Crystal Garden. Ewa Bash

that, the Mentor let me go to the city several more times. He allowed me to buy clothes I liked. I immediately bought some jeans, but almost didn’t wear them, as the old-fashioned trousers were much more comfortable. He also allowed me to buy a bike, so I had more time to get back by dawn. By this time, I was a strange sight – a weird Victorian boy on an ultra-modern bike. Ah, the memories. The lonely highway, the wind in my ears and an old tune from the early nineties in my head: “*Ride the wind. Never coming back until I touch the midnight sun …” [*Poison – Ride the wind]. I felt totally free. How wrong I was!

      I fell in love with Prague completely and irrevocably. I loved her streets, her time-blackened sculptures, her people who were always ready to exchange a few words about some nonsense, and her tourists with cameras on every corner. It was the tourists I was hunting. I became their ghosts and vampires, I carried them into past centuries and epochs. Some fled in terror, some could not understand what was happening to them, some were delighted and tried to capture everything they saw. But naturally, they took home with them nothing but a pile of photos of empty streets because I did not have power over technical devices. Over time, I learned to cast spells on entire groups of people. The newspapers were reporting that 200 people saw St. Wenceslas pacing the Charles Bridge in his shining armour and slippers, about 300 cats dancing in a ring at the Old Town square, and the babies placed by a local sculptor on the television tower actually crawling. So, I had fun. I could do anything, except one thing.