“And you still have a tongue, do you?” Karadzic said. “I did not bring your woman here, you poor fool. She came to me, perhaps in search of a man. I can see why she left you.”
“You lie! She did not come on her own.”
“No? Actually I had planned on luring her with the old woman, but it wasn't necessary.”
The old woman?
An arm suddenly clamped over Jan's mouth and yanked his head back. He swung his elbow back and was rewarded with a grunt. A hand punched his kidneys and he relaxed to the pain.
“Perhaps you would like to see your Helen?”
The arms from behind jerked his hands behind him and lashed his wrists together with rope. They shoved a rag in his mouth and ran a wide strip of tape over it. Karadzic walked slowly up to him. His old commander breathed heavily, his lips parted and wet. Sweat glistened on his forehead. Without warning his arm lashed out and he struck Jan on his ear. He gasped in pain.
“You would do well to remember who's in charge,” Karadzic said quietly. “You always were confused about the power of command, weren't you?” He thrust his face up to Jan's, his smile now gone. The man's breath smelled sweet of liquor. “This time you'll wish you were already dead.”
Jan winced. Karadzic struck again, on Jan's cheek.
The man spun and marched down the tunnel. “Bring him,” he said.
The hands behind shoved Jan and he stumbled forward. They propelled him quickly down the dim passage, to a steel door beyond which Karadzic had stopped. Then the door opened and Jan was pushed roughly into the room. He scanned the interior, breathing shallow, fearing what he might see here.
A dozen sets of eyes stared at him, blank in their state of stupor. Candles flickered amber through the white haze. The music seemed to resonate with the black rock walls, as if they were its source.
Then Jan saw the body moving slowly on the floor not ten feet from where he stood and he knew immediately that it was Helen.
Helen!
Oh, dear God! What have you done?
He screamed despite the rags in his mouth, but the weak sound was lost to the music's dull thump. He threw himself forward against the hands that held him, struggling frantically to free himself.
Oh, dear Helen, what have you done? What have they done to you?
His vision blurred with tears and in a sudden fury he flailed back and forth. She needed help, couldn't they see that? She was lying on the ground moving like a maimed animal. What kind of demon would do this to his wife?
Angry shouts sounded behind him and a rope flopped around Jan's neck. They dragged him back, straining against the rope. The door crashed shut and he was shoved down the corridor. Jan tripped and sprawled to his knees.
She was smiling, Janjic. Writhing in ecstasy and smiling with the pleasure of it.
They pulled him to his feet and kicked him forward.
Helen, dear Helen! What have they done to you?
They've done to her what she deserves, you pathetic fool. They have given her what she has wanted all along.
He was forced down a long tunnel, and then another that branched to the right. The passage ended in a cell hewn out of solid black rock. By the light of torches they strapped his arms to a twelve-inch-wide horizontal beam bolted to the wall. Two men restrained him while Karadzic looked on. But the fight had left Jan and he let them jerk his limbs about as they pleased.
His mind was on Helen. She had fallen again. He'd brought her two thousand miles to escape the horrors of Glenn Lutz, and now she had found worse. A death sentence for both of them. And why? Because he hadn't loved her dearly enough? Or because she herself was possessed with evil?
Ivena's words came back to him. “Helen's not so different from every man,” she'd said. But Jan could not picture
any
man, much less
every
man doing this. And if Ivena was right and this was a play motivated by God himself, then perhaps God had lost his sense of humor.
They suddenly ripped the tape from Jan's mouth and pulled the rag free. His lips felt on fire.
“You really shouldn't have tried to stop me twenty years ago,” Karadzic said. “See what it's cost you? All for an old priest and a gaggle of old ladies.”
“I've paid for my insubordination,” Jan said. “You took five years from me.”
“Five years? Now you'll pay with your life.”
“My life. And what do you hope to gain by taking my life? It wasn't enough to kill an innocent priest? Blowing the head from a small child's shoulders didn't satisfy your blood thirst?”
“Shut up!” Even in the dim light he could see Karadzic's face bulged red. “You've never understood power.”
“The real war is against evil, Karadzic. And it seems you don't recognize evil, even when it crawls up inside of you. Perhaps it's you who don't understand power.”
Karadzic didn't answer, at least not with words. His eyes flashed angrily.
“You don't have the courage to take your anger out on me, face to face,” Jan said. “You hide behind a woman!”
The commander looked at Jan for a moment and then placed his hands on his hips and smiled. “So. Our valiant soldier will fight for his lover's life. He realizes that I'm going to kill her, and now he'll use whatever means at his disposal to persuade me otherwise.” Karadzic leaned forward. “Let me tell you, I don't bow to humiliation so easily, Janjic.”
“No? But the priest humiliated you, didn't he? You marched into the village intent on sowing some horror and instead you received laughter. You've never lived it down, have you? The whole world looks at you as a coward!”
“Nonsense!”
“Then prove yourself. Let the woman free.”
“And now the soldier attempts manipulation. I told you, your woman's here of her own choosing. Your
mother
, Ivena, I took by force. But not dear Helen.”
“Ivena? You have Ivena? What could you possibly want with an innocent woman?” Nausea swept through Jan's gut.
“She was to lure your lover, my friend. But now she'll serve another purpose.”
“You have me. Release them, I beg you. Release Ivena; release Helen.”
Karadzic grinned. “Your Helen is far too valuable to release, Preacher.”
Preacher?
“You have no complaint against her. You have me. I beg you to let her go.”
Now the big man chuckled. “Yes, I have you, Janjic. But I was offered a hundred thousand dollars for the death of the preacher
and
his lover. That would be your Helen. I do intend to collect this money.”
A hundred thousand dollars? Jan was too shocked to respond. Then he knew it all in a flash.
Lutz!
Somehow Glenn Lutz had his finger in this madness.
“Lutz . . .”
“Yes. Lutz. You know him, I see.”
A growl formed in Jan's stomach and rose through his throat. His blood felt hot and thick in his veins. Then he lost his reason and began screaming, but the words came out in a meaningless jumble. His heart was breaking; his heart was raging. He wanted to kill; he wanted to die. He suddenly threw himself against the restraints, thinking that he had to stop the man.
Karadzic was going to kill his mother and his wife.
A blow crashed against his head. Karadzic's fist. Jan shuddered and settled back, silent. A balloon of pain swelled between his temples.
Another fist smashed into his jaw and stars dotted his vision. Jan slumped forward and lost his mind to the darkness.
JAN COULDN'T tell if he'd regained consciousness or if the black before his eyes was still the darkness of his mind. He thought he blinked a few times, but even then he couldn't be sure. Then he heard ragged pulls of breath and he knew that he was hearing himself.
He was still strapped to the beam, hands spread wide. His shoulders ached badly and he made a feeble attempt to shift his weight back from them. An immediate surge of pain changed his mind. He sagged on the beam and fought to clear his mind.
The room echoed with his own heaves of breath. The sound brought a chill to his bones, a déjà vu that suddenly had the hair on his neck standing.
He had been here.
When?
It came back to him like a fist from the darkness: He was in the dungeon from his dreams!
For twenty years he had dreamed of this very placeâhe knew it was the same. The same sound, the same beam at his back, the same pitch-blackness. The details had sunk to obscure depths during these last dreamless months, but they came raging to the surface now. The dreams had been a premonition of his own end.
Death awaited at the end of this mad journey. He'd been given loveâa graft of God's heart, Ivena had said. And now he'd found death. The price of love was death. Jan's chest tightened with remorse. What a fool he'd been to bring Helen to Bosnia. To Karadzic!
Oh, dear Helen, forgive me! Oh, God, help me.
A soft voice whispered in the darkness.
“It is a only a shadow of what I feel.
”
Jan caught his breath and lifted his head.
“No more than a faint whisper.”
The voice was audible! Jan held his breath and scanned the darkness but saw nothing. He was hallucinating.
“You feel this pain?
“Your worst pain is like a distant echo. Mine is a scream.”
This was not a hallucination! It couldn't be!
Oh, my God! You're speaking! I'm hearing the voice of God!
A tear slipped down his cheek. He stilled and listened to the loud inhaling and exhaling of his breath. He could see nothing but blackness. Then he spoke in a whisper.
“And my love for Helen?”
“A small taste. You could hardly survive more. Do you like it?”
Then it was true! “Yes! Yes, I like it! I love it!”
A small voice began to giggle behind the other. A child who laughed, unable to contain his delight. It fell like a balm of contentment over Jan. God and this child were seeing things differently, and it wasn't a sad thing they were seeing. Tears fell from Jan's eyes in streams. He began to shake, smothered in these words whispered to his mind.
His world suddenly flashed white and he gasped. At first he thought it might be the war memories, but he saw immediately that it wasn't. The field of white flowers stretched out before him, ending in a brilliant emerald ocean. The sky rushed toward the distant water, in rivers of red and blue and orange.
He shifted his feet and looked down. A thick carpet of grass squeezed between his toes, so rich and lush that it appeared aqua. Within three meters, the bed of red-and-white flowers began, swaying ever so gently with a light breeze. They were the flowers from Ivena's greenhouse. The sweet odor of rose blossoms swept through his nose.
Still the sky fled to the horizon, like a sunset photographed in time-lapse but never ending. Jan stared at the surreal scene and let his jaw fall open. It was not of this world. It was of the other. And it was part of his dream.
He heard a faint note on the air, like the distant drone of a huge wind. He was thinking that the sound might be coming from the field when he saw it, a single black line on the horizon moving toward him.
The line stretched as far as he could see in either direction. Slowly it grew, moving in with increasing speed. Jan caught his breath. Tiny shapes emerged from the faceless line. They flew toward him, below the streaming sky, against the tide, as though riding an airborne tsunami.
Jan jerked back a step and froze, unsure what to do. Then the sea of figures was upon him, rushing a hundred feet over his head, silent except for an aerodynamic moan, like a mighty rushing wind. He yelped and crouched low, thinking they might clip his head. But they were a good hundred feet up. It was the sheer volume of them that cast the illusion of proximity.
He stared, dumbstruck. They were children, mostly. He could see their blurred bodies streaking over him in hues of blue and red. A faint bubbling sound suddenly erupted from the children, running up and down the scales, as if magical chimes were moving with them. Only it wasn't a chime; it was laughter. A hundred thousand children giggling, as if their sweep down upon him was a great joke they now delighted in.
Jan's mouth spread in a smile. A chuckle escaped his mouth.
The laughter grew in response. And then Jan was laughing with them.
The line suddenly ended and he saw that the leaders had looped up into the sky, like a wave curling back on itself. They screamed in for another pass. A man with long hair led the flight, and at his right a smaller figure clung to his hand, squealing in fits of laughter; he saw them both clearly this time. They looked at him directly and their eyes sparkled with delight. When it seemed they were close enough to touch, Jan recognized them.
It was Father Micheal and Nadia!
Suddenly Jan wanted to leap up and join them. He stood to his feet. He was laughing with them, right there in the stone room; he knew that because his shoulders were feeling the pain from his body's jostling. But in his mindâin this other worldâhe jumped and flung his hands up futiley. He
had
to join them!
They looped back again, but this time they stopped high above and hovered like a cloud that covered the sky. The sound fell silent.
Jan pulled up, astonished. What was happening?
Then a thin wail cut through the air. And another, and another until the sky moaned with the sound of weeping. Jan stepped back, stunned. What had happened?
He lowered his eyes to the meadow. And he saw what they saw. A body lay on the flowers, ten feet from him, and he knew. It was Helen, and heaven was weeping for her.
Two emotions collided. Delight and grief. Love and death.
Jan's world snapped back to black, and he inhaled quickly. He was back in the dark room. The vision of heaven was gone.
THAT WAS
your dream, Jan. The dungeon and then the field. It was this. You have somehow waited for this moment since the day you saw Father Micheal and Nadia die. You were meant for this. This is your story.