The Mysterious Case of the Blood in the Snow
I came home and wrote about this all as soon as it happened. Mary was already asleep.
I've always been afraid of blood. Especially human blood not from my own body. So it was anomalous, to say the least, that I had followed the train tracks that far into the night.
It's not like I couldn't see the blood — it stood out clearly in the night against the flood-lit snow. And it's not like I couldn't tell it was human blood — the drizzled specks of black on white had quickly resolved into the unmistakable pattern of a bootprint. Someone had started bleeding way back there and was already soaking their socks by the time they got here. So why was here where I was?
I guess I was looking for adventure. Or an adventure, maybe. Just one.
I looked around.
Prague's train tracks stretched into darkness before and behind me. The night was two mouths eating twin licorice trails, and I stood in between on an island of the flood-lit snow. Dark hills rose up and off to my right, while the earth gave way to low-set houses and apartment buildings to the left. This section of tracks was utterly decrepit, unused.
My own blank white footprints criss-crossed back and forth over the rails behind me, curious and hesitant, while ahead of me continued the strange footprints, speckled and dark, unwavering. My shadow was Neil Armstrong on the moon.
There was no movement anywhere.
I was scared, but thrilled. I had stumbled across the one clue needed to solve the mystery, except there was no mystery, just the bloody clue. A huge array of lights hung over me where I'd paused. I leaned my head back, trailing frosty breath like car exhaust, and regarded the heaven-hung light source. It was a massive fixture that belonged in a football stadium, not the back bend of some neglected railroad. Someone's tax dollars were going to waste, lighting up this nowhere land, with no one but me to appreciate it. Mary would have appreciated it, but she wouldn't have come out with me in the first place. She never went anywhere anymore except work and the grocery store. She left me alone to explore the city and enjoy its hidden places.
"It's too cold," she'd say from under the covers. "It's too cold."
I kicked some snow toward the nearest bloody bootprint. I wanted to see how old the blood was by how the snow landed and stuck. I couldn't tell anything. I went over and into a crouch next to the bootprint and studied it up close. The blood looked dry.
I poked the blood print with a stick, trying to lift it to see if it would stay solid. I lifted it with the care of someone trying to replace a whole puzzle into its box without the pieces falling apart. This didn't work. I dropped my stick on the ground and stood up, trying to make out which way the boot tracks went. From where I was, directly under the light, the bootprints were visible for only a dozen feet or so in either direction. After that, darkness took over. It was hard to tell where they went after that. I would have to go see for myself if I wanted to know.
"Okay," I said to no one. "I'm coming."
My sneakers, not at all made for this winter perambulating, crunched into the snow satisfyingly. My toes were freezing. But so what? Cold toes warm back up.
I walked alongside the bloody tracks until the light from the outdoor lamp disappeared from the ground. I looked back at where I had been standing, feeling somewhat betrayed by the light source that I could still see but which was no longer aiding my investigation.
I'd have to get resourceful. I fished my cellphone out of my pocket and pressed one of the keys. Instant square-screen glow. I held the tiny screen down to the ground and refound the tracks easily. To stay on the trail, all I had to do was bend over every few feet and sweep the ground with my phone. Its faint aquarium-colored light would reveal the boot pattern creepily. I felt like a forensics expert in an H.P Lovecraft story, scanning the crime scene with UV light for traces of damning fluids. Smart move.
I continued my three-steps,-crouch,-scan-and-repeat rhythm. It was maddeningly slow going, but I wasn't going to give up. I would figure this out, solve this mystery. But I would remain professional, too, and use sound methods and not be overly impressed by myself when I finally unraveled the enigma of the bootprints. I held myself to a higher standard than that. All in a day's work.
I glanced behind me. The pool of flood-lit snow seemed unapproachably distant now, cut off from me by the stretch of darkness between us. My own bobbing, portable pool of night, more like a small pond really, seemed helpless and extinguishable by comparison. I held the phone oriented screen-down, so that its bluish light followed my every step like an inverted shadow.
After a few more minutes I rounded a slow corner of hillside and the giant lamp behind me disappeared completely.
The footprints veered suddenly from their straight course. I wanted to divine their destination without leaving the relative comfort of the train tracks. But when I tried to follow their new course by stretching my phone out and up, darkness rushed in upon me. The phone's light disappeared when I tilted it away from the ground, useless for anything but close-quarters illumination. I would have to hold my phone inches from the ground in order to stay on the trail.
I checked the battery to make sure it wouldn't die unexpectedly. Three-quarters of a full charge remained. That should be enough.
I set myself against the darkness's secrets and stepped off the train tracks.
The footprints in the snow were solid red, now, resembling not the real-life tread pattern of a boot's sole but the footprints you see in cartoons: that squat exclamation point used to show the proper steps on a dance floor. I didn't stop to think about the fact that the footprints' creator had to have been bleeding quite a lot to fill the snow so fully with red. It was a cold January night, but my own blood began to tingle under my skin. I was walking more quickly, now, too. The series of deep red impressions came into my light with a certain queer regularity that, for the moment, allowed my mind to wander while I walked.
I thought about how I would tell Mary, wrapped up against the cold.
"You'll never guess what I found tonight."
"Hmm."
"Do you not want to hear it?"
"Sorry, I'm just stressed about work."
"Oh..."
"Can it wait?"
I followed the prints down a small slope and up to a scraggly bank of black foliage, which was back-lit by the insomniac windows of apartment tenants on the far side. I checked the time — 2:21 a.m. What were these people doing awake?
I guessed the trajectory of the trail through the foliage and found it on the other side. I didn't stop to wonder why my quarry hadn't just gone around the way I had. The snow was less thick here, and it took more effort to find the bootprints, deep as they were, among the holes in the snow where leaves and dark ground showed through.
Down a set of stone, snow-covered steps, along a narrow alleyway between apartment building and brick wall, back up more steps, almost slipping on the hard ice under the soft snow, I followed the trail. Down yet more steps, into a residential cul-de-sac, past the doors of ground-floor families, between dormant cars, I followed the trail. Through a courtyard, faintly lit by gas light, enough for me to pocket my phone for a moment to save battery, I followed the trail.
Back in darkness, up a slight hill, away from the fringes of town we had been skirting, my trail and I kept on.
I sensed more than saw, then, a dark eminence ahead of me. I looked up into a monstrous face. It was the abyssal black yawn of a doorless building.
I couldn't tell what kind of building it was, or had been. It was entirely unlit. It was falling apart. I could tell all this without my cellphone, but I couldn't tell much more.
The doorway, as I approached, turned out to be more than just an empty frame. The jamb was violently marred in several places, like a shark attack victim, huge chunks missing from it. I scanned it up and down with my feeble light, trying to put a whole puzzle together with the small pieces my light revealed. The remaining door frame was white, cracked, with only the evidence of hinges. I couldn't tell how old this building was. I peered inside.
I expected a wafting stink, but I smelled nothing. No decaying sacks hung from the ceiling, no human-sized spiderwebs in the corner. I found this disappointingly incongruous with my horrorshow expectations. There didn't seem to be anything inherently nefarious about the building. Just the ripped up doorway. And the blood footprints leading into it.
I held my phone up high against the exterior wall and found a colored metal plate, blue, affixed to the outside plaster near the door. White trim squiggled its border, and big white letters stamped across its face. It was a sign, and it said Praha Hlavní nádraží — Prague train station.
I poked my nose back inside, but still there was nothing. The bloody bootprints certainly came in through this door, but I could only make them out as far as the snow had drifted in through the open door frame. After that, the ground was a brownish gray concrete, and the prints all but disappeared. I followed them in.
Standing in what I took to be the middle of the room, a memory struck me. Back in North Carolina with Mary, back in the warm southern autumn, back in the twilight of our secret hideout.
It was an abandoned condominium. It was our discovery. It was where we went to figure each other out. It was at the end of a long walk down the Chapel Hill train tracks.
The memory was of the last time I had been there.
"What do you mean, you think you changed your mind?" I'd said.
"I think I've changed my mind," she said. "How else do you want me to put it?"
"Well did you change your mind or not?" I said. "What's there to think about?"
"There's plenty to think about it, for your information." She was sitting on the carpeted stairs of the unused building. "We made this plan months ago — you knew I didn't know how I was going to feel come September. So don't act so surprised."
"Surprised? I have every right to feel surprised. We had a plan, Mary, and now you're changing the plan."
"I didn't say I was changing the plan."
"Changing the plan, changing your mind, whatever." I stared above her head, up into the gloomy stairwell where we'd had our first kiss. The darkness of the unlit house had seemed a filter over reality, then, like a fairy tale tint. Now it was just lightless. "So what is changing, if nothing is changing?" The difference between dusk and midnight.
"I...I still want to go, you know, with you. I just don't know if it's a good idea for us to go... together."
I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose under my glasses, then realized what I was doing and stopped it. How had I ended up here?
"You know I don't have the money to move to a big city," I said. "It wouldn't...without you, it just wouldn't happen." I leaned my forehead on the doorframe and stared into the unfurnished kitchen. The doorframe was cold, and the coldness seemed to seep through my forehead and into my brain. My thoughts became frosty.
The memory faded, replaced with sudden loneliness. I looked back the way I had come in.
Through the rectangle of empty door there came a remarkable glow. The world outside shone with the faint reflection of the moon on the snow. As my eyes adjusted to the interior of the building, I was surprised to be able to make out features in the distance that I had walked past without even noticing, trees and billboards, and a little shed off to the side. The Plutonian moonlit snow hid the ground's contours like a white bedsheet thrown over a messy room, smoothing out everything except where my own footprints followed the bloodied ones. I had traipsed across that landscape with my little light without realizing that what I'd thought was impenetrable dark had been hiding this navigable lunar vista, if I'd only let my senses acclimate to the new surroundings.
It was the inside of the train station that held real darkness.
I blindly stamped my feet a bit to warm them, something I had read about characters doing in books. I didn't know if it worked in real life. I thought it did. It hurt slightly. I took this as a good sign. At least I wasn't going numb.
I contemplated waiting for my eyes to adjust to the new darkness, but knew it would do no good. I re-illuminated my ersatz flashlight, without which I would have been stymied at the threshhold. As it was, I spent six or seven minutes of meticulous, fearful exploration of the walls with my hands and cellphone light before I found another doorway leading to a different part of the building. It was a doorless mirror of the first, leading into an interior room. It was the only option available to me. I took it.
In the next room I found, after more extensive scanning of the floor and walls with my cellphone light, a wet pack of cigarettes, a drawer from a wardrobe with a candy wrapper inside of it, and a single leather workout glove, the kind with the fingers cut off at the knuckle. The kind my dad wears to the gym every morning. The cigarettes weren't the kind my dad smokes, though. They were some Czech brand, and he only smokes Camels. All these things I found while scooting around just the perimeter. I was too afraid of the dark expanse of the middle of the room to cross it directly, so I had never obtained a good idea of the size of the room. For all I knew, there could be a monster lurking in the middle of the room, inches from my face, and I would have just stumbled into its jaws.
I eventually found another empty doorway and took it.
In the next room my cellphone light uncovered a sleeping bag wadded up in the corner, a baseball cap, another pack of cigarettes, this one dry, and an actual door that seemed to be properly shut. It looked to be a metal door, the kind that swing slow and heavy, but I couldn't tell what color it was. Everything seemed bluish-white under my LCD screen light.
I stood for a moment, deliberating.
Then I reached out and turned the knob of the door.
It took my eyes a moment to re-adjust to the new light, faint as it was. A single bulb strung from a wire hung from the ceiling, suspended and motionless. The light was orange, a little brownish maybe, and dirty seeming. The bulb could've blown out at any second and I wouldn't have been surprised. There was also a man.
He was standing in the corner.
It was not a large room — it had probably been a broom closet — so we were only about six feet from each other at the moment I opened the door. He looked up at me, but his eyes told me he didn't see anything.
He was wearing a blue jacket, zipped halfway up, with the unzipped collar flaps drooping forward like white wilted flower petals, exposing a cottony inner lining. He had a short beard of some gray, mostly brown. His brown hair was thinning but still long enough to be unkempt. His face was craggy, weathered, whether by acne or accident I couldn't tell. His eyes were, in that low light, unyieldingly black. He could have been 30; he could have been 60. His jeans were soaking red.
It didn't occur once to me to try to speak to him.
He coughed once, without covering his mouth. Both him arms were tucked inside the same jacket pocket, which gave his body a weird, twisted look. He coughed again.
"Neveem," he said, weakly. I couldn't tell if it was the deadening light that made his skin look burnt and dried out, or if that was how he really was. If it was the light, then my skin must have looked the same to him. I had no idea what he had said. Mary would have been able to tell me. Moving here was her idea in the first place. Unlike her, I had come without a shred of preparedness. I spoke not a word of the language, which is why I could only just now stare.
He started to speak again, but a coughing fit interrupted the thought. When he coughed, his body shook terribly, frighteningly. His pants sloshed against his legs and the floor like heavy curtains next to an open window during a storm.
He issued what sounded to me like speech, but I couldn't be sure. I took a single cautious step toward him.
His eyes caught me by surprise.
Suddenly, he was looking right at me, and I knew he was looking right at me, could see me exactly as I was, unique and apart from every other human being who had ever wronged him. He saw me as alive.
"Neveem tso mam deylat," he said, and collapsed.
I jumped back, landed on my toes, and stayed there, one hand on the door frame. I was prepared to leap away in a heartbeat. I was afraid he would lunge for me, grab me by the ankles and do to me whatever it was that had been done to him. I hovered, on tiptoes, buzzing with adrenaline, ready.
He didn't move. He didn't even seem to be bleeding. Was he bleeding? Was he breathing? I couldn't tell. Each second was an ice cube. We were completely still.
Then the light went out.
That was it. I was out of there, scrambling backwards and toward the walls I thought I remembered having doors in them, running with panicked legs before my mind could have anything to say about it.
Adrenaline pushed me through the front door and out into the now-dazzlingly bright snow, my cellphone clenched in one of the two fists I pumped up and down as I ran. I had forgotten all about it.
My running legs kicked out into the air and suddenly I wasn't running but falling, somersaulting down a hill I had meticulously snooped up not fifteen minutes earlier. It had seemed much smaller then. I landed on my knees and skidded to a stop at the bottom. I was surprised at how much it hurt.
"Ahhhhh— mmff!" I grunted, rocked back, rubbing my knees, whose impact had plowed away twin trails of snow to expose the brown and pebble-strewn earth beneath, and winced at the pain.
The knees of my jeans were brown and gray with mixed earth and snow. I relaxed into a sitting position, breathing for a moment and wishing I was back home in bed with Mary. Then I pinched the material of my jeans up off my knees so that they wouldn't touch. They were throbbing, now, and I was afraid I had broken something. Gingerly, I rolled my wet pant legs up past my knees, which were purple with blood.
Ekleksographia:
Wave Two
March, 2010
Fiction
Alex Henderson
Alex Henderson lived and worked in Prague, Czech Republic, for nine months in 2008 and 2009. He has since moved back to Carrboro, North Carolina, next door to the University at Chapel Hill. He gets some writing done when he has the time, but mostly he writes when he doesn't.