The Chosen Child

by Graham Masterton

  But then she heard a high, plaintive sound, a sound that echoed all around the vault, as if every skull that was nailed to the brickwork was crying in chorus. It was the child crying – crying for what it was, crying for what it had done. It was the eeriest, saddest, most unsettling sound that Sarah had ever heard in her life.

  Rej stepped forward, and laid his hands on the child’s black-caped shoulders.

  ‘I forgive you,’ he said. ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, I forgive you.’

  The knife stayed aloft, its blade gleaming. But already, something extraordinary was happening. Cracks were appearing on the child’s face like the cracks in an old oil painting. Underneath his cape, his body started to sag, Sarah could hear crackling noises, like brittle bones breaking, or wing cases being crushed.

  At the same time, she heard – she felt – a deep vibrato humming. It sounded like monks chanting, or thousands of insects in a summer field. It sounded like organs, and machinery, and engines rumbling. It began to swell, and to fill the vault from floor to ceiling, louder and louder, until the concrete landing began to vibrate under their feet and even the iron railings started to sing, like railway tracks when a locomotive is coming at speed.

  The knife fell to the concrete floor with a dull ringing noise. The child’s head dropped into his cape. Rej tried to hold him up, tried to support him, but his cape folded up, fold upon fold, layer upon layer. And the humming went on, until it was thunderous. The humming of soldiers, the bellowing of tanks, the thunder of bombing.

  The child collapsed to the ground, but the noise went on and on, and Mr Okun knelt on the steps with his hands clamped over his ears.

  ‘Let’s get out!’ Rej shouted. ‘Let’s just get the hell out!’

  There was a crackling rumble, and a massive chunk of masonry dropped from the ceiling, and splashed into the sewage below. Then another piece fell, and another, and a whole row of brickwork dropped away, taking scores of skulls with it. The entire vault shook so violently that Sarah couldn’t even stand up properly.

  ‘Come on!’ said Marek, and helped her towards the tunnel.

  She turned once: to look at what remained of the child. There was nothing but a heap of decaying velvet, and curved, translucent pieces of bone and body-shell.

  Mr Okun came up the steps, his face rigid. ‘What have you done?’ he screamed. ‘What have you done?’

  He knelt beside the dead child and picked up pieces of velvet as if he hoped he could breathe life back into them. He turned to Sarah accusingly, and screamed, ‘You’ll be punished for this! I swear it!’

  At that moment, the vaulted ceiling cracked from one side to the other, and collapsed. Hundreds of tons of bricks and concrete buried the Executioner’s trophies, and the Executioner itself, and Mr Okun, too. The last that Sarah saw of him, a huge block of concrete was dropping onto his back.

  ‘Come on!’ Rej shouted at her ‘Before the whole damned sewer caves in!’

  As they ran along the tunnel, they heard a final shattering rumble, and thick dust came billowing after them. Sarah and Marek took Rej between them, and together they made their way back up to the surface. Marek opened the manhole cover, and they climbed wearily up the ladder and into the hazy sunshine.

  *

  Ben was in Irena’s office when she arrived, sitting on her desk and laughing; but when she walked in and put down her briefcase he stopped laughing, and stood up, and smiled, and coughed.

  Her hair was still wet from the shower, and combed straight back, so that she looked like her father. She wore a plain grey tailored suit and a fresh primula-coloured blouse.

  ‘Well, well,’ said Ben. ‘I understand that congratulations are called for. You and Komisarz Rej have actually done the business.’

  ‘News travels fast,’ said Sarah.

  Ben tapped the side of his nose. ‘Contacts, that’s the secret. Contacts. Komisarz Jarczyk told me, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘I wanted to talk to you about contacts,’ said Sarah. ‘Why don’t you come into my office?’

  Ben heaved himself off Irena’s desk and gave her a wink. ‘See you later,’ he said. ‘And don’t be late.’

  He followed Sarah into her office and Sarah closed the door. ‘Did Jarczyk also tell you that Roman Zboinski is dead?’

  Ben nodded. ‘Not a great loss to humanity,’ he said.

  ‘A great loss to your bank balance, though.’

  ‘I really don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Oh, no? I’m talking about fraud, perpetrated through the Senate contingency account, that’s what I’m talking about.’

  Ben innocently spread his arms. ‘Fraud? What fraud? You saw the statements.’

  ‘I saw the statements you gave me. But I also saw the real statements... the ones that Anton Dlubak printed out.’

  ‘The real statements?’

  ‘Come on,’ said Sarah. ‘I’m not going to beat around the bush. I have a copy of them and you could face criminal prosecution. You’re certainly going to have to resign from Senate.’

  Ben gave her an amused, quizzical frown. ‘Do you know something, Sarah? I believe that all this Executioner business has really got to you.’

  ‘I have the printouts, Ben. You don’t have any choice.’

  ‘All right, then. Let’s see them, these printouts.’

  ‘Jarczyk has them at the moment. They had blood on them... they’re putting them through forensic tests. Then I’ll get them back.’

  ‘Jarczyk didn’t mention any printouts to me.’

  Sarah had been opening her briefcase. She stopped, with the lid half raised. Ben came up to her desk and leaned over it, his face so close that she could smell the Binaca on his breath.

  ‘Jarczyk didn’t mention any printouts to me,’ he repeated, as if he were talking to a child. ‘In fact, Jarczyk specifically said that there were no printouts.’

  Sarah stared back at him, and at that moment she felt as if she had never hated another human being so much.

  ‘You’ve done it again, haven’t you?’ she said. ‘Bribed, and bullied, just like you always do.’

  ‘Survival of the smartest, sweetheart.’ He kissed the tip of his finger, and tried to touch her on the lips with it, but she twisted her head away. He laughed, and then he said, ‘There wasn’t anything else, was there?’ and opened her office door.

  ‘Oh,’ he added, before he left, ‘I don’t know whether you’re thinking of reconsidering your position, but I’m afraid that I’ve had to put in a very negative report on your labour-relations problems. You don’t have to let me know directly; but if I were you, I would do it before New York does it to you first.’

  He left, leaving the door open. Sarah stood very still for a moment. Then she sat down. She couldn’t have phoned Stefan, even if she had wanted to, because he was still in the hospital, having his shoulder dressed. In any case, there was nothing that Stefan could do about her career at Senate. He had been part of something very different.

  She closed her briefcase, and snapped the locks shut.

  *

  When Marek came into the Welcome Bar, the waitress was wiping the tables and rearranging the cruets.

  ‘Well!’ she said. ‘I wondered how long you could manage to stay away!’

  ‘I just came to give you this back,’ he said. He opened his hand, and there was the silver cross.

  ‘Then this thing that you were involved in, it’s over?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Marek. ‘And that cross... well, I don’t really know what happened, but it saved my life, I promise you. And other people’s lives, too.’

  ‘My mother gave it to me, before she died. It was given to her at her confirmation. She always used to tell me that it was lucky.’

  ‘It wasn’t just lucky,’ said Marek. ‘It was magical.’

  ‘Why don’t you have a coffee?’ said the waitress. ‘On the house; for old times’ sake.’

  ‘All right,’ said Mare
k, and sat down. The waitress brought his coffee and sat down opposite. ‘My mother was in the Home Army, during the war. She helped with the wounded, and she helped to take messages. She always used to tell this story about how she was crawling along the sewers one day, and she got caught in a tangle of barbed wire. The more she struggled, the more tangled she was. She was down in that sewer for two days and two nights, and she thought she was going to die.

  ‘She said she started to cry. And after a while, she heard somebody crawling towards her. It was another child, she said, but a very strange child with a face like the infant Jesus.

  ‘She said it stared at her for a long time, and then it unwound the wire and pulled her free. She managed to crawl along to a manhole cover, and climb out. She never told anyone in the Home Army what had happened to her, because she thought it was all a dream... a mirage, you know, because she was so frightened and thirsty. She thought she had dreamed about the infant Jesus coming to rescue her, although she had probably managed to unwind the wire by herself.

  ‘Whenever she told me that story, she always used to say, “He had such a sad, beautiful face. He touched me as if he thought that I was wonderful, just for being so ordinary; and that there was nothing more he wanted in the world to be ordinary like me”.’

  Unaccountably, Marek found that he had tears in his eyes. The waitress reached across and squeezed his hand. ‘You look exhausted. You should sleep.’

  Marek nodded, and cleared his throat. ‘I just want you to know something,’ he said. ‘That story your mother told you... that was true.’

  “Yes,’ said the waitress, as if she wasn’t in the least surprised.

  Marek finished his coffee. ‘Your mother,’ he said. ‘Is she still alive?’

  ‘Oh, no, she died nearly twenty years ago. She’s buried in the Municipal Cemetery. They gave her a birchwood cross, like the rest of the insurgents. Ewelina Lysiak.’

  ‘The same name as you.’

  The waitress stood up, took his cup, and unexpectedly bent over and kissed his cheek. ‘We will always be here to look after you,’ she said. ‘Always.’

  *

  It was three weeks later when Sarah entered the Cathedral of St John on Kanonia, in the Old Town. It was mid-morning, and the cathedral was suffused with sunlight. She genuflected to the altar, and then made her way forward through the nave.

  Rej was kneeling next to the centre aisle, his hands clasped together. She came between the pews like a woman walking through a field of rye, and knelt down next to him.

  ‘Nadkomisarz Dembek told me you were out of hospital,’ she said. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Fine. My shoulder’s still stiff. They took thirty-six pellets out of it.’

  ‘I’ve come to tell you that I’m leaving... going back to America.’

  He looked at her for a long while without saying anything, and then he nodded.

  ‘It was Ben,’ she said. ‘He made my position here completely untenable. It was either resign or face the sack.’

  ‘Don’t you worry about Ben,’ said Rej. ‘He’ll get what’s coming to him, one of these days.’

  ‘I shall miss Warsaw,’ Sarah told him. ‘I was beginning to feel that this was where I belonged.’ She paused, and then she added, ‘I shall miss you too.’

  ‘Well... I won’t be here for much longer. They’re retiring me. I’m thinking of buying a small farm somewhere.’ He nodded towards the altar. ‘I’m just giving thanks that I’m still alive; and that I didn’t go through the whole of my life not believing in anything but Lenin.’

  He smiled, and then he said, ‘I was just trying to think of a way of giving thanks for what happened. It seems heartless to call it “the Executioner”... it wasn’t an executioner at all. He wasn’t even an “it”.’

  ‘He was a child,’ said Sarah. ‘Avery strange child, yes, and a very terrible child, too. A child who was chosen to do something that no child should ever have been chosen to do.’

  Rej looked away. ‘I think, in Poland, that has happened to far too many of our children, don’t you?’

  Sarah waited for a moment. Then she touched his shoulder, and turned, and walked away.

  18

  The Senate International Hotel was opened the following October, seven weeks ahead of schedule and $3.5 million under budget.

  Three days after the gala opening, part of the suspended ceiling in the conference area collapsed, killing five people and seriously injuring another twenty-seven. Engineers blamed the collapse on sub-standard concrete and reinforcing rods that were far thinner than the recommended gauge.

  Among the dead was Ben Saunders, Senate’s president of Eastern European development. A 90-kilo section of concrete had pinned him to the floor, before a huge sheet of plate-glass had dropped eleven metres from the ceiling and cut off his head.

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  GRAHAM MASTERTON was a bestselling horror writer for many years before he turned his talent to crime. He lived in Cork for five years, an experience that inspired the Katie Maguire series.

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  Katie Maguire was one of seven sisters born to a police Inspector in Cork, but the only sister who decided to follow her father into An Garda Siochana.

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  London, 1750

  Beatrice Scarlet is the apothecary’s daughter. She can mix medicines and herbs to save the lives of her neighbours - but, try as she might, she can’t save the lives of her parents. An orphan at just sixteen, Beatrice marries a preacher and emigrates to America.

  New Hampshire, 1756

  In the farming community where Beatrice now lives, six pigs are found viciously slaughtered; slices of looking-glass embedded in their mouths. According to scripture, this is the work of Satan - but Beatrice Scarlet suspects the hands of men. As she closes in on the killer, she must act quickly to unmask him - or become the next victim herself...

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  First published in the United Kingdom in 1997 by Mandarin William Heinemann

  This eBook edition first published in the UK in 2017 by Head of Zeus Ltd

  Copyright © Graham Masterton, 1997

  The moral right of Graham Masterton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.