The trumpeter of Krakow

by Eric P. Kelly

“Can you tell when he is playing, and when the father?”

“I could easily at first. Now it is much harder, but I think that I could distinguish did I not know at what hours each played. His notes are not quite so pointed as the father’s, but they are becoming more and more like them all the time.”

The conversation ran to other matters and it grew late. Finally the woman made up a bed for the girl on a small couch which Joseph and his father had built. It was close to the outer door, and directly below the casement, over which a piece of tapestry hung; the window was open in this fair weather, and Elzbietka could easily hear noises from outside, especially the sound of the church bells and the trumpet, for the window faced in the direction of the tower. Joseph’s mother retired to the second room, where she slept when Joseph was at the church, and Elzbietka, without undressing, for she feared lest the alchemist should call her suddenly, threw herself on the couch and tried to sleep.

She found sleep impossible. Visions of some terrible thing happening to her uncle and the student kept her thoughts boiling like water in a kettle. She kept remembering the words that other people had said, the remarks made by other students, the whispers up and down the lane that Pan Kreutz was engaged in some terrible work of Black Magic.

It was a superstitious age, an age when people believed that powers of evil could be called upon, like human beings, to perform certain dark deeds—that souls of the dead forever haunted certain lonely places on earth and would answer a question if one but knew how to address them. If a black cat crossed one’s path, then bad luck was sure to follow; if an owl hooted at exactly midnight from the tower of some deserted church then the witches were riding through the air on brooms or branches; if a dog howled in the night it was a sign that some one living near by was about to die.

There were people who fostered such ideas for their own benefit. They were for the most part necromancers or magicians who took the gold of credulous ones for telling them of their own futures or for warding off some impending evil from them. Perhaps some few of these believed themselves honest; the greater number were thoroughly dishonest and unscrupulous, men who wore dark robes and practiced dark ways simply to frighten superstitious folk into giving them money. These magicians sold articles called “tokens” which were guaranteed to keep away certain evils. A little ball of black stone would prevent the possessor from being bitten by snakes. The little yellow, glasslike substance, created when lightning struck in sand and melted the fine particles, was greatly valued; crumbled and taken internally it would prevent stomach trouble. Worn about the neck in a small bag it would keep off lightning. Certain little bones from the bodies of cats, dogs, and hares had properties of benefit; the heart of a frog had many mystic qualities.

It was quite apparent in the case of the alchemist, Kreutz, that something was going on that was undermining his health and perhaps his reason. Such a change as had come over him was not at all normal in a man with such a strong body and mind as he possessed. And as Elzbietka lay awake thinking of one thing after another she became a prey to many strange fears, among them this one, that Kreutz was no longer the master of his own soul, that somehow the student Tring had become the master of it; that Tring had discovered something in his studies which he was working out at the expense of the man who naturally should have been his teacher and master.

The trumpet had in the meanwhile sounded the first hour, but still she was not able to sleep. Her natural thoughts of her uncle and Tring were followed by a flood of fanciful imaginings, and in them she saw the figures warped and distorted out of their natural proportions; persons who are sick and persons who carry troubles in their minds experience this frequently, at a time when the body is tired and aching for sleep and yet when the mind is overactive with worries. Her uncle at one minute of normal and ordinary size seemed at intervals to shrink or enlarge without warning; Tring was now a student of the collegiate type, now a nightmare of a thing with the head of a pumpkin that grew until the whole sky was filled with the darkness of his shadow. They were engaged in many nefarious enterprises: they were releasing great hordes of bats from baskets, bats that they had created out of old sandals; they were leaping into the air and catching huge birds like eagles which they were imprisoning under the roof of the loft; they were mixing fiery liquids that hissed and bubbled and foamed—they were doing a thousand things at once and all of them somehow of evil. For nearly an hour these phantoms of half sleep danced in her brain, and then suddenly the bell on the tower sounded twice.

“The second hour,” she exclaimed, the drowsy phantoms of her brain taking sudden flight.

The Heynal began. “That is Joseph,” she thought.