The Worm in Every Heart Read Online Free PDF

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 secret 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—
    â€œGirl,” he says again, this time out loud. “What iss your name?”
    Through a dust-dry mouth: “Kotzeleh.”
    â€œKot-zssel-eh.”
    It means little thorn.
    â€œLittle 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.
    â€œYou kill well, Kotzsseleh-girl. For a peassant.”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œOf 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.)
    â€œSo 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.
    â€œI 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