The Worm in Every Heart

by Gemma Files

  “Well, he’s out of his box now,” she points out. “Gone walking, I suppose; Taifun-gerat must have woken him up.”

  From Chavah, a hoarse whisper: “Kotzeleh, please . . . don’t say that, don’t say such things, please . . . ”

  “Why not? You think he can hear us?”

  “Oh, Kotzeleh . . . ”

  “’Where his blood falls, lilies grow,’” Lev mutters, to himself, meanwhile. “But no, this Latin’s so old—or might be it’s some form I’ve never seen before, Slavic-crossed. Hungarian? Romanian, that’d work too—a Romance language, anyway—”

  Chavah bends lower, cries harder, her tears making salty little circles in the sewer-water’s scum; Kotzeleh shoots her a glance, before turning back to the shadows . . . shadows of gaping monk-corpse, of leering ikon-image, of fluttering, watery reflection, all of which suddenly seem somehow larger, and closer. Darker, too.

  (As though that were really possible.)

  “’Where he lets blood to fall, there lilies grow’—yes, I’m almost sure this time. That could be it.”

  “Lev,” she starts, impatient—then stops, listening hard, as he just keeps on mouthing out the words in question, like he hasn’t even heard her. Straining into the darkness above the raspy rise and fall of Chavah’s breath, an incipient wail in every drawn lungful.

  “’Where he lets blood.’ Like a barber? Lilies are a holy flower, though, the kind you offer to saints, to the Virgin Mary . . . ”

  But: “Lev,” Kotzeleh says again. Her hand moving, so much unasked it feels like someone else’s, to take up its natural position on her knife’s hidden hilt.

  “Yes?”

  “What do lilies smell like, exactly?”

  Lev sniffs the air, frowning. Sniffs again. Frowns deeper.

  “Like that,” he replies, eventually.

  * * *

  Sometimes Kotzeleh wonders, even now, so long after: Who she might have become, instead of what. Some comfortable grandmother, a smiling Bubeh in flowered house-dress and sensible shoes, safely insulated from the past by as many layers of love as she could gather to herself; some elegant matron or spinster teacher in Krakow, in Paris, in New York, in Tel Aviv. Some apple-cheeked old lady, her gold hair faded to grey and her killer’s bones hidden deep beneath wrinkles and varicose veins, beneath fat and frippery, beneath the instinctive (if inaccurate) assumptions of those who’ve never had to spit on the Torah in order to stay alive, to stand by and watch their neighbors lined up against the nearest wall. To clap and cheer as children are loaded onto trains bound for crematoria, or breathe the human tallow-soaked ashes from a burnt-out sewer pipe’s back-blast . . .

  What did you do in the War, Madam Mendesh? Oh, not Madam—very well, then. My apologies.

  (So: Would that be Miss, instead? Or Missus?)

  It must be nice to survive, she supposes—she, who always fancied herself a survivor, even when things were at their utter bleakest. If nothing else.

  For Kotzeleh, however, the War goes on and on; there is no truce, no quarter, no V-Day to divide history into “before” and “after.” Nothing but the same damnable darkness to fathom, ever and always, slow and painful as some diver lost far beyond his depth—hallucinations, pressure in the chest, that awful sinking feeling. An upside-down, mapless world full of (fellow) monsters.

  For all of which, along with her many other sins, she knows—on some level—that she must surely have God to thank.

  * * *

  Lilies and blood, Lev’s eyes on hers, Chavah’s weeping. Then all at once, the fallen wall behind them cracks further, issuing five or so Germans in a spew of blackened bricks and melted mortar: Blinking, coughing, bloody like afterbirth. The straggly remains of some back-up platoon caught in the Taifun-gerat‘s indiscriminate sweep, clutching their weapons so close you’d think they were substitutes for the crucifixes Hitler’s already outlawed; a strange faith, but their own. And easier by far to pull the trigger than pray, Kotzeleh supposes, considering the usual outcome of either action—

  Suddenly, she’s locking eyes with Lev’s gun-barrel rather than him, its sight drawing a careful bead on her forehead. “Down in the mud, Polack whore,” Lev tells her, utterly matter-of-fact, as she gapes—then adds, to them: “You think I won’t shoot, if I have to? Though I do hate to waste a hostage, especially one this juicy . . . ”

  Hidden behind a fresh fall of masonry, Fat Chavah kneels lower still, blinking her seared eyes furiously, hunting ‘round for something—anything—to use as a weapon. While Kotzeleh simply stands there doing her level best to look the kidnapped Christian, shivering shoulders hunched to hide where her hand is bound for, giving them the tearful blue eye through the dirty gilt fall of her hair. Thinking, all the while:

  Oh, Rabbi, you idiot. Like the Mayor of Chelm, you’re God’s own fool.

  What does he think this is, anyway—a mitzvah, some selfless act that’ll get him back in the legendary G-d’s good books? Sacrifice himself for Kotzeleh, to cover Chavah, so that when the Nazis kill him it’ll provide enough distraction for them both to bring his murderers down in turn?

  So slow: Seconds passing like centuries, as Kotzeleh’s fingers find the knife, hilt-first. She quirks her mouth at Lev, signalling It’s all right, no more, you can stop now, NOW. Now, damn you. I said—

  (stop)

  She can see his lips moving even from here, though, as the Germans shift, thumbing their safeties; that familiar invocation of last resort, clear as the prominent nose on his too-Hebraic face. Hear, o Yisroel, the Lord our God, the Lord our God is one . . .

  And: Not MY God, Rabbi, Kotzeleh thinks, grimly. Not by a long shot.

  A flash of the future now, its resonance echoing back over years, sharp as a turned thumb in a still-green wound. Because this is when she might have saved him, that’s what she’ll always let herself believe—right here, this very moment, had things only gone differently. But it’s not like any of them will ever know, after all . . .

  (Is it?)

  One single moment: Here, then gone. Then Chavah slides her seeking palm across a hidden catch cunningly worked into the snaky tangle of demons crushed beneath St. Christopher’s feet and jolts back, hearing it click; kicks up a dirty wave as she does so, making the Germans jump in turn. And something comes ripping through the wall to meet her, five leprous-white fingers catching her fast by the scalp, pulling her back through the too-small hole it’s made—a scraping pop followed by a wrench, a crunch, by Chavah’s body slumping headless into the murk, as the Germans open fire.

  Lev falls, instantly pierced at the wrist, the knee, with one eye shot out and his hair full of blood, so cheerfully bright red it seems dyed; Kotzeleh lunges to slit the nearest German’s throat as he does, some boy barely her own age wearing a uniform one size too small, then pivots to use his gun on the rest—white muzzle-fire blast and glare, hot whine of ricocheting bullets. Then dives deep, letting the shell-casings fall where they may, swimming through garbage to emerge at last, panting and dripping, by the chamber’s door. Spits liquid waste and stands there for a moment, trying not to see where Lev’s blood has already begun to surface . . .

  Germans dead and dying, face-up or face-down; Kotzeleh watches them twitch, her joyless, skinned-back grin no more emotional than a dog’s. Yet none of them should be able to talk, at this point—which is just what makes it so very strange, if not maybe far more than that, to realize someone is saying something from behind her, his voice husk-dry but patient as a snake under glass.

  (girl)

  Huge figure turned sidelong to line up with the first fissure’s crack, dark on dark, like some Victorian silhouette portrait dressed in a rusty chain-mail gown, its eyes ravenous. Saint Xawery Martyr-maker in the livid flesh, crosses puffed raw on every visible surface like suppurating, Pope-blessed sores, watching her from that shadowed archway; Xawery, who must be kept safe and s
ecret for all souls’ sake, tipping Fat Chavah’s severed head to his mouth and drinking hot blood from the open ruin of her shattered throat.

  Red drools from his chops, slops to his wrists, pooling, gouting. And where it falls, whether on stone or water . . . or Chavah’s abandoned hulk of flesh, for that matter . . .

  (Oh no no no)

  Those waxy flowers by his rotting boots? They must be lilies.

  Girl, the Saint says, without really saying anything—that’s what Kotzeleh thinks he says, at least, seeing how he’s speaking Medieval Polish, unintelligible to her like Chaucer would be to any given Anglophile. But he improves so quickly it’s as though he’s plucking the right words from her brain, fingering through the folds, same as a common pickpocket. Taking what he wants and leaving the rest, making that his words clarify with only the smallest, most sibilant drag: Thus, and so—

  “Girl,” he says again, this time out loud. “What iss your name?”

  Through a dust-dry mouth: “Kotzeleh.”

  “Kot-zssel-eh.”

  It means little thorn.

  “Little Hebrew thorn,” the monster says, gently, with a ruined smile. And Kotzeleh gasps, without meaning to, at the sound of him commenting so freely on what she’s only just thought. There’s a probing intelligence in those awful eyes, yet almost no sympathy; not as we understand the term, anyway.

  Then: “Are you barren of God’s bounty, little Ssephardesss? Can you ssee your own sshadow at noon-time? Does nothing grow where you sstand?”

  Scripture, one assumes. A subject she’s never excelled at.

  “You kill well, Kotzsseleh-girl. For a peassant.”

  “I know.”

  “Of coursse you do.”

  Of course.

  She risks a glance at Chavah’s face, its burnt features gone slack and blood-loss pale; sees the Saint follow her eye-line, and begin to see a chance—the barest shadow of one, at least. That shattered section of wall the Germans came through, unguarded aside from their bodies. Guns floating stocks-up every few paces between her and potential escape, child’s play to reach with a sudden rush . . .

  (not to mention how this thing doesn’t even know what a gun is, probably. For all he just saw her use one.)

  “So why didn’t you help me, then?” she demands. Xawery simply smiles, unpleasantly: So many of those teeth! And all of them so stained and jagged, like a box of broken bone-needles.

  “I would never deprive a fellow warrior of enemiess,” he tells her, mildly enough, smooth as milk in arsenic. And lets Chavah’s emptied skull drop, at last, with only a tiny splash.

  Kotzeleh lunges, grabs, fires without aiming. Makes the gap, squeezes through. Runs runs runs, into stinking darkness.

  But even a scuttle carries for miles, in this echo-chamber. Which means she can already hear Xawery, following.

  * * *

  Words in her veins, like some mnemonic virus. She mouths them in her sleep now, whether or not she wants to—the Saint’s confession playing dusk ‘til dawn behind her shut eyelids, a flickering newsreel on endless loop. Remembers them as cold and wet and hollow, the same way they came that first time, as she fought her way up-current: back towards the pipe she’d come from, back towards the manhole and the engine which covers it, with the reek of gas in front of her and the smell of lilies behind.

  What iss it you kill for, Kotzsseleh? To live, only? Or doess your God require you to, even ass mine did?

  Taking one corner after another, slipping on slimy stones, skinning her hands on the walls. The gas stings her eyes, but Kotzeleh runs on.

  The Holy Land iss full of sstrange thingss indeed, ass I found when one came to me on the battlefield, offering ME ssurvival—at a price. But I never saw itss face, and when I woke in darknesss later, the hilt of my own ssword burnt my handss.

  Through the first wall, past the bale of wire, that sad bundle inside it still smoking. Kotzeleh can hear the Taifun-gerat everywhere now, grinding-grating, like some horrible clockwork heart pumping out death.

  Pray, they told me, to redeem this ssinful world. And sso have I prayed, almost consstantly, ssince they nailed me down in THAT. Yet I do not ssee that the world is much improved, for all my piety.

  Loud, loud, almost deafening, and the gas so thick she can barely see, let alone run anymore. So Kotzeleh turns here instead, head swimming—and finds Xawery suddenly right up against her gun-barrel in a ragged blur of movement, peering down at her with those scarlet eyes whose sockets seem both hollow and painfully overfilled at once, like twin slit-pupilled blood-blisters.

  “I never assked to become what I became,” he tells her. “Only to sserve God in my way, ass Ssaint Chrisstopher did—Chrisstopher, who ate human flessh and prayed with a dog’s tongue. Yet wass he ssaved.”

  And: “No one is saved,” snarls Kotzeleh, feeling a great, grey wave of hopelessness roll up through her mouth. “No one. Not one.”

  (Not even those who deserve to be.)

  She doesn’t cry, though—she can’t. That other one, Katarczyna; she could cry. But she’s gone, and only Kotzeleh remains: Kotzeleh, her father’s little thorn, hard and sere and bitter and barren. Sharp enough to pierce this empty-rinded world to its black, black heart.

  Kotzeleh, unable to weep over Lev’s stupid goodness, over her own realization that she actually did care for him—now, of all times, when there’s nothing left that matters anyway. When it’s too late for anything.

  “No one is saved,” she repeats again, quieter. “And monsters . . . are only monsters.”

  Monsters like you and I. Monster.

  She feels her finger tighten on the trigger, and prays that the wave will be as fast as it seemed.

  * * *

  It doesn’t end like this, however. Obviously.

  * * *

  Kotzeleh and Saint Xawery, caught in the typhoon’s path. She smiles as the first blast perforates his midsection, loosing a flood of guts—but he just smiles back and hugs her to him, shrouding them both beneath what (at first view) looked like a mould-striped leather cloak, rather than a pair of folded, membranous bat-wings.

  He bites her, instinctively insulating himself with her blood, and she—helpless, hating, equally instinctively—

  —bites him back.

  So the Taifun-gerat‘s wave passes over like the Angel of Death did in Egypt, engulfing but not consuming, shying from the same sign of blood which once kept Israel’s firstborn safe. And they stand there joined, waves of thought passing between them in a bright, arterial circuit: Kotzeleh, still fighting, even as her limbs cool and stiffen; the Saint, cradling her, firm and fair as any father, his armor digging little crescent-shaped scars into her torso’s hide. Musing, as he does—

  Iss no one ssaved, truly? Not ever? But if I may be ssaved, so may you alsso, little Kotzsseleh. So may all we monssters . . . in time.

  Years later, a whole new century, and she still can’t make up her mind: Could it be that he wanted her to follow her better impulses, just like Lev did, even when she was so utterly sure she had none left? To force her to re-evolve back up out of the muck, and take her place in a Crusade so new it needed no Pope to sanction it?

  Vampire against vampire, monster against monster. Kotzeleh against the world which made her what she is, living or dead: A hunter, a killer. A true knight of zealous, self-legitimized genocide.

  Albedo from nigredo. This is the lowest point. So low, so deep, that the only thing left to do from here on in is . . . rise. Again.

  Nigredo to albedo. The alchemical distillation process. Garbage into gold. Shit into salvation.

  And: Iss that what they’re doing up there, do you think? Your enemiess, thesse oness who alsso bear the Crosss, though twissted to their own particular endss?

  Can they posssibly know they’re creating gold ssuch as you?

  Saint Xawery, M
onster-Martyr, lays his latest victim down in the filthy water gently, as in a warm bath. Strokes her dazed eyes closed, with soft and tender touch. Thinking, while he does so—

  Ah, little Ssephardesss, little Jew-girl. You’ll make ssuch a fine, black joke to play on the upsside world.

  But don’t come back down here, daughter. Not ever. For God has given me this place for mine, and I will cede my share in it to no one . . .

  ( . . . not even you.)

  The seventeen-year-old who once knew herself as Katarczyna Mendesh lies there in the clammy water of the Warsaw sewer, cursing the Saint and both their rotten Gods at once—all three or four, equally. She feels everything drain away.

  And when night comes fresh once more, Kotzeleh wakes up for the last time, or the first: Swollen, filth-encrusted, thirsty with a brand new, deep red thirst. Again and again, and then yet again.

  That night, and every night after.

  Ring of Fire

  Late June, 1857:

  “The sepoys themselves, strangely enough, have a phrase which describes my current state of mind to perfection: ‘Sub lal hogea hai’—’Everything has become red.’”

  * * *

  Unlike most madmen, Desbarrats Grammar was debatably lucky enough to be gifted with an enduring understanding of the exact instant when his sanity had collapsed. The moment in question had occurred shortly after the retaking of Calcutta, during what his commanding officer had then referred to as “the mopping up,” post-Indian Mutiny—a process of justice which, in keeping with the usual British reinterpretation of Biblical tradition, required considerably more for the price of an eye than payment in kind. Correspondingly, a method of retribution had to be improvised which would be both impressive and educative.

  And this was how Grammar, then a mere twenty-two years of age, soon came to be standing next to a cannon across the mouth of which a lucklessly uprisen native soldier of the British Army had been strapped, briskly dropping his sword in one neat arc in order to visually indicate that the order to fire had been given—upon which the cannon bucked, swinging a bit to one side on the recoil, and enveloped him in a halo of molten blood before his attentive native second-in-command even had a chance to get him out of the way.