A Grain of Truth

by Zygmunt Miloszewski

  For several minutes they walked on in silence. They took a few turns, but all the corridors were identical to one another. Disturbingly identical – the mere thought of the possibility of being left alone down here and losing his way was enough to make his skin creep.

  “OK, we’re there,” said the young guide, and suddenly stopped at a wall made of planks. There was one missing, and they could see grey concrete behind it. “Behind this wall is the tourist route, the room with various archaeological exhibits. If there really is something going on down here, and if someone in there heard noises, we should be able to hear them even better.”

  They fell silent. There must have been a group going along the tourist route, because they could hear footsteps, muffled talking and laughter, then the high-pitched voice of the tourist guide, who was talking about somebody’s extraordinary heroism. After a while all the noises moved away and they were left in unpleasant, dense silence. Szacki shuddered as he felt something move across his fingers – it was Sobieraj’s hand. He looked at her in surprise, but she just smiled apologetically. She didn’t let go of his hand, and it was rather nice. But only for a short time – then all other feelings were abruptly displaced by a pang of fear, as from the maze of black corridors they heard a distant, but distinct, bestial howling.

  “Holy fuck,” said Dybus.

  Sobieraj sighed out loud, and squeezed his hand tightly.

  “Can you tell where it is?” Szacki asked, pleased there was no tremor audible in his voice.

  “The echo could be misleading, but I’d bet on the west, towards the synagogue and Saint Joseph’s church. I’ve got it all mapped out as far as the ramparts, we’ll see afterwards.”

  Now they were walking much more slowly and cautiously. First Dybus, then Szacki and Sobieraj, still clinging to his hand. The taciturn Wilczur brought up the rear. It crossed Szacki’s mind that they should get the old policeman out of there. If he really did have claustrophobia and had a heart attack in these vaults it would somewhat complicate their outing.

  “Where are we now?” he asked. They had gone about a hundred metres and the tunnel was going downwards in a gentle arc; until now they had passed one intersection and one side branch, filled in with loess rubble.

  “Under the walls – to the left we’ve got the Old Town and to the right Podwale, the ramparts. Do you hear that?”

  The howling sound came again; if it really was louder, then it was only by a little. Sobieraj glanced at her watch.

  “What’s the time?”

  “Almost three.”

  They slowly went on, and the faint, unearthly howling was audible every time they stopped. At one point they heard a distinct metallic noise, as if someone had dropped a spanner onto a concrete workshop floor. Dybus stopped.

  “Did you hear that?”

  “Let’s go,” Szacki urged, dragging Sobieraj after him, but her hand slipped out of his sweaty palm.

  “Oh my God,” she drawled in a hollow tone that made everyone look at her. Slowly she raised her hand, and in the white light of the torches they could see it was all red with blood. The woman crumpled, and was clearly about to be sick.

  “Basia, hey, calm down,” said Szacki, gently pulling his colleague upright. “Nothing’s happened – I cut myself at the office, I’m sorry, I didn’t have time to put a plaster on it. I couldn’t feel it bleeding – I’m sorry.”

  She gave him a look of hostility, but also relief. Without a word she took a thin silk scarf from her pocket and provisionally bandaged his hand.

  “I don’t know if we shouldn’t send someone better qualified down here,” she muttered. “Strange vaults, strange howling, we don’t know what we’re looking for, and now that blood, it’s a bad sign.”

  “We’re looking for Szyller,” said Szacki. “So far in this case every time someone has disappeared, they’ve been found later on trussed like a piglet.”

  “You mean a lamb,” Wilczur corrected him. “Pork’s treif.”

  “Treif?”

  “Not kosher.”

  “In any case, this time we’ve got a chance of finding someone sooner than that.”

  “How on earth do you know this has anything to do with it?”

  “Howling, barking, it all fits.”

  “Have you gone mad?” Sobieraj made her surprised-and-outraged gesture, which suited her very well. “Where does barking fit into it?”

  “Well, what have you got in that painting in the cathedral? Children being kidnapped and murdered, rolled in a barrel of blood, and the remains thrown to dogs to devour. What haven’t we seen yet?”

  “Oh God,” groaned Sobieraj, but not because this information had shocked her. This time the howling was more distinct, and they could also hear furious barking. Distorted by the winding corridors, the noise sounded hellish and made their flesh crawl, their hair stand on end and their muscles tense, as if waiting for the signal to run.

  “We haven’t gone all that far,” cried Dybus. “Maybe we’d better get the hell out of here.”

  “Quiet,” commanded Szacki coldly. “What are you expecting? The Hound of the Baskervilles? A beast from hell breathing fire? A dog is a dog. Have you got a gun, Inspector?”

  Wilczur opened the flap of his jacket; next to his sunken ribcage there was something swinging in a holster that looked like a classic police Walther.

  “Let’s go. Quickly.”

  They set off. As the unearthly animal noises got rapidly closer, Szacki couldn’t shake off the sensation that he was standing in the middle of a road, caught in the headlights of a speeding car, and that instead of jumping aside he was starting to charge towards it. It’s a dog, it’s just a terrified dog and the acoustics of a small space, that’s all, just a dog, he kept repeating to himself. Walking ahead of him, Dybus suddenly stopped, Szacki’s momentum meant he fell on top of him, and after that everything happened quickly – too quickly, unfortunately, and too chaotically.

  Dybus had stopped because around a bend in the corridor some steps began, cut out of the loess, leading in a steep spiral downwards, into inky darkness, from which the furious barking was coming, not just loud, but deafening by now. Perhaps he wanted to warn the others, perhaps he wanted to establish what to do next; his intentions ceased to be relevant as soon as Szacki pushed him and he fell headlong with a short cry. Szacki wobbled and fell to his knees, but by some miracle he managed to keep his balance and froze in a bizarre position: his feet and knees remained at the level of the corridor, but he was leaning his hands against the wall of the staircase – for want of a better word. Someone behind him, maybe Sobieraj or maybe Wilczur, grabbed him by the tail of his jacket, and he was just about to sigh with relief when right in front of his face the muzzle of a furious dog appeared – black and shaggy, with mad eyes, it was covered in dust, drool and caked blood. I wanted the Hound of the Baskervilles? Well, I’ve got it, thought Szacki.

  The dog, a mongrel the size of an Alsatian, didn’t go straight for his throat, but froze a few centimetres from his face, barking deafeningly; it couldn’t get its balance on the narrow steps and was just scratching at them with its claws, sending up a stifling cloud of dust. Shocked and stunned, Szacki took one hand off the wall to shield himself from the startled animal’s teeth, and that was his second biggest blunder of the day – the biggest of all was still ahead of him. The moment he waved his injured hand, wrapped in the blood-soaked scarf, in front of the dog’s nose, the animal went crazy. And just as only a split second earlier Szacki had been propped up and had the chance to keep his balance, as soon as the dog violently bit him, he lost it entirely. He howled in pain as he and the dog rolled down the stairs, finally landing on something soft, which must have been Marek Dybus. Of course, his headlamp had fallen off, and now it was lighting up his fight with the monstrous, frenzied mongrel from a strange angle. The whole time he had one hand trapped between the animal’s jaws, while he tried in vain to push away its head with the other. He kept yanking at its wet coat, bellowing
and screaming, but the dog was not going to let go, it just bit down harder and harder – he could clearly feel the layers of tissue tearing under the pressure of its jaws. Acting more on instinct than reason, he let go of its head and reached into his jacket pocket for the Glock. Writhing violently as he tried to yank his body from under the dog’s paws, which were now clawing at his belly instead of the loess, miraculously he released the safety catch, stuck the pistol in the animal’s mouth right next to his own hand and fired.

  His roar of pain merged with the deafening, ear-splitting bang of the gun; a cloud of tissue, which the shot blew out of the dog’s skull, fell on Szacki’s face in wet, sticky drops. At the same moment, the white light of a headlamp appeared at the foot of the stairs, illuminating something that Szacki couldn’t see, but which kept on barking like mad. Under the headlamp a flash of fire appeared. One, two, three.

  The barking changed into the quiet whimpering of a dying animal.

  Inspector Leon Wilczur approached Szacki and helped him to get up; a little further off Dybus was scrambling to his feet, and at the top of the stairs he could see the light of Sobieraj’s headlamp. It looked as if everyone was all right. Well, almost.

  “Bloody hell, I think I’ve shot off part of my finger.”

  “Show me, Teo,” said Wilczur matter-of-factly, addressing him by name for the first time ever, and pulled Szacki’s hand roughly, making him hiss with pain. “Got any water?” he asked Dybus.

  Dybus took a bottle from his backpack. Wilczur bathed the prosecutor’s hand; it looked nasty. The glass cut on his thumb was still bleeding, on the back of his hand there were deep marks left by the blasted mongrel’s fangs (Szacki had never liked dogs), and the torn flesh between his thumb and index finger showed unmistakably which way the bullet had gone before penetrating the dog’s brain. The old policeman examined the wounds with expertise, then told Dybus, who was still in shock, to take off his shirt; he tore it into strips and carefully bandaged Szacki’s hand. The prosecutor was impressed by the policeman’s sangfroid.

  “OK, can we go back now?” asked their guide and expert on the underground, whose restless eyes implied that he was on the edge of panic. “I for one am not venturing a step further into this Mordor.”

  “There’s no question,” said Szacki; in fact he wanted to throw up – the bile was accumulating in his mouth in a sour wave, but once again the professionalism he had developed over the years prevailed. “I’ve got to see the place they ran out from.”

  “But how?” Dybus’s voice was hysterically plaintive. “There’s no more howling now.”

  “But there is a trail of crumbs,” said the prosecutor, and pointed at the floor, where the claws of the racing dogs had carved out symmetrical grooves.

  They left the two carcasses behind them and headed onwards; this time Szacki was at the head of the group. He was desperate, determined at any cost to find out what lay ahead at the end of the corridor.

  VIII

  “Do I have to?”

  Weronika knew this cross, sulky question didn’t mean that Helka wasn’t missing her father, because she was missing him, in a way that was unimaginable, inconceivable, burning through the little girl’s soul over and over again. She knew, because she was from a broken family herself. Her parents had divorced when she was already at college, but even so it was the worst memory of her life. Divorcing Teo had been painful; now and then she felt a wave of anger flood her, she wanted to lay hands on him and scratch his eyes out for betraying her and cheating her. But there was nothing to compare with the time when her father had taken her to Wedel’s chocolate shop and café on Szpitalna Street, and informed her that he and Mum weren’t going to be together any more. She had never been to Wedel’s ever since.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t miss him. If in the blink of an eye Helka could have teleported herself onto her father’s knees, she certainly would have done it. This was a rebellion, a denial, a way of testing how much she could get away with. A way of stretching the emotions that tied her to her parents to the limits of endurance, testing them to see if they would break. And also a display of loyalty to her mother, a way of saying: Look, I accept your life, I like Tomek, it’s Daddy who’s bad, Daddy left us, let’s punish him.

  And of course Weronika felt like stepping into those comfortable shoes, taking her daughter in her arms to have her on her side, for the two of them to get even with that evil prick together, shoulder to shoulder. But that was a harmful, easy way out. Helka had nothing to do with it, and she shouldn’t have – let her build her life with her mum and her dad right behind her, even if her mum and dad were no longer standing side by side in an embrace.

  “Yes, you have to. But anyway, you want to, and I can’t understand what you’re so het up about.”

  “Coz of all those hours on the bus. I could go kayaking with Tomek. It’s warm already. He promised we’d go once it warmed up.”

  She smiled, but she was getting annoyed. She found her daughter’s deference to her new partner immensely irritating, even though she should have been glad of it. The stories told her by friends who had brought children into a new relationship made her blood run cold, but in her case it seemed to be a sort of idyll. However, she felt annoyed whenever she heard this sort of response from her daughter. She hadn’t a clue why – she’d have to talk to the therapist about it. Or maybe she didn’t have to, maybe she knew that actually she still loved Teodor; she was still tied to him, she didn’t really give a shit about Tomek and knew this whole relationship was just for show, calculated to rub that white-haired bastard’s nose in it. And here, all of a sudden, in the middle of this put-on relationship, in which she hadn’t had a single decent orgasm yet, her daughter was gushing in rapture over some guy who left her cold. Bugger it all.

  “I’ll tell you what, Helka. You’ll go and you’ll have a good time, and you’ll see some new places, and you’ll do your best pout for Daddy, like you did for me on Monday, so he’ll know his daughter’s growing up too. You’ll be able to distract him a bit – the poor man’s stuck in the office the whole time getting bored, so he could do with a bit of a laugh. Well?”

  IX

  The pain in his injured hand was unbearable, travelling up his arm in waves, as if the stupid hound were still hanging there, and Szacki was sincerely hoping that was the end of the thrills for today.

  The dogs’ claw tracks led them to a small room, similar to the one near the seminary where they had started their expedition. There they found three amateurishly welded-together cages, some dog shit, a lot of blood and the corpse of Jerzy Szyller. The discovery prompted various reactions. Dybus was violently sick – he must have turned his digestive tract inside out. Auntie Basia switched off her headlamp to get rid of the sight. Wilczur lit a cigarette. Szacki, feeling overwhelming exhaustion brought on by the adrenalin flowing out with his blood, sat down on one of the cages and held out his hand for a cigarette. Wilczur obligingly tore off the filter and handed him a lighter. Szacki wanted to object and ask for one with a filter, but he gave it a rest and lit up. The smoke settled the nausea that had been rising in his throat, and by blowing it out through his nose he could block up his olfactory receptors for a while, giving him a breather from the charnel-house stink. He found to his surprise that an unfiltered Camel tasted better than the ordinary ones. Bah, it actually had a taste.

  “Where are we?” he asked, also because he wanted to occupy Dybus’s mind with something; he had no desire to allay a panic attack, a hint of which he could see in those restless eyes.

  Dybus took out a map covered in incomprehensible coloured lines and spread it next to Szacki.

  “I’ve never been in this exact spot before, but somewhere here,” he said, showing a point on the map just outside the city walls, not far from the junction of Zamkowa Street and Staromiejska Street. Not far from the abandoned mansion. As far as Szacki knew, there was a meadow in that spot.

  “There’s nothing there,” he said.

 
“Not now,” agreed Dybus. “But at one time there was a whole district. Except that most of the houses were wooden, so there’s nothing left. This room must have been left behind by some wily merchant who realized robbers were more likely to look under the tenements than under the poor people’s houses on the ramparts.”

  “We’ll have to check if there’s a way of getting from here towards the mansion on Zamkowa Street, the cathedral and Budnik’s house on Katedralna Street. I think we’ve just discovered how the corpses teleported themselves from one place to another.”

  “Are you sure?” said Sobieraj, who had recovered a bit, but was still as white as chalk.

  “Yes, I think so. One thing’s been bothering me since yesterday, namely Mrs Budnik’s body. There was sand under the fingernails, a sort of yellow, seaside sand. At the time of the autopsy I didn’t take much notice of it, I told myself maybe she liked digging in the earth, or it was sand from the crime scene. But this morning I checked the bushes below the synagogue, and her garden too, and in both places there’s just ordinary black earth.”

  “Unlike here,” muttered Wilczur, and scraped at the wall; there was a bit of yellowish loess left under his long fingernail.

  “Exactly.” Szacki went into a corner of the room, as far as possible from the corpse, to stub out his cigarette.

  Only then did he do what he hadn’t had the courage to do until now, which was to look straight at Szyller’s corpse, while at the same time lighting it up with his torch. The patriotic businessman was only recognizable because he had been chained to the wall high enough to prevent the dogs from devouring his face. The rest of him, from more or less the level of the ribcage downwards, was torn to bloody shreds. Szacki didn’t even want to guess where exactly the pieces fitted, which were scattered all round the room. The experts, the experts would deal with that.