The Procession to the Golden Gnome

In one village—I know exactly where it lies, but I won’t say—they’ve had a lovely tradition for quite a few centuries. Every 22nd of March, the villagers, led by the mayor, set out in a procession to a crevice in the rocks, which for centuries has simply been called the Hole, so that every adult can throw a valuable object into the bottomless darkness, step aside, and wait.

With a resigned shrug, everyone then turns and quietly walks back to the village, though a good half of them will secretly return to the rocks at least once before dusk. For a simple reason: according to tradition, a Golden Goblin is supposed to emerge from the Hole after noon and repay the thrown objects tenfold.

One might say that this is an incredibly enduring ritual of pagan origin, against which John Hus and Comenius already railed, and which the good Father Krolmus neglected to comment on in his folk-lore notes. And perhaps an ethnologist might pause to consider that the custom has endured in its unaltered form throughout the entire twentieth century, if the throwing of valuable and even more valuable objects for the purpose of the aforementioned return were merely an echo of a pre-Christian fertility ritual.

Which, surprisingly, it is not.

For it is indeed verified, recorded, and stored in the archives (including the Archivum Secretum Apostolicum Vaticanum) that this has actually happened several times, most recently in 1614, when the daughter of a local Protestant pastor accidentally dropped a silver ring into the hole. The girl shed a few tears and clasped her hands in fervent prayer as a little man emerged from the dark and returned the ring, along with nine others (one of which turned out to be made of platinum by mistake, a fact discovered only three hundred years later), to its happy little owner.

The event was kept secret by various parties for various reasons, but since in Bohemia everybody spills the beans, the procession to the Golden Gnome became a regular pastime and a risky investment for many generations during the post-White Mountain, Enlightenment, and modern eras.

Ever since a satellite town sprang up on the outskirts of the village, whose residents were eventually initiated into the tradition, the offerings have grown richer year after year—who wouldn’t want ten times their investment? And so, bags full of coins, bundles of bonds the size of a year’s worth of a national daily newspaper, stamp collections, and Chinese and Meissen porcelain fall into the Hole. Even a kilogram gold bar has flown down there. Lighter by a portion of their wealth, people then leave, wondering where they went wrong. But they’ll come back next year. Those who long for a big, effortless profit are gullible and loyal.

Just like the elf who, every March 22nd, climbs up a narrow shaft, driven by pure altruism and a genuine desire and ability to return the donated items tenfold, and who spends the rest of the year healing fractures and massaging bruises after being knocked down by a pile of falling offerings just before the end of his exhausting climb.

For when one is small, even magic cannot help.

⇐ march story ⇑ table of contents may story ⇒

"Things just happen. What the hell."
Didaktylos*
* Terry Pratchett. Hogfather

Welcome to my world. For the longest time I couldn’t think of right name for this place, so I left it without one. Amongst things you can find here are attempts of science fiction and fantasy stories, my collection of gods, bogeymen and monsters and also articles about things that had me interested, be it for a while or for years. (There is more of this, sadly not in English but in Czech, on www.fext.cz)

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