The Chosen Child

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Come on, Marek, get your ass over here!’

  Marek heard another tremulous noise, but this wasn’t the sound of a child crying: this was him, whimpering. He thought with an odd sense of dispassion that he sounded just like a dog whose paw has been run over.

  Clayton came back to the edge of the cascade and tried to reach out for him, but he was still too far away.

  ‘All right!’ said Clayton. ‘I’m coming out to get you! All you have to do is stay still!’

  Clayton stepped back onto the foaming ledge and began to shuffle his way towards Marek with his right arm extended. It took him seven or eight shuffles to reach him, but when Marek tried to snatch at his hand, Clayton stepped back.

  ‘Don’t just grab like that, you’re going to have to take my hand real easy. Get a firm grip, and then just shuffle your way along like I’m doing. Don’t try to walk the way you were before, and don’t look down. If this ledge was painted on a floor, you could walk along it easy. It’s plenty wide enough.’

  Marek stiffly reached out and took Clayton’s hand. Then he began to shuffle his way forward, a few centimetres at a time, trying not to think where he was, trying to believe that he wasn’t going to fall.

  They had almost reached the far edge when a huge dead rat suddenly appeared over the top of the cascade, and tumbled down the steps to lodge against Marek’s ankle. Marek jerked his foot up in disgust. The rat fatly slithered away down the cascade, but Marek began to sway backwards, and he knew that he had irrevocably lost his balance.

  ‘Hold on!’ Clayton bellowed. But it was too late, for both of them. Marek toppled down the cascade, splashing and bumping against the steps, and Clayton came splashing after him.

  Marek was jarred and jolted and bruised by every slithery concrete step. Then Clayton rolled past him, his arms and legs flying, and kicked him in the cheek. The two of them plunged into the deep cold pool of sewage at the bottom of the cascade, and Marek found himself deep underwater.

  It seemed to take him a long, slow century to swim up to the surface. He let out an explosive burst of air, and then spat and spat. Clayton surfaced a moment later, his hair plastered flat over his skull.

  Together, they swam to the edge and clung on to the rusted rungs of a service ladder.

  ‘Why the hell didn’t you let go of my hand?’ Clayton gasped.

  ‘You told me to hold on!’

  Clayton climbed up the ladder with sewage streaming from his clothes. ‘I bet I’ve contracted every damned disease known to Western civilization! I bet I’ve caught cholera and typhus and hepatitis and plague!’

  He reached the concrete platform at the top of the ladder, and furiously kicked away a condom which was draped over his boot. ‘I stink!’ he shouted. ‘I absolutely stink!’

  Marek climbed after him and knelt down on his hands and knees, coughing. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry. I just lost my balance.’

  They trudged back towards the tunnel entrance. ‘Do you still want to go on?’ asked Clayton. ‘I don’t mind quitting while we’re ahead.’

  ‘Let’s quit,’ said Marek. ‘I feel sick.’

  Just as they reached the tunnel, however, they heard a quick, scuffling noise. Clayton immediately shone his flashlight down it, and caught the back of a shadowy, fleeing figure, more like a ghost than a man.

  ‘Is that him?’ he asked Marek.

  Marek nodded, his heart beating in long, suspended thumps.

  ‘Right then. It looks like we don’t have much choice. Let’s get after the bastard.’

  14

  Once the sun had gone down, the country air became chilly and Rej lit the log fire in the living-room. They sat in front of it drinking honey vodka and eating plum cake. They were all tired, because they had been riding all afternoon, hiring horses from a stables on the other side of the village. They had ridden through the woods where it was almost completely silent except for the birds and the jostling and jingling of the horses’ harness. Sarah and Rej had ridden slowly because Rej was so inexperienced, and held his reins as grimly as if he were careening down a mountain on a runaway bobsleigh; but Katarzyna had cantered way ahead of them, right up through the birches and the shivering aspens, until all they could see was an occasional glimpse of her horse’s bright chestnut flank.

  Now Katarzyna was in her pyjamas and ready for bed, and Sarah and Rej were trying to soothe some of the unexpected muscles that they had discovered. The living-room was small and whitewashed, with heavy oak furniture and heaps and heaps of huge cushions, some velvet, some crochet, some embroidered with buttons and beads. On one wall there was a painting of the Vistula in autumn, with knobbly rows of pollarded trees in the foreground and tall wistful poplars in the background. Above the fireplace hung a silver icon of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

  ‘I wish I could go to America,’ said Katarzyna, her eyes reflecting the flames from the birch logs.

  ‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t,’ Sarah told her. ‘You could come and stay with me.’

  ‘Do you live near Disney World? I’d love to see Disney World!’

  ‘No, I don’t. But we could always fly there.’

  ‘How about daddy? Could he come too?’

  Sarah turned to Rej and smiled at him. ‘I don’t know. It depends whether he’s interested in going on rides and talking to giant mice. He would probably find it far too silly.’

  ‘Well...’ said Rej, ‘it might be worth visiting, purely for research.’

  Katarzyna kissed them both goodnight and Rej went to tuck her in. When he came back, ‘You like it here?’ he asked.

  Sarah nodded. ‘It’s beautiful. I wish we were staying longer.’

  ‘We could always come again. My friend hardly ever uses the place these days. His wife died of cancer two years ago. A place like this, well, it’s not the same when you’re on your own.’

  Sarah sipped more vodka and then lay back against the cushions. ‘I can’t stop thinking about that old woman today. She wouldn’t have frightened me so much if she hadn’t have known my name.’

  ‘Coincidence. Inspiration. Magic. It doesn’t matter which, does it? She can’t do anything to harm you.’

  ‘Do you believe in magic?’

  Rej looked at the fire. The flickering light cast a strong shadow under the scar on his cheek, where the thing in the sewer had cut him with its knife. ‘I’m not sure. My mother was very superstitious. She was forever tossing salt over her shoulder and making sure that she didn’t walk under ladders. If ever she had a wart, she used to rub it with a stone, then wrap up the stone in paper, and drop it at the crossroads at the end of our street. Whoever picked it up was supposed to get infected by the wart instead of her.’ He laughed. ‘I can’t remember if it ever worked.’

  ‘But this face that’s supposed to be following me.’

  ‘Oh, that’s just rubbish. Country people love making fools out of us townies.’

  ‘You think so? After that seance, I think I could believe in just about anything.’

  Rej was silent for a while. Then he reached over and took hold of her hand. Oddly, it didn’t come as any surprise.

  ‘If you could believe in just about anything... could you believe that I think you’re very attractive?’

  She found herself smiling. ‘I think you’re attractive, too. So there.’

  ‘Me? I’m ugly. I’ve got a face like a block of rock.’

  ‘I happen to like blocks of rock. You know what they say. Inside every block of rock, there’s a beautiful sculpture, just waiting to be discovered.’

  ‘That’s very poetic.’

  ‘Maybe you make me feel poetic. Maybe you make me feel all kinds of things that men haven’t made me feel before. Like, safe. No man ever made me feel so well-protected.’

  ‘Just because I lost my temper with that boyfriend of yours.’

  ‘No, it’s more than that. Every other man treats me as if I’m some kind of ball-crushing Amazon. All right – I’m doing a very hard j
ob in a very competitive world, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t need looking after in the same way that any woman does. And you do it.’

  Rej looked into her eyes for a very long time. ‘They’re green,’ he said. ‘They’re like the sea, where it’s very shallow; almost transparent.’

  He leaned forward and kissed her. It was a gentle, caring kiss at first, almost the kind of kiss that you give to someone you love while they’re asleep. But then Sarah put her arm around his shoulders, and drew him closer, and opened her mouth.

  She had never been kissed like this before. He was strong, and he was firm, and his tongue dived between her teeth like a muscular seal. But there was none of the crushing and slobbering that she was used to. He kissed to please her; he kissed to excite her; and she suddenly realized what it was that made him so different: he wasn’t afraid of her.

  He cupped her breast through her soft pink checkered shirt, and she could tell how much it aroused him. He kissed her cheeks and her chin and her eyes and her nose. His hands were broad and his fingers were stubby, but he stroked her hair and her neck so gently that she had to close her eyes, as if she were dreaming. He kissed her shoulder, and started to unbutton her blouse.

  ‘I knew you wanted to do this,’ she whispered, kissing his craggy cheek, and grinning at him.

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘You gave up smoking... and you knew I wouldn’t like kissing you so much if you smoked.’

  He eased the blouse from her shoulders. ‘Everybody has to make sacrifices to get what they want.’

  She knelt up to face him, and they kissed some more, but much more hungrily now. They wanted each other and there was no need for them to pretend. Rej reached around Sarah’s broad, pale-skinned back, and released the catch of her bra. Her breasts swung free from the cups, heavy and wide-nippled, with the palest branches of blue veins. Rej took them in his hands and gently squeezed them, rolling her nipples in between finger and thumb until they crinkled.

  They dragged piles of cushions in front of the fire. Then Sarah unbuckled her belt and stepped out of her jeans. Rej stripped, too, wrenching off his shirt and kicking off his corduroy trousers. His body was slabby and muscular, not a young man’s body, but the body of a man who keeps himself tolerably fit and lives off nervous energy. His chest was marked with a small crucifix of grey hair.

  He tugged down Sarah’s white silk panties, revealing a soft tuft of blonde hair. He touched her with his finger between her legs, and she was already slippery. He kissed her with his eyes closed. Then he opened them again and said, ‘I told a lie. You’re not attractive. You’re beautiful.’

  His blue boxer shorts were rearing in front. Sarah gripped his erection through the cotton and gave it a hard, playful squeeze. ‘What’s under here, komisarz? Don’t tell me this is where you keep your nightstick?’

  He laughed, but at the same time he couldn’t hold back a little gasp. She tugged down the shorts and his penis bobbed up, big and swollen and emphatically veined. She delicately scratched his balls with her fingernails, and they wrinkled up in reaction like big crimson walnuts.

  ‘Has it been long?’ she asked him, kissing him, and slowly rubbing his penis up and down.

  ‘It’s never been like this, ever,’ he told her, close to her ear.

  She lay back on cushions, her big breasts spreading sideways. He climbed over her and kissed her more and more frantically – her mouth and her neck and her shoulders. He cupped her right breast as if it were a full glass of champagne, and kissed her nipple.

  She kissed him just as frantically in return – his chest, his Adam’s apple. She bit at his nipples, too.

  ‘Condom,’ he said, reaching to his trouser pockets.

  Sarah lay back while he located the packet. She held his penis in her hand while he tore the foil open, and stretched the rubber over his glans. She helped him roll it right down, and then she slowly massaged him, while all the time she looked him directly in the eye, challenging him, arousing him, with eyes as green as shallow seas.

  With the fingers of her left hand she parted her lips, and he entered her. His whole body was tense, and the muscles around his buttocks felt like rope. He was thick and hard and she felt herself opening up to take him in. She wanted him in, as far as he could, as deeply as humanly possible, and more. They made love in silence, in front of the fire. She dragged her fingernails down his back, and clutched his buttocks, and pulled them apart as if she were breaking bread. She probed inside him and he winced, but he didn’t push her away. He thrust harder and harder, and deeper and deeper; and although his rhythm was unfamiliar at first, it began to carry her away, until she matched it with her own movements, and the two of them were pushing at each other, hip to hip, as if they were trying to force themselves to occupy the same space at the same time, in defiance of physics, in defiance of reality, in defiance of everything else except that they needed each other.

  Sarah felt the room beginning to contract. The fire was far too hot and far too bright, and the cushions were far too prickly. But Rej kept pushing and pushing, and the feeling was so good that she didn’t want it to stop, ever. His face, looking down at her: his block of rock. His muscular chest, with its hairy cross and its gloss of perspiration. The relentless squeaking of his condom. He pushed and he pushed and she felt as if the soles of her feet had suddenly opened up, like floodgates, and allowed a gush of pleasurable darkness to fill her lower legs, and then her knees, and then her thighs.

  ‘Stefan,’ she whispered, and she loved the sound of the name. The darkness filled her completely, and she began to shake, and shake, and grip his shoulders. He kept on pushing and the feeling was so intense that she lifted her head from the pillows as if she were having a fit. ‘Stefan.’ Her nipples were rigid and her whole body was tight.

  Then Stefan quaked, too, and arched his back; and deep inside her she felt his condom bulge.

  He took himself out, very carefully, and lay on the cushions beside her. They looked into each other’s eyes for reassurance and explanations; but they were deeply pleased with each other, too.

  ‘You won’t believe me if I say that I love you,’ said Rej.

  ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ she said. She propped herself up on one elbow and traced a cloverleaf pattern on his bare shoulder with her fingertip, over and over.

  ‘Well... you don’t seem like the kind of woman who believes in love at first sight.’

  ‘What kind of woman is that?’ she challenged him. ‘As a matter of fact, I believe in romantic accidents. Two people, who should never have met, discovering each other completely by chance. Three years ago I was working in New York. If somebody had come up and told me that in three years’ time I’d be making love to a Polish detective in a cottage overlooking the Vistula, I’d have told them they were crazy.’

  He kissed her, and touched her forehead and her hair. ‘Sarah Lewandowicz,’ he said, with satisfaction.

  ‘I’m only Lewandowicz in bed,’ she retorted. ‘Up, and dressed, I’m Leonard.’

  Rej got up and poured them two more glasses of honey vodka. She lay back looking at his naked body. He was so sinewy and strong, and yet he looked vulnerable, too. When he came back and lay beside her, she licked her fingertip and touched each of his nipples; and then she reached down and massaged his penis and his balls, feeling his stickiness.

  ‘Do you know what I would like now, more than anything else in the world?’ he asked. His eyes were very serious.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said, and kissed his lips.

  ‘A cigarette. I would die for a cigarette.’

  *

  The logs gradually collapsed and died, until there was nothing left of the fire but sparks and ashes. Rej fell asleep on the cushions, one hand holding his penis, like a small boy. Sarah covered him with one of the home-woven blankets that were draped over the back of the sofa, and kissed him. He didn’t even stir. A whole afternoon of horseback riding had obviously exhausted him.

  When she was
sure that he was asleep, she tippytoed across the room and opened her Gucci satchel. She took out a twist of newspaper, and opened it up. Five aspen berries rolled into the palm of her hand. Then she opened her purse and took out a silver-and-amber bracelet that Piotr Gogiel had given her after her first meeting with Vistula Kredytowy. She hoped that it wouldn’t matter that the amber and the silver were joined together. Finally, she took out her nail scissors and carefully cut off a centimetre from her fringe.

  She glanced back at Rej: still deeply asleep. He had been so warm and protective towards her that she felt incredibly cheap for trying out the old woman’s charm. But Madame Krystyna’s seance had opened up a door for her; and made her realize that there was another world; just as real and just as tumultuous as the so-called ‘real world’; and if the old woman’s charm could show her what this face was that was supposed to be following her, then she wanted at least to try it.

  Naked, she crept back across the room, lifted a large brocade cushion, and arranged the berries underneath it in the pattern of a five-pointed star. She laid her amber bracelet right in the centre of the star, and her hair clipping right in the centre of the amber bracelet. She lowered the cushion, and then rested her head on it, settling down to sleep.

  It was over an hour before she finally closed her eyes. She kept thinking about the old woman snatching her sleeve and screeching at her. ‘Why do you bring that face? What are you trying to do? Show us what a martyr you are?’

  What had frightened Sarah the most was that the old woman had known her name, when she couldn’t have known, no matter what excuses Rej had come up with. But the word martyr had frightened her too. Martyr conjured up images of painful, self-sacrificial death, like Joan of Arc, or Catherine broken on the wheel. The old woman’s words had sounded more like a prophecy than a taunt, as if Sarah had already committed herself to a course of action which would lead her inevitably to martyrdom. She couldn’t imagine what cause she would possibly die for, but then few martyrs do.

  She watched Rej sleeping, and wondered about him, and what kind of man he really was. She knew that he wasn’t much of an intellectual, and that he wasn’t particularly sharp, but she had to admit to herself that his lack of flash was part of his attraction. If he didn’t know anything, he didn’t try to pretend that he did. He never carried crisply-laundered handkerchiefs, only small packets of tissues. And he didn’t seem to know the meaning of the words ‘pressing your pants’.