The Worm in Every Heart

* * *

Not even a hundred years since the Warsaw sewers’ endless night; she is still so very young yet, after all. Or at least by her new tribe’s reckoning.

Kotzeleh knows about monsters, then as now. The golem, the vampire, the dog-headed saint: She knows monsters are real, knows they exist. She’s seen their work first-hand, and paid them back in kind for tear gas down the manholes and teenaged snipers bleeding out in the streets, rape and looting at will, doctors and nurses shot on sight, thousands herded into public parks and executed under manicured trees, in the genteel company of gazebos and swan-pools. 18,000 insurgents dead and 6,000 badly wounded, 15,000 marched away to camps as prisoners of war, 180,000 civilians killed outright—and 10,000 German dead balanced on the other end of the scale, 7,000 gone missing and 9,000 seriously injured, but never enough, never. Never.

No penance wipes this slate completely, even now. No ocean rift runs so wide or deep as to wash this stained hand clean again. It’s permanent, like dye: No monster can ever change their nature, no monster can ever be forgiven. No more than anyone else—anyone equally guilty—ever can.

Not even her.

* * *

So: A soundless rush, some massive exhalation—one bright, hot gush of wind sweeping down on them from

above, the Taifun-gerat‘s pestilential breath. Fat Chavah turns, face crisping; a second later, she, Kotzeleh and Lev fall headlong through grate and floor alike as the walls collapse, the ceiling falls, the side of the pipe cracks open like a rusty iron scream. Down into the boiling mud with their hair and clothes on fire, shit-slimed ammonia stinging mist-thick in Kotzeleh’s eyes . . . oh, it’s just like a dream of Hell, all right: her own, or someone else’s.

And then there’s nothing. A long slice of it, gas-burnt, gas-stinking.

“P- . . . pretty girl?”

(Not any more, most likely.)

But: Again, the same voice, weak but insistent—and Kotzeleh comes awake with a hand thrust hard where her gun should be, dust in her eyes and rocks in her hair, a rusty piece of metal half-piercing her palm: Oy gevalt! It hurts with a fierce, dull pain, though not strikingly more or less so than every other part of her body.

“Katarczyna, answer, I can’t see you anywhere . . . answer me please, my little Kati . . . ”

She coughs long and loud at that, a phlegmy clip-feed rattle. Correcting him, automatically—

“My name is Kotzeleh, Rabbi.”

Somewhere nearby, Fat Chavah chokes hoarsely, weeping through the dust and flame. Kotzeleh reaches out wide with both hands, maimed and whole; she grabs Lev by the sleeve with her wounded one, Chavah by the flaking scruff of her burnt braids with the other, then fists down hard enough to make her scream inside and starts dragging them both forward through rubble and muck, crawling away from the fire inch by painstaking, pain-filled inch. Crawling towards . . . what?

“This tunnel was made to lead somewhere, obviously,” Lev observes, ridiculously even-toned. Like some infernal tour-guide.

And: “Oh,” Kotzeleh manages, blood clotting her sleeve fast to her wrist, “you think?”

Simply: “Yes.”

(I mean, what’s the alternative?)

Rising stink of burnt shit and mold, the post-blast silence ringing in their ears like distant earthquake rumble. Kotzeleh sets her shoulders at a determined angle, puts her head down and bears forward, pushing so hard her neck starts to ache and strain. Hears Lev kicking and punching at the walls beside her, feeling for any possible breach they can force themselves through. Chavah’s whimpers dim. Everything narrows, boils away to purest effort, the way she likes it best.

And finally—after what seems like years, but probably only lasts bare minutes—the bricks do give way, tumbling all of them into somewhere new.

Lev is first to look up, which seems fitting; first to gape ‘round at the arching, dripping, cavernous walls, so bright and dark with strange patterning. An ossuary jewel-box thrown open to the hot non-wind, shelves on shelves like narrow slate beds strewn with desiccated brown monk-skins, twinkling with dun shards of bone.

“One of your lost crypts?” Kotzeleh asks Lev.

“Seems so,” he replies. And sloshes forward, squinting, while Chavah leans her burnt head against the nearest wall and vomits into her own hands—weirdly neat, like most things she does, regardless of her bulk. She heaves a few more times, reduced to bile, before slumping to trail her hands in the water, exhausted; if she’s praying, she certainly knows enough (by now) to keep it to herself while Kotzeleh’s still in close proximity.

Lev’s running his hands over the facade to Kotzeleh’s left, meanwhile, like he’s reading a braille message through both burnt palms. And Kotzeleh just stands there, one hand on her knife-hilt, because it’s not just losing a fresh layer of skin that’s making her nerves crawl: Everywhere she looks, she can see them watching—empty eye-sockets, black and blank. Sprung jaws hanging, cracked teeth exposed in nude and lipless grins . . .

She clears her throat, rackingly, trying to form a thought that doesn’t have to do with mummified Catholics. Managing, a swallow or so later—

“You think the Nazi slime had a good laugh, watching those fools back there scuttle? Jews versus the Taifun-gerat: Talk about a cheap show.”

Lev doesn’t turn. “Not so cheap, in the end. Probably didn’t know it when they lit the match, but . . . ”

(and here he gives a smile, oddly sweet and surprisingly sharp, familiar to Kotzeleh like her very own)