As White as Snow (4 page)

Lumikki leaned on the windowsill. Even though the air outside was just as warm as inside, the light breeze dried the sweat on her skin. She wanted to take a shower, but that would be pointless because she’d just have to do it again in the morning. And Lumikki didn’t feel like waking up half the hostel. She considered for a moment whether she might be hungry, but quickly rejected the idea of food. All she had were yesterday morning’s pastries, which came in different shapes and looked delicious, but always turned out to be the same dough with slightly variable fillings. Some were sweet and some savory, and all of them left a greasy film on the roof of her mouth.

Either the heat or her nightmare must have woken her up. Maybe both. The clammy sheets twisting against her skin might have triggered the nightmare. It was familiar, but she hadn’t had it in years. After she started school, dreams about bullies had replaced it, nightmares that continued in the daylight, repeating again and again until reality and dream intermingled, leaving her unable to say when she was awake and when she was asleep.

This nightmare was from earlier, though. From the years before she learned fear.

In the dream, Lumikki stood before a large mirror. She was little, about two years old. At first, all she could see in the mirror was herself and the dark room she was standing in. She lifted her arm and her mirror image did the same. She smiled. She grinned. The reflection did the same. Then, in the mirror, she saw another girl appear behind her in the room. The
girl was a little older than her, but very similar in appearance. They were even wearing the same white dress.

The girl placed her hands on Lumikki’s shoulder. The hands felt warm and safe. Then the girl leaned in and whispered,
“Du är min syster alltid och alltid och alltid.”
You will be my sister forever and ever and ever.

Lumikki turned to her.

Why the hell did she always turn, even though she knew that nothing good would come of it? Up to that point in the dream, she felt good. She felt warm. When she turned, everything went cold. No one was standing behind her. She was in the dark room all alone. She turned to look at the mirror again. The girl was there. She stroked Lumikki’s hair and Lumikki felt her gentle touch. Lumikki wanted to push the hand away, but when she tried, her hands met only air.

“Vill du inte leka med mig?”
the girl in the mirror asked sadly. Don’t you want to play with me?

Lumikki shook her head violently. She just wanted the girl to go away. The girl wasn’t real, and Lumikki was afraid.

“Jag blir så ledsen,”
the girl said. It makes me so sad.

Then she started to cry. Lumikki wanted to look away. She wanted to squeeze her eyes shut. But she couldn’t stop looking. Even though she knew. She knew she didn’t want to see the girl’s tears.

The tears were red. They were huge drops of blood that ran down the girl’s cheeks and dripped from her chin, streaking down her dress. When Lumikki finally tore her eyes away,
she looked down and saw that her own dress was no longer white, but streaked with blood.

That’s when she woke up. Always right then.

Lumikki had never understood where the nightmare came from. Had she caught a glimpse of a scary movie by accident when she was little? Had one of the older kids at daycare or on the playground told her a ghost story?

It was obvious why the nightmare had returned now, though. You didn’t have to be a dream analyst to figure that out. The reflection of Lumikki and Lenka. Lenka’s claim that they shared a father. That they were sisters. The parallels screamed so loud she would have had to press her hands to her ears not to hear them. What made Lumikki shudder wasn’t that the nightmare had come back after so many years. It was that the dream might not be just a dream.

That didn’t make any sense, though. If Lenka’s story was true, which Lumikki wasn’t ready to swallow, at least not yet, they’d never met before. So preschool-aged Lumikki couldn’t have had a memory of standing in front of a mirror with her sister.

She didn’t believe in visions. That was nonsensical drivel.

So this had to be just a coincidence. Or maybe she’d overheard something. Maybe a word here and a word there from her parents’ otherwise carefully masked arguments had been enough to construct a tenuous image that twisted and expanded in her child’s mind into this nightmare. That sounded like the most plausible explanation.

Lumikki sucked in the night air with slow, deep breaths. The nightmare’s grip loosened. Prague at night smelled of
hope and broken promises. It smelled of history and dusty streets. It smelled sweet and savory all at once.

Lumikki decided she’d try to sleep with the window open, in spite of the traffic and the sounds of the night. As she turned back toward the bed, fists suddenly began pounding on her door with such force she thought the door might come off its hinges.

Lumikki snatched the sheet from the bed and wrapped it tight around her naked body. Then she grabbed the nearest thing that could serve as a weapon to protect herself. It was a half-empty water bottle. Her defenses left something to be desired. Every muscle tense, she stared at the door. If the intruder got the door open, she would be ready to kick it back in his face. The inward-opening door would work in her favor. The element of surprise even more.

Lumikki stayed perfectly silent. That she knew how to do. She was a master at that.

The fists trying to pound through the door came again, this time even harder.

Lumikki hoped that a well-aimed blow with the water bottle could work too. First the door, then the bottle. That was her detailed plan of attack.

Just then, from outside the door came the sounds of guys laughing and drunkenly trying to sing.

“We like to party, party! We like to party, party! Come on, man! This is no time for sleep!”

Lumikki’s shoulders relaxed. She let her hand holding the bottle fall. She realized before one of them did:

“Oh shit! We got the wrong room. It’s 208, not 206.”

As the merrymakers moved on to bang on the next door and repeat their chant, Lumikki crawled back into bed. Amazingly, the cacophony coming from the traffic and the hall made her eyelids droop shut immediately as a deep, dreamless sleep took her.

The man was awake. He was often awake in the wee hours of the morning when everyone else in the house was asleep. A shepherd guarding his flock. That’s what they thought, anyway, and they weren’t completely wrong. They were his flock and he had been raising and shepherding them for years, more than twenty now. He had been patient and long-suffering. The man had told himself many times that if he could just wait long enough, he would be rewarded.

The man paced from room to room with soft, soundless steps. The rooms smelled a little dusty and stuffy, and they were full of the breath and dreams of sleepers. He looked at the peaceful, slumbering faces. One mouth hung open a little, another clutched a pillow like a long-lost lover. They all looked small and fragile, even the men. They were like butterflies he could reach out and touch. He had the power to crush them, to pierce them with pins and make them part of his collection, to pluck their wings, to choke them with smoke or take away their oxygen.

He held their lives in his hands.

FRIDAY, JUNE 17

Jiři Hašek squeezed two oranges into a glass and threw the juice back in a single gulp. The fresh, sweet flavor spread through his mouth, and he could almost feel the vitamins being absorbed into his bloodstream and giving him his morning pick-me-up. Looking out the window at the city waking up to its morning bustle, he could tell the day would be sweltering again. A thin, misty layer of cirrus clouds covered the sky, but it curbed the blazing sun about as much as a veil cooled the warmth of a bride’s gaze at her groom.

Jiři smiled to himself, thinking how handsome he looked sitting in his penthouse apartment drinking fresh-squeezed orange juice. With his classically styled dark coiffure, straight-legged trousers, and white collared shirt, he was like something out of an advertisement. The embodiment of success and vitality.

Jiři almost laughed out loud. He was only twenty-five years old. He had the job of his dreams. Every sign pointed to a career with a steep upward trajectory. He was an investigative TV journalist who could easily become the next big star in his field. He could have his own program before he was thirty. He wasn’t in a serious relationship, but that wasn’t due to any lack of options, just a matter of personal choice. Jiři didn’t want to make any serious commitments yet. He wanted to be able to flirt, to have adventures, to enjoy all the variety the world had to offer. He could settle down in a few years once he found a woman who was interesting and exciting enough.

Jiři Hašek was living his dream to its fullest and shamelessly loving every minute of it. He wasn’t completely sure whether he deserved his position or this life, but he wasn’t about to start apologizing for it.

The youngest of five siblings, Jiři had learned to stick up for himself and to grab some candy whenever it passed by. He was never the brightest student, but he was hungrier for knowledge and had a knack for finding exactly the information that would help him get ahead. Sometimes that information was helpful to him and harmful to others. When Jiři discovered the relationship between his history teacher and the math substitute—something he’d caught hints of and then established definitively when he opened the copy room door at just the wrong moment for them and just the right moment for him—he didn’t hesitate for a second. He demanded higher grades in history and math, and of course, received both.

The right information opened doors that would otherwise stay closed. Jiři realized that he had a nose for news and found his way into journalism very early.

Jiři thought about the story he was working on right now. He felt a thrill race through his body. This was going to be huge. It would be his big break. Once he broke this story, everyone would know his name and recognize his face.

It was completely different from the bland stories he normally had to work on: Protests against the government. The effect of the euro crisis on the common man. The rise in food prices from the perspective of shop owners. Mistakes in the restoration of historic buildings. Jiři always did the stories his bosses asked him to do. He tried to be accurate and creative, bringing some new perspective that no one else had thought of yet. But he had never been as genuinely excited about a story as he was about this one.

This one was important. It was heartrending. It had a human element. It was shocking and serious and worth exposing.

Jiři didn’t play pious. He could admit that his desire to stand above the rest of the world drove him just as much as his thirst for knowledge. Yes, he wanted to be a hero. He wasn’t one of those workhorses who stayed in the background, content just so long as the truth was revealed. Jiři wanted to be seen. He wanted glory, and he wanted praise. He wanted people to remember his name and face just as much as the story he happened to be telling. But for Jiři, truth and fame were not mutually exclusive. They were two sides of the same
coin. Telling the truth brought fame, and his yearning for fame increased his motivation to work at unearthing the truth.

For the first time in his life, Jiři was doing a story that would have real significance and attract the attention of a wide audience. He had spent months studying parish records and family histories. He had pored over police reports searching for clues and inconsistencies. He had also interviewed people who were so afraid they wouldn’t let him show their faces or use their names. Jiři knew the material he had was dangerous, which was why it was so valuable.

Divine, some would say. Devilish, he would say.

Now, the moment was at hand when Jiři needed to move closer to the heart of darkness, literally. He had to find an interview subject who would be willing to speak on camera, even if only as a blurry, anonymous figure with a digitally disguised voice. And he had to confirm things with his own eyes.

The heat was oppressive. Something in the air seemed to threaten thunder, maybe even a full-on storm, but there were no signs of anything like that in the sky.