The Worm in Every Heart

The Worm in Every Heart
© 2004, 2015 by Gemma Files
Introduction © 2003 by Nancy Kilpatrick
Cover art © 2015 by Melanie Luther
Cover design © 2015 by Samantha Beiko
Afterword © 2015 by Michael Rowe

All Rights Reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

2004
Originally published in Trade Paperback in the United States by Wildside Press, LLC.
414 Hungerford Drive
Rockville, MD 20850
www.wildsidebooks.com
ISBN: 978-1-894815-76-5

2015
CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS
Toronto, Canada
www.chizinepub.com
[email protected]
eISBN: 978-1-77148-341-4

Distributed by Trajectory, Inc.
50 Doaks Lane
Marblehead, MA 01945
[email protected]

Proofread by Ben Kinzett

We acknowledge the support of the Canada council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council

Coded in Canada

by Nancy Kilpatrick

I FIRST MET GEMMA FILES
in Toronto in the early 1990s. I'd been a fanatical purchaser of vampire books and had a vast collection of titles (which now exceeds 1700, God help me!) Vampire volumes had come into vogue by then, and since I'd managed to acquire just about everything written prior to that time, I was relegated to the fresh blood of newly published works. Every month I would watch the cash register tally up four or more hardcover titles, depleting my finances and overburdening my bookshelves. I frequently purchased from Bakka Books, which at that time was Toronto's only SF/F/H bookstore. John Rose, the owner, kept saying: “You must know Gemma. She's the other vampire collector.”

So I'd heard about Gemma, but we never seemed to be browsing in Bakka on the same day of the night of the full moon. I'd also been informed by a discerning bookish pal Bob (Hadji) Knowlton about his friend Gemma: “You've got to meet this girl. She's brilliant, and she loves vampires.” I didn't put the two Gemmas together until the day I received a call. Gemma and I chatted a while, and I invited her to visit and see my book collection, and all the other vampire memorabilia (read: junk!) I''d acquired over the years, like a piece of plaster from the Grand Theater in Derby where Dracula was first staged, a promotional keyring from Dracula's Wallpaper Warehouse in Ontario, the four foot tall Nosferatu punching bag . . .

Right from the get-go, I knew Gemma was, as Bob said, “Brilliant.” This young thing was just wiggling out of journalism school. She was the precocious offspring of parents in the arts, which likely set her up for being highly educated, thoughtful, attracted to all things creative, a bit melancholy, and extremely well read in the wide world of books, not just those involving bloodsuckers and other demons of the night. She arrived at my door wearing her multi-colored Moroccan cap, serious but modern glasses, and carrying a huge backpack which she always seemed to be lugging around; we talked vampires for hours. Needless to say, I liked her immensely. Not only was it refreshing to chat with another vampirophile, but I found her open and honest and not fearful about plunging into free-rolling discussions involving the deeply existential and macabre subject matter I favor. I became a kind of loaning-library for books she hadn't yet read, and a minor sounding board for projects, of which she had plenty in mind, so we met regularly for a while, until life impinged—for me, that meant the ending of a marriage and a move to Montreal.

At the time I met Gemma, she had been writing regular columns, mainly on film, for one of Toronto's entertainment weeklies, EYE Magazine. Besides reading her published articles, she handed me bits of her fiction to peruse, and I always came away thinking the same thing about her work: “Brilliant.” Clearly this girl was destined for great things. So it surprised me not when she catapulted out of the small press and began selling her short stories to major anthologies like the cleverly-conceived, Stephen Jones-edited The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women, and Dark Terrors 6. Ellen Datlow picked up her amazing tale “The Emperor's Old Bones” (originally published in
Northern Frights 5,
and which is included in this collection) for
Year's Best Horror and Fantasy
(13.) Gemma also sold stories to television, and won the International Horror Critic's Award. If I'd put money where my thoughts were about Gemma's fate, I'd be rich now, but then who would have bet against me?

Gemma utilizes style and grace in her writing, and possesses an adventurous spirit that shows in her work. She kindly penned “Rose Sick” for
Seductive Spectres,
one of the erotic horror anthologies I edited under the nom de plume Amarantha Knight. I then invited her to submit another story for
Demon Sex.
That story, “Bottle of Smoke” (which you'll read in this collection); was picked up by
The Hunger
, the HBO TV series of erotic horror shows, and then she went on to sell the program four more of her fine tales!

Now Gemma is all grown up as a writer, teaching film at a university, happily collecting accolades for her work. I take some sort of maternal pride in her successes. I'm one of the people who knew-her-when, who has never had a doubt that she will reside among the stars one day. Her writing is layered and textured. Her imagination and the subject matter she explores are reminiscent of Caitlin Kiernan's work. At the same time, she chooses words with a cleverness and sensitivity that reminds me of Poppy Z. Brite's short fiction. She shares the immediacy and accessibility of Neil Gaiman's writing.

But don't misunderstand me: Gemma Files is no copycat. She is part of the new wave of wordsmiths that add class to darker fiction by the intelligent use of language, and elevate the fantastic back to its rightful place as literature, reconnecting to its classical roots: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Picture of Dorian Grey, anything by Poe. Those beautifully constructed works that still, after more than a century, leave us shivering and breathless because their authors understood the power of words, that syntax could rupture readers, and do what Franz Kafka said it should, “melt the frozen sea within.” Under that broad umbrella of the resurrectionists of this terrifying genre, Gemma Files is unique. Her work may leave you breathless. It could awaken realms within. At times you might sit stunned, wondering at the richness of writing, reconnecting to the reasons you have always loved to read.

In
The Worm in Every Heart
, Gemma's eclectic second collection, time and space are spanned: “Nigredo” is set in Warsaw during WW2, when gods beget monsters; “Ring of Fire” features a madman who uses the 1857 mutiny in India to his advantage; “The Guided Tour” takes us hitchhiking through the bountiful US of A; “Year Zero” reveals unexpected fallout from the French Revolution; the protagonist of “Flare” is an unusual Toronto arsonist; “Bottle of Smoke” puts a female spin on a tale that could be from the Arabian Nights; “Fly-by-Night” pits a modern military medico against an ancient vampire; “In the Poor Girl Taken by Surprise” revamps a werewolf legend from Quebec; a 19th century Russian scientist creates life in “A Single Shadow Make,” but who is man, who monster?; “The Land Beyond the Forest” indulges the recollections of an English vampire of noble birth; “The Kindly Ones” questions whether or not a mother from Scotland is capable of love; a centurion from ancient Rome captures the wrong British girl in “Sent Down”; “By the Mark” blends flora, poetry and witchy alienation; “The Emperor's Old Bones” reveals a dark Chinese custom; and “The Narrow World” shows how sex magick can go awry.

The Worm In Every Heart
beckons readers to a literary danse macabre that spans the ages and swirls through the cultural mosaic. The grim melody of life's bleakness blends well with the dark harmonies offered in these stories. These are fatal rhythms, ones we're all familiar with; the Reaper's scythe keeps the time. And Gemma's work is timeless. Destined to last. You can bet on it.

Nancy Kilpatrick

Montreal—2004

IT'S 1944, LATE SEPTEMBER
, and Kotzeleh's just about decided that God probably doesn't exist—that that's definitely the best way to think about it, at any rate. Since, otherwise, she'd be forced to conclude He meant all this deliberately, and find Him. And kill Him for it.

On the eastern bank of the Vistula, just visible from Warsaw's borders, the Red Army have taken Praga; it was their lure which incited the Home Army to rise back in August, when they seized two-thirds of the city within three days: 40,000 armed insurrectionists with 210,000 unarmed helpers. But the Russians just squat there still, waiting, as reinforcements led by S.S. Lieutenant-General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski—6,000 of their own defectors amongst them—continue to force the rebels back into Stare Miasto, the Old Town . . . down into miles and miles of sewers where food is scarce, water polluted, dysentery rife.

Warsaw's is a history of invasion, as Lev the Rabbi tells Kotzeleh whenever they have enough free time for talk, and sometimes when they don't; the city has been occupied more often than not, by anyone within marching distance. The Swedes, the Russians, the Prussians, the French—and after the French came the Russians again, a fact (Kotzeleh occasionally thinks) that really should have told the Home Army's leaders something, within context.

“How far do these tunnels go down?” Kotzeleh asks Lev, absently. He shrugs.

“Five hundred years or more, maybe.”

“Nu? So long?”

“They've got catacombs here, just like in Paris. Pits of bone from the Plague. Some of them even feed into crypts where the churches used to be.”

“Before the bombs?”

He smiles. “Before this shithole was even a real city.”

Kotzeleh accepts this concept without question. Above them, the grating shakes with each new howitzer-hit, sifting stalactites of fecal matter down into the scum they wade in; von dem Bach's ordinance uses shells almost a metre in diameter, able to penetrate two metres of concrete. At seventeen, Kotzeleh's world has shrunk to nothing more than a compendium of holes where things used to be: Buildings, synagogues, people. Solidity, permanence, they're things of the past; this is a New Age, as Tateh used to say.

“My little thorn,” he'd called her. “Be a thorn in their sides, my Kotzeleh. Go down smiling. Go down
killing
.”

Now she does her worst, which usually works. And when it doesn't . . .

After Warsaw finally does fall, which (as it happens) won't be all so very long from now—over and over and over again, in the long, dark century to come—Kotzeleh will map in dreams these tunnels which are her second birthright. Will wander them once more with knife and gun in hand, searching in vain for the secret step-parent who occupies them still. Somewhere.

Here in 1945, though, Kotzeleh's shoes squish when she walks. Their soles are sodden cardboard, cloth sides soaked through, filled from top to bottom with sewer-water slush. When she takes her stockings off, her toes are a mass of white blisters she can peel away one-handed. Seams of dirt map her long, gaunt legs from calf to thigh.

How long have you been down here, dumpling?
the contact asked her, cautiously, the last time she bought guns from him.
It's Katarczyna, am I right?

My name is Kotzeleh.

Kotzeleh. But seriously, dear—how long?

A month. Two, might be.

More like more.

As though time mattered, down here. Or up there.

No one should be down here for MONTHS, let alone a—
But here he'd trailed off, eyes skittering from Kotzeleh's calm, blue-grey stare, leaving her to fill in the blank herself: A woman? A girl? So sweet, so pretty and educated, so Aryan-looking, made for more than a stinking corpse-mouth hole full of people like you? Like me?

If Marek knew,
he'd begun again, finally. Kotzeleh cut him off.

Marek's dead,
she told him. Then:
Do you have bullets for us, or not?

Now she sits and watches the rats squabble over their own dead, thinking:
That'll be us, before long.
Remembers how fast a man named Okun died from eating just one, then remembers the burnt-meat smell from the squad's last manhole foray—two down one after the other, bang and bang, the rest dancing and screaming as they found the oil-filmed water suddenly alight from Fat Chavah's dropped Molotov—and feels her mouth start to water. Bites her cheek ‘till she tastes blood, then stops . . . because it tastes too good, and she doesn't have any left to spare.

Down here, the cleanest things they ever see are Nazis. And she's already killed five this week without finding even one whose boots were small enough to fit her peeling, bleeding, sewer-sodden feet.

* * *

It's a set routine, even now: Back and forth along this trackless warren of dark water and dripping pipes, with only an occasional thin fall of barred sun, klieg-lights or street-fires to tell their way by. Kotzeleh and her crew work blind more often than not, avoiding traps by touch, memory and luck alike, marking whatever fresh ones they've tripped with braille-subtle scratchings, chalkmark scrawls like scat or spoor. From Old Town right along the main sewer under Kracowskie Przedmiescie, and out again at Warecka; check each station ‘till they find someone left alive, make report, then double back again down into the dark, the wet. The long and pungent miles of echoing silence.

“Hell has seven levels, did I ever tell you that?” Lev the Rabbi asks—in a gasping whisper—as they slip free from the tangled knot of rusty barbed wire blocking their path, once a perfectly useable shortcut between storm-drains. “They go down like a ladder, rung by rung: Gehenna, Sha'are Mawet, Sha'are Zalmawet, Be'er Shahat, Tiit Ha-Yawen, Abaddon, Sheol—but that's not all, no. Because below even that, even further, you have the sea of Genesis, of first Creation: Tohu Yi' Bohu.”

A harsh name like salt on the lips, warm and rough and weirdly familiar. That uterine sea we all swim in at least once, forgotten long before we know to try and remember its safely rocking waves, its full and buoyant embrace.

Pure Kabbalistic crap
,
of course—mystical babble like half of everything else Lev spouts, most times seemingly at random. He cut his sidelocks back when the fighting started, so he's probably damned now, and knows it. Still, the gesture also put him long past the point where fear of potential pollution might stop him from chattering on to Kotzeleh about anything Torah-related that slips into his head, under any circumstances; Katarczyna Mendesh, the least Jewish-looking Jewess in Warsaw, barely raised with a sense of her own heritage that extends beyond a lingering taste for gefilte fish and matzoh-ball soup.

Old habits really do die hard,
she thinks. Then:
A good enough way TO die, if you had to pick one.

But at least Lev's monologues help pass the time, as the rest of the group have already come to appreciate; give them something to take their minds off the muck around them, if only for a moment. Distract them from fixating on the little nagging details like that something slimy which hangs, caught, in the middle of the wire-bale they've just dodged past—ragged, half-submerged, some long-gone child messenger's discarded coat, maybe. Or maybe . . .

. . . something more.

Dead from hunger, sickness, a bullet in the back left too long untreated. Or smothered and cooked bone-black by that thing the surface troops keep warning is on its way, von dem Bach's famous
Taifun-gerat
, the Nazi storm-starter: A portable engine made just small enough to seal over manholes, pumping gas down into all the relevant nooks and crannies; one brief touch of a match, one stray spurt from a flame-thrower's nozzle, and all the scurrying in the world won't save you from the blast.

Like roaches from a burning butcher's shop
, Kotzeleh thinks, unable to stop herself. While Lev adds, at the same time—right in her ear, already stinging with potential lockjaw where a stray strand of wire must have nicked her lobe—

“Everything starts over at the bottom, you see. Like in alchemy. Albedo out of nigredo, the gold out of the dungheap. The Philosopher's Stone, pretty girl; true paradise, regained.”

Kotzeleh squints hard against the dim light, sniffing long and loud. “This doesn't smell much like paradise,” she says.

A laugh, impossibly dry: “No, it doesn't, does it?”

Up ahead, Fat Chavah gives a warning hiss—footsteps, jackboots, passing by above. Lev and Kotzeleh freeze, rooted in the murky eddy, feeling for their triggers. But it's a false alarm, “like always” . . .

Except when it isn't.

“Could be we just haven't gone down far enough yet,” Lev suggests, finally—trying to sound like he's joking, probably. And failing.

* * *

A day later, loaded down with new-won weaponry and making straight for Home Army headquarters—Ochota, 80 Wawelska Street, the last Old Town building left both standing and occupied—Kotzeleh and her companions run straight into that same chatty contact who sold them bullets sloshing back the other way, a straggly crocodile of fellow refugees in tow. The sound of their guns cocking in the dark makes him jump and freeze, ‘til he takes a hesitant half-step further into the light and realizes who's leading the pack.

Relaxing: “Oh, so it's you, dumpling.”

And now with the charm.

“As you see,” Kotzeleh says—stating the obvious, studiously bland. “You should tell your people to walk quieter from now on, if they don't want to run into company; there's two patrols a mile ‘til you get to the suburbs.”

“Ah, yes.” The contact leans closer, lowers his voice, assuming an intimacy Kotzeleh finds vaguely grotesque. “And you know why, of course.”

“To kill us.”

“Partly.” A beat. “They got Radoslaw this morning.”

Radoslaw.

Colonel Jan Mazurkiewicz, the Home Army's highest-ranking “officer.” Behind her, Kotzeleh hears Fat Chavah make a noise somewhere between a sob and a sigh; Lev sags sideways against the sewer wall for a second, but masters himself almost immediately. While Kotzeleh just stands there, her cold eyes half-lashed, daring the contact to frisk her (metaphorically) for any signs of normal human weakness: staring down the future's foregone conclusion like it was just another open pipe-mouth full of stink and danger, just another black and empty barrel on another Nazi gun.

So this is the end,
she thinks, feeling nothing. And notes, aloud, with an acid little nod to his sleeve—

“That must be why you took off your armband.”

The contact shrugs, unfazed. “Wear the Home Army's insignia from now on, you might as well paint a target on your chest.” He gestures at the hard-breathing crowd behind him like he's showing off what he bought for dinner. “
They
need me alive, dumpling, to get them past the barriers; they want me alive, because
they
want to live. Can you blame them?”

THEM, no. But—

“—you should go too, maybe,” Lev puts in, suddenly. Adding, as Kotzeleh pins him with a glare: “Look, it only makes sense, nu? While you still can.”

“I'm fine where I am.”

“But you . . . ” He trails off. “You could get word to somebody, that's all I'm thinking. Get them to send back reinforcements.”

And if there's no one left to send, Rabbi? What then?

“Why don't you go yourself, if you're so eager?” she snaps.

And now it's Lev's turn to raise his brows and shrug, throwing an ironic glance the contact's way—his thoughts so clear that Kotzeleh can practically hear them in her head.
What, me, with the Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion tattooed on my face? To men like this, I'm not even Polish—but you, Kotzeleh, you. You, my dear . . .

. . . can pass.

As she already has done, many times, and may well do a few more before the bullet hits the bone. Yet the injustice of it twists in her nonetheless, raising a flush under sewer-pale skin—the contact, smiling that bad-teeth corpse's smile at her, his offer a secret handshake, a shared sin, the same temptation she's had to guard against since bombs first began to fall. A siren song whose first verse always sounds like
leave the Jews behind and come along, sweetheart, you with your pretty blond hair and your straight little nose, so Aryan-pure you'd fool the Fuhrer himself,
whose chorus always sounds like
just leave them to die down here like the rats they are, come along with us up into daylight, and survive . . .

“You could live a long time,” the contact tells her, smiling wider. “You're young yet, dumpling.”

Kotzeleh takes one last look at him for reference, then tucks her gun away again; he isn't worth the effort, let alone the ammunition. Answering, simply—

“No. I'm not.”

To which the contact frowns, mouth kiting up on one side, like he's bitten into something sour. But whatever comeback he's planning is derailed when—with an ugly, scraping CLANG—the manhole above them is suddenly prised up, popping free like a boil to reveal a knot of gaping Nazi faces.

The refugees flatten, shrieks rising. A woman grabs both her children with a hand across each one's mouth, hauling them backwards out of sight, as confusion—ever-infectious—rips through the crowd around her. Caught full in the spill of sunshine, Kotzeleh goes for her gun but somehow gets her knife instead; she turns to see the contact waving frantically upwards, yelling: “
Mein herren
, no, don't shoot! We—”

And: Is that really the trail of an “s,” right there at the end? Kotzeleh will never know, not that it matters—her blade has already punched through his voicebox and out the other side before she even thinks to aim it, loosing a startlingly vivid pump of heart's blood twenty feet in the air to spatter some Nazi's cheek.