The Chosen Child

by Graham Masterton

  She touched his cheek with her fingertips. Without waking, he brushed them away, as if he were walking through his father’s garden and a midge had settled on his face. She herself was Polish; but she knew that she could never be Polish in the way that Rej was. Although she was working here now, Poland was still a faraway homeland, remote and romanticized, a reality that never was:

  It was a land of dreams: a land of dawns and dusks, a land of blossoming orchards, colourful musk thistles, large and dark branchy trees, glittering streams and dark woodlands, silver spruces, bridges in the middle of nowhere, and dark windmills over swelling waters.

  There was a Poland of emotion. A Poland with old monuments, and churches, and fragments of town walls, palaces and huge parks, shrouded in mists rising from park ponds, roads leading somewhere into the distance, tracks running through villages. All gone; all imaginary; and yet never forgotten. A Poland that existed only in the minds of Poles; and yet a Poland that they would die for. Perhaps that was what the old woman had meant by martyrdom.

  Sarah slept. She lay on her back, one hand raised, her hair spread across the cushion. The glowing fire limned her naked body, her flat stomach and her long slim legs. The last logs on the fire gave a soft lurch, and sparks were whisked up the chimney.

  She dreamed that she was walking across a wide, sunlit barley field, with the ripe barley whipping against her calves. She was wearing a thin flowing dress with large poppies printed on it, which had once belonged to her mother. In the far distance she could see a line of trees, and smoke drifting between them. Although the day was so warm and the wind was so soft, she felt strangely unsettled, as if she had forgotten something important. She wondered what time it was, but she had no way of telling.

  High above, a V-shaped flight of cranes flapped their way south. She had the feeling that the summer was coming to an end, and that winter would soon be here, sooner than anybody could imagine. She started to walk more quickly. She didn’t want to be caught out in the open when the weather turned and it started to snow, not in this flimsy dress. The barley field seemed to stretch ahead of her for ever. She knew that she had already been walking for several hours, and that she was late. She could see people on the horizon, cutting the barley with scythes, but they were so far away that even if she had called out to them, they wouldn’t have been able to hear her.

  The sun began to sink, and in some way, to darken. The wind began to rise and blow chaff across the field, although it was still quite warm. Sarah turned around, and saw, far behind her, a large hunched figure in a cloak or a cape. The figure was following her across the field, its cloak billowing in the wind, and dust rising from its footsteps. It was almost black, this figure, and although there was nothing around it with which she could compare it for size, it looked huge, as if all the perspective in the field had been reversed, like a medieval painting, and objects grew bigger the further away they were.

  She stopped for a moment and shaded her eyes, and watched the figure approaching. Not only was it very large, it was walking very fast, too, unnaturally fast. She had caught sight of it only a moment ago, and yet already it seemed to have reduced the distance between them by a third. She began to feel that she didn’t want to let it catch up with her – that it intended to do her some harm.

  She carried on walking, as fast as she could. She was wearing no shoes and her feet were scratched and bruised by thistles and barley stalks and stones. She ran for a little while, and then walked some more, and then ran for another few minutes, until she was out of breath. All the same, the edge of the field seemed just as far away as it had before, and when she turned around, she was astonished to see that the figure in the cape was less than a hundred metres away from her, and closing on her fast.

  I can see your face as clear as day, Miss Lewandowicz. But I can see the face behind you, too.

  Although she was tired, Sarah started running again. She knew that she was fit, but it was almost impossible to run barefoot across this dry, broken soil, and the heat was almost unbearable. Apart from that, she was naked under her dress, so that her breasts bounced uncomfortably as she ran, and the dress itself seemed to cling to her like a winding-sheet.

  The sun sank lower and lower, until it looked as if it were burning the trees. Sarah glanced over her shoulder and saw that the figure was only a few paces behind her, looming over her like a huge shadow. All the same she tried to keep on running, her breath coming in parched, rasping gasps, her legs scratched into criss-cross patterns by the thistles, blood sticking her toes together.

  I can see the face that’s been close behind you all your life; and now it’s even closer still.

  Now the figure was so close that she could hear its cape rapidly dragging over the barley, and the insistent chop-chop-chopping of its footsteps. She was bursting for air, bursting with panic. She tried to leap over three deep furrows and she fell, bruising her elbow and scratching her cheek. She rolled over onto her back and looked up. The figure was standing over her and it was immense. It must have been three metres tall, maybe taller.

  She was too exhausted to move. All she could do was lie on the soil, panting for breath. She couldn’t understand what this figure was, or what it was going to do to her, but she had never felt such dread in her entire life. The figure seemed to emanate dread, as if everything that Sarah had ever been afraid of was concealed beneath its cape. Fear of the dark; fear of spiders; fear of being alone. She felt that it would only have to sweep open its cape, and she would be overwhelmed in terror.

  ‘Don’t,’ she whispered. ‘Please don’t.’

  The figure stepped even closer. Then it reached up, and cast back its hood, so that the last light from the disappearing sun illuminated its face.

  Sarah’s whole body was locked with fright. The face was very pale, and unnaturally small, like the face of a child or a china doll. It had black, unblinking, expressionless eyes – eyes as dead as a hammerhead shark’s – but its little nose was exactly modelled, and so was its tiny mouth.

  Although its face was so small, the rest of the figure’s head was in proportion to its huge body – a pale domed skull with hanks and patches of diseased-looking hair on it. The contrast between the coarseness of the head and the miniature perfection of the face was so extreme that Sarah couldn’t stop staring at it, too horrified to turn away.

  The figure stared back at her, quite motionless. Then, slowly, it began to lean towards her. It leaned as if its feet were on silent hinges, not bending its body. The little face came closer and closer, until Sarah could have reached out and touched it. There was a long moment of supreme tension. Then suddenly the face distorted. The jaw dropped and the mouth stretched open. Sarah could hear the crackling of bones and muscles, and the glutinous cacophony of wet flesh. The tiny black eyes stayed staring and steady, but the mouth opened so wide that it was inside-out, revealing purplish, swollen gums, and thousands of tiny needle-sharp teeth. A long purple tongue rolled out of his lips, and strings of thick saliva swung from its jowls.

  The sun disappeared, and darkness swallowed everything: the sky, the barley field, the figure in the cape. But in the very last instant of fading light, Sarah heard the metallic sliding sound of a blade being drawn out of a scabbard, and glimpsed a huge steel blade being lifted into the air.

  She couldn’t scream. She couldn’t breathe. The night exploded inside her mind, like a black glass window breaking. She felt herself dropping through the ground, through layers and layers of time and history, through countless harvests, through woods and bushes and battles and blood, buried by centuries of grief, buried by soil that was crumbled in summer, frozen in winter, sodden in spring.

  She thrashed from side to side, suffocated, crushed; and it was only when Rej seized hold of her arms and shouted at her that she opened her eyes.

  It was still very dark. The fire had died out, but she could see the outline of his shoulder.

  ‘What the hell’s wrong?’ he asked her. ‘I thought you were
having a fit.’

  She lay back for a moment. She was dripping with perspiration. Even her hair was wet. She couldn’t believe that she wasn’t covered in thousands of tons of soil; and that what she had just been dreaming was just a dream.

  Rej said, ‘You all right now?’ and she nodded. He climbed off her. He fumbled for his trousers and found his cigarette lighter, and lit the oil-lamp next to the couch. His hair was sticking up and he looked almost boyish.

  ‘I was all ready to call an ambulance.’

  She drew the blanket over herself. ‘Honestly... I’m fine now. I’m okay, I promise.’

  He sat watching her, one hand on her thigh. ‘What was it, a nightmare? You kept saying “don’t”.’

  ‘It was nothing. Sleeping in a strange place, that’s all. Why don’t you turn out that lamp and come back to sleep?’

  ‘Do you feel like a drink? How about a cup of tea?’

  She dabbed her forehead with the blanket, and smiled at him. ‘Listen, I’m fine. I really am. I just need to get some sleep.’

  He looked like a man who would have done almost anything for a cigarette. But he nodded, and patted her leg, and said, ‘Okay... if that’s what you want.’

  He reached over, lifted her head, and plumped up the cushion that she had been lying on. As he did so, the aspen berries rolled out. He lifted the cushion completely, and saw the amber bracelet, and the snipping of hair. He let the cushion drop back, and looked down at her with a disappointed expression on his face.

  ‘What?’ she demanded.

  ‘You tried it, didn’t you? That stupid spell.’

  ‘Of course I tried it! What did you expect? I wanted to find out what she was talking about. She knew my name, Stefan! I mean, what are the odds against that?’

  ‘There are no such things as spells, for God’s sake. Magic, superstition – it’s all in the mind.’

  ‘Oh, stop talking like an apparatchik. She knew my goddamned name!’

  Rej turned his face away and didn’t say anything; but Sarah could see a muscle working in his cheek. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to call you that. But I had to know.’

  After a while he turned back again. ‘So what did you see?’ he asked her. ‘Or was it nothing but a nightmare?’

  ‘I was walking in a field, and something was chasing me. In the end, it caught up with me. It was horrible. It was all covered in a kind of a cloak, and it had a huge head and a tiny face. A tiny, tiny face, just like a little child. It leaned over me – it tilted right over me – and then its mouth opened so wide. It had a knife, too. Well, more of a sword than a knife. It pulled it out, and God knows what it was going to do to me – but then I woke up.’

  ‘A cloak?’ asked Rej. ‘What colour?’

  ‘I’m not sure. It could have been black; it could have been very dark blue.’

  ‘Any buttons on it?’

  ‘Buttons? I don’t know. I can’t remember. I was too terrified.’

  ‘Think. Did it have buttons on it?’

  ‘Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. Why is it so important?’

  Rej said, ‘Listen – if what you dreamed was only a dream, then it isn’t important at all. But if the spell really worked – if you really saw this face that’s been following you – then every single detail that you can remember is just as important as if you saw this person in the flesh.’

  ‘I’m not sure that it was a person. Well, not in the usual sense of person.’

  ‘So what was it? Some kind of... thing?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Sarah. ‘Its face was actually beautiful, but in a very cold, dead kind of way. Its eyes were totally blank, they didn’t have any expression at all. But its head, its scalp – it was horrible, all tufty and balding and scaly. It looked as if it was suffering from ringworm, or something like that.’

  ‘Could you draw it for me?’ asked Rej.

  ‘I’m not sure that I’d want to. It frightened me to death.’

  Rej leaned over her and kissed her, first on the forehead and then on the lips. She touched his cheek, and said, ‘I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have called you an apparatchik.’

  ‘Hunh!’ he shrugged. ‘Maybe I was, once. Maybe old ideological habits die hard.’ He stroked her shoulder as if he couldn’t quite believe that it was real. ‘You’re used to freedom,’ he said. ‘I can smell it on you. It’s exciting.’

  Sarah had a feeling then, quite unexpected, that she and Rej would never be able to have anything more than a fleeting relationship, a night here in Czerwinsk, maybe one or two nights more back in Warsaw, but nothing permanent. He was strong, and he was kind, and she was almost in love with him. But he had so many years of catching up to do.

  ‘This thing,’ she said, ‘whatever it was, came following me over the field. It was so frightening that I couldn’t find the strength to get away from it. It seemed to drain all of the strength out of me. It even drained the light out of the sky.’

  Rej said, ‘When I was down in the sewers, and I was attacked, my flashlight went dead. It was just as if somebody had sucked all the power out of it.’

  ‘It was so fast,’ said Sarah. ‘I was running, but it still managed to catch up with me.’

  ‘This thing in the sewers was fast, too. I only managed to escape because they were dragging me out with a rope.’

  Sarah closed her eyes, and tried to picture the figure that had been pursuing her. Its exquisite, diminutive face. Its raggedy, diseased-looking skull. Its heavy, windblown cape. She could see it as clearly as if it were tilted in front of her, the way it had in her dream. And there were two buttons, holding its cape together; two buttons, connected with a chain. And on each button, the face of a snarling beast.

  ‘Yes,’ she told Rej. ‘It did have buttons. I can draw them for you.’

  Rej sat beside her while she sketched one of the buttons in the margin of yesterday’s Super Express. He drummed his fingers and she was dying to tell him that he could smoke; but she didn’t. When she was finished, she passed over the newspaper and watched while Rej examined it.

  ‘No doubt about it,’ he said, after two or three minutes. ‘That’s exactly it.’

  ‘That’s exactly what?’

  ‘The same button that we found after Jan Kaminski was killed. It was attached to a piece of very old velvet.’ He looked intently at her. ‘Your dream or your nightmare or whatever it was... it was real. There was no way you could have drawn this button without seeing it first.’

  Sarah said, ‘Oh, God,’ and covered her mouth with her hand.

  ‘What are you worried about?’ said Rej. ‘This is one step nearer to finding out who the Executioner is.’

  ‘But how could I do that? How could I know what this button looked like, just from a dream?’

  ‘I take back what I said before. I don’t think it was a dream. Not in the conventional sense. I think you actually saw the Executioner.’

  ‘That creature? With his great big cloak, and his eyes, and his mouth and everything? How could that be real? And supposing it is real?’

  ‘Then we find it,’ said Rej, ‘and we arrest it. And if we can’t arrest it, we’ll kill it. Then you and your workers can get on with building your fancy hotel, and I can go back to work.’

  ‘But why is it looking for me?’

  ‘For the same reason that it went looking for all of those other people... little Zofia and Ewa Zborowska and Bronislaw Slesinski. They were all connected with the Home Army. It wants to hunt down every last one, and kill them, though God alone knows why.’

  Sarah was silent for a moment. She felt deeply tired, but she knew that she wouldn’t be able to sleep. ‘Let me draw it for you,’ he said. ‘Then at least you’ll know what you’re looking for.’

  Rej leaned over and kissed her cheek. She had a feeling that it would be one of the last kisses that he would ever give her.

  *

  Clayton and Marek hurried Indian-file along the narrow oval sewer, their shoes spla
shing rhythmically in the water. Their flashlight beams jiggled and jumped as they ran, until the sewer became a kaleidoscope of dancing reflections.

  ‘Can you see him?’ Marek panted. ‘He can’t have got too far ahead.’

  Clayton tried to steady his flashlight as he ran. At the far end of the sewer, it looked as if a shadow was disappearing round a corner. ‘There! That’s him! Did you see that? Just caught a glimpse of him!’

  ‘How come he doesn’t need a flashlight?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Clayton. ‘Probably knows his way by now. Less’n he can see in the dark.’

  ‘Oh, come on. This is total darkness, down here. Nobody can see in total darkness.’

  ‘Don’t believe it, kid. They have lizards back in New Mexico, live all of their lives under the ground, in prehistoric caves. They can see, these critters, they’ve proved it, whether by infra-red or ultra-violet or what have you. Don’t tell me that a human being couldn’t do the same.’

  They went on jogging for another two or three minutes, and then they came to a branch in the sewer – one leading south, one leading south-west. ‘Ssh, stop, listen,’ said Clayton, so they stood completely still, suppressing their breathing. From the south-westward tunnel they heard the unmistakable slapping of feet in several centimetres of water, and a single, barking cough. ‘Got the bastard,’ said Clayton, and they set off jogging again.

  They had no idea how far they had travelled. Marek guessed that they had probably run right under Marszalkowska and crossed Trasa Lazienkowska; but they had been running for so long that they may have gone very much further. The air in the sewer was growing increasingly fetid, and Marek couldn’t stop himself from spitting and coughing. His wet clothes clung to his skin, and he felt sick and exhausted. If Clayton hadn’t kept on jogging ahead with such determination, he would have found the nearest manhole and climbed out as soon as he could.