into the gutter. Němec’s dreamself walked over to the place
where the corpse was lying & watched it slowly dissolve. Sitting beside it in a
chair was a nurse with Alice Steinerová’s face — she was kneading & wringing
long strings of fat from her hands. Perched on her right shoulder was a grey rat,
familiar-looking. This version of Alice Steinerová had something far too
perfunctory about her — like a wind-up doll. She’d wrung the last of the fat
from her hands & now sat there filing her nails. The scene reminded Němec in a
peculiar way of the Prof’s ghost, the first time he’d appeared, sitting on a
snowdrift. The rat on Alice Steinerová’s shoulder snickered. In the background,
the spires of St Vitus were visible above the rooftops. Němec tried to get some
sort of bearing, but the scene kept slipping. Alice Steinerová yawned. When she
looked up from her nails, a vague disquieting expression came into her eyes. Her
lips, when she moved them, made a sound like a radio whose tuning wasn’t
aligned with the broadcast band. A sound like someone peeling off a nylon
raincoat. Of sand being poured slowly through a sieve onto a tin sheet.
‘There was a custom in former times,’ she said, as if seeing him for the
first time, ‘for guardian spirits to dwell among the thresholds, where no man
must linger, for fear of being turned to stone.’
She was looking at him exactly the way Mrs Severínová sometimes looked
at him, whenever he asked a wrong question. But how could you tell the
difference between right questions & wrong questions?
‘Drown the cocks,’ snickered the rat.
By now the corpse had completely dissolved, all that was left was a
yellowbrown smear in the cracks between the cobble stones.
‘Shouldn’t we go away now that there’s nothing left?’ he said, not knowing
why.
He felt idiotic standing there like that.
‘You’ll have to wait,’ Alice Steinerová said, turning her attention back to
her fingernails.
‘Mouths in the glass,’ the rat.
‘Wait? Wait for what?’
‘The door.’
‘Tremble thou wretch!’ sneered the rat.
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‘What door? There isn’t any door.’
‘You’ll see.’
‘Make no noise, make no noise — draw the curtains!’ Rattus rattus.
A moment later, a couple of gallery assistants arrived, carrying a large roll
of photographic paper. They placed it carefully on the ground & then began to
unroll it across the brownish stain the corpse had left behind. The paper was
entirely white, like a fresh blanket of snow, except in the middle, where there was a
picture of a blue door. Němec stared at it in wonder. Just then, slipping the
nailfile into the breast pocket of her pinafore, Alice Steinerová casually stood &
walked across the photograph towards him.
‘It’s time,’ she said.
