He took out his clasp-knife, and opened the manhole cover. He made no attempt to hurry, or to conceal what they were doing, but nobody took any notice.
‘Before that, the earliest historical reference I could find to any kind of mass beheading was way back in the 15th century, after the Battle of Grunwald.’
Marek gave him a shifty, uncertain look.
‘You never heard of the Battle of Grunwald?’ said Clayton, in surprise. ‘That’s the same as me never hearing of Bull Run.’
‘What’s Bull Run?’ Marek asked him.
‘Come on,’ said Clayton. ‘Let’s just get down this hole before anybody starts wanting to know what the hell we’re doing here, having a history seminar next to an open sewer. You go first... I’ll close the cover after us.’
Marek peered dubiously into the darkness. ‘How do we know that Mr Okun isn’t on his way back?’
‘We don’t, kid. But there are two of us and only one of him.’
Marek cautiously climbed down into the manhole. The iron rungs were worn, and he slipped on the third and almost fell, but Clayton caught his sleeve. ‘So long as you don’t wind up in the shit.’
When Marek was sufficiently far down, Clayton climbed in after him, and closed the cover. Section by triangular section, with emphatic metallic clangs, Marek saw the sky disappear like a cut-up cake, until they were swallowed in darkness. He could hear echoing and gurgling and huge bellowing whispers, and noises that sounded like distant cries. He kept on climbing down, trying to direct his flashlight beam so that he could see his feet. He was terrified of missing the last step and dropping blindly into raw sewage, over his boots. He was already beginning to regret that he had agreed to get involved with Clayton and Rej. It had seemed cool and different at the time, but now he felt seriously apprehensive. Supposing Mr Okun was the Executioner? He had already cut off Rej’s finger and scarred his face: what would he do to him, if he caught him, especially since his only escape route was blocked by Clayton’s panting bulk and a closed manhole cover.
‘You okay, kid?’ Clayton asked him, in a tubular-sounding voice, and Marek had to answer, ‘Fine. I’m really fine.’
They reached the main sewer pipe. Marek’s flashlight illuminated a wide arched ceiling, in the style constructed immediately after the Second World War, although the thick encrustations of yellowish salts that streaked its sides made it look much older – more of a hermit’s thousand-year-old cave than a municipal sewer. The salts sparkled and glittered, and although it was noisy with clattering water and the air was almost unbreathable, it looked almost enchanted. Marek stepped down in the slowly-moving sewage, and was relieved to find that it was less than three centimetres deep.
‘It’s okay, it’s shallow,’ he called. Then he took two steps forward and plunged up to his crotch.
‘Ja pierdole!’ he shouted. He was so angry that he couldn’t even move. ‘My Levis! My fucking Levis!’
Clayton reached the bottom rung, and splashed over to help him out. ‘Don’t make waves!’ Marek screeched at him. ‘Don’t make waves!’
Clayton gripped his hand and hauled him back onto the shallower shelf at the side of the pipe. ‘Most of these type sewers have a deep central channel,’ he remarked, flicking his flashlight beam right and left.
‘Yes, well, thanks for telling me. Shit!’
Their flashlights criss-crossed, and they could see that the sewer went off in three different directions – a wide main drain running north-west towards Piekna; and south-east towards Ujadowskie Avenue; and then a lower, narrower drain running off south-west although they couldn’t tell how far because it curved to the right after only twenty metres. This drain must have been very much older than the main sewer, because it was built of brick, and its curved walls were covered with dripping stalactites of curdled grease. Marek saw a humped grey shape wriggling in the sewage that ran down it, and took two steps back in fright. Only Clayton gripping his sleeve saved him from dropping back into the deep central channel.
‘Did you see that? What the hell was that?’
‘Rat,’ said Clayton laconically. ‘Small one, too.’
‘Shit, I forgot about rats.’
Clayton was examining the bricks where the older sewer joined with the post-war sewer. ‘Somebody’s been walking up and down this pipe fairly regular,’ he remarked. ‘Look at the long horizontal scratch marks in the grease. Some of them are old but are some of them are fresh. There – look – on the ceiling. Somebody’s been trailing a hand along the ceiling to make sure that they don’t bump their head. Gloved hand, probably, the marks are too wide for bare fingers... and besides, who’d want to drag their bare fingers through this stuff?’
‘So what do you think?’ asked Marek, edgily. The cold sewage was beginning to trickle inside the legs of his jeans, and he could hardly wait to pull them off and wash himself. ‘You think that Mr Okun came this way?’
‘Looks like it. Not just today, but on a regular basis.’
Marek said, ‘Maybe it’s time we called the gliny.’
Clayton shook his head, still shining his flashlight from left to right, scrutinizing the brickwork and the channelling, peering at the stalactites to see if any had been broken. ‘People don’t realize what trails they leave behind. You know something, I was six months in Arizona once, training up Native Americans as police officers. They were shit when it came to paperwork, believe me. But when it came to seeing where people had passed by, it was like they had X-ray eyes, you know, like Superman. They could point to a stone that somebody must have displaced, by stepping on it; or a broken weed that couldn’t have been broken by the wind. It wasn’t magic. It was observation, and sheer out-and-out logic; but it taught me a whole lot about hunting people down. You see here? You see these semicircular scuff marks, on the sides of the brickwork. Those are shoe-marks, the edges of somebody’s shoes, you can see the same marks on automobile carpets, or the lower part of well-used doors.’
He peered down into the darkness of the sewer. ‘That part wasn’t magic, the analytical part; but they did have magic. I saw a Pima Indian officer find a wanted man in two hundred square miles of desert, just by following the smoke from this little burner he had. Whichever direction the smoke blew, he followed it; and I can swear to you, kid, there were times when that smoke was blowing upwind. It was ever since then that I decided that crimes could be solved all kinds of different ways: occult included.’
‘What do you think we ought to do now?’ Marek asked him. ‘If Mr Okun’s gone down there –’
‘I’m pretty sure he has gone down there. And if that’s the case, what do you think we ought to do?’
‘Um, go back up top and wait for him to come out?’
‘And say what? “You went in that sewer and now you’ve come back out again – I’m calling the cops”? Do me a favour. If this guy’s the Executioner, we’ve got to find some proof, and the only way we’re going to find any proof is by following him.’
Marek looked into the narrow, curving sewer. He couldn’t see the rat any longer, but that was no guarantee that it wasn’t still there, slick and grey and crowded with diseases, and waiting to bite at his ankles.
‘What if we meet him, face-to-face?’
‘I told you. There’s only one of him, and there’s two of us.’
‘Clayton, for Christ’s sake. He chopped three big Germans into little bits.’
Clayton beckoned him forward, into the sewer. ‘That’s because they didn’t know what to expect. They didn’t have any inkling what they were dealing with.’
‘And I suppose you do?’
Clayton walked a little way ahead of him, silhouetted by his flashlight like a character from a cinema noir movie. ‘You know the trouble with you kids today?’ he told him. ‘You always think you know everything; and because of that, you never learn anything. When I was your age, I was a filing clerk; and being a filing clerk meant wearing a shirt and necktie and keeping my hair cut. I was right at the botto
m of the ladder and they gave me all the crap jobs, emptying wastebaskets, making coffee, running errands, and all the time I had to be polite to everybody in the office, yessir, nossir, certainly sir, even the total assholes. And do you know something? I took a pride in myself, and I took a pride in my work, and I never gave backtalk to nobody. In three years I knew the whole damn business better than anybody there, and they made me a manager.’
‘So what’s the moral?’
‘The moral is, keep your mouth shut when you’re young. Never stop listening, and never stop learning. Read the clues, kid, the same way I always had to. Read the fucking clues.’
‘What clues?’
‘The clues to life, kid. Like staying angry on the inside but always being quiet on the outside. And these clues here, you didn’t even see them, did you, you were so damn worried that your pants were wet. The finger marks, the shoe marks – the simple fact that Mr Okun came down here. I mean, people just don’t disappear down manholes, do they?’
‘Maybe they do. Maybe I never noticed it before.’
‘They don’t, believe me. But you were smart enough to spot him. Which means that you’re smart enough to work out what you’re dealing with.’
By now, they were over twenty metres into the sewer, crouching down slightly so their hair wouldn’t touch the black glutinous stalactites that hung down all around them. The stalactites had the consistency of axle grease and they smelled so foul that Marek’s mouth filled with saliva and he had to keep on spitting.
Clayton said, ‘You’re dealing with something that’s got used to living down here in the dark. In fact, maybe it always lived in the dark, that’s what you have to say to yourself. You have to free your mind, you understand, and not make assumptions. This could be man or beast or monster.’
Marek said, ‘Ssh! Did I hear something?’
Clayton stopped, and listened too. After a few moments, however, he shook his head. ‘You get real weird noises, down in the sewers. Most of the time they’re echoes... you know, trucks driving over manholes, nosy kids getting their heads chopped off.’
‘You told me to read the fucking clues,’ Marek objected.
Clayton turned around and grinned at him. ‘Don’t take it to heart, kid. It’s called stupid American humour.’
They kept on splashing ahead. By now the sewer had curved so far that, when he glanced back, Marek was unable to see the main drain. He didn’t know where Clayton was taking him, or what he expected to find, but he was feeling breathless and sweaty and desperately claustrophobic. He kept thinking about the manhole cover, which was shut tight, and wishing he were climbing up those iron rungs at double-quick speed and forcing it open, and climbing back out onto Koszykowa. But Clayton pressed on, his back hunched, his flashlight reflecting in curves and spangles from the walls and the sewage-water.
‘Are you okay?’ Clayton called back; and Marek said, ‘Fine. Why shouldn’t I be?’
Ahead of them, they heard the rushing sound of cascading water. After thirty more metres, they found themselves in a large, arched chamber, almost the size of a small church. On one side, brownish sewage was foaming down a series of steps, into a larger pool in the centre, which lazily circled before tipping its contents down a shallow slide, into total darkness.
‘So where do we go from here?’ asked Marek, raising his voice so that Clayton could hear him over the confusion of pouring and gurgling and gushing.
‘I don’t know... I’ve been trying to work out why the Executioner comes down here, whoever he is. That’s why I’ve been reading up all of this history, and all of this mythology. Most of it may be bunkum, but in every legend there’s usually some grain of reality, you know. Some essential truth.’
‘Maybe Mr Okun is just a thief, you know, and hides his stolen property in the sewers.’
Clayton shook his head. ‘Would you come down here, if it wasn’t totally necessary? No, kid, the sewers are the key to this. The sewers is what this is all about.’
Their flashlights reflected on the dun-brown surface of the water. Then they probed the various pipes and entrances all around the sides of the chamber. There was no indication that anybody had been here, or where they might have gone. Marek was more than ready to leave right away; but Clayton stayed where he was, his eyes narrowed, his flashlight systematically searching the walls.
‘There has to be something. You can’t pass through anyplace without leaving something.’
‘But he could be anywhere,’ said Marek. ‘He could have left by another manhole, and be back at home by now.’
Clayton ignored him. ‘I was telling you about the Battle of Grunwald, wasn’t I? That was back in 1410, when King Ladislaus Jagiello gathered his soldiers in the Kampinos Forest, and beat the living crap out of the Teutonic Knights.’ He continued to scrutinize the chamber, his flashlight beam descending every step of the foaming cascade, step by step. ‘It was a victory, but it wasn’t an easy victory. Two of those Teutonic Knights fought so madly that the Poles thought they were possessed. They rode right through the middle of King Ladislaus’ men, cutting their heads off like they were asparagus. Heads, arms and legs flying everywhere.
‘And the story goes that when it was all over, and the king’s men searched the battlefield, trying to find the bodies of these guys, they found their armour scattered around, but that was it. No bodies, nothing. At first they put it down to magic – you know, the way that anybody would have done in the 15th century. But then they found some burrows in the ground nearby; and they dug up one of these burrows, and two or three metres down they found a “thing like a child, yet the size of a man, with broad hunched shoulders and legs like those of a cricket”. It had a face “so terrible that none could look on it”. When they first found it, they thought it was dead; but after a while they realized it was deeply asleep, like it was hibernating. So they did what any self-respecting 15th-century soldier would do, and they hung it, and disembowelled it, and chopped it up, and burned it, and had a priest sprinkle holy water all over the ashes.’
Marek was straining his ears. He thought he could hear footsteps, faintly splashing along one of the pipes.
Clayton cleared his throat. ‘A few days later, though, they found another one of these “things”, another one of these so-called “children”, and they sealed it in an oak box and brought it back to Warsaw. They put it on display for two or three weeks, but people started complaining about sickness and nightmares; and the church bells started ringing in the night when there was nobody there to ring them. They brought John XXIII, the Anti-Pope, from Rome; and he recommended that they bury this “thing” as deep as they could, and never speak of it, which they didn’t.’
Marek said, ‘Are you trying to scare me, or what?’
‘I’m just telling you what I’ve been reading about. You can read it for yourself. It’s all in the National Library. Why do people never use their own libraries? You should see the stuff they’ve got in there, brilliant.’
‘I can hear something,’ said Marek.
‘You can hear your brains working, for the first time in your life.’
‘No, seriously. I can hear something.’
They listened, and waited. Over the rushing of the water, Marek was sure that he could hear a high, plaintive wail.
‘Can’t you hear that?’ he asked Clayton; but Clayton shook his head.
‘It’s like a kid crying. I’m sure of it.’
‘Which direction is it coming from? Any idea?’
Marek listened again, but the wailing had stopped. He pointed tentatively towards a narrow tunnel on the far side of the chamber. ‘I couldn’t be sure, but I think it was coming from over there.’
‘Let’s check it out, then,’ said Clayton.
There was only one way to reach the other side of the chamber, twenty-five metres away, and that was to walk across the third highest step of the thirty-step cascade.
‘We can’t go across there!’ Marek protested.
�
�How else?’ asked Clayton. ‘Come on, kid, it’ll be a breeze. Just follow me.’
Clayton went first, cautiously placing his left foot onto the narrow concrete ledge. Sewage splashed over his boot in a bubbling flurry, and he almost slipped. He placed his right foot ahead of his left foot, like a tightrope walker, and then began to inch his way across, his arms extended to give himself balance.
‘Be careful, kid!’ he called back. ‘This concrete’s real slimy.’
Marek took a deep breath and then wished that he hadn’t, because the air was so fetid. He stepped out onto the cascade, and went teetering across it, the water rushing against his ankles and chilling his feet. Ahead of him, Clayton made it across and was leaning against the curved wall, emptying sewage out of one of his boots.
‘Just take it as it comes!’ he called. ‘Don’t try to rush it!’
Marek was more than half way across when his left foot slipped off the ledge and he had to seesaw from side to side to stop himself from falling. He managed to lift his foot back up again, but then he found that he had frozen. He had lost all momentum, and his legs refused to move.
‘Come on, kid, just put one foot in front of the other!’ Clayton exhorted him. But all Marek could do was stand in the middle of the cascade, his arms outstretched, biting his lip in panic. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t breathe: all he could do was to think that he was going to fall.
The Chosen Child Page 26
