The Worm in Every Heart

by Gemma Files

  Except when it isn’t.

  “Could be we just haven’t gone down far enough yet,” Lev suggests, finally—trying to sound like he’s joking, probably. And failing.

  * * *

  A day later, loaded down with new-won weaponry and making straight for Home Army headquarters—Ochota, 80 Wawelska Street, the last Old Town building left both standing and occupied—Kotzeleh and her companions run straight into that same chatty contact who sold them bullets sloshing back the other way, a straggly crocodile of fellow refugees in tow. The sound of their guns cocking in the dark makes him jump and freeze, ‘til he takes a hesitant half-step further into the light and realizes who’s leading the pack.

  Relaxing: “Oh, so it’s you, dumpling.”

  And now with the charm.

  “As you see,” Kotzeleh says—stating the obvious, studiously bland. “You should tell your people to walk quieter from now on, if they don’t want to run into company; there’s two patrols a mile ‘til you get to the suburbs.”

  “Ah, yes.” The contact leans closer, lowers his voice, assuming an intimacy Kotzeleh finds vaguely grotesque. “And you know why, of course.”

  “To kill us.”

  “Partly.” A beat. “They got Radoslaw this morning.”

  Radoslaw.

  Colonel Jan Mazurkiewicz, the Home Army’s highest-ranking “officer.” Behind her, Kotzeleh hears Fat Chavah make a noise somewhere between a sob and a sigh; Lev sags sideways against the sewer wall for a second, but masters himself almost immediately. While Kotzeleh just stands there, her cold eyes half-lashed, daring the contact to frisk her (metaphorically) for any signs of normal human weakness: staring down the future’s foregone conclusion like it was just another open pipe-mouth full of stink and danger, just another black and empty barrel on another Nazi gun.

  So this is the end, she thinks, feeling nothing. And notes, aloud, with an acid little nod to his sleeve—

  “That must be why you took off your armband.”

  The contact shrugs, unfazed. “Wear the Home Army’s insignia from now on, you might as well paint a target on your chest.” He gestures at the hard-breathing crowd behind him like he’s showing off what he bought for dinner. “They need me alive, dumpling, to get them past the barriers; they want me alive, because they want to live. Can you blame them?”

  THEM, no. But—

  “—you should go too, maybe,” Lev puts in, suddenly. Adding, as Kotzeleh pins him with a glare: “Look, it only makes sense, nu? While you still can.”

  “I’m fine where I am.”

  “But you . . . ” He trails off. “You could get word to somebody, that’s all I’m thinking. Get them to send back reinforcements.”

  And if there’s no one left to send, Rabbi? What then?

  “Why don’t you go yourself, if you’re so eager?” she snaps.

  And now it’s Lev’s turn to raise his brows and shrug, throwing an ironic glance the contact’s way—his thoughts so clear that Kotzeleh can practically hear them in her head. What, me, with the Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion tattooed on my face? To men like this, I’m not even Polish—but you, Kotzeleh, you. You, my dear . . .

  . . . can pass.

  As she already has done, many times, and may well do a few more before the bullet hits the bone. Yet the injustice of it twists in her nonetheless, raising a flush under sewer-pale skin—the contact, smiling that bad-teeth corpse’s smile at her, his offer a secret handshake, a shared sin, the same temptation she’s had to guard against since bombs first began to fall. A siren song whose first verse always sounds like leave the Jews behind and come along, sweetheart, you with your pretty blond hair and your straight little nose, so Aryan-pure you’d fool the Fuhrer himself, whose chorus always sounds like just leave them to die down here like the rats they are, come along with us up into daylight, and survive . . .

  “You could live a long time,” the contact tells her, smiling wider. “You’re young yet, dumpling.”

  Kotzeleh takes one last look at him for reference, then tucks her gun away again; he isn’t worth the effort, let alone the ammunition. Answering, simply—

  “No. I’m not.”

  To which the contact frowns, mouth kiting up on one side, like he’s bitten into something sour. But whatever comeback he’s planning is derailed when—with an ugly, scraping CLANG—the manhole above them is suddenly prised up, popping free like a boil to reveal a knot of gaping Nazi faces.

  The refugees flatten, shrieks rising. A woman grabs both her children with a hand across each one’s mouth, hauling them backwards out of sight, as confusion—ever-infectious—rips through the crowd around her. Caught full in the spill of sunshine, Kotzeleh goes for her gun but somehow gets her knife instead; she turns to see the contact waving frantically upwards, yelling: “Mein herren, no, don’t shoot! We—”

  And: Is that really the trail of an “s,” right there at the end? Kotzeleh will never know, not that it matters—her blade has already punched through his voicebox and out the other side before she even thinks to aim it, loosing a startlingly vivid pump of heart’s blood twenty feet in the air to spatter some Nazi’s cheek.

  Because that’s what you get for not wearing your armband, you “charming” bastard. You get to die after all, the same as everybody else, even dirty Christ-killers like Lev—

  (and me)

  Another refugee, male this time, swerves in mid-flight to punch her full in the mouth, hard. And spits, as he does it: “Crazy bitch!”

  Kotzeleh grins, through pinkening teeth. “Crazy Jew bitch,” she corrects, gently.

  Then the shooting finally starts.

  Machine-gun chatter magnified from a thousand reverberate curves, kicking up brown spray as Chavah, Lev and Kotzeleh dive one way, the refugees the other—hot whine ruffling the rat-tailed nape of Kotzeleh’s neck as Lev fires past her, a lucky shot that erases half of one Nazi’s face in a single bloodjet burst. And then down, down, further and faster, slipping and sliding on corroded metal, shit-slimed clumps of trash.

  They pause near a grate, a rushing waterfall of sludge, hearts hammering; Kotzeleh puts her head between her knees to clear it, and raises it again to an unfamiliar sound. Some odd sort of rhythmic, mechanical grunting that reaches them only sporadically, sandwiched between fresh volleys.

  “They should be chasing us,” Lev murmurs, to himself. Then, watching Fat Chavah sniff and Kotzeleh wrinkle her brow, still trying to place that ever-growing noise: “What is it you’re smelling, you two?”

  Fat Chavah: “ . . . flowers?”

  Gas.

  * * *

  Not even a hundred years since the Warsaw sewers’ endless night; she is still so very young yet, after all. Or at least by her new tribe’s reckoning.

  Kotzeleh knows about monsters, then as now. The golem, the vampire, the dog-headed saint: She knows monsters are real, knows they exist. She’s seen their work first-hand, and paid them back in kind for tear gas down the manholes and teenaged snipers bleeding out in the streets, rape and looting at will, doctors and nurses shot on sight, thousands herded into public parks and executed under manicured trees, in the genteel company of gazebos and swan-pools. 18,000 insurgents dead and 6,000 badly wounded, 15,000 marched away to camps as prisoners of war, 180,000 civilians killed outright—and 10,000 German dead balanced on the other end of the scale, 7,000 gone missing and 9,000 seriously injured, but never enough, never. Never.

  No penance wipes this slate completely, even now. No ocean rift runs so wide or deep as to wash this stained hand clean again. It’s permanent, like dye: No monster can ever change their nature, no monster can ever be forgiven. No more than anyone else—anyone equally guilty—ever can.

  Not even her.

  * * *

  So: A soundless rush, some massive exhalation—one bright, hot gush of wind sweeping down on them from
above, the Taifun-gerat‘s pestilential breath. Fat Chavah turns, face crisping; a second later, she, Kotzeleh and Lev fall headlong through grate and floor alike as the walls collapse, the ceiling falls, the side of the pipe cracks open like a rusty iron scream. Down into the boiling mud with their hair and clothes on fire, shit-slimed ammonia stinging mist-thick in Kotzeleh’s eyes . . . oh, it’s just like a dream of Hell, all right: her own, or someone else’s.

  And then there’s nothing. A long slice of it, gas-burnt, gas-stinking.

  “P- . . . pretty girl?”

  (Not any more, most likely.)

  But: Again, the same voice, weak but insistent—and Kotzeleh comes awake with a hand thrust hard where her gun should be, dust in her eyes and rocks in her hair, a rusty piece of metal half-piercing her palm: Oy gevalt! It hurts with a fierce, dull pain, though not strikingly more or less so than every other part of her body.

  “Katarczyna, answer, I can’t see you anywhere . . . answer me please, my little Kati . . . ”

  She coughs long and loud at that, a phlegmy clip-feed rattle. Correcting him, automatically—

  “My name is Kotzeleh, Rabbi.”

  Somewhere nearby, Fat Chavah chokes hoarsely, weeping through the dust and flame. Kotzeleh reaches out wide with both hands, maimed and whole; she grabs Lev by the sleeve with her wounded one, Chavah by the flaking scruff of her burnt braids with the other, then fists down hard enough to make her scream inside and starts dragging them both forward through rubble and muck, crawling away from the fire inch by painstaking, pain-filled inch. Crawling towards . . . what?

  “This tunnel was made to lead somewhere, obviously,” Lev observes, ridiculously even-toned. Like some infernal tour-guide.

  And: “Oh,” Kotzeleh manages, blood clotting her sleeve fast to her wrist, “you think?”

  Simply: “Yes.”

  (I mean, what’s the alternative?)

  Rising stink of burnt shit and mold, the post-blast silence ringing in their ears like distant earthquake rumble. Kotzeleh sets her shoulders at a determined angle, puts her head down and bears forward, pushing so hard her neck starts to ache and strain. Hears Lev kicking and punching at the walls beside her, feeling for any possible breach they can force themselves through. Chavah’s whimpers dim. Everything narrows, boils away to purest effort, the way she likes it best.

  And finally—after what seems like years, but probably only lasts bare minutes—the bricks do give way, tumbling all of them into somewhere new.

  Lev is first to look up, which seems fitting; first to gape ‘round at the arching, dripping, cavernous walls, so bright and dark with strange patterning. An ossuary jewel-box thrown open to the hot non-wind, shelves on shelves like narrow slate beds strewn with desiccated brown monk-skins, twinkling with dun shards of bone.

  “One of your lost crypts?” Kotzeleh asks Lev.

  “Seems so,” he replies. And sloshes forward, squinting, while Chavah leans her burnt head against the nearest wall and vomits into her own hands—weirdly neat, like most things she does, regardless of her bulk. She heaves a few more times, reduced to bile, before slumping to trail her hands in the water, exhausted; if she’s praying, she certainly knows enough (by now) to keep it to herself while Kotzeleh’s still in close proximity.

  Lev’s running his hands over the facade to Kotzeleh’s left, meanwhile, like he’s reading a braille message through both burnt palms. And Kotzeleh just stands there, one hand on her knife-hilt, because it’s not just losing a fresh layer of skin that’s making her nerves crawl: Everywhere she looks, she can see them watching—empty eye-sockets, black and blank. Sprung jaws hanging, cracked teeth exposed in nude and lipless grins . . .

  She clears her throat, rackingly, trying to form a thought that doesn’t have to do with mummified Catholics. Managing, a swallow or so later—

  “You think the Nazi slime had a good laugh, watching those fools back there scuttle? Jews versus the Taifun-gerat: Talk about a cheap show.”

  Lev doesn’t turn. “Not so cheap, in the end. Probably didn’t know it when they lit the match, but . . . ”

  (and here he gives a smile, oddly sweet and surprisingly sharp, familiar to Kotzeleh like her very own)

  “ . . . gas burns upwards.”

  And THERE’s a comforting image.

  But: “Come here,” he tells her, veering off towards something new half-hid in shadow between two broken slabs of wall the blast must have knocked loose, much like his brains. “Look at this, would you?”

  She feels her hand twitch before she can stop it, yearning to make a fist again, then thinks better of the idea; feels her whole arm spasm at the sting like a half-body wrench, a lopsided crucifixion. “Rabbi, we don’t have the time—”

  “Nu? Nothing but, surely, ‘till the fire burns itself out.” He crooks a finger, tempting. “Come on, Kotzeleh, indulge me. I want to show off my shul learning one last time, while I still have the chance.” As she hesitates: “God would appreciate the gesture, I’m sure.”

  Kotzeleh breathes out through her nose, a single, calming huff. Finally—

  “Your God wants a lot, Lev.”

  “But he’s your God too, pretty girl. Isn’t he?”

  Well . . .

  . . . remains to be proven, that.

  Ikons and mosiacs stained by time, crawling with water-reflected light. And here between, out of this crack where the walls shivered apart, comes something extruding from the shallow, bricked-up cell hidden behind: A . . . box? A coffin?

  Man-sized and lightly featured, rust-bleeding iron chased in bands of tarnished brass; the hinges have popped under heat, pressure, water-warping maybe, and its emptied shell gapes like a lesioned mouth, the whole inside of the thing embossed with crosses. As Kotzeleh peers closer, however, she finally realizes what she’s looking at—it’s one of those containers the Catholics routinely lock bits and pieces of their holiest holies inside, the better to prepare them for ritual display. Dust from the road to Egypt and splinters of the True Cross, broken femurs and nail-pierced palms; that severed tongue they keep in the Vatican’s treasure-trove, black and slimy, wedged deep inside a skull made from glass and gold . . .

  (relics)

  . . . yes, that’s the word. Which makes this a reliquary, though Kotzeleh can’t ever remember having heard of—let alone having seen, in the so-called flesh—a reliquary big enough to hold somebody’s whole body inside it.

  On the wall above, meanwhile, just one flaking section of the nearest fresco: A monster’s foreshortened face gaping down on coffin-box and supplicant/tourists alike, snouted, with teeth like tusks.

  “What is that, anyway?” Kotzeleh demands. “A monkey? Some kind of . . . ”

  “A saint,” Lev replies, still studying their find. Then adds, at her look: “Pretty girl—they’ve got their stories, same as us; it’s rude not to listen at all, even when you know you’ll have to kill them later on. Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of Christopher, the Christ-bearer?”

  Kotzeleh shrugs, a suppressed shiver. “Not like that.”

  The ikon stares, yellow eyes popping, as Lev traces a blackened trail of silver lettering around the reliquary’s rim. Explaining, absently, while he does—

  “It’s the oldest form of the tale, you see: From back in the first millennium, when the Church was still organizing itself, agreeing on what was ‘true’ and what ‘wasn’t’. They don’t debate things the way we do, after all—it’s just one way or another, and anybody who takes the middle ground can stand there and burn. So.

  “Used to be, before people drew accurate maps, Christians—and some Jews, too—believed a race of dog-faced people lived in darkest Africa. Big teeth, panting tongues . . . ” He prods the painted rock with a gentle nail, to illustrate. “Cannibals, too, though that might not apply, since they couldn’t possibly have thought ordinary men belonged to the same speci
es as themselves—”

  To which Kotzeleh nods, thinking: And doesn’t THAT sound familiar?

  (Never trust people who’d nail their own Messiah to a cross . . . oh, but wait, I forgot. That was us, wasn’t it? Supposedly.)

  That supposition alone being good enough, apparently, for everyone else involved to shift the blame squarely onto the shoulders of the Jews.

  And now here they are, Lev and Chavah and she herself, squatting to soak their wounds in the shit of centuries because that same long-ago judgement has finally let loose a dragon on Europe, crushing and pruning and scorching all Warsaw alike—not just the ghetto, oh no, much as it may have begun there—to the bare earth with its hot, poisonous breath.

  They call us vermin, she thinks. But it’s Christianity that’s the true curse. All their talk of love and forgiveness—such garbage, in the end. Have you ever seen them leave a single thing upright and intact behind them, once they’ve decided it needed a laying on of hands?

  “St. Christopher the Cynophelus, who carried the Christ-child over water,” Lev says, musingly. “Because the idea was that God’s redemption could be given to anyone, if they only had enough faith. Even monsters.”

  SUCH garbage.

  Behind Kotzeleh, Chavah has starting crying again; choking, anyway, which sounds pretty much the same. Her burnt head leaves marks where she leans it against the wall. While Kotzeleh fists her hurt hand hard, yet once more, at the scrape and bleed of Chavah’s voice in her ears, forcing herself past an infectiously tempting rush of sympathy by putting her attention squarely elsewhere. Asking—

  “What’s the inscription say, anyway?”

  Lev clicks tongue to teeth, backtracking, and lets his moving finger underline the words. “Home to Xawery, Crusader, Martyr . . . could be Martyr-maker, I’m reading it right . . . and Incorrupt. Contemplator for his sins, and ours. Keep him safe and secret, at your own souls’ cost.”

  Kotzeleh glances around: Blood in the water, seeping like oil; skittering shadows on every side. She reaches for her knife, instinctively, as one seems to move a bit too fast and spider-like for comfort—but finds it right where she left it, sheathed in the hollow of her back between skin and waistband. Cold weight of metal, familiar like the pulse that hammers in her throat, sharp enough to scratch with every breath.