A steady stream of dust drifted through of the windows of the carriage as Dr.

Horvath wafted another layer from his unread book. The driver seemed determined to strip his two passengers of any comfort as each jarring rut in the uneven road bounced the tired pair against the hard wooden seats. The horse-hair padded bench on which he sat was as hard a cotters bed, & for the tenth time in the last hour he longed to be done with his journey. It had taken three arduous days of flea infested Inns, stale meals, & cruel rural highways to get him this far & he was at the limit of his endurance. The driver shouted above the creaking carriage urging the ragged horses on, using whip & threat in equal measure; he forced them up the steep slope of the hill until the ridge leveled out onto broad pastures, & the road softened into an avenue lined with walnut trees & twisted apple. Here the road seemed to settle, the ruts cut less harsh & the endless creak of straining wood mellow to a coarse rumble. Beyond the fluctuating film of airy grime the doctor looked out of the window at the spring that wove into view; the deep forests that flowed across the landscape called for his attention with an ancient charm. Such a vastness of nature was both alluring & disturbing, & he could not decide if the rawness of the untamed lands he would now be a part of could accept a man like himself: urban & curbed from the natural world. From the high vantage of the road the woodlands seemed endless, & the few huddled villages he could see appeared less nestled, as the poets may have termed it, and more cowed by the great weight of nature surrounding them. Felled areas dotted the landscape, especially along the valley floors, striped the dark brown of tilled soil; and further still, along slack terraces, regimented orchards lined the forests edge, their order sadly determined against the chaos of Natures rule. Here people lived at Natures bequest. He jarred against the headboard as the carriage hit another new level of Purgatory & the winnowing creak of the vehicles beleaguered axels complimented his own muffled grown. If not for his trunks, cases & other baggage he would have hired a horse for this the final leg of his journey. He only hoped he would find a wagon for rent to cover the last half mile once the carriage reached his roads end. He was sure it could not be far now as they had started their decent into the valley below, & he leaned himself forward, pushing aside the useless flap of curtain hanging down, & peered at the soft roll of hills that rose around him. Alongside the road weary labourers stepped aside as the carriage passed, farm workers Horvath assumed; non-smiling, hard, their eyes glazed with fatigue & contempt for those too moneyed to walk. Horvath raised a hand in a half-greeting to those who would perhaps be his new neighbours but the response was nil; a youth smiled, his teeth milled by coarse grains & yellow & pointed. Pushed from behind, he moved on with eyes caste to the floor. An older man laughed at the youth & grabbed a blackened thong around his own neck, pulling it out from his shirt. He waved it towards Horvath: a black talon, a crows foot. The claws were long & cutting, & only briefly shown before they were thrust back beneath the stained shirt, & the carriage was away. Horvath sat back inside, the dust now a swirling cloud that coated his lips & throat. Hed heard of the old beliefs still held by people here but not expected to come face to face with it before even arriving. The reputation the mountain people was not a kind one in this respect & he wondered how much of this reputation may actually be fact. Yet even for the less superstitious the Sylvan heart of the Carpathian hills, these mellow reaches, held threats that made Horvath reconsider his impulsive decision to make this land his home. Wild pigs were not the most malicious creatures to wander through Moravias forests, with wolf & bear often sighted in hard years. The young keeper at the last stage had happily told him of the deaths of three woodsmen; ripped down by the claws of a half-starved bear the year before, they had not been found til the stink of rotten meat had drifted far enough to call in a hunters dogs. Brushing these dark thoughts from his mind, & another layer of dust from the book in his lap, he smiled at his own foolishness. If he continued like this he would scare himself all the way back to the Danube before the summer dawned, & give his brothers at home something to mock him for into the bargain. Another jolt of the carriage heaved the battered dray, for so it now felt, up a final slope, & brought him back to the solid world around him. The driver shouted the horses back to a walk, as on the curve of the road ahead a white-washed cross signaled the final end of their torturous trip. The doctor felt himself long for the clean air that had been so

suffocatingly denied him these last few miles of dusty road, & hastily gathered his few articles together & made to open the carriage door. His travelling companion grumbled, a large bulbous man, & tried to readjust himself to endure the last haul into Krajne village, the final stage & resting place. Stepping down Horvath appraised his luggage & acknowledged no losses or damage to the driver with a curt nod & looked about him. A small hamlet of 6 houses stood back from the road whilst the dust covered cross signaled the juncture of the main road to the larger village of Krajne to the south, & eastwards to the smaller settlements beyond the forests verge. Northwards ran the road along which he had travelled, & a smaller but metaled track leading up a hill veered west into the trees in front of him. The hamlet, which would become his home, lay along this forest track & was said to be larger than the one he now viewed at the crossroads, but deluged by the dark forests that lined the low hills & hid from sight. No doubt once he organised a good horse he would be able to cover the mile & a half to krajne in quick time if business extended that far. This, if he were honest was something he was not overly hopeful of as the opening of a medical practice in such backward territory was seen by many of his peers a clear lunacy, & he couldnt help but agree. He had though never considered money a motivation, & secretly relished the time to be spent in these untrammeled hills. And whilst most of his friends were headed for the large cities to practice medicine, he had chosen Konkusova Dolina: a small village, in a small region of small wealth but a land rich in solitude. A bank of corn flowers stalks attracted his eye, & he wandered over brushing his fingers softly along the prickly heads of last years grasses now dark & forlon after a long winter. The corn flowers stood equally somber, their glory long spent in a now distant summer, but as ever they waited & would soon reappear with the better weather. He had always loved these flowers, their quiet dependability; their never failing surety that spring would come. Their cold woody stems in winter were a stark contrast to their almost ethereal beauty in summer, & of course their choice of habitat: rooting in the bitter rubble of a roadside, choosing the hard earth cast by men over the softer issue of natural forms. As if they, like him, chose hardship over ease. A little boy pointed him in the direction of a fair haired man who was, as Horvath stood speaking to him, preparing a low slung cart to return to Konkusova Dolina. The price agreed was reasonable enough considering that his wife & two daughters would now have to walk. The man introduced himself as Milan & showed a polite disinterest in the Doctors thanks & explanations, merely pocketing the money as he heaved Horvaths various bags & boxes onto the cart without comment.. Loaded, the cart began to totter up a steep lane towards a low rise & then descended into the shallow valley beyond, the valley of the Konkus family. Milans daughters & wife chatted amicably as they followed the cart up the hill impervious to the prick of the spring chill. The scent of wild garlic filled the air & as the snow drops continued to fade with the receding snows that still, even now, clung to the higher & more shaded woodlands, the bright eyed daisies & other ragged adventurers could be seen creeping out of the dark soil. A pale pink haze hung over the fringes of the forest as wild cherry came into bud & a similar brume, like a wintery green mist, drifted about the woodland as life regained the trees & winter starkness was hid behind new born fronds. The sun hung in a blue mist above them & barely managed to penetrate the cool seeping from the woodlands on either side of the road, it would be midday by the time the ground warmed & white patches of night frost still remained in the grassy hollows of the verge. A cock pheasant barked beside the track & took off in flight, it barely missed the head of the horse & skimmed down towards a mass of dog rose, running as it landed deep beneath the thorns into briary dark to disappear. The doctor breathed it all in. The sciences had brought him a deep appreciation of natures richnes s & despite his learning as a physician it had been a love of botany that had coerced him into this recklessness he now found himself involved in; a recklessness that would, within the year bankrupt him should he find no patients for his medical knowledge. No easy task this given that every family in Moravia possessed itself of at least one aged relative who ministered to the family, if not the communitys, health. Like a Jesuit on some foreign continent wresting men from darkness, he would struggle to bring the local people here into this new faith, that of science. They would not be so easy to beguile but he felt sure that with a few cured confessors turned to him, he could keep the wolf of penury from the door.

Next to him Milan had become more talkative & chatted amicably but Horvath barely listened. He smiled occasionally to show interest & responded to the odd question but other than that he was content to simply sit & view his surroundings. It seemed the house the doctor was to rent had belonged to Mi lans wife through her aunt & had been empty since the old ladys death the summer before. Milans brother -in-law, whom Horvath had met in Trnava to secure the house, had had little interest in the family & had not been seen in the valley in near thirty years. As the highlights of Milans narration drifted on, the doctor scanned the small houses & fields that sat beside the road. As they ambled over a small brook the potent smell of sodden earth rose up from the banks of the berm & seemed to cloy the air with its dampness & bitter balm. It was all nectar to him, & it drenched his lungs in a long forgotten aroma of the land. A primeval sense of belonging arose within him, as it always had since his childhood; like the smell of sweet mown grass, the scent of wet earth was an ancient reminder of home. Milan grunted encouragement to the carts struggling horse as it crested a second rise. The young gelding seemed as relieved as its owner to have made the steep ascent & trotted easily down the path. They had now entered the butt of the valley &, bowl-like, it contained the last remaining homes before the track became no more than a path that drifted off beyond the line of trees. The houses, still some way off, appeared neat & trim. Perhaps boasting one or two rooms, a wood store, out-kitchen, & animal pens, they served more a function than a fashion but each one expressed the finesse of its owner & builder, with personal motifs & depictions adorning walls, gates & outbuildings. Small wicker boundaries circled the inner properties but the orchards, meadows, & paddocks were unfenced, & as Horvath looked on he could see well-worn paths drifting between cottages. A communal pool sat sadly neglected in a low dell, high surrounded with reeds at one end, the other trampled & churned into muddy mire. Circling the valley like a defensive wall, the tree line wove an unsteady ring across the hills. Great banks of trees then rose up on either side in an endless wash, towering above the valley & giving the place a hidden feel; offering the village perhaps some sanctuary from the world outside. Yet this sanctuary could only ever be temporary for should the villagers fail to keep the woodlands at bay it would surely inundate the vale, losing it forever in the mighty stillness of the trees. Milan pointed off to the left of the road where the land dipped & was halved by an earthen track. Six ancient walnut trees lined the south side of the track which wound its way between an unkempt hedge of mixed bramble, wild rose & stunted cherry. Above the hedge, & lower in the dell, a large redbrick chimney jutted & was accompanied by a smaller adobe one that listed with the weight of years. As Milan drew the cart to a halt a penetrating silence crept out of the landscape, a sweet & awful stillness. Horvath drank in the quiet & scanned the rich woodland that kept the cottage on three sides. A mix of oak, plane, cherry, pine & untamed walnut descended on the house which stood small against this wild backdrop. Light shone from the tops of the trees & seemed to surround this little garden, keeping it lit against the gloom that strayed from the forest. A pair of black & red woodpeckers skitted across the road & skimmed a decrepit tree stump that appeared to mark the entrance of the doctors new home & whatever feelings of trepidation had haunted him before fled at the sight of this. Milans polite cough brought Horvath back from his reverie reminding him that the luxury of a day spent musing was not to be enjoyed by all. The key to the house was to be found hung from a nail beside the door, & Horvath wandered down the track leaving Milan to unload his belongings. Tansy stood against clumps of grey grasses, their yellow heads sadly drooping & relieved of their bitter smell til the seasons turned; & comfrey too was there in dark shades of green. A small circle of stones lay overgrown at the entrance to garden but he could see hyssop & thyme, & many other plants & herbs he did not know. As Horvath descended towards the house he heard the c hatter of Milans wife & daughters flowing down from the road behind, their voices sounded unnaturally shrill in the quiet, a noisome intrusion that rang loud in the deafness of such a place. Once past the hedgerow the sound of people dissipated & Ladislav surveyed his house & garden. The grounds themselves were unremarkable: before the house was a large area of what had become scrub grass, it

was bordered with rose & attempted to convey an air of civility upon an obstinate wilderness; two large lilac trees were sadly neglected either side of the main entrance to the house, & an overgrown thicket of more herbs, again hyssop, & mint, rosemary & what looked like chive, or perhaps onion, spread beneath the kitchen window to the left of the door in what Marta had perhaps once used as an herb garden. And on closer inspection the unhappy remnants of disordered lemon balm & a stunted bay jostled each other in a sunless patch beneath one of the lilac trees. The aspect of the house favoured the south west which would provide the garden, kitchen & front living areas of the house with afternoon sun which would no doubt be cheering in the winter gloom; but the house was dramatically overshadowed from the rear by tall plain trees that would block any light even on the boldest of summer days. The whole timbre of the house & gardens about was one of forgotten melancholy as if old Marta had had no longer the energy nor aegis to preserve her home from the efforts of decay. The house was far from crumbling but Horavath had the impression of a place unwanted; as if since the old ladys death, no one had thought or cared about the place, that no one had seen a value or a purpose in the house. This struck him as strange, it being a fairly large building, well made & with land. He looked for signs that the villagers had been: tracks across the garden, fruit taken from the orchard, perhaps a shepherd had grazed his sheep or cut grass for winter in the paddock, but nothing, almost as if the place had been avoided. But was this so unusual? After all Milans wife, niece to old Marta, had perhaps insisted no one enter what was now partially her property, perhaps village custom respected some unknown agreement on the death of a neighbour. He looked once more about the garden acknowledging that perhaps his imagination was also at work as no doubt a little attention was all that was needed to restore the character of the place. The key hung on a rusted hook before the door & slid easily into the lock; a three quarter turn & the door seemed to shudder under the strain of an unfamiliar invasion. Heaving his shoulder & knee against the wood Ladislav pushed before popping the handle & key, the old wooden door grimaced in annoyance before finally giving way. Inside thin motes of dust drifted in the disturbed air & a cool chill radiated out of the orphaned rooms. Horvath took a step inside & listened, aside from his own breath the house remained quiet: not even the timid scurry of squatting mice disturbed. To the left was a small sitting room & on the right a simple kitchen with stove, wood table & chairs, & a stone sink. Directly before the front door a flight of stairs led to what the he had been told were two bedrooms, one destined to be his study. The house smelled of disuse, not unpleasant but torpid, & it seemed to cast as lazy peacefulness which reminded the doctor of deep sunlight. He sighed, a great wave of contentment surged within him, & he was surprised by its power. For a moment he felt himself lifted, perhaps mesmerized even, as if on the verge of sleep & a scent of lavender breezed throughout the house & yet vanished before his senses captured its delicate strength. He stared around the entrance hall anew, it was a fleeting presence of something other. As if Horvath had momentarily stepped outside of himself & glimpsed anothers view; the house & rooms remained a solid as they were before, but its collective features of character & experience wafted a hazy image before him. Like dreaming but awake he sensed that things were other than they should be, but was unsure why. Ecstatic, he struggled to regain a sense of his time & place, & inhaled deeply. He was mildly startled by the intensity of this feeling, a dizzy spell maybe, but slowly he descended into normality, the lavender was gone to be replaced by a mildewed damp & dust aroma, & he placed a steadying hand on the rough stone of the porch to prove to himself that that the world was safe beneath his feet. The experience had taken mere seconds, a dj vouz without the sense of familiarity yet more a voyeuristic glance into a moment beheld by someone else. The sun coming through the door behind him anchored his senses & he pressed his back into the warmth of his skin to reassure himself, like a cat arching away fatigue. Perhaps long hours of travel or the expectation, not to say fear, of his new surroundings had lightened his head, but the smell of lavender, had it not been too strong to mistake for fancy? Straightening himself he exhaled long & low, blowing out whatever airs had fuddled his mind & swept away the illness of ease that now seemed to bait him. From euphoric contentment to nervous wreck in a few

seconds, he smiled to himself, if nothing else he needed to unpack the brandy. At that he heard a shuffling behind him as Milan lugged a hempen sack to the door way. Horvath turned to meet him & saw Milans wife & daughters struggle the remaining box down the track. He was in no mood for conversation so paid & ushered them off a quickly as politeness allowed. Milans wife, now said to be called Mirka, would return in a day or two to undertake any chores the Doctor found necessary & bring along Josko, their son, to help with heavy work; not least of all being to cut back the knee high grass that fanned itself across the sloping lawn to the side of the house. When the family had left Horavath made his way into the kitchen, the long day & constant jolting of the carriage & cart he was sure had fatigued him &, no doubt, brought on the dizzy spell he had suffered earlier. He inhaled the dank air, reassured that it bore no hint of lavender, & exhaled once more watching the whirling dust motes caught in the mild vortex of his own breath as they drifted through the afternoon sunlight. The reasoning spirit of man is an extraordinary thing, he mused, & smiled; for so must it be. If we allowed ourselves to contemplate each & every glimpse of the surreal that dreamlike appears to all, we would no doubt lose our tender hold on the real. Like a sailor aboard a ship in mid-ocean he must trust, for hopes sake, in what is solid beneath his feet for to stare into the fluid reaches of infinity is simply to grand an undertaking. His own teacher of philosophy had once said that the sciences & reason seek only to reassure men, not to enlighten them. Horvath sat down at the kitchen table & tried to focus his attention on the tasks at hand & realised that they were plentiful. Beyond merely settling in he would need to confirm his arrangement to hire the cleaning skills of Milans wife as the house, judging by the kitchen, had not been cleaned since Marthas death. He looked about the room tracing the cobwebs from corner to corner; his sense that the house itself lay like some sleeping creature returned. He could not keep frightening himself in this way, he knew. Fifteen minutes in the house alone & he was already imagining far worse than cobwebs; but it was there, the sense that the house & gardens waited, as if by some loud or vulgar sounds they may awaken. He felt the irrational need to speak in whispers or await the welcoming return of the households rightful owner to allow him in, make the introductions needed that he might stay. Well, perhaps he was not far wrong: Marta had been born, loved & died here, & the house still held her. Like heat or cold, damp or dry the resonance of a person long dead has the facility to seep into the fabric of a thing, & there forever be as a record of his presence or actions. A phantasm is such a thing, Horvath reasoned, no ghost or drifting soul, but an earthly impression upon the fabric of place of a person who is no longer present, akin to the odour of a meal, lingering still, but long since eaten. So Marta, long dead & now, no doubt & hopefully, resplendent in the presence of God, perhaps may suffer some expression of her former life to stay as part of the buildings soul. He rose & went back out into the hall. Lifting several boxes full of books he eventually found a small wooden case in which he had packed several bottle s of his fathers wine, & a bottle of brandy gifted to him by a college friend on his leaving. He uncorked the brandy with a rusted knife he found on the window shelf &, not being able to find a clean cup, drank deeply from the bottles mouth. The hot liquid burned to the bowl of his belly, & he grimaced at the taste so unfamiliar. The haze of presentment he felt was slowly replaced & he corked the bottle with a slap of his hand. The dimming of the sun beyond the windows recalled Horvath to more mundane thoughts & he began the task of bringing his remaining bags & belongings into the house. Stacked within the hallway & overflowing into the living room he decided to leave the unpacking until the next day & prepare for his first evening in his new home. The was a light chill descending outside, & the house itself was cold from lack of use, so he light the stove in the kitchen with wood he found stacked in nook in the pantry. He had seen a stack of damp looking logs piled up around the side of the house & would have to bring as much as he could in before long, standing out in the weather for more than a year it would need drying before it could be of any use to him. Milan has sold him some bread & a few other supplies, & he had found apples stored in the pantry off the kitchen; neatly wrapped in old straw there were perhaps two dozen in a small wooden crate that seemed to have survived the winter. The thought occurred to him that someone must have kept them here after old Marta had died as the apples would not have survived since her death. Hed speak to Mirka tomorrow & pay her, or

whoever, for those he was about eat. Alongside the fruit he found 2 large stone pitchers which he dusted off which a handkerchief, they would be perfect for bringing in water from the small spring that poured from the rocks at the far end of the garden. There was no well to speak in Martas garden, Milan had told him, as none was needed thanks to the spring, but the community maintained a large & deep well a few dozen yards away down at the nape of woodcutters road where it bowed into the forest, & all were welcome to take from that. Picking up one of the stone jugs he shuffled himself back into his overcoat & made for the spring. Leaving the house he walked across the garden towards the jumble of rocks & overhanging roots that he assumed must be the water source. A pheasant called somewhere in the orchard & was answered from far off. He began to hear the sound of water trickle as he neared but could see no sign of water. The ground appeared dry & no run off wound away that he could see. A dark spruce hung deeper over the craggy mound & its soft needles padded the floor as he trod beneath its arms. The spring was small when he found it, a delicate thing that gently poured itself upon the land. The fountain intrigued him, & as he approached he saw a small basin of stone had been crudely fitted to capture & direct the flow of water. It was surrounded by ferns, & the earth near the basin itself oozed beneath his feet, a perfect home for the willow that stood sadly by. The water drifted away from the basin, seeping through a jumble of natural stone & back into the dark soil beneath; the waters brief appearance above the ground almost magical to behold as it glimmered into life for a few determined moments. As Horvath watched the waters tumble from the rock he noticed, cut into one of the larger stones, an inverted triangle with the words Ad fontes inscribed beneath. The carver had taken care in his work for despite the triangles simplicity the angles appeared precise & lines clear. This was made by no child wasting away an idle hour. He traced the symbol with his finger & felt the time added smoothness glide beneath his skin; the cool of the water added to the sense of the shape having a polished finish, as if someone at sometime had spent an age tracing & retracing the image as he did now. Unconsciously, he cocked his head to the side, his forefinger still trailing lightly over the image, & realised he was listening to the spring as is bubbled into the rock basin. The sound was cooling & carried with it a small breeze that seemed to have been liberated from the rocks along with the water. The humble rapture of the spring & its accompanying air sang its chorus in such peaceful tones that it seemed to be ignored by all except Horvath. The towering trees, shrubs, ferns, & moss covered rocks stood imperiously by as the little spring babbled its joy to all & none, but impervious to their neglect she rejoiced. The Doctor scraped away the moss around the triangle clearing the symbol for plain sight as if it might hold some special significance. He had no idea was the triangle might have meant to the carver but he was sure, for some reason he couldnt express, that it did have meaning. He cleared away dead leaves from the pan, & tried to readjust the stone trim of the basin as best he could. He would need to lay steps across the damp earth when time allowed before it became a mud pool in the April rains, & prune back the willow before the warmth of summer crept further in. The spring, by no means a grotto, seemed somehow removed from the garden, a small & unique place that calmed the space around it; it mystified him, as perhaps all fountains do to those who care to sit beside them, & he was loathe to leave & head back into the grim musk of an unclean house. Yet the shadows stretched across the garden & a chill had now descended making him shiver as he filled the two flasks. The water seemed to illuminate the dark stone from within as he walked back across the garden & the light from the failing sun leapt about the lip of the jug in unexpected waves, carrying with it the song of the little spring. The sunlight slid behind Krajnansk hora & Horvath sat before the remains of his evening meal: Bread, sheep cheese, apples, & dried sausage made up a feast for a king; & he drank deeply of the fresh spring, a water of which like he had never tasted before. He had scrubbed clean an old wooden platter & cup, & now filled the latter liberally with water that even now, in the gloom of evening, seemed to reflect a sapid light. He cleared the kitchen table, & began to search a small trunk for books. Clearing the dust of travel from the several volumes he had brought with him, he shifted his candle against the shade & checked their titles. Placed upon the table they were mainly medical books with a few volumes of poetry including Horace & Goethe; a few novels, which had become fashionable in recent years, & a

bible given to him by his father when he had left Nitra to study. Not much for an evenings entertainment, but then his small bible caught his eye. He collected it carefully, & unwrapped the newspaper that bound it. Gently tracing the leather binding with his finger he lift the cover open. His father, now dead more than a year, had been a devout man & had taken to underlining passages in the bible for his sons reference should the need arise for guidance away from the family. The doctor sat know & leafed gently through the pages: despite his love of science it had never ceased to amaze him that within this simple book lay a store of knowledge compiled from the words, thoughts, & deeds of the worlds most inspired men & women. He may not be the most devout man in Christendom but he believed in God, & the writing He inspired. As his placed the book back on the table the pages fluttered from his fingers & he saw, lined with a thick stub of pencil, 1 kings 13:18 : and an angel spake unto me by the word of the Lord, saying, Bring him back with thee into thine house, that he may eat bread and drink water . In the failing light Horvath reread the passage; mayhap the turns of the day had left him vulnerable to outrageous foolishness, but he relaxed against the arm of the chair & smiled. Who knew what brought men & fate together, but at this time he raised his cup of water, her water, in acknowledgement. Old Marta, mistress of this house & attendant to the garden spring, had, he believed, welcomed him in. During the following weeks Horvath set to a routine of life that saw him begin to establish himself as a trusted member of the small community. Mirka came at intervals to care for the house, Milan & Josko tended to the outdoors. & his practice had slowly garnered a few regular complainants who, despite being by & large healthy, liked to sit for awhile & share their burdens. His earnings were minimal as those who sought his care had little to pay with, but rather than spurn his neighbours for the sake of a few crowns he accepted payments in kind. Most of his patients had the normal run of the mill illnesses &, being as isolated as they were from the world at large, seemed healthy beyond reason, or at least healthier than many who struggled to live in the filth of the city. Those able enough came to his door but, out of deference to his stature he assumed, they preferred to be remain in the garden rather than enter the house, & as the summer months continued he would set his kitchen table beside the herb beds & see his patients there. By noon on most days he was free to follow his most personal passion & wandered the hills & woodlands collecting plant specimens. He had seen the women collecting grasses & herbs out beyond the meadows, & spoken to them at length about their properties, noting all in his neatly written journal; it was amazing to him how such common weeds as mouse tail could be used in a variety of different ways, curing everything from stomach pains to rheumatism. And animals too, he came to know as deer often drifted down from the forest in the early mornings, moving silently through his orchard, beautiful like some winsome shade they pruned the hedgerows of their fruit in the dawn mist; whilst the nights played host to noisome pigs that chapped like old men as they rummaged through the undergrowth. His life established a simple pattern, & he came to enjoy the long hours he spent alone in the garden after the last of his daily patients had left. Josko & Milan had advised on the planting of a vegetable garden, & by midsummer pumpkins & courgettes had overtaken the side of the house sheltered from the sun, swarming like a broad-leafed morass on the damp soil. As time passed & his reputation spread beyond his neighbours he found himself being called to visit more of his patients at their homes due to the distance many would have to travel carrying the elderly or very young. A lad named Alex was given the task of fetching the doctor, as receiving visitors in the garden had also lost its novelty for many, & yet for reasons he could not fathom the villagers who did come still politely refused to enter his home. Despite trying in vain to encourage those needing his care to come into his admittedly cramped surgery, he was nevertheless expected to haul his medicine bags to & fro between garden & hamlet. It seemed that he, like any other plying a trade, must accommodate his customers. He had still not managed to buy a horse, & on longer journeys the boy Alex met him at his roads end with a handcart acting as both guide through the labyrinth of hamlets, & porter. The pleasantness of the local people had beguiled him & he had become to think of them as more than just acquaintances; being Catholic in a predominantly protestant region meant he did not attend the church but he had befriended the cleric who stoically held service despite the few who cared to attend. The irreligious nature

of the Carpathian people, especially these people, was known to Horvath but he found little in them to be unchristian if by a mans deeds & actions you might judge him. He was still, no doubt, considered by them to be an outsider but he was confident this would change in time. Most folks in Konkusova dolina & the surrounding hamlets seemed endlessly related to each other & mayhap this sense of extended family encouraged a reticence & maybe even distrust in the world beyond their home. But perhaps this was not so unusual, even in the large human reservoirs of Vienna & Budapest the native born felt obliged to mistrust any & all who were not of them; & in these masses, where no semblance of kinship could possibly exist, the urbanite strove to unite himself to others in an effort ward away the foreign & exotic. Even at college he himself had seen the scornful look on friends faces as they contemplated life outside their little world, looked down upon a rustic villager in the market place, or spoke condescendingly of a neighbouring town. So, was it so surprising that here in these small hamlets, where a man might be born & die without ever leaving the valley & where a neighbour was most likely also kin, that they too might be a little wary of a stranger? In this wise, it was probably the most natural think in the world. However, his sense of isolation was growing, a feeling of merely being on the fringe of community. He was respected, even greeted & treated warmly when out & about or visiting the sick, but there was always a reserve. As if they waited for him to leave before they could relax & return to being themselves. But this sense of alienation was brought home to him at the end of his fourth month in the valley, & made his a glaring & obvious exclusion, it came as the eve of the summer solstice melted into a clear & starlit night. He had set out from Konkusova dolina just after sunset with intention of visiting the cleric, Miroslav Schultz, as he had done on most Sunday evenings since soon after his arrival. The cleric lived in small 3 roomed cottage on the edge of Krajne village; he was unmarried & having been disfigured by small pox in his youth it seemed unlikely that the kindly man would find a wife. Rumour had it that he had formed an attachment to a Czech widow in Stary Hrozenkov, a small village in Czech Moravia a day by horse from Krajne, but Horvath was certain the rumour was unfounded. Miroslav Shultz was a priest, & more importantly a good man & the idea that he may have gotten himself involved with this village in anyway was unthinkable. Some believed Stary Hrozenkov to be the bolt hold of witches, diviners &, so the more outrageous claimed, of necromancers. These stories amongst Moravian villages were ever present but in Stary Hrozenkov the reputation had stuck & the Doctor assumed a man such as Schultz would avoid any connection for good names sake. Horvath was sure that the rumours were false but people talked & for this reason alone he convinced himself that Schultz would never be seen in such a place. For despite the church, despite modern ideas, & perhaps even a lack of proof viable to even to most gullible, folk in these parts persisted to believe the ridiculous; & the belief that Stary Hrozenkov was in some way a place of magic & dark dealing lived on. And this was the fundamental problem with Moravia & the Carpathians at large: Whilst the rest of civilised Europe had put an end such bed time stories, primitive beliefs lingered on here. Such was the extent of their superstition that Horavath had seen dogs impaled on sticks in the belief that human wolves or werewolves would be warned away; life size figures of women were paraded through villages & symbolically drowned in a river or stream to fend off the vigours of winter & even some educated aristocracy had taken to exhuming the dead to ensure no vampiric activity. The hysteria created even here over the death of Eleonore von Schwarzenberg had been enough to convince anyone of the lack of rationalism in closed communities such as this. However, Horvath, on this early summer evening, hummed quietly to himself as he meandered past the first few cottages of on his way down the hill to Krajne. The evening was still & he enjoyed the rich scented warmth that exhaled gently from the heavy wheat fields beside the road. Milans house could just be seen beyond the walnut trees that lined his sheep fold. Ordinarily, the chatter of his wife & daughters could be heard drifting down from the rise but this evening the house was uncharacteristically quiet, no lights burned in the window. The next property along the road was old Jan Orlaks place, a sprawling & untidy cottage that showed well enough the lack of a womans hand since his wife had died at the birthing of their first child 40 years before; beyond that Samo & Katka Koza & their 4 children. Milan once told the Doctor that Katka, in her youth, had been considered

one of the most beautiful women in district until Samos drunkenness & fists had reduced her to a sour faced harridan best avoided. As he passed each of the cottages he noticed their vacancy. Windows dark, animals penned, dogs leashed to gate or door posts & the quiet. By the time he reached the edge of Krajne, & still had not seen a single soul nor sign of life, he had grown to fear that some disaster had occurred & he had remained unawares. It was not only the fact the hamlets seemed deserted but also that there was an air of abandonment that hung heavy. Washing still hung on the lines, chickens scratched amongst the dust but they were gone, the people. Stopping at the brow of the low hill that dropped down to Krajne he strained to hear any man made sound. There in the trees, the breaking of sticks! But no, not Human. Then he heard a distinct human cry. It was far off but certain. He held his breath & turned towards the hills behind him, looking up towards the Karjnaske hill that dominated his own valley, he willed the sound to return but it did not. Only the raw silence of the world et non hominibus, an Edenic quiet filled with the desolation of Adam, was to be heard. Horavath turned & hurried down the hill. As he hastened towards Miroslavs house he was relieved to see the lighted windows burning brightly in the eerie darkness of what had begun as benign summers eve. His friend heard the lych gate swing out on corroded hinges & pulled open the door to witness the Doctor pale & shaken. Ushering the Doctor in, Schultz took his friends walking stick & hat & smiled, seating him down at the kitchen table he gave him glass of watered wine & tried to explain. The wine returned the doctor to safety &, in the secure harbor of Schultz company, he felt his manner may have been over acted, but still where had the villagers gone? His friend sat opposite resting his large hands on the rough skin of the table. Horvath noticed how in this light, with the fast fading summer sun muted by the kitchens dark wood furniture, the clerics scarred cheeks looked almost smooth & unmarred. His soft hands nervously stroked the wooden table top between them, soothing his thoughts & pacifying. It was a tradition, he said, that none of the villagers were keen to talk about. In fact there was little to be said as few knew its origins or meaning, but like cows to the corn they simply followed what others did, & so the tradition continued. The church, or rather Schultz in his official capacity, had spoken out against it, hed tried to deter participation with services held in open fields on the same night, hed forbade their going but nothing had worked. Whatever meaning the villagers found up there in the dark forests this one night a year, it was far beyond him to end. To put an end to what those to whom hed spoken believed to be the crux on which their livelihood depended must be left to better men than himself. What little information he could gather, what little his neighbours were willing to tell was scant but sounded grotesque to the incredulous Horvath. The locals would leave their homes before sunset gathering with them the elderly & young alike, each laden with bundles of clothing & food. No signal was needed to gather the folk for they each made their individual or familial way through the lanes. No doubt Horvath had missed his neighbours departure due to the secluded location of his house, but they would have intended to avoid him, & used the forest paths that led up above the village. Many of the paths converged & diverged throughout the woodlands & their neighbours & kin would meet, silently greeting each other before moving swiftly on. Little would have been said as there was little to speak of, each new the course of their direction & their only interest would be to navigate the near invisible trail in the dim light of the forest. No torches were carried so sure footedness was essential, infants were carried by their mothers & the young were responsible for maintaining the old. The men folk would lead the path & like bees drawn to a flower the villagers would unerringly arrive at the clearing within an hour of midnight. The clearing was a large patch of natural pasture that sloped eastwards from the crest of Krajnansk hora & was unremarkable except for a solitary stone megalith that raised itself the height & half again of man yet with the girth of a young girl. The stone was said to be older than history but was unnatural to its environment so the presumption was that at some time men of extraordinary ability had transported it to its current location but none knew for what purpose. The cleric himself had not seen the stone nor had any desire to do so, but had he been so inclined he doubted the villagers would be enthused by his curiosity. It was theirs & he, being like the Doctor from beyond the valleys surrounding Krajnansk hora, was not of them despite his twenty years of residence.

They will return by mid-morning tomorrow but I urge you not to intrude upon their...event. The Cleric continued, I do not try to imagine, Horvath, for it is not my place to judge. I minister to them & try to encourage a more Christian way of life but should I, or you for that matter, ask of them more than they are willing to concede then we will be shunned. And this I do not want. A little influence is better than none, is it not? The two friends sat late into the night. Their talk ranged between their chosen professions of science & God, before meandering on to all things the wine allowed. As the first light of dawn cast upon the sky a timid blue the doctor rose from his chair on unsteady legs & headed for home. He looked long at the dark forest that sat back across the wheat fields &, in his drunkenness perhaps, yearned to know of what they did. Up there in the clearing, along pathways hid & barred by protective gates of woven woods, his friends & neighbours explored a world unknown to him; a world evil perhaps but a world wholly seductive in its mystery. As Schultz had predicted signs of returning life reappeared to Konkusova dolina the following morning but the villagers were not forthcoming & Horvath did not see much of his neighbours for the next several days to come. A blissful lethargy seemed to have descended upon the community which continued until the first sheepish arrival of a patient heralded that enough time had passed for the Doctor to be readmitted into their lives. The wheels of daily life turned on as the village came together to harvest their wheat, each field & each families winter store being brought in before the village moved onto the next. And as the days passed the Doctor would wander across new mown fields to sit & watch a community, a family, at work & in harmony. Everyone worked to their capacity, from the eldest who cared for the infants & prepared food; to the young, some barely thigh high who ran with water to the sweating men scything in ordered rows, & to the women raking & baling, backs bent a dozen yards behind the swinging blades. The sounds of men & women calling to each other drifted in the heavy summer air, laughter or annoyance, but it was a timeless call; one which had had been heard for centuries, the sounds of life close to the land. Children screamed in happiness & sang in their tears, parodied their fathers & held their mothers; running from one generation to the next they were rebuked & loved, hurled to the sun & dropped sprawling upon the earth as the days wended seamlessly to into one another. Horvath began to rejoice with them as the last days of summer brought the harvests to an end, he began to note with satisfaction the full barns & cellars of his neighbours, to feel their relief at a season well rewarded. He brought in his own small clutch of vegetables from his garden, digging potatoes from the ground with his bare hands reveling in the satisfaction of this. By the end of September young Alex, son of Samo & Katka Koza, had taken up the post of Horvaths constant companion, arriving at his door before seven in the morning ready to carry out any small jobs needed. Milans boy, Josko, was also a frequent visitor due to his duties about the garden, & Milan himself had spent much of the month chopping & stacking wood for the winter to come. And when Mirka had called the Doctor to join with them to celebrate her daughters eighteenth birthday he had felt a new acceptance. They had sat beneath a lilac tree on wooden stools & logs, whilst Mirka sang songs of the forest & the hills. They drank rough brandy made from plumbs & pine, eating greasy lumps of pork pulled from the fire hot & dripping; Samo Koza slept in the grass snoring loudly oblivious to the booted toe of Katka, his wife, as she poked his ribs, & she, dressed in the pale blue skirts of her grandmother swung old Jan by the arms making him feel young. The girls, Milans daughters, had tied their hair in white ribbons that he, Horvath, had gifted them & looked shyly from the kitchen door, smiling pink cheeked at their mothers song. Alex sat beside his fathers sleeping feet, full bellied & weary eyed, stroking the grass with a faraway content, looking now to smile at Horvath who, himself, smiled tears at such a place as this. The events of the solstice began to recede & Horvath managed to push the stories that Schultz had told to the back of his mind; & when the sun shone & his friends were all about him he could quite believe that perhaps, in this case, the evidence he had seen on that night betrayed truth. Late autumn had arrived by the time the cold had started to infect the evenings & Horavath found himself more & more confined to the indoors as nights continued to grow shorter. The days however had become luminous as the translucent autumn light appeared to clear the air of all impurity & enhance what summer had sought to mellow. The forests green faded by degrees into the russet tones of copper & his meagre meals were

supplemented by the vast array of mushrooms that now arose from beneath every fallen leaf. Raspberries framed the verges & his orchard demanded more of his regard than he felt he had time for, but he diligently collected all apples within easy reach & had Josko & Alex take the rest for their families. As most if not all the locals had plentiful orchards themselves Horvath knew that apples collected by the boys were not for eating, as a good, strong alcohol could be cooked up from spare fruit or that unfit for eating. In this time of harvest he came to realize that nothing was wasted & the villagers joked that the bruised apple or pear we threw disdainfully into the forest today, would a fruit to be dreamed of come winters end. Spring was a time of hunger, a lean time of year in the hills as the winter store of food was near gone, yet the fields still new planted. As old Jan had once told him: Spring was a time of birth & death. Despite the open courtesy of the village Horvath had given up any thoughts of a deeper sense of friendship with the people whom he would have liked to consider his friends. He continued to be invited to special occasions, he officiated as a witness to their legal disputes & was called upon to give advice. They respected him he felt sure but it was obvious to him now, & had been since the solstice, that there was to be some measure of distance between himself & them, a narrow gulf perhaps but one of abysmal depths. If Schultz, after several decades, had been unable to traverse the barricades of local reserve he surely couldnt expect much better. It was a sad but true fact that he would forever remain an outsider, someone accepted to a degree but someone still not of them. This did not trouble him too much for like any interloper he would have to be satisfied with what his adopted home was prepared to share with him & be grateful, or, of course, leave. A thing he could not now envisage himself doing. Rough & sometimes crude these people may be, but they were the salt of the earth & Horvath had found in them a sense of belonging, even if it was only on the periphery of their lives, that he had not known in the shallowness of the city. He came to understand that despite what some may see as their ungodly conventions the folk of Konkusova dolina & the surrounding hamlets had a very crystalline sense of propriety. Their orthodoxy was based on a simple & acute belief in what was right & what was not; they lived as within the laws of the land as any others Horvath had met, treated cruelty, theft & dishonesty with contempt & performed the acts of good citizens not as a sense of duty but out of faith in the rightness of what they did. They may act out the rituals & rites of a more primitive era but they did so in the knowledge that the wider world no longer appreciated the veneration of the old gods & carried out their celebrations quietly. There is little room in this world nonconformists &, he thought, that perhaps the majority of people spend their lives never speaking the truth as they saw if for fear. Perhaps if all matters of faith were conducted as privately as was done here men would feel little antagonism towards others of differing views. By the arrival of November he was beginning to see less & less of the world outside, being only summoned by Alex Koza if he was needed. Most people were content to stay home after the hard work of summer & visited less. The boy, Josko, was no longer needed in the garden & Milan had finished the main house repairs & had stacked enough wood behind the house for two winters. Horvath now had the solitude he enjoyed. The day of St Martins feast had been, in contrast to his usual quiet routine, an eventful one. He had walked down to an empty church in the morning, more out of solidarity for his friend Schultz than anything else, & then had been called to the death of an elderly woman in the hamlet of Jeruzalem. As he had left the grieving family a young man had appeared running up the lane shouting for his attention. They rushed off together to the laboured birth of a little boy back in krajne who arrived howling into the world, fit & hale despite his mothers pains; neither location being far off in themselves but both being equidistant from Konkusova dolina in opposite directions, they took time to reach. On his return home after several tiring hours trudging back & forth across the fields & muddy lanes, he had found young Alex shivering in the garden waiting to take him to Jan Orlak who, being drunk the night before on his brothers plumb brandy, had spent the best part of the day vomiting convinced of his near end. The Doctor had half a mind just to ignore Jan who should by now know well enough how to manage the after effects of too much drink, but turned himself about anyway & slithered back of the wet track.

As Horvath arrived at his cottage Lenka Moravecova, an elderly lady whose standing in the community as a healer was slightly more respected than Horvaths, appeared at the gate. She fluffed him back out into the lane with her flapping hands & heaving chest before telling him that she had administered her own remedy of chamomile & mint to alleviate his nausea, valerian to help him sleep & ease his stomach. Her intention was no doubt to let him know that he really wasnt needed with his fancy pills & tinctures, but he smiled politely as she passed & moved on up the path to the old mans door. The peeling paint on door was a mild blue, similar to a cornflower, & was a traditional colour often used in this area, & the black latch that hitched the door to the frame was a rust brown that seemed as natural to the door as the flaking paint. He knocked & entered without waiting. He found Jan curled like a child in bed, submerged beneath a quilted blanket & sweating profusely. The sweet smell of stale liquor hung in the air & the old man made a pitiful picture groaning as the doctor poured him a mug of water & urged him to drink. A thick bean soup, long congealed at the base of a pan, sat on a cold stone in the pantry off the kitchen & Horvath rekindled the fire & heated the meal adding pig fat & water, stirring it in. No doubt the old man had eaten little in the last twenty four hours & the warmth of the broth would ease his stomach. Jan sat mournfully against the headboard as Horvath spoon fed him the first few mouthfuls neither speaking much. The old mans frail hands shook slightly as Horvath handed him the spoon & bread before leaving. Failing to provide anything beyond the gentle remonstrance his position in the community required of him in such cases he left Jan to his broth & water, & returned home. As he walked the twilight gave itself over to a full & starless evening; there was to be no moon this night & the blackness that descended was total. Stray features were illumined in the lights periphery & these guided him to the turn of his road. Orion was not present in the stars & the great weight of blackness that spread about chilled him. It seeped into the world as an emptiness, a void filled with absence, if such a thing maybe. This fear of night: that all familiar things that in the clear sheen of daylight could reshape & rework itself in darkness to become cold & fearsome was, mused Horvath, Gods starkest evidence of his self: when the reassured atheist by day turns whimpering supplicant by night. A damp chill could be felt descending from the trees, an invisible mist of cold that seeped into his clothes making him pull his thick coat tighter still. Despite the cold he did not rush, but steadied his pace & inhaled the coming winter, breathing it deep into his belly where if filled him, leaving him cleansed. A fox barked, eerie & painful, as he kicked the mud from his boots against his door post; the vixen shouted again from further up the hill as he closed the door, turning Martas key against the night. He left his soiled boots & hat propped against the wall & walked into the kitchen. The house was still & quiet, & as he felt his way along the table top to the corner where he had left a candle, he shivered slightly against the darkness. An owl screeched in the garden but his candle was lit now, & he took the flame into hearth of the fire, lighting wood & dry grass, restoring his home with fire & light. A glass of strong wine & he settled, the bottle close to his hand, & the night close by & hung about the walls. It had become Horvaths custom to sit each evening before the fire in his living room & read. He had set two armchairs opposing each other by the fire for when Schultz visited, which was not so often now that the weather had turned; & had had Mirka sew up heavy drapes of cloth across the windows to exclude the cool nights air. Old Marta had pasted old newspapers around the walls to serve as an insulating agent, & an aged fire rug had been found by Mirka which kept the chill from radiating up through the thin gaps in the floors wooden boards beneath those seated before the fire. His small store of books was stacked next to the fire place on two rows of shelves & within easy reach. Although the doctor was far from penury he finances were at best unhealthy so he used the local tallow candles for lighting, preferring to light only one an evening & then he would wait until the ambient light & glow from the fire were sufficient to read by. The room itself was small at barely three paces across, & the sombre grey plaster coating of the walls around the fireplace, which had not been covered in newspaper & dull enough in summer, gave off a warm blush from the fire which added a cosseted feel: as long as doors were kept closed an hour or two into the evening he would be warm enough to remove his over coat & relax. The comforting quite of the house at night often led him to sleep as he was, propped up in the chair by horse hair pillows, with his thick over coat as a blanket. It was a

time he had come to treasure, wrapped there in the warm heart of his house whilst the chill of early winter circled the walls beyond. It was on one such an evening that he had first met Marta. As he sat before the fire that evening Horvath positioned himself as was usual with his feet propped on a low wooden stool & a thick woollen fleece across his knees, & his coat draped around his shoulders. He had mixed himself a jug of red wine & honey which was warming before a fire that swayed with the oncoming drafts of cold air that simpered down the chimney. A cool wind had picked up as the evening had progressed, & the lilac tree beyond the window could be heard whispering & tapping against the prohibitive glass. The room had reached a level of comfort & warmth, & the doctor flicked idly through a book of translated poetry. He found the Hungarian language awkward on the tongue but perused now the passages of English verse rendered through a Magyar sieve, & hoped to glean some trace of original sentiment. He skimmed the lines of love, beauty & despair, all convictions of the modern age; & then of loss:

Lady, art thou real? Nay, a dream, the flight of simplest fancy Dost thou thyself conceal from love? I offer the tenderest to entrance thee. But love. Dost thou know this word, Has thou spoke, let pass thy lips this sound? Or has thou found in others more preferred A greater note with which thy heart shall resound? A meagre man am I to sing thy praise. No lute nor lyre nor harp accompany me; But mine a voice in harmony with love betrays The greatest sympathy. No worthier am I of thee. Of heaven thou surely art. For no earthen creature resembled in thy form Trod this ground nor wounded so the human heart. And I, the first to be succumb & be reborn; A planet am I, a satellite revolving my eternal quest Round thy sun. Once extinguished to be extinct. All this am I & consider myself blessed, For in thine arms I am with heaven linked.

A steady draining of life, a percolation of essence until all that remains is a form containing what was. Had this poet power to trade a million lingering lives for one immediate death no doubt his love would cease in an instant lest the cold progression of waste take care. The decline of beauty is inevitable, thought Horvath. Even the Great Pyramids must crumble for nothing is set to last or endure; & at the end of all will the gods themselves dissolve into serenity & leave our annulment unremembered? The doctor leaned his head back upon the chairs rest & closed his eyes. The ancients feared to be forgotten for in forgetfulness is the souls oblivion & our darkest fear; & if all our works & deeds were to be mislaid upon our death would our efforts in this life have been in vain? He opened his eyes half amused by such philosophy & looked upon her of whom the poet sang. She sat before him without movement, her hands folded before her, her gaze into the fire an attitude of placid repose as if the flames entranced her from the hours about; or maybe their pagan dance sung such lullabies that only she may hear. Her dark hair hung in willow tails & spirals, & flowed into her lap in a tranquil

succession of rivulets that contrasted starkly with the pure marble clarity of her skin. She did not appear to notice him but sat as one accustomed to solitude, a meditative aesthete unattached yet present. The fires glow surrounded her & pushed into shade all else until a shallow niche of light enclosed & kept her. Her shallow breath hushed the air & was the only sound between them. Horvath himself did not breath, nor any sound or movement make. He mirrored in his stillness the wraith. His mind tried to summon fear, conjure horror or at the very least provide him with some sense of trepidation; any tangible sense that what he saw should not be believed, but nothing came. Perhaps this was some Morphine play or Hypnotic theatre (yet such a vision could only be by Prosepine sent) & that his tired mind had formed this fantasy to while away the dormant hours. He would awake & find the room & all about him cold; the fire in embers & Marta merely a vaporous image memory would fail to hold. And yet she still had not moved but gazed unseeing into the grate: expectant? But no, she was not waiting; she sat composed at journeys end, & it was this inhuman serenity that tapped upon the posteriori lens of the doctors rationale; that offered solid confirmation for things already evident but beyond the simplistic realm of science. Neither dream, nor anything of mankind made could present the absolute sense of quietude & peace that Marta now displayed. For Horvath it was akin to staring into the furthest reaches of a forest glade that no man had yet defiled. Her apparition did in no way startle him, but strangely he feared the smallest movement he might make would send her from him & make away from this extraordinary meeting; like one who steps before a timid creature Horvath held onto each passing second in the sad knowledge that soon, in the span of a moment, she would be gone. He knew, felt, that this was an unnatural thing; he was certain that in the true world & in the true time that passed outside his doors, this image of a young Marta, a living Marta was to be dreaded. But he could not find such feelings in himself. His heart hummed in his ears, & his breath came in shallow takes that perhaps might be held up as some sense of fear, but Horvath new it was not fear for he had no desire to run. And then she glided out of stillness, a silken transition from inobservance & disinterest; it was a small shift but it thundered through the room: a slight tilting of the face & head so gently performed as to be missed had not all the doctors senses been focused on observing the minutiae of her. Her eyes shifted from the fire & fell upon him. In the moments after she had gone he would try to recall all that had passed, but so little had. The eternity of those seconds during which they had gazed upon each other had been mute in all except intensity. He had been thrust panting into the stark appreciation that here sat the dead & this had been juxtaposed by an equal presentment unconnected to her aethereal state. For in opposition to the shock he felt at this ghostly sighting came a rampant & brutish realisation. One quite unfamiliar to him & perverse in its present context: that of pathetic recognition. In Marta he knew love & felt as one desolated. He did not sleep but sat until dawn & waited. Throughout the night the smell of lavender had haunted him as an intermittent reminder of her company, but she did not materialise & the start of day greeted him feverishly as if afraid to break his vigil. For love: it can be ill-mannered guest when uninvited, & beggar those who are not quick to act. Yet Horvath sat & stumbled through the day regretful of the nights passing & found himself continually returning to the fireside in hope, but hope was not to be satisfied. He walked out to the spring desiring more than water & inhaled the chill air; it burned his lungs & throat, & flooded his being with the liquid scents of earth, water & autumnal decay. His eyes were stung with the cold of a long breeze that ruffled down from the boughs above him, & he sought in its cleansing flow some abreaction of the soul. He had felt the slow creep of yearning rise from out the fetid pit of love, its taloned hooks set to pin & bind, & reason fought against this. He cast about for a previous anchorage, a safe harbour that would tie him to a sturdy quay, securing him from drifting on wild seas but found none to preserve him & knew, with all the desperate force of certainty, that no sanctuary could now be found. It seemed to him a nightmare, a waking torment, that he should know love yet find it mockingly without his grasp. He judged his mind to be frail, the wine perhaps, the loneliness; the hours spent without another voice to rationalise, to keep him bound to what is solid in the world. But no, he knew, deep in his better self, that Marta was as she had come; & he was now lost to all cept her.

He knelt before the spring, wiping back the dead & fallen leaves of yesterday & dipped his hands into the crystal cold. His hands became immediately numb & he relished the senselessness as the water splashed into the jug he held. The inverted triangle gleamed in the winter light at the waters edge & he recognised its femininity: the water mark, the well from which all life emanates; the shrine before which all men must kneel. From this time & forward all things could only be perceived through the prism of her & what subjectivity he may once have possessed shimmered in its frailty; all was now, for Horvath, founded in her. The next several days passed without her return. Horvath prowled the house like a caged cat, refusing to leave & yet desperate to be unconfined. He tried all manner of rationalization but the sense was always there, like a rumour that never fades, the tone of which is ever present in all the things done & said. She haunted him with her absence & he grew from fret to anger to despondency in the space of minutes in ever more frantic cycles. On the fourth day he left the house for the first time, left the gardens & the orchard, & walked hard & fast into the dull grey of the forest. His feet pounded the narrow trail that wound its way up & along the ridge above his house. His clothes flew about him, unkempt & untied, yet he barely felt the prick of cold that brushed against his bare skin. Rain fell turning to snow, & the winds shook the hills & trees turning fleet footed across the standing pines & icy streams. The earth became thick & heavy on his feet, a wet sapping clay that gummed him to the floor whilst sliding beneath his boots. He stopped high above the valley, his breath beaten & ripped between his lips, & stared down upon his home. His house, hers also, sat small & vulnerable below him wrapped in sleek webs of mist that strayed from out the clouds & ran across the hill sides. The rain was now far heavier & he felt the sting of ice as it bounced across his face. He looked about, & further up the hill but he could see no signs. He was sure it could not be much further; but no, he was not sure. It could be miles still. He slumped against the bark of a small oak, exhausted from his climb & several days with little sleep. The clearing was sure to be close, beyond the next brow perhaps or through the next stand of trees. He had walked so far. He felt drained by the weather, by anxiety, by hunger, he could hardly remember the last time he had drunk water. His mouth was slick with dry spittle & tasted sour from the wine he drank. His fingers shook, & his legs lay like lead weights splayed out before him. He clothes were soaked & for the first time since leaving his house the cold began to numb him. He pulled himself to standing & again gazed down to his house almost hidden now in near complete cloud. As he looked the wind dropped slightly & the clouds drifted apart on the fallen wind; the valley was shown him for the briefest of instances, the dreary lane of mud slick from winter, the orchards of his neighbours, his own house where smoke curled from the chimney to be whipped away by in the blustery wind. She was not on some high hill, to be found roaming the dark shadows of winter or waiting at the old stone beyond these lightless trees. She was home, he felt, where she had ever been. When he returned to the house Alex Koze stood bundled in an oversized coat in the porch way clutching a note from the cleric Schultz. It invited the doctor to dinner that evening & as it had been a month or more since the two friends had last met the cleric was, no doubt, sure of a positive response. Horvath hastily scrawled a brief reply claiming a lack of sorts as his excuse; a lack of sorts best remedied by an early night & laudanum to ease his bodies ill humour. He would be down in Krajne in a week or so & bade Alex reassure Schultz not to be concerned. Giving the boy a half crown & dismissing him he brushed aside any misgivings he may have had with his lack of probity & hurried into the house. He ate sparingly & felt his stomach cringe at the invasion of food so full with anxiety had he become. He raked & laid the fire for the evening early & by the time the sun had slid behind the tallest beech trees in front of the house, & still an hour before dark, he was sitting pensively at the Kitchen table. His only time piece was a pocket watch & it lay on the table before him, time scarcely moving itself around the watch face as he waited, hesychast-like, intent upon his own depths; & what limited outer-world could penetrate his introspection was by Aion had: his eye ner left the ticking hand as it nudged the day into blessed night. Late autumn had arrived by the time the cold had started to infect the evenings & Horavath found himself more & more confined to the indoors as nights continued to grow shorter. The days however had become luminous as the translucent autumn light appeared to clear the air of all impurity & enhance what summer had

sought to mellow. The forests green faded by degrees into the russet to nes of copper & his meagre meals were supplemented by the vast array of mushrooms that now arose from beneath every fallen leaf. Raspberries framed the verges & his orchard demanded more of his regard than he felt he had time for, but he diligently collected all apples within easy reach & had Josko & Alex take the rest for their families. As most if not all the locals had plentiful orchards themselves Horvath knew that apples collected by the boys were not for eating, as a good, strong alcohol could be cooked up from spare fruit or that unfit for eating. In this time of harvest he came to realize that nothing was wasted & the villagers joked that the bruised apple or pear we threw disdainfully into the forest today, would a fruit to be dreamed of come winters end. Spring was a time of hunger, a lean time of year in the hills as the winter store of food was near gone, yet the fields still new planted. As old Jan had once told him: Spring was a time of birth & death. Despite the open courtesy of the village Horvath had given up any thoughts of a deeper sense of friendship with the people whom he would have liked to consider his friends. He continued to be invited to special occasions, he officiated as a witness to their legal disputes & was called upon to give advice. They respected him he felt sure but it was obvious to him now, & had been since the solstice, that there was to be some measure of distance between himself & them, a narrow gulf perhaps but one of abysmal depths. If Schultz, after several decades, had been unable to traverse the barricades of local reserve he surely couldnt expect much better. It was a sad but true fact that he would forever remain an outsider, someone accepted to a degree but someone still not of them. This did not trouble him too much for like any interloper he would have to be satisfied with what his adopted home was prepared to share with him & be grateful, or, of course, leave. A thing he could not now envisage himself doing. Rough & sometimes crude these people may be, but they were the salt of the earth & Horvath had found in them a sense of belonging, even if it was only on the periphery of their lives, that he had not known in the shallowness of the city. He came to understand that despite what some may see as their ungodly conventions the folk of Konkusova dolina & the surrounding hamlets had a very crystalline sense of propriety. Their orthodoxy was based on a simple & acute belief in what was right & what was not; they lived as within the laws of the land as any others Horvath had met, treated cruelty, theft & dishonesty with contempt & performed the acts of good citizens not as a sense of duty but out of faith in the rightness of what they did. They may act out the rituals & rites of a more primitive era but they did so in the knowledge that the wider world no longer appreciated the veneration of the old gods & carried out their celebrations quietly. There is little room in this world nonconformists &, he thought, that perhaps the majority of people spend their lives never speaking the truth as they saw if for fear. Perhaps if all matters of faith were conducted as privately as was done here men would feel little antagonism towards others of differing views. By the arrival of November he was beginning to see less & less of the world outside, being only summoned by Alex Koza if he was needed. Most people were content to stay home after the hard work of summer & visited less. The boy, Josko, was no longer needed in the garden & Milan had finished the main house repairs & had stacked enough wood behind the house for two winters. Horvath now had the solitude he enjoyed. The day of St Martins feast had been, in contrast to his usual quiet routine, an eventful one. He had walked down to an empty church in the morning, more out of solidarity for his friend Schultz than anything else, & then had been called to the death of an elderly woman in the hamlet of Jeruzalem. As he had left the grieving family a young man had appeared running up the lane shouting for his attention. They rushed off together to the laboured birth of a little boy back in krajne who arrived howling into the world, fit & hale despite his mothers pains; neither location being far off in themselves but both being equidistant from Konkusova dolina in opposite directions, they took time to reach. On his return home after several tiring hours trudging back & forth across the fields & muddy lanes, he had found young Alex shivering in the garden waiting to take him to Jan Orlak who, being drunk the night before on his brothers plumb brandy, had spent the best part of the day vomiting convinced of his near end. The Doctor had half a mind just to ignore Jan who should by now know well enough how to manage the after effects of too much drink, but turned himself about anyway & slithered back of the wet track.

As Horvath arrived at his cottage Lenka Moravecova, an elderly lady whose standing in the community as a healer was slightly more respected than Horvaths, appeared at the gate. She fluffed him back out into the lane with her flapping hands & heaving chest before telling him that she had administered her own remedy of chamomile & mint to alleviate his nausea, valerian to help him sleep & ease his stomach. Her intention was no doubt to let him know that he really wasnt needed with his fancy pills & tinctures, but he smiled politely as she passed & moved on up the path to the old mans door. The peeling paint on door was a mild blue, similar to a cornflower, & was a traditional colour often used in this area, & the black latch that hitched the door to the frame was a rust brown that seemed as natural to the door as the flaking paint. He knocked & entered without waiting. He found Jan curled like a child in bed, submerged beneath a quilted blanket & sweating profusely. The sweet smell of stale liquor hung in the air & the old man made a pitiful picture groaning as the doctor poured him a mug of water & urged him to drink. A thick bean soup, long congealed at the base of a pan, sat on a cold stone in the pantry off the kitchen & Horvath rekindled the fire & heated the meal adding pig fat & water, stirring it in. No doubt the old man had eaten little in the last twenty four hours & the warmth of the broth would ease his stomach. Jan sat mournfully against the headboard as Horvath spoon fed him the first few mouthfuls neither speaking much. The old mans frail hands shook slightly as Horvath handed him the spoon & bread before leaving. Failing to provide anything beyond the gentle remonstrance his position in the community required of him in such cases he left Jan to his broth & water, & returned home. As he walked the twilight gave itself over to a full & starless evening; there was to be no moon this night & the blackness that descended was total. Stray features were illumined in the lights periphery & these guided him to the turn of his road. Orion was not present in the stars & the great weight of blackness that spread about chilled him. It seeped into the world as an emptiness, a void filled with absence, if such a thing maybe. This fear of night: that all familiar things that in the clear sheen of daylight could reshape & rework itself in darkness to become cold & fearsome was, mused Horvath, Gods starkest evidence of his self: when the reassured atheist by day turns whimpering supplicant by night. A damp chill could be felt descending from the trees, an invisible mist of cold that seeped into his clothes making him pull his thick coat tighter still. Despite the cold he did not rush, but steadied his pace & inhaled the coming winter, breathing it deep into his belly where if filled him, leaving him cleansed. A fox barked, eerie & painful, as he kicked the mud from his boots against his door post; the vixen shouted again from further up the hill as he closed the door, turning Martas key against the night. He left his soiled boots & hat propped against the wall & walked into the kitchen. The house was still & quiet, & as he felt his way along the table top to the corner where he had left a candle, he shivered slightly against the darkness. An owl screeched in the garden but his candle was lit now, & he took the flame into hearth of the fire, lighting wood & dry grass, restoring his home with fire & light. A glass of strong wine & he settled, the bottle close to his hand, & the night close by & hung about the walls. It had become Horvaths custom to sit each evening before the fire in his living room & read. He had set two armchairs opposing each other by the fire for when Schultz visited, which was not so often now that the weather had turned; & had had Mirka sew up heavy drapes of cloth across the windows to exclude the cool nights air. Old Marta had pasted old newspapers around the walls to serve as an insulating agent, & an aged fire rug had been found by Mirka which kept the chill from radiating up through the thin gaps in the floors wooden boards beneath those seated before the fire. His small store of books was stacked next to the fire place on two rows of shelves & within easy reach. Although the doctor was far from penury he finances were at best unhealthy so he used the local tallow candles for lighting, preferring to light only one an evening & then he would wait until the ambient light & glow from the fire were sufficient to read by. The room itself was small at barely three paces across, & the sombre grey plaster coating of the walls around the fireplace, which had not been covered in newspaper & dull enough in summer, gave off a warm blush from the fire which added a cosseted feel: as long as doors were kept closed an hour or two into the evening he would be warm enough to remove his over coat & relax. The comforting quite of the house at night often led him to sleep as he was, propped up in the chair by horse hair pillows, with his thick over coat as a blanket. It was a

time he had come to treasure, wrapped there in the warm heart of his house whilst the chill of early winter circled the walls beyond. It was on one such an evening that he had first met Marta. As he sat before the fire that evening Horvath positioned himself as was usual with his feet propped on a low wooden stool & a thick woollen fleece across his knees, & his coat draped around his shoulders. He had mixed himself a jug of red wine & honey which was warming before a fire that swayed with the oncoming drafts of cold air that simpered down the chimney. A cool wind had picked up as the evening had progressed, & the lilac tree beyond the window could be heard whispering & tapping against the prohibitive glass. The room had reached a level of comfort & warmth, & the doctor flicked idly through a book of translated poetry. He found the Hungarian language awkward on the tongue but perused now the passages of English verse rendered through a Magyar sieve, & hoped to glean some trace of original sentiment. He skimmed the lines of love, beauty & despair, all convictions of the modern age; & then of loss:

Lady, art thou real? Nay, a dream, the flight of simplest fancy Dost thou thyself conceal from love? I offer the tenderest to entrance thee. But love. Dost thou know this word, Has thou spoke, let pass thy lips this sound? Or has thou found in others more preferred A greater note with which thy heart shall resound? A meagre man am I to sing thy praise. No lute nor lyre nor harp accompany me; But mine a voice in harmony with love betrays The greatest sympathy. No worthier am I of thee. Of heaven thou surely art. For no earthen creature resembled in thy form Trod this ground nor wounded so the human heart. And I, the first to be succumb & be reborn; A planet am I, a satellite revolving my eternal quest Round thy sun. Once extinguished to be extinct. All this am I & consider myself blessed, For in thine arms I am with heaven linked.

A steady draining of life, a percolation of essence until all that remains is a form containing what was. Had this poet power to trade a million lingering lives for one immediate death no doubt his love would cease in an instant lest the cold progression of waste take care. The decline of beauty is inevitable, thought Horvath. Even the Great Pyramids must crumble for nothing is set to last or endure; & at the end of all will the gods themselves dissolve into serenity & leave our annulment unremembered? The doctor leaned his head back upon the chairs rest & closed his eyes. The ancients feared to be forgotten for in forgetfulness is the souls oblivion & our darkest fear; & if all our works & deeds were to be mislaid upon our death would our efforts in this life have been in vain? He opened his eyes half amused by such philosophy & looked upon her of whom the poet sang. She sat before him without movement, her hands folded before her, her gaze into the fire an attitude of placid repose as if the flames entranced her from the hours about; or maybe their pagan dance sung such lullabies that only she may hear. Her dark hair hung in willow tails & spirals, & flowed into her lap in a tranquil

succession of rivulets that contrasted starkly with the pure marble clarity of her skin. She did not appear to notice him but sat as one accustomed to solitude, a meditative aesthete unattached yet present. The fires glow surrounded her & pushed into shade all else until a shallow niche of light enclosed & kept her. Her shallow breath hushed the air & was the only sound between them. Horvath himself did not breath, nor any sound or movement make. He mirrored in his stillness the wraith. His mind tried to summon fear, conjure horror or at the very least provide him with some sense of trepidation; any tangible sense that what he saw should not be believed, but nothing came. Perhaps this was some Morphine play or Hypnotic theatre (yet such a vision could only be by Prosepine sent) & that his tired mind had formed this fantasy to while away the dormant hours. He would awake & find the room & all about him cold; the fire in embers & Marta merely a vaporous image memory would fail to hold. And yet she still had not moved but gazed unseeing into the grate: expectant? But no, she was not waiting; she sat composed at journeys end, & it was this inhuman serenity that tapped upon the posteriori lens of the doctors rationale; that offered solid confirmation for things already evident but beyond the simplistic realm of science. Neither dream, nor anything of mankind made could present the absolute sense of quietude & peace that Marta now displayed. For Horvath it was akin to staring into the furthest reaches of a forest glade that no man had yet defiled. Her apparition did in no way startle him, but strangely he feared the smallest movement he might make would send her from him & make away from this extraordinary meeting; like one who steps before a timid creature Horvath held onto each passing second in the sad knowledge that soon, in the span of a moment, she would be gone. He knew, felt, that this was an unnatural thing; he was certain that in the true world & in the true time that passed outside his doors, this image of a young Marta, a living Marta was to be dreaded. But he could not find such feelings in himself. His heart hummed in his ears, & his breath came in shallow takes that perhaps might be held up as some sense of fear, but Horvath new it was not fear for he had no desire to run. And then she glided out of stillness, a silken transition from inobservance & disinterest; it was a small shift but it thundered through the room: a slight tilting of the face & head so gently performed as to be missed had not all the doctors senses been focused on observing the minutiae of her. Her eyes shifted from the fire & fell upon him. In the moments after she had gone he would try to recall all that had passed, but so little had. The eternity of those seconds during which they had gazed upon each other had been mute in all except intensity. He had been thrust panting into the stark appreciation that here sat the dead & this had been juxtaposed by an equal presentment unconnected to her aethereal state. For in opposition to the shock he felt at this ghostly sighting came a rampant & brutish realisation. One quite unfamiliar to him & perverse in its present context: that of pathetic recognition. In Marta he knew love & felt as one desolated. He did not sleep but sat until dawn & waited. Throughout the night the smell of lavender had haunted him as an intermittent reminder of her company, but she did not materialise & the start of day greeted him feverishly as if afraid to break his vigil. For love: it can be ill-mannered guest when uninvited, & beggar those who are not quick to act. Yet Horvath sat & stumbled through the day regretful of the nights passing & found himself continually returning to the fireside in hope, but hope was not to be satisfied. He walked out to the spring desiring more than water & inhaled the chill air; it burned his lungs & throat, & flooded his being with the liquid scents of earth, water & autumnal decay. His eyes were stung with the cold of a long breeze that ruffled down from the boughs above him, & he sought in its cleansing flow some abreaction of the soul. He had felt the slow creep of yearning rise from out the fetid pit of love, its taloned hooks set to pin & bind, & reason fought against this. He cast about for a previous anchorage, a safe harbour that would tie him to a sturdy quay, securing him from drifting on wild seas but found none to preserve him & knew, with all the desperate force of certainty, that no sanctuary could now be found. It seemed to him a nightmare, a waking torment, that he should know love yet find it mockingly without his grasp. He judged his mind to be frail, the wine perhaps, the loneliness; the hours spent without another voice to rationalise, to keep him bound to what is solid in the world. But no, he knew, deep in his better self, that Marta was as she had come; & he was now lost to all cept her.

He knelt before the spring, wiping back the dead & fallen leaves of yesterday & dipped his hands into the crystal cold. His hands became immediately numb & he relished the senselessness as the water splashed into the jug he held. The inverted triangle gleamed in the winter light at the waters edge & he recognised its femininity: the water mark, the well from which all life emanates; the shrine before which all men must kneel. From this time & forward all things could only be perceived through the prism of her & what subjectivity he may once have possessed shimmered in its frailty; all was now, for Horvath, founded in her. The next several days passed without her return. Horvath prowled the house like a caged cat, refusing to leave & yet desperate to be unconfined. He tried all manner of rationalization but the sense was always there, like a rumour that never fades, the tone of which is ever present in all the things done & said. She haunted him with her absence & he grew from fret to anger to despondency in the space of minutes in ever more frantic cycles. On the fourth day he left the house for the first time, left the gardens & the orchard, & walked hard & fast into the dull grey of the forest. His feet pounded the narrow trail that wound its way up & along the ridge above his house. His clothes flew about him, unkempt & untied, yet he barely felt the prick of cold that brushed against his bare skin. Rain fell turning to snow, & the winds shook the hills & trees turning fleet footed across the standing pines & icy streams. The earth became thick & heavy on his feet, a wet sapping clay that gummed him to the floor whilst sliding beneath his boots. He stopped high above the valley, his breath beaten & ripped between his lips, & stared down upon his home. His house, hers also, sat small & vulnerable below him wrapped in sleek webs of mist that strayed from out the clouds & ran across the hill sides. The rain was now far heavier & he felt the sting of ice as it bounced across his face. He looked about, & further up the hill but he could see no signs. He was sure it could not be much further; but no, he was not sure. It could be miles still. He slumped against the bark of a small oak, exhausted from his climb & several days with little sleep. The clearing was sure to be close, beyond the next brow perhaps or through the next stand of trees. He had walked so far. He felt drained by the weather, by anxiety, by hunger, he could hardly remember the last time he had drunk water. His mouth was slick with dry spittle & tasted sour from the wine he drank. His fingers shook, & his legs lay like lead weights splayed out before him. He clothes were soaked & for the first time since leaving his house the cold began to numb him. He pulled himself to standing & again gazed down to his house almost hidden now in near complete cloud. As he looked the wind dropped slightly & the clouds drifted apart on the fallen wind; the valley was shown him for the briefest of instances, the dreary lane of mud slick from winter, the orchards of his neighbours, his own house where smoke curled from the chimney to be whipped away by in the blustery wind. She was not on some high hill, to be found roaming the dark shadows of winter or waiting at the old stone beyond these lightless trees. She was home, he felt, where she had ever been. When he returned to the house Alex Koze stood bundled in an oversized coat in the porch way clutching a note from the cleric Schultz. It invited the doctor to dinner that evening & as it had been a month or more since the two friends had last met the cleric was, no doubt, sure of a positive response. Horvath hastily scrawled a brief reply claiming a lack of sorts as his excuse; a lack of sorts best remedied by an early night & laudanum to ease his bodies ill humour. He would be down in Krajne in a week or so & bade Alex reassure Schultz not to be concerned. Giving the boy a half crown & dismissing him he brushed aside any misgivings he may have had with his lack of probity & hurried into the house. He ate sparingly & felt his stomach cringe at the invasion of food so full with anxiety had he become. He raked & laid the fire for the evening early & by the time the sun had slid behind the tallest beech trees in front of the house, & still an hour before dark, he was sitting pensively at the Kitchen table. His only time piece was a pocket watch & it lay on the table before him, time scarcely moving itself around the watch face as he waited, hesychast-like, intent upon his own depths; & what limited outer-world could penetrate his introspection was by Aion had: his eye ner left the ticking hand as it nudged the day into blessed night. He felt sure she would come but he must prepare himself. She would not just arrive, no, she must see that he was ready, that he paid the tribute that such as she required. She moved in beauty, like the night* & such a creature cannot be summoned but must be lured with adoration.

And so the night finally oer laid the world & Horvath sat before the quivering fire. He had set the stage as their previous meeting & in his nervousness had drunk a quart of wine but his heightened senses kept the fog of drunkenness from him. The same book of verse was open on his lap & the same poets words slid beneath his finger as he read & reread the lines. In him was some arcane need for ritual, that if this night was identical in all detail to the last, then she would reappear as she had done; as if he could by rote of action fool time & have the past reissued in a present frame. He even sought to re-enact the style in which he had sat, the thoughts of which he had thought, & perhaps most particularly of all, the state of consciousness that had brought Marta forth. He tried to relax but felt the nervousness of a new lover who waits unsure. He drank more, the cramps in his stomach clawing still; another draft of laudanum, yet he could not rest nor be at peace. He strained to hear, to see at every small sound or flicker of firelight that crept about the room, but the hours passed & he was all alone. He knew not what time Marta came for sleep had over taken him but he was certain the hour was late. His left arm was locked against the arm rest of the chair & no feeling remained in his hand. The book of poetry had at some stage fallen to the floor & lay upturned, its spine twisted in complaint & reflecting his own discomfort. The candle had faded into a pool of grease & the room was barely lit by what survived of the fire but despite the lack of flame the room was suffused with vermillion warmth; & in this womb-like hemisphere he strained against the fetters of sleep, & emerged into the lavender dream of Marta. As before she sat & gazed into the embers, & as before Horvath too gazed & tracked the individual perfection of her face until hed memorised each line & flow. He felt now not to expect a word or gesture for she communicated all in her presence, she radiated essence or, perhaps he thought, in her disembodied state all masque & visage had been flayed away by death & what remained, liberated from the fleshy artifice of being, was the elemental aspect of her. She had no use for words as she displayed all if Horvath had but the wit to comprehend. With a deftness born out of desire not to startle, he rose himself into a full sitting position & placed his hands squarely on the arms of the chair. In this position he could view her from toe to head & marvelled at her proportion & vividness. This was no transparent ghostly shade but gave the impression of solid mass, as tactile & sensory as any thing living. She filled space & had dimension but she also possessed an unreal perfection as some idealised image of womankind, a Dantean muse whose very presence refers us to our own mortal imperfection. As the moments passed he found a reflection of her calm pervaded him & he relaxed back into the chair. He steeped himself in the warmth of her contentment. It was a sensation unlike any he had experienced before but not unlike the surety of a child held in its mothers embrace, or that of the weary mendicant who, having wandered lost, is led home by the compassionate hand of God. There was nothing more to rail against nor tasks to be completed; no journeys to be undertaken nor future to be carried through. There was only this instant of being, & all else before & to come was an annoying irrelevance. Time had no place here & when she turned to meet his stare Horvath could not say if they had been sat together a moment or an age. As before her movement was slight, the smallest shift of her chin bringing her focus in line with his: her smile was the merest cant of her upper lip & the soft crease of the lines about her eyes. Her motion was of such subtlety as to have not occurred but it was perhaps more properly represented as the barely perceptible spark of intention that ignites the aura, or the shock of instinct that perceives what cannot be sensed. He felt himself inundated & born aloft. He was cocooned within her confines & unbound from the purposelessness of his former independence. The natural selfishness of Occidental thought had served to pour scorn on the Eastern philosophy of submission & yet how liberating was this new captivity. Each night followed a similar pattern & the ritual of Horvaths life evolved into a daily incantation brought forth from his awakening fear of loss, of Martas refusal to return. He measured his day by repeating the actions of the previous & so precise had he become that by the first day of December he even awoke from sleep with an exactness of time that varied little from the day before. He would eat as he had done, always sitting in the same space: spoon, knife, cup, & plate as before. His clothes were left unchanged & he feared to shave or in any manner alter his appearance. He had turned Mirka, Milans wife, from the door on several occasions when she

had come to clean &, in fact, had refused entry to any & all who had come. The last to visit, perhaps more than a month before, had been Alex Koza calling him to attend upon a broken hand but the boy, for his pains, was castigated for his lack of kind & cuffed from the door. So intent was he to preserve the mis-en-scene of each day that he felt the slightest alteration in atmosphere or deviation from habit would break the reproduction of the previous coming. Horvath himself scarcely left the house except for his daily pilgrimage to Martas spring, a place he now felt certain was her asomatous keep, & a sanctuary of hallowed significance. The blessed flow of water that issued forth, to the Doctor, became akin to the vary stuff of Marta herself &, by imbibing thus, he drank of her. A sacred homophagy by which he meant not to be only with her but to be part of her: a consummation that would bring about their androgynous whole, a Platonic reunion; no longer cleaved at the whim of vainglorious gods but at long last rejoined. The cleric Schultz had sent messages twice in the preceding weeks. Upon the first occasion Horvath, who had taken to bolting the doors & shuttering the windows in his efforts to encapsulate himself & conserve her from unwelcome influences, had secreted himself from view. As Alex Koza had p ounded on the door & begged the doctor to show himself, Horvath had hid upon the top of the stairs landing barely able to contain his fury at such a callous attempt to breach his sanctuary. The boy, in his trepidation, had sought the help of Milan & between the two of them they had, to Horvath's mind, proceeded to assault his home with all the venom of a Tartar invasion, & the loud knocks, bangs, & hollering yells seemed a personal attack designed to shatter & rob him of the solitude he had for himself created. Despite Horvaths view of their efforts they soon gave up & left within few minutes &, descending the stairs, he spotted the clerics note the boy had slipped beneath the front door. It read: My Dear Dr. Horvath, What end is this? Whatever terror haunts thee casts no shadow on solid ground, tis but imagination unrestrained. I leave this now but will return in person. Your friend, M. Schultz And leave the messengers had done. Horvath had stood within the door & held the clerics note. Not long past the familiar, cursive hand would have delighted the doctor, & Schultzs use of middle Slovak would have, as if often had, amused Horvath trained in the more assertive western script. But as he read & reread the words his friend had written he felt the acid taste of revulsion enter beneath his tongue. His fingers trembled & he felt the burn of the rough paper between his finger & thumb as if the very fabric of the note itself contained nought but malice. His lips were now parched & grimed with the nights flavours of red wine & laudanum - the one exception he had made to his habitual routines was the use of this medicinal opiate that had now become a intermittent yet constant refrain. His lack of sleep & poor diet failed to assist him & he struggled daily through the fog of sleeplessness & barely suppressed hunger, & the laudanum gave him strength & clarity. But now, as he stared with impotent indignation at the worlds intrusiveness, he shook with what he saw as the clerics heresy. His fingers traced the lines & he squinted to ensure himself of Schultzs words: Whatever terror haunts thee casts no shadow on solid ground, tis but imagination unrestrained. Imagination unrestrained! The words smouldered on his tongue: hypocrite, heretic. That he, Schultz, a priest & man of God should deny divinity in such vulgar terms, that Marta should be so vilified & mocked as a thing of his imagination. The fool Schultz, who talked of love from the pulpit yet had never known its touch nor taste, who spoke of God & yet had never stood before the divine like a child before the oceans roar. He threw back the doors bolts & stepped out into the pale winter sun. Blinded he cast about for the Cleric, who surely must have delivered this note himself, but he was gone to return no doubt to his cold isolation save the ever present company of his god whilst he, Horvath, blazed with a new found glory. A light snow fell but beyond this the air was frozen in a deep & icy chill. Horvath pulled his cloak about him & cocked his ear but all was silent. The meddling cleric was gone now for sure. He pushed towards the spring more in need of Martas presence than water & knelt in reverence before the ice bound grotto. The cold soaked his knees but he did not feel it. He focused his attention on a hymn that was scrawled upon a paper held

by a rock above the little cascade. In fact, he reminded himself, it was no hymn but a prayer: a prayer of adulation that she might know of his devotion. For he thought of himself as truly blessed, & like Adam before the fall, before Eve, he, Horavth was unique as the only child of his personal god. And so he knelt now before Marta, clasping his hands unto his breast & recited his prayer as a lover might, as did Adonis importune Venus. He knelt as a submissive suitor before the immaculate & begged for life in her: Lady, thou art real? No dream nor flight of simplest fancy. Why dost thou thyself conceal from love? For I offer the tenderest to entrance thee. The days passed bringing with them a pall of heavy snow that left the valley near impassable. A drift banked up across the road that was near as tall as a man, & it was only after nearly two weeks that men from the village could make their way beyond their own front gates to clear the road. The path to Horvaths house remained uncleared, no sign had been seen of the Doctor except on the odd occasion when a thin line of smoke drifted from the chimney in the late afternoon. This was the only sign he still lived. However, once the snow was cleared enough to allow for it the cleric himself chose to visit, & hastened up the icy path towards valley with an ever increasing sense of trepidation. It had now turned two months since anyone had last had contact with the doctor, & a sighting of him by Samo Koza a few days past had filled the cleric with dread. Koza had been out with his dogs checking snares which had taken him up behind Horvaths holding into the tree line. From this vantage point he had peered down on Martas neglected fruit gardens where the naked stems of raspberry, red current, & gooseberry stood harshly black against the white of snow. The fruit bushes were un-pruned & this more than the dearth of winter seemed to emphasise summers spent glory. In fact, despite the efforts of Milan & his son to keep the place in order, old Martas house & garden appeared to have withdrawn &, as if by some conscious will the property no longer wished to be, & was attempting to evade being. The house itself seemed less defined &, if one did not focus upon it, seemed to blend itself into the well trimmed & cropped, yet uncontained, surroundings. The garden seemed at once kept & unkempt as if he had caught the grounds in mid-transformation, as if it were trying to mask its own departure into the wild by trailing out a lingering visage that would gently, subtly meld into none being. And perhaps, if done in such a wise, none would even notice its absence. Koza huffed warm air into his cupped hands. As the day had worn on the temperature had steadily dropped & he knew that by night fall the cold would have buried itself deep into his bones. He picked up two young coneys that now lay rigid by his feet & pushed further up the path to the last of his traps that sat beneath the spreading reaches of an old bore tree. As he rose to a turn in the path he caught sight of a jagged movement down below the verge. Again the movement & Koza leaned forward & searched down the bank to the forests edge. At this time of year hungry pigs were often emboldened enough to range during the day & perhaps an old sow or boar was tilling the mulch in search of anything edible. The trees skimmed Martas, now Horvaths, orchard, & then cut in at a sharp angle of 45 degrees were Martas well had once been dug. The well had since collapsed &, as if annoyed by this blockage, the subterranean flow had surfaced some way above the gardens & now descended collecting itself in a small basin. And it was at the small pool were Samo Koza saw a barely recognised figure. Koza crouched low & stepped a few paces forward to gain a better view &, despite the rumours spread around Konkusova Dolina, he was still little able to reconcile the shadow that moved before him with the man he knew it to be. The dark outline of Ladislav Horvath sat hunched by the side of the spring. His limbs shook as if affected by extreme illness & it was this sharpness of agitation that had caught Kozas eye. He seemed knelt in an attitude of prayer but was slouched in such a curious position that he seemed set to tumble, as if he had fallen

into sleep. On straining against the breeze Koza could hear the doctor as he croaked through some kind of liturgy; it was as though he sang: a monotone canticle half hissed out on ragged breath, half forgotten upon the tongue; the words needing to carry themselves out upon their own impetuous. He directed his words downwards into the depths of the pool & appeared oblivious to all about him. His trembling continued &, as Koza edged further forward, seemed to intensify & subside in a rhythmic series of wavelets, perhaps marking time in accord with the doctors words. Across his shoulders was draped a dark cape & even at this distance Koza could see it was heavily stained & appeared frayed at the hem. A deep cowl was pulled forward to shield Horvath from the chilled breeze & this obscured his face from view, but despite the cloak the doctors frailty was evident. Edging still further to the brink, & signalling his two dogs to remain still, he raised himself into a full standing position resolving to hail Horvath & aid him if he so needed. As he rose he dislodged a clump of snow that hung from the limb of a smothered pine & this in turn poured itself into desperate flurries & sloughed onward from the tree & was gone. Such a small eruption barely heard but in the quiet of the moment it appeared as a bugle call. Horvath spun on his knees & sighted Koza immediately, who had in an instant of indecision half raised his hand in greeting & simultaneously sunk for the protection of as snow clad stump, before climbing unsteadily to his feet. As Koza watched Horvaths lips continued in their unconscious recitation but the full force of the doctors attention faltered as if caught between two incomprehensibilities, as a child wrenched from sleep struggles to reacquire the day. Horvath swayed on his feet & he seemed struck by a vital uncertainty; his look leapt from Koza to the spring & back again, & was immediately repeated. Flight was clearly contemplated but this was seemingly countermanded by a desperate desire to not abandon the waters. Casting one last baneful glance at Samo, Horvath lurched back towards the house. As he did so the breeze flipped at the hood of his cloak, tossing it back & revealing the doctors emaciated features for the first time. A gaunt alabaster profile surged forth from the hood but for Koza, used to the privations of winter & the ravages of the seasons sunless skies & scant provisions on a man, this did not over startle him. The matted crop of white hair & similarly bleached, derelict beard, however, here succeeded & caused Koza to stumble back & reach for his staff as if to ward off a renewed assault from a distant assailant. It was remarkable to him that a face so familiar could appear so perverse like some cruel parody of the actual, or the lined & creased features of age transposed upon remembered youth. The transformation of Horvath was replete in its severity & swift in its accomplishments. A wealth of possibilities dawned on Koza & he was well aware, but had never encountered, the urban plagues that effected townsmen, but illness could turn a man so rapidly & so completely leaving only ragged, blistered skin pulled taught across the sharp bones of a desperate figure? A loud thud cracked across the air & by the time Koza had regained composure the door of Martas house was shut & bound, & the doctor vanished. But the image stayed, he collected his dogs & near ran through the knee deep snow propelled by disgust, of that he was sure; but also by something more desperate, fear. The news reached Schultz by the days end, & with the help of supplementary anecdotes supplied by wagging tongues the vulgar interpretations of some of the local people had propelled Horvath from ailing doctor to something far more malignant. And so now he, Schultz, pushed his way through the knee deep snow that was barricading the untrod path from the road to Horvaths house. His thin leather house boots, which he had neglected to change such was his haste, had quickly soaked his feet & rubbed painfully against his chapped & raw ankles. He glanced quickly up at the chimneys as he rounded the hedgerow but saw no sign of heat or smoke rising into the frigid air. To not have a fire lit in this weather was clear madness & he pushed on with renewed vigour & a heightened sense of foreboding. As he approached the front of the house he noted the drawn curtains & almost hermetic way the windows had been sealed against light. The doctor had pasted pages of his valuable medical journals against the

glass & stuffed the inevitable small gaps between the frame & wall with lichen. As Schultz approached the door the snow gave way to a beaten patch were foot prints had stamped down a clear area that trailed drunkenly in the direction of Martas well. It seemed, or so the Cleric assumed, that whatever disturbed Horvath he was mobile enough to venture beyond his door & lent credence to the improbable tale he had heard related by a near apoplectic Katka Koza. All previous efforts at gaining access to the doctor had failed & for this reason Schultz did not trouble himself to hail or try to raise the house. He stood before the main door & strained to hear any sounds from within, he could hear none. He circled to the back of the house but here also the windows had been shuttered with pages ripped & pasted upon the pains. Looking more closely he could see that Horvath had taken meticulous care in sealing out the light as each page had been lined with precision against its neighbour. It was clear that the doctors intention had been to insulate himself from the world to such a degree as to be a veritable act of entombment: but what could drive a man to such a condition? Stepping back he glanced again towards the roof & the chimney that led smoke away from the kitchen. At first he saw nothing unusual but as he was about to turn away he caught sight of what at first appeared to a blackened heap piled upon the chimneys mouth. Moving further back he raised himself onto a snow covered pile of logs & peered again at the roof of the house. Straining to see against the opaque skyline he realised it was nothing heaped on the chimney but rather something stuffed through it. It appeared, in his derangement, that Horvath had plugged the chimney from within, wedging sackcloth to close up the aperture. But for what possible reason? Schultz moved back to the front of the house &, as a seeming anomaly, the spout directly above Horvaths living room appeared to be free of obstructions. The cleric then systematically checked all windows &, as he had previously thought, all appeared to have been obsessively sealed. Once again he arrived at the rear of the house & continued his scrutiny believing, & perhaps for lack of other alternatives, that details would reveal a larger accuracy. He stood gazing at the rear door & began to run his fingers along the jam & frame feeling the knotted wood slide by until, in the gloom unseen, he felt the sharp cold of metal. Along the seal of the door six nails had been driven from the inside crosswise into the outer wooden frame pinning the door closed; & stooping to inspect the lower part of the door he spied the lock clogged with cloth & coated with melted candle wax. Circling to the front, the lock of door there proved to have been untampered with & it was plain that Horvath had ventured forth, as evidenced by Samo Koza. It seemed that the doctor had gone to extreme lengths to secure the world without, but for what God given reason? The sun was now well below the tree line & darkness was fast approaching as Schultz pondered his friends possible motives. The change of appearance had been drastic enou gh to frighten Koza which was no mean feat, & this coupled with the clerics own experiences now & the tales of others, convinced him that his friend was suffering in the extreme but, the question was, from what malady? And then with a creeping sense of unbelief the cleric began the steady & involuntary process of realisation. Despite the cold, sweat rippled across his brow & back as his breathing quickened & his heart began to quicken. But could this be true? As a student he had heard of another such similar instance but, as he had read the rather inflated description of the unfortunate in Linz, it had been clear, at least to Schultz, that the tormented soul in question had been clearly mad, a deranged victim of his own demonic dreams. This could surely not apply to Horvath whose sense of reason, if not his ardent faith, would safe guard him against such ridiculousness. Schultz did not deny the existence of the devil, in fact he believed Satan to be a part of our daily lives. However, he also knew that many a sad lunatic who had claimed to be the devils kin was nothing more than lost to himself. But what other explanation could be had? This transformation of his home into some hermetic anchorage, his reclusiveness & transfiguration spoke of a spiritual agony in which Horvath must desperately be engaged. And

there is but one source, as Schultz knew well, of such a malignant power. If Horvath was to be saved, if his friend were to be wrested from the hands of Hell then he knew there was only one possible option; unchristian, unholy as it may seem. The ancients had known the Devil well & it was to them that he must now turn. He broke into a hurry as he turned on his heels & made for the home of Milan, his uncertainty resolving into clerical ire with each passing step. By the time he stood before a startled Mirka demanding to see her husband his ire had turned to the righteous certainty & he quavered with a heady mix of fear & rage. There would be hell to pay this night for the Devil, despite Horvaths call, would not find a welcome in Konkusova dolina. Ladislav had ignored whatever beast or man had circled his home, the world beyond this moment was a trifling thing as poorly relevant to him in significance as the dust beneath his feet, for she had come. The fire flickered kindly in the grate & soothed the air with a blush of warm light, the glow of which enrapt them in a cell of quiet darkness. Martas skirts slid against the wooden boards of the floor & trailed upwards in an amber flow above the curve of her knee & wrapped itself snugly against her waist. Her bodice reflected off the light of the flame & moulded smoothly against the pale hue of her skin, & this in turn wavered in the fires shadow play from alpine white into subterranean dark & back again. Her hair trailed down from crown to lap & descended in rivulets of black meandering curls. But it was none of these things on which Horvath was focused for he wandered in the Elysian precincts of her aspect. He was as one unaware, bound by threads of stronger worth than any cast iron chain, & absorbed not what was before or beside him but whatever ephemera the gods had spun on the day that Marta had died. He seemed infused in her & she in him, yet it was his self, his flesh & bone that appeared devolved & less corporeal. He had drifted into her & knew of no sweeter manna. The pale blue of her eyes rested on him & smiled so that he might know he was not alone & he was reassured by her & leaned forward to touch the cold lightness of her hand. He slender fingers tapered into an interlaced pattern, threaded, as they were, in an attitude of prayer & lain upon her thigh. As on every previous evening she never spoke nor made but the slightest of movements; she had appeared to him without fail & had sat with him through the long nights as dispassionate in her presence as one uncaring. But it was in this seeming indifference to all about her that Horvath had seen her Edenic serenity. She did not desire, love nor pine for she beheld all things &, if paradoxically, held to nothing. The meaningless nature of her previous life had slipped from her & all that had been of value to her had fallen away leaving her in divine poverty, divest of clay & clad in Kenosis. She had become the emptiness within the vessel, the unfilled void in which all possibility exists. She sat at the core of peace which poured forth into & about him drowning out the monotonous half existence of the living. She passed into him a fresher air that becalmed & bore him from the tides of ceaseless motion into perfect inaction, into the oblivious unity of the whole. The flames of the fire continued their melody of change as the hours past unnoticed. Horvath now knew that she would not leave him, & he traced the lines of her face with his outstretched fingers & felt the brush of her hair against the back of his hand. Although not solid made his senses perceived her touch & he inhaled her breath, sweet with the taste of lavender as she exhaled, as if she were a mere woman. The poets had not spoken of this, how could they have? What words had men for this, love? Could such a grunted syllable equate or transmit her that other might understand? Never. The rut of men, hung about with tinselled praise as it was, that passed for our elevation & sat god-like in our estimation, was nought but the demi-sense that perhaps some men retained of their own divine union. And that the torments of his days without her loomed, as great in him as the prospect of any cruelty the gods upon man had yet inflicted, he endured for she would return to him & salve the wounds that she herself had inflicted.

During the day he circled the barricades of his home safeguarding its fastness, & awaiting her return like the sons of Seth awaiting the return of the daughters of Cain, as the Nephilim await their own return to grace. Yet he now existed without care, a keen & willing victim of the horrors of her hiatus, for come the night so would she come, a bearer of light to him, a daemon of the Seraphim who perhaps rebellious of the detached tolerance of a God impervious to mankind, stooped to hold the hand of man. It was for her, & her kind, which the entire world had so yearned; as child, now adult, yearns at the memory of its mothers touch, for that familiarity o f keeping so antithetical to the cold speculation of God. She came to annihilate the chaos of life, to release him, Horvath, from the modals of human action & bring him home into the primordial quiet, to the fathomless stillness of non-being. The hour was now late & dawn, & Martas removal, would not be far off. Horvath stooped & pulled a crude candle from a lacquered box by the fire. The candle was of a rough mould that he had fashioned himself from the leavings of previous nights. It would hold the flame until the hearth & grate were cleaned & reset for his flint had long been lost, & so this flame & fire at night were nurtured & revered. His body ached with privation & he struggled to stand & move about the room. His ragged sense of perception elasticated the space around him & he reeled as one aboard the tossed deck of a ship as he moved clutching mantel & chair back for direction. He placed two spindled fagots onto the fire & listened as they crackled into ignition. From the corner of his eye Marta raised herself beside him & pressed her lips against the sunken hollow of his cheek. His tired frame sagged against her in relief for their time of separation was soon to be at an end. In the grey pre-dawn a light snow drifted down masking the winters solstice with a monochrome hue. As if the dark had sucked all colour & tone from the spectrum of frozen light, the day awoke to find the land in shades of absence, & this was amplified by the sombre men gathered now at the end of Horvaths track. Mil an, Schultz & Koza formed the core whilst several others grouped around about them with Jan Orlik shaking his head as Samo Koza spoke. He related his sighting of Horvath the day before, explained the doctors change of appearance & his flight when seen & hailed by Koza. Several of the men asked their questions & many offered explanations as each man pondered the wisdom of what was said. As they spoke five more men arrived stamping clogged snow from their boots & they were trailed by Alex Koza who had summoned them from their beds. The men had come down from the higher hamlets of Osikovce & Hlavac & were none too pleased to be thus roused. And now the thirteen men stood & lost themselves in claim & counter claim, & in the clamour of conjecture. Jaro Lachovic, who had come perhaps the furthest from the mill in Podkylava, a good hour in this weather & in the dark, silenced all before signalling Schultz to speak. It had been the cleric who had called them & he who must justify this killing of a man. When Schultz stepped forward to speak he felt, with a clear instinct, the full authority of his Protestant God swell within him & he knew, with the iron conviction of one unused to certainty, that which must be said & done. When he spoke he spoke of Hell & of Heaven, & of the shallow vale that rims Gods paradise; he spoke of Christ & Lucifer, & of he who brings light to the darkness; he spoke of goodness & of evil, & of what it was to be the instrument of justice, to be the first stone cast by God. His voice rose above the silent morn as he told of Linz, a tale now transformed to harrow their fragile disbelief, & of how the wretched oftentimes seek comfort in the cold caverns of hell mistaking the clasp of Satan for the embrace of God. He spoke of love & its sacrifice of torment, as Christ himself had sacrificed for love; and of Longinus, who, possessed by a quickening of the heart & enraptured by a state of divine love, had killed & rendered unto man & god alike a merciful release. As he spoke the mens, nervousness grew & they hobble-stepped from foot to foot in their cold & angst. The Devil himself was hid closer to their hearths as each man knew, for every priest & penitent had warned them to have care. Their pagan rituals, it was said, would one day draw the darkness in. And so the

words Schultz spoke bled any discontent from the men about him as he pulled upon the final cords of their apprehension &, unbound from ethical polemic, allowed it to slip away unnoticed. The old ways knew how to chase the Devil from his den & it was these ways which the Priest now invoked. He grabbed each man in turn & by his hands, & they agreed that Catholic charms were feeble when balanced against the Pagan hammer. Within the house Horvath sat at the kitchen table & tried to steady his trembling. The warm ease of laudanum was slowly seeping through his system & he knew it would not be long before the cold chill that seemed to encase him since Martas departure would begin to ebb & fade. He pulled upon the stained fringe of his coat to insulate what meagre warmth his body still held, & blew warm air into his palms wincing at the sting of raw & cracked chilblains. He looked out towards the garden half hid behind a lace of frost that scaled the lower half of the window & saw the men of Konkusova dolina descending on his path. Marta had told him they would come & for this he had removed all blocks & barricades from the lower doors & windows; for hearts become feint in hesitance wake, & for Horvath their feint hearts would leave him lost. In his left hand he now held the text that Marta had given him, pulled, miraculously so it seemed, from the basket of waste scrap paper, wood shavings & kindling used to light the fire. It had come, he was certain, from a book of meditations given him in his youth but he could not place the author nor did he fully know to whom or of what, in this instance, the writer spoke. But she had pressed it into his hand upon their parting & to him it told of the mans most sacred longings:

Thou calledst, and criedst aloud, and forcedst open my deafness. Thou didst gleam and shine, and chase away my blindness. Thou didst exhale odours, and I drew in my breath and do pant after Thee. I tasted, and do hunger and thirst. Thou didst touch me, and I burned for Thy peace.[1]
The first thud against the door stirred him & he gently folded the paper & replaced it into the pocket of his coat. His hand lingered upon its edges & he felt the recitation of the text through the thin folds: thou calledst, & criedest out aloud; and another stroke hit the door. Horvath moved to stand & pu shed his unsteady frame upwards, he stood back to lean his weight against the cold stone of the pantry wall. Another bang against the front door & he heard his friend Schultz calling out above the echo & the further raised voices of all those sent. A mirage passed beyond the frosted pane of the window & he inhaled, the image across the glass twisted to & froe in an effort to see & be unseen. Horvath stepped towards the window & clutching the counterpane expelled the warmth of his breath onto the ice. Glass broke; he heard the music of its fall & felt the cool rush of air, behind him. The window at the door perhaps, but Horvath did not turn, yet wiped against the pane before him as young Alex Koza stared back at him through the frost & began to howl. Wood splintered as the door succumbed to rock & boot, & to the cries of delighted anger from those without. Horvath turned to face the malaise & closed his eyes to grasp, lest courage fail him, her image. thou didst gleam & shine, & chase away my blindness. Her breath upon him & the hands of men about him, he opened his eyes & saw the terrible fear of Schultz as the clergyman cried for tighter bonds. The boy Koza wept & would not meet his gaze. Milan pulled him roughly by the hair & he felt himself beaten onto the floor but there was no hurt though blood & cudgels fell. He was now in snow & lapped by whiteness. A rope swirled about him limb & wrist as they pulled him to his knees, & he heard, sweet, the flow of Martas water trill across the garden waste. It sang & gurgled in its basin & merry-made to the rhyme of grunting men; she chapped upon the waiting stone & in the cold & freezing air she sighed & spun her breath in webs of air, releasing the long forgotten hours of summer - & Horvath heard her song: Thou didst exhale odours, I drew in my breath & do pant after thee.

He hung between their arms & could not find a way to stand. Knots dug deep into his bones & his skin was flushed with the chill his nakedness had allowed. His feet were blood stained & bruised as he skimmed across the snow & buried rocks the forest held. The path upon which he stumbled arose & fell, & he no longer knew the woodlands nor its lightless bowers. His hair hung in rats tails pleated with sweat & grime but his hands no longer moved to twist away the blinds from his eyes. They stumbled up & he felt the heavy tread of those beside him, spurred on by the clerics righteous tongue. A branch of pine flayed the path & Horvath did not find a way to overstep & fell then rose again. His men unyielding in their care as they propelled him onwards to their meeting place. And now the wind was taut with winter & rushed about the trees overhead, & they in turn danced & wavered above him. Horvath felt the keening of the wind to be upon him & knew the strains of its melody as its many fingered hands strummed the naked boughs. It was a song of ancient memory, a song of unarticulated poetry that played not upon the ear & faculties but hummed unto the timbre of the soul. It trailed out across the landscape, unearthed, from wherever deeper regions list & remain unnoticed til the coming of their hour. It chanted of our blacker day & whispered of what things may come when we are gone & the world is emptied of our flurry. The lamentations reeled upon the eddies of the air & bucked against the chomp of boots in snow; & like a vapour swirled about the doctors nose & mouth, a melody of wisp & smoke, tangible & yet not. Horvath gasped & felt its tang upon his lips, tongue & teeth like an antique & stale draft & yet elusive it remained, for the elegy would not be tied to him, not yet, but played him on. Upon the air, & from out the Jeremiad wind, she gently made: I tasted, & do hunger & thirst. And he knew it to be her song of a new & dawning life. However deeply led the forest so did the men walk on until, alerted by the sudden rasp of light that bleached the snow before him; the forest ceased & Horvath sank. His blood flowed freely upon the virgin plain but faster still it was erased with each passing moment as great banks of snow teemed upon The Clearing. The cloying wetness of the stuff rose up above his elbows as he, dog-like, lurched on fours towards the centre of the sleeping meadow, as if meaning to out-strip his fellows & flee. But he gurgled back at them through broken teeth, a spume of spittle spray upon the wind, & felt with gratitude the stout hands of his neighbours as they pulled him free & carried him onwards with reels & kicks. The dark clouds lowered yet & Horvath strained to raise his head, to push back the winds insistence that swept away his vision leaving the world opaque & blurred; the snow sought to hound where the breezes failed & he blinked in defence against their assaults. He knew that Marta was there but could not fix upon her. He heard her still in the winds chilling frenzy; her words winnowing free from the chaff of sounds about him & he tried, like one lost, to cling to her passing song & words, & trace them to their origins. But they would not yield to his grasp. The cold was now deep within him & he felt as one discarding leg & arm across the field as each useless item became as a thing cast away, fruitless & idle, to his cause; the cold wrapped around his naked form enshrouding him in cool detachment & numbingly released him of the burden of bone & flesh. He felt the sluggish rhythm of his chest labour on in obstinate indifference to the failing purpose all about it. And at this time the world became still & the fury of the wind abated. The snow, still rife with the madding foam of winter yet becalmed, hung as if suspended upon the invisible tips of some many fingered beast that now withheld its breath & stilled the falling flakes. All sounds contracted within themselves & ceased; & cradled within this absence of noise was a purer note of quiet. Horvath raised his shattered head to marvel at the suddenness of change. His comrades now bore against him, their backs arched & brows furrowed; their faces set & determined as men compelled, the set of men toiling at a task most odious. He tried to spur them on & bark encouragement but in the great stillness that prevailed his words were muted, did not gather pace, & failed upon his lips. Horvath saw then how the winds & cold were still cruelly cast against them, & how the roar of chaos bellowed about them as if some angry press of discord thrummed between their wavering figures. He raised his

arms to encircle & harbour them against the tempests savage maw which loomed as a darkness, threatening to engulf their world of frenzied movement & sound, but he was somehow now restrained by peace & immobile made by passive bonds. The men heaved their burden, him, against the blast & Horvath felt himself straighten & elongate. He felt elevated & a drifting free as if he were being raised up by inhuman hands; & all about him in these listless airs a canopy of ease mocked the bitter gales sweeping across the fields. He felt the brutal force of the men as fingers, knees, & shoulders pushed into him, holding him upright, & then the lash of crude twine, meant to sustain him, & the fetter of crude ropes around his legs, midriff, chest, throat & brow. And then the cold rasp of stone & ice as his thighs, buttocks, spine & head ground against the stone plume that had awaited his arrival. The vital sting of its trunk, whose moss & lichen sought to bruise & cut, relented to his touch & Horvath sank into its fleshy folds as a child sinks in to the dreamless night of sleep. He felt the warmth of the sun upon him but it was an indirect impression & he was unsure if it was a sensation remembered or one valid to this time, but it drifted over him, wafting down on sepia wings, their lavender flights timid to reveal their origins or from what source this bounty had been sent. And the light was vibrant & had form, it resonated with a brilliance that was more than visible but also solid; the light was sensual & touched him smoothing back the beauty of these hours to reveal a profounder artistry. Horvath blinked & tried to clear the blood from his eyes & focus upon the glory he beheld. It was then, upon the cusp of argent light, that Marta sang once more, the final words of a seekers lament: Thou didst touch me, & I burned for thy peace. Her words shimmered in the light before him & seemed to resound, echoing through the rays that swept around his eyes. And the source of the light appeared to sway upon her words, a darting streak that wove in circles hither & back. It taunted & beguiled him, & he strained the harder for to see its shape & kind; yet still it danced before him. From the wind, & descending fast, his own words returned to him & he heard entwined within their cadence of his reflected voice those of Marta. Her voice rose & fell with his, pushing through the stillness that enclosed him though seeming to glide without disturbance upon the silence, effecting only to enhance his sense of peace as a star in a moonless sky serves only to enhance the darkness of the night. They sang in unison, an epithalamium bourn upon the light that shone & that now had clarified & grew shape & shade. His throat burned with the sweetness of her words & he sought to recognise her face as it came to him, as her features materialised out of the light. Her eyes, he saw now, were a blue grey & rimmed with blood for the weeping & sorrow she had made afore they met. Her cheeks were stained with tears, & rouged with earth & ash as she now mourned him & his mortal life. Her lips were split & peeled, & her mouth twisted, broken toothed, smiling as she sang; the passion of her melody exacting wounds upon her tongue & cheek. The wind had gained in ferocity & pummelled the men from all sides with a rare ruthlessness. Samo Koza & Jaro Lachovic pinned the sagging doctor against the stone pillar & looked to Schultz for an end. Dark & ravening clouds rolled across the sky & surged upon the encircling trees in a rush of sound that forced the men to shout to be heard. Snow layered their capes & leggings as they fought to strap Horvath standing against the stone. Alex Koza squatted down, hunched beside the men in an effort to protect himself against the wind, & fearfully eyed the cruel & incomprehensible tragedy play-out before him. Old Jan Orlik seemed to share young Kozas fear. He clutched at Schultzs sleeve & pleaded for a hearing but the Cleric did not notice. He raised his hands & signalled for the men to part & stepped towards the doctor.

Horvaths head wavered & gyrated against his fetters as if he sought to catch sight of a thing behind & beyond them. The men shuffled uncertainly on frozen legs glancing back towards the trees, now wrapped in a cerecloth of dark snow. The doctors long hair was matted with blood & earth, & Sch ultz gently traced the lank strands away from his friends face &, gazing deep, found no man he recognised. Horvath appeared oblivious to

those about him; his eyes were vacant to the attendant time but stared instead into a more distant present. He grimaced & maundered through some unholy hymn, his words bestial & perverse, performed to an infernal chant.

Schultz felt the fear of ages grip him as the sounds of Horvaths devilish song was caught up by the wind & whipped back upon him. There was a primal ugliness about the words, a deep evil that gnawed at him, & was at once sickly & foul, & yet beguiling. He felt nausea run through his gullet & the bile of it burned upon his lips; and within him a deep arousal, an arising of a dormant thing of ancient lineage, consigned once to oblivion but now remembered. He pulled upon the remnants of his resolve & slipped the edge of a honed skinning knife from his pocket. The blade writhed in the dull light & stroked against the palm of his hand in heady anticipation, it raised itself & hung between them at eye level, flashing in the sallow sun. The cleric eased it fore & back, & watched the gilded shimmer etch across the torn features of his friend, as if to pierce with reflected sun the gloom of Horvaths distant mind; & thence to thrust the daggers image into the doctors remote psyche & return him. Yet Horvath remained still borne beyond them, still adrift on the cadenza of this, his evil lament. In the warmth of their seclusion Horvath longed to move & enfold her as she wove before him. The rapture of her burned upon his eyes & he was transfixed, immovable as stone. He now felt a quickening within him, faint at first, but then more insistent. Martas broken image wound in front of him, & the words of he r song reduced & stilled, & he felt too the slow declension of his own voice as their words seeped into the wider stillness. He felt propelled from within; a thrusting upwards from the gut, a sweet exhalation that whipped the air from his lungs & suffused him with a sharp warmth that pummeled up through his core & entered his head with a stinging clarity. The quickening coursed through his limbs, drove the blood from his temples, & prickled the skin as a jolt that shook him. Marta had gone but he now felt the touch of her within as she moved about enlivening him; she sapped him & he felt himself draining into her depths. And all was still. From without, from the heavens perhaps, he heard his own voice, now indistinguishable from that of Marta: Cado, Cado. And so he fell, & she with him; and she held his hand & would not allow him to lose her, as she led him ad fontes . And with that the winds dropped & Schultz stepped back from his friend. Blood dripped from his wrist & fingers, the knife blade dulled in the red stain of life.

Conclusion: In the days that followed Horvaths death Milan was tasked with his burial. Schultz steadfastly refused to have his friend interred in holy ground & so a grave was dug in the Marthas garden. It was left unmarked, & as the decades passed the small mound of earth under which the doctor lay vanished beneath the green. No one who was present at his death ever spoke of it, nor was Martas house ever lived in again. It seemed best, so the villagers said, to keep the old place empty. Yet Schultz was not a man to forget. Troubled for years by the events of that night he finally confessed all, relieving his soul before taking his own life. His confessor was David Koza, priest & son of Alex Koza. The house declined & was barely rubble when the Second World War started. A partisan group fleeing German patrols bedded down in the ruins of the house, & was using the old fire place as a hearth in which to cook a meal. Late in the night Villam Orlik awoke, troubled by the sound of voices he roused a comrade & the two men crept beyond the ruins into the quite of the night. Skirting the tree line they checked & circled the house & grounds finding & hearing no one. What happened next made for strange hearing. As the old fighter stood in Krajnes communist era pub, a half drunk beer in his hand & strong cigarette drooping sadly from his lips, I was unsure whether he was just

good at playing a crowd or serious in what he said. Waving a leathery hand towards the window & the dark hills beyond his voice quavered, the words difficult to find. They had come back to the sleeping camp, he had said, lighting cigarettes & sitting beside an old barren spring. Orlik had looked back towards the house & there in the gloom, enrapt in the glow of a fire long extinguished sat a man & a woman. They neither appeared to speak nor move, they simply sat. She with him & he with her.

[1] Augustine: book 10 ch.27