The kitchen smelled of Sunday lunch and cheap perfume, which mingled with the stench of burnt lard. The sun leaned against the windows, but its rays offered no warmth; they were cold and sharp, like the medical light in a morgue.
Ema sat at the table.
Opposite her sat them. Father and Mother. Or at least, that was what she assumed. Whenever she attempted to look them in the face, their features blurred like watercolor in the rain. She saw only outlines—her father's broad shoulders in a shirt, her mother's manicured hands clutching a ladle.
"Why aren't you eating, Ema?" a male voice whispered. It was soft, yet ingratiating. "Mommy cooked something so good. Just for you."
Ema turned her gaze to the corner of the room. There, where the wicker dog bed had always stood, it was empty. Only a greasy stain remained on the linoleum. Her eyes fell on the sideboard right next to it, where a dusty framed photograph stood. It showed her, younger and happier, clutching a small dachshund crossbreed they had taken from a shelter. He had short legs, one permanently floppy ear, and faithful eyes. She tried to remember his name. But it eluded her, as if someone had erased it. She felt only a dull ache in her chest where the memory should have been.
She looked down at her plate. The meat in the brown gravy was still steaming.
"Where is he?" she asked quietly. "Where is the doggy?"
The mother leaned toward her. Her face was still just a smudge, but her mouth... her mouth was clear. It was stretched into an unnaturally wide smile that revealed too much gum. She lifted the ladle to give Ema more. Long, rusty hairs hung from the metal, matted with gravy.
"Eat," the mother said, and the smile stretched even further, until the skin on her cheeks gave way with a quiet snap. "Like a good little girl. You must smile more. The world is beautiful, after all."
The smile drew closer. It filled her entire field of vision.
"NO!"
Ema jerked up in bed with a scream. Her heart hammered against her ribs like a frantic bird. It was dark. The air in the small panel-block room was heavy and stale.
She was shivering. She touched her face—it was wet with cold sweat.
Just a dream. Just that damn dream again.
She looked around. The cramped room she shared with a pile of boxes was reality. Prague. A sublet she lived in with three other students she barely knew. She was a stranger here.
Lately, it had been getting worse. The nightmares came more often; they were more aggressive, more vivid. Sometimes she felt like reality was crumbling beneath her fingers.
Do I belong in a madhouse? the thought occurred to her, and her throat tightened. Am I really crazy? Should I have myself locked up before I hurt someone?
The thought terrified her. Because she didn't remember. She knew her name was Ema. But beyond that? Last name? Blank. The city she came from? A black hole. She was like a book with the first chapters torn out.
She reached for the nightstand. Next to the alarm clock, shining a merciless 05:00, lay a blister pack of pills. They weren't prescribed. Well, not to her. She bought them from the roommate in the next room. Her mother was a psychiatrist and supplied her daughter to help her handle the stress of medical school. But the daughter needed money for parties and cocaine more, so the trade suited them both.
Ema took half a tablet. She knew she shouldn't, but she needed to turn off the screaming in her head. She washed it down with stale water.
She got up and walked to the mirror. Even in the gloom, she saw her reflection. She was thin, the circles under her eyes dark. She wore a large gray hoodie that she disappeared inside, and short denim shorts. It was early summer, dawn was breaking outside, but she felt a constant internal chill. She pulled up her hood.
She had to go. The part-time job wouldn't wait.
She entered the back entrance of the bar, pulled on rubber gloves, and began automatically wiping down tables.
"Hi," a rougher voice sounded behind her. It was Karel, the manager. He leaned against the doorframe, measuring her with a worried look. "You don't look good, Ema. Didn't sleep again?"
Ema straightened up and put on the best fake smile she could conjure. It was practiced in front of the mirror.
"I'm fine, Karel," she lied. "Just the heat. I'll have a coffee, and I'll be okay."
Karel hesitated for a moment, then shrugged. "Alright. But if it gets too much, say so."
In the evening, the bar filled up. Noise, clinking glasses, laughter. Ema darted behind the bar, mixing drinks, washing glass. It was mechanical work that allowed her to turn off her brain.
And then it happened again.
The lights above the bar buzzed and dimmed. Only one remained, casting stroboscopic flashes on the man sitting directly in front of her.
He lifted his head. His face changed in the flashes. The skin around his mouth cracked, lips stretching to an impossible width. Blood ran down his chin onto his expensive shirt.
"Home?" he asked. His voice sounded like the crushing of bones. "Are we going home, little Ema?"
Ema dropped a glass. The crash snapped her out of it.
The bar was lit, music was playing. In front of her sat a slightly tipsy man around thirty, smiling at her with hope in his eyes. It was the type of smile that said 'I'm alone, and I think you're pretty.'
"Miss? I was just asking when you get off. If I could walk you home. You look... sad."
Ema took a step back, her heart still pounding from the hallucination. "No," she breathed. "No, thank you. I... I can manage."
The man's smile faded. He nodded sadly and withdrew back into his solitude. "I understand. I'm sorry."
At home, she washed off the smell of alcohol and cigarettes. She lay down in bed, but sleep eluded her. When she finally drifted off, it wasn't rest. It was a fall.
She was back.
The skatepark. The sun beat down on the concrete so hard the air shimmered.
Ema ran between the ramps. Tears streamed down her cheeks, her breath ragged. She saw Lukáš. He was sitting on a low wall with the other boys. She liked Lukáš. He was her best friend, maybe something more.
She threw herself at him, hugging him around the neck, burying her face in his t-shirt.
"Lukáš!" she sobbed, words tumbling over each other. "My parents... my parents cooked..."
She spoke the name. She felt her lips move, knew she said the word. But in her head, only a deaf, stifling silence rang out, as if someone had cut that part of the sound out of the tape. The dog's name remained mute, drowned in static.
"...in that pot... there were hairs... they went crazy!"
She expected him to hug her. To say it would be okay.
Lukáš didn't even move.
"Dude, did you hear that Marek..." he continued talking to the others as if a crying girl wasn't hanging off him.
"Listen to me!" Ema screamed and shook him.
Lukáš pulled away. He shoved her sharply, making her stumble. He looked at her. His eyes were serious, dead, without a shred of emotion. But his mouth... his mouth stretched into a wide, toothy grin.
"Can't you see we're discussing important things, Ema?" he said coldly.
Then he turned to Marek. He grabbed his skateboard. Without winding up, just with a clean jerk, he slammed the edge of it into his face.
CRACK.
Marek staggered back. He touched his face; his palm instantly turned red. For a split second, there was pure shock in his eyes. Disbelief.
Then he moved. It was fast, instinctual. He grabbed his own skateboard and, with all the strength he could find, drove it into Lukáš's side.
SNAP.
The sound of breaking ribs was duller, but just as terrible. Lukáš staggered and gasped for breath.
For a second, a grave silence reigned in the skatepark. Ema expected screaming, pain, a fight to the death. The situation was on a knife-edge, serious as death itself.
And then it came.
Marek, with his nose driven into his skull and blood flowing down his chin, began to shake. A dry, croaking sound tore from his throat. He was laughing.
Lukáš grabbed his broken ribs, straightened up, and joined him.
It was an extreme, inhuman roar of laughter that spread like a contagion. Jana was laughing. Everyone was laughing.
The image disintegrated.
She saw only the outlines of figures at the edge of the forest. Even in the shadows and fog, she recognized the sheen of expensive fabrics. Men in tailored suits, women in costumes that didn't belong here in the mud and pine needles.
Several figures in those expensive clothes lay motionless in the wet grass. Others knelt over them, rhythmically compressing their chests in a desperate attempt at resuscitation. They waved their hands, screaming silently into the darkness.
The silence was cut by the deep rumble of engines.
Other massive black SUVs emerged from the fog. Wheels crushed the forest path. People with stony, deadly serious faces got out. No panic, just the cold, terrifying efficiency of an incoming catastrophe.
The image rippled and shattered into shards.
Suddenly, she was sitting. She felt a hard, worn seat under her bottom and the smell of diesel and old dust in the air. An engine vibrated beneath the floor.
She was sitting inside an old Karosa bus.
She raised her head. Above the driver's cabin, to the rhythm of the bus's jolting, the destination sign flickered. Letters jumped, disappeared into static, but the first part shone clearly.
S... V... A... T... O...
Ema opened her eyes. It was Sunday morning.
The name. Svato...
She sprang out of bed and grabbed her phone. Her fingers trembled as she tapped the letters from the nightmare into the connection search engine.
Svatobořice-Mistřín? No, that sounded foreign. Svatoslav? Nothing.
And then she saw it.
Looking at the name, a chill ran down her spine. It wasn't just a match of letters. It was an echo. She smelled coal dust and pine needles. This was it.
Adrenaline flooded her veins.
She packed her backpack. This time it wasn't just for a trip. She threw everything in—spare clothes, a power bank, a flashlight, even an old sleeping bag she dug out from the bottom of the closet. She felt this wasn't a round trip.
She looked at the nightstand where the blister pack of pills lay. Her hand hovered over the white tablet for a moment.
No, she decided in the first moment and clenched her fist. I have to see this clearly. No chemicals. Even if it hurts.
She was already turning to leave, but then she stopped. The fear was cold and tangible. What if I can't handle it? What if I start screaming out there and can't stop?
With a quick, jerky movement, she grabbed the blister pack and shoved it deep into her hoodie pocket. Just in case.
The bus sped along the highway away from Prague. The landscape changed; modern halls were replaced by fields and forests. Ema had headphones in her ears, but the radio in the bus was playing loudly.
"...buy a new Škoda and get certainty on the road..."
The signal crackled. The presenter's voice hitched, deepened, as if the tape in a cassette player had wound up.
"...get a car that will take you all the way... HOME?"
The last question sounded playful, almost childish, but with an undertone that gave Ema goosebumps. She looked around. The other passengers were sleeping or looking at their phones. No one heard anything.
When she got off in Malé Svatoňovice, it hit her in the eyes. The atmosphere. It was desolate here, a silence that pressed on the ears.
At the bus stop stood an older man in overalls, smoking a Startka cigarette.
Ema approached him.
"Hello," she tried. "I'm looking... I'm looking for a town. It should be near here, across the forest."
The man was silent. He just dragged on his cigarette and looked through her.
"I remember a large square on a hill," Ema continued, and as she spoke the words, the images in her head sharpened. "There was a church with a high tower. And down in the river valley were old, beautiful factories. Textile mills. And factory owners' villas."
The man remained silent, his face like stone.
Ema thought feverishly about what other clue she could give him. What proof to pull from the fog in her head so he would stop treating her like a lunatic. And then another shard emerged in her mind.
It was bright, colorful, but instead of relief, a chill ran down her spine. It was a memory so vivid and innocent that, in the context of her current life, it hurt.
She saw herself on a chain carousel standing right in the middle of the square. She was spinning around, legs high in the air, feeling that intoxicating childish sensation of truly flying. She tasted the sweet flavor of strawberry ice cream on her tongue and waved down at the crowd of people... whose faces she couldn't recall. She saw only colorful smudges.
She raised her eyes to the man. No longer with voracious hope, but with a quiet, freezing certainty.
"I think..." she began cautiously, lowering her voice. "I think a fair was held there once in a while."
The man looked at her, then looked around as if searching for someone, and suddenly burst out laughing.
"Are you kidding me, miss?" he chuckled and waved his hand in the air. "Where's the camera? Did I win something? Am I on TV?" He winked at her meaningfully.
Ema didn't smile. She stood there, backpack on her back, pale and deadly serious. Desperation was in her eyes.
The man's smile slowly vanished. The cigarette was burning down to his fingers.
"There's nothing there," he said finally, his voice rough and quiet. "Just deep forests. Private hunting ground, everything fenced off. We call it Little Siberia. There's always fog and cold, even in summer. No one goes there. And you shouldn't either."
Ema nodded silently and headed toward the newsstand.
"Hey! Miss!" he shouted after her when she was halfway there. "Did I really not win anything?"
He looked around the bus stop suspiciously again and peered inquisitively into the bushes to see if a TV crew would emerge. When Ema didn't answer and disappeared into the door of the newsstand, he spat disappointedly and stubbed out his cigarette.
"Damn youth," he muttered under his breath, while adjusting his overalls. "No respect for elders. Just making fun of us."
Ema bought meatloaf in a roll, but she had no appetite. She threw it into her backpack next to the sleeping bag.
Little Siberia.
The name resonated in her head like a warning bell.
She reached the edge of the forest.
She expected to see fences, barriers, signs. But there was nothing. Just a quiet, dusty dirt road disappearing among the trees.
She stopped. Suddenly, a sharp, pulsing pain shot through her temples. She hissed and pressed her palms to her forehead.
She turned her head to the left, toward the meadow bordering the forest.
Everywhere was silence and emptiness, just grass waving in the wind. But for a split second, Ema saw something else. Reality blurred before her eyes like a poorly tuned signal.
She remembered.
This was the place.
Before her inner eye, two polished black SUVs materialized on the empty meadow. She saw people in expensive suits running around, felt their panic which smelled of the fear of death. She saw a man lying in the grass with a torn shirt and another frantically performing heart massage on him.
Ema blinked sharply.
The phantoms vanished. Only the empty meadow and the murmuring forest remained.
She shook herself, swallowed dryly, and stepped into the shadow of the trees.