Wounds, page 5
Your father’s thoughts had begun to cool, fluttering down to me now rarely, like leaves from an old tree, nearly spent. One drifted past, stately and blue. You were younger; you were on the couch watching TV with him. You’d had a good day; you were tired and warm. You leaned over and rested your head on your father’s shoulder. He pushed you away. You apologized and leaned in the other direction. Shame consumed him.
He wanted to be touched with another kind of love, from another kind of person.
You flushed the vat as I considered that thought. The floor opened beneath me and I flowed through a narrow chute in a wild green torrent, sliding through darkness for several disorienting minutes until I splashed from the end of a culvert and flew through the clear air, landing finally in the warm lake and dissolving there.
It was like waking. It can only be like waking.
I saw the stars overhead. I felt the ripple of wind, the pull of the roots of the Devil’s Willow as they sipped at me. I felt the bed of the earth below me, and I felt too the great, slow-beating heart of the thing buried beneath the cold mud.
I am the lake. You have made me anew.
~ ~ ~
Joey met you under the Devil’s Willow. He was angry and scared, but just proud enough to believe that you had come to regret your earlier rejection of him, and now wanted him after all. He didn’t come alone. He wanted to make you pay for the embarrassment you’d caused him, so he had two of his friends follow. They were meant to hide in the bushes several yards away and take pictures of you as you undressed, to pass around the school. Joey meant to have his revenge.
You were waiting for him beneath the willow. You had a picnic blanket spread out and half a dozen candles lit, their flames trembling in the cool night air. The sky was high and cold, icy with stars. You sat in the middle of the blanket, legs curled beneath you, a glass of whiskey already in your hand. Joey paused when he saw all of this. He considered doubling back to send his friends home.
But his fear of you was too great, so he didn’t. He stopped at the edge of the blanket and stood frozen.
“Come on,” you said.
“Are you drunk?”
“A little bit.”
“Without me? That’s not fair.”
“So sit down and catch up with me.”
He dropped to his knees and moved closer to you. You handed him the bottle, and he took it. You let him take a good swig, his head tilted back, before you slipped the knife cleanly between his ribs. You held it there for a moment, your hand wrapped tightly around the handle.
“Ow!” He looked down at what you had done. He hardly believed it was real. It felt so inconsequential; like a wasp sting. “You bitch! You stabbed me!”
You slid the knife free, and it was like pulling a stopper from a bottle of wine: Blood gushed from the wound, and Joey fell forward, catching himself with one hand while holding the other to his side. The pain careened through him now, unbelievable in its ferocity. “What?” he said, and his voice sounded small—like the child he still was.
I watched your face for a reaction. You looked pale, but otherwise betrayed no emotion.
“Help me,” he said.
There was a rustling from the bushes several feet away, and you turned toward it, alarmed. His two friends—boys you must have seen at high school with Joey—crept uncertainly out of hiding. One held his phone at his side.
“Dude. Are you okay?”
You stood, the knife drooling in your hand.
“I think you better call an ambulance,” Joey said, his voice pitched high with fear.
Because they were fools, the boys ignored him and ran forward. One dropped to Joey’s side, and the other screamed at you, calling you filthy names, his body rigid with shock. You ignored them all; you were watching the tree.
A cold tongue of fire crept up from the roots and coiled around the trunk. Several more followed. In moments the Devil’s Willow was a pale green-white conflagration, shedding no heat but filling the little valley with its weird radiance. I felt that thing that slept under the mud stir beneath my waters. Every slow thump of its heart brightened the willow’s fire.
You spoke to it. “Bring him back. Please just bring him back. I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll kill everyone. I’ll kill them all.”
I realized then that you were talking to the Morningstar. Your unfilled want, Allison, the hollow in your heart and the love that goes unanswered, is a prayer to Him. Your whole life is a hymn to Hell.
I think that’s when I fell in love, myself, for the first time.
“I don’t know what to do,” you said.
You couldn’t bring back your father, though; whatever sorcery he practiced, you did not know it. You’d started something, but you did not know how to go further. In moments you would be brought down by these stupid boys, and what might happen after that I couldn’t even guess.
But if the Morningstar could not respond to you, I could.
I couldn’t speak to you without the radio. I would have to show you.
Joey made it easy. He lay gasping on the blanket, his friend’s hand pressed into his side. The heel of his left shoe rested in the water. So I pulled him in. It only took a moment; it was easy. I had become the lake, diffused into it like a breath into the atmosphere. I poured myself into his eyes and down his throat; I filled him like a vessel. Then I used him to pull in his friend, and I filled him, too. In moments I had all three. I felt their life sparking in me. For the first time since being brought here, I knew a communal mind again. I was no longer alone. And so began the miracle you brought to our town.
We stood panting by the shore, feeling our new selves. We glanced at one another, ashamed by this new intimacy at first, at the torrents of knowledge that poured into us, all our shabby secrets and desires brought to sudden light. But the embarrassment dissipated quickly; there can be no secrets if we all share the same mind.
The same love.
We looked at you. We spoke to you in a chorus of voices: “Come here, Allison.”
The look on your face—I didn’t know it. Was it another kind of love? Was there more yet to learn?
“Who are you?” you asked.
“You know who we are,” we said, in unison.
You turned and fled. It was a shocking rejection. We didn’t understand. Isn’t this what you wanted? To be welcomed? To be loved? Not to be alone anymore?
The tree lit the night and soon drew other people from town. They joined us, reluctantly at first—many had to be forced into the water, where I could pour into them—but they were grateful soon enough. By the time morning approached, we had everyone.
We decided to work. It was what we knew. The memory of the mills drove us. Many of us went into the lake to be consumed by the labor. Limbs were broken and reconfigured, bone grafted to bone, kites of skin stretched taut. It took two hundred people broken down and reassembled to make the skeleton of the mill’s first wheel; there is more yet to be done.
As the sun crests the hills, the mill begins to turn in the lake. We lift our voice in a chorus of groans. We bend to you like reeds to the light. Why don’t you respond, Allison? Why have you never responded to us, despite our every provocation?
We used to know our monster. Now we don’t. We see you with ten thousand eyes, but we don’t know you. You’re standing at the window of your house, your hollow father still sitting behind you like a deposed king. His head gone cold and quiet. You’re staring out at us. You press your hand to the glass. Can you feel the warmth of us, the way I felt your warmth once, through a different glass?
Your face makes a complicated movement, an expression we believe will tell us something about you. But before we can read it, the sunlight hits the windowpane and the glare of it reflects back to us, a tiny star in the morning light.
Skullpocket
Jonathan Wormcake, the Eminent Ghoul of Hob’s Landing, greets me at the door himself. Normally, one of his several servants would perform this minor duty, and I can only assume it’s my role as a priest in the Church of the Maggot that affords me this special attention. I certainly don’t believe it has anything to do with our first encounter, fifty years ago this very day. I’d be surprised if he remembers that at all.
He greets me with a cordial nod of the head and leads me down a long hallway to the vast study, lined with thousands of books and boasting broad windows overlooking the Chesapeake Bay, where the waters are painted gold by an autumn sun. I remember this walk, and this study, with a painful twinge in my heart. I was just a boy when I came here last. Now, like Mr. Wormcake himself, I am a very old man, facing an end to my life.
I’m shocked by the toll the years have taken on him. I know I shouldn’t be; Mr. Wormcake’s presence in this mansion extends back one hundred years, and his history with the town is well documented. But since the death of the Orchid Girl last year, he has withdrawn from public life, and in that time his aspect has changed considerably. Though his bearing remains regal, and his grooming is as immaculate as ever, age hangs from him like a too-large coat. The flesh around his head is entirely gone, and his hair—once his proudest feature—is no more. The bare bones of his skull gleam brightly in the late afternoon sunlight, and the eyes have fallen to dust, leaving dark sockets. He looks frail, and he looks tired.
To be fair, the fourteen children crowding the room, all between the ages of six and twelve, only underscore this impression. They’ve been selected for the honor of attending the opening ceremonies of the Seventieth Annual Skullpocket Fair by the Maggot, which summoned them here through their dreams. The children are too young, for the most part, to understand the significance of the honor, and so they mill about the great study in nervous anticipation, chattering to one another and touching things they shouldn’t.
Mr. Wormcake’s longtime manservant—formally known as Brain in a Jar 17, of the Frozen Parliament, but who is more affectionately recognized as the kindly “Uncle Digby”—glides into the room, his body a polished, gold-inlaid box on rolling treads, topped with a clear dome under which the floating severed head of an old man is suspended in a bubbling green solution, white hair drifting like ghostly kelp. He is received with a joyful chorus of shouts from the children, who immediately crowd around him. He embraces the closest of them with his metal arms.
“Oh my, look at all these wonderful children,” he says. “What animated little beasts!”
To anyone new to Hob’s Landing, Uncle Digby can be unnerving. His face and eyes are dead, and his head appears to be nothing more than a preserved portion of a cadaver, which never moves––it’s as still as a walnut––but the brain inside is both alive and lively, and it speaks through a small voice box situated beneath the glass dome.
While the children are distracted, Mr. Wormcake removes a small wooden box from where it sits discreetly on a bookshelf. He opens it and withdraws the lower, fleshy portion of a human face—from below the nose to the first curve of the chin, kept moist in a thin pool of blood. A tongue is suspended from it by a system of leather twine and gears. Mr. Wormcake affixes the half face to his skull by means of an elastic band and pushes the tongue into his mouth. Blood trickles down the jawline of the skull and dapples the white collar of his starched shirt. The effect is disconcerting, even to me, who has grown up in Hob’s Landing and is accustomed to stranger sights than this.
Jonathan Wormcake has not ventured into public view for twenty years, since the denuding of his skull, and it occurs to me that I am the first person not a part of this household to witness this procedure.
I am here because Mr. Wormcake is dying, and as the resident priest of the Church of the Maggot, it is my duty to preside over his end of life ritual.
We don’t know how a ghoul dies. Not even he is sure; he left the warrens as a boy and was never indoctrinated into the mysteries. The dreams given to us by the Maggot, replete with images of sloughing flesh and great, black kites riding silently along the night’s air currents, suggest that it’s not an ending, but a transformation. But we have no experience to measure these dreams against. What waits for him on the far side of this death remains an open question.
He stretches his mouth and moves his tongue, like a man testing the fit of a new article of clothing. Apparently satisfied, he looks at me at last. “It’s good of you to come, especially on this night,” he says.
“I have to admit I was surprised you chose the opening night of Skullpocket Fair for this. It seems there might have been a more discreet time.”
He looks at the children gathered around Uncle Digby, who is guiding them gently toward the great bay window. They are animated by excitement and fear, a tangle of emotions I remember from when I was in their place. “I have no intention of stealing their moment,” he says. “This night is about them. Not me.”
I’m not convinced this is entirely true. Though the children have been selected to participate in the opening ceremonies of Skullpocket Fair, and will be the focus of the opening act, the pomp and circumstance is no more about them than it is about the Maggot, or the role of the church in this town. Really, it’s all about Jonathan Wormcake. Never mind the failed mayoral campaign of the mid-seventies, never mind the fallout from the Sleepover War or the damning secrets made public by the infamous betrayal of his best friend, Wenceslas Slipwicket—Wormcake is the true patriarch of Hob’s Landing; the Skullpocket Fair is held each year to celebrate that fact, and to fortify it.
That this one marks the one hundredth anniversary of his dramatic arrival in town, as well as his imminent farewell to this particular life, makes his false modesty a little hard to take.
“Sit down,” he says, and extends a hand toward the most comfortable chair in the room: a high-backed, deeply cushioned piece of furniture of the sort one might expect to find in the drawing room of an English lord. Wormcake maneuvers another, smaller chair away from the chess table in the corner and closer to me, so we can speak more easily. He eases himself slowly into it and sighs with a weary satisfaction as his body settles, at last, into stillness. If he had eyes, I believe he would close them now.
Meanwhile, Uncle Digby has corralled the children into double rows of folding chairs. He is distributing soda and little containers of popcorn, which do not calm the children, but do at least draw their focus.
“Did you speak to any of the children after they received the dream?” Wormcake asks me.
“No. Some of them were brought to the church by their parents, but I didn’t speak to any of them personally. We have others who specialize in that kind of thing.”
“I understand it can be a traumatic experience for some of them.”
“Well, it’s an honor to be selected by the Maggot, but it can also be pretty terrifying. The dream is very intense. Some people don’t respond well.”
“That makes me sad.”
I glance over at the kids, seated now, popcorn spilling from their hands as they shovel it into their mouths. They bristle with a wild energy: a crackling, kinetic radiation that could spill into chaos and tears if not expertly handled. Uncle Digby, though, is nothing if not an expert. The kindliest member of the Frozen Parliament, he has long been the spokesman for the family, as well as a confidant to Mr. Wormcake himself. There are many who believe that without his steady influence, the relationship between the Wormcakes and the townspeople of Hob’s Landing would have devolved into brutal violence long ago. Not everyone welcomed the new church, in the early years.
“The truth is, I don’t want anyone to know why you’re here. I don’t want my death to be a spectacle. If you came up here any other night, someone would notice, and it wouldn’t be hard for them to figure out why. This way, the town’s attention is on the fair. And anyway, I like the symmetry of it.”
“Forgive me for asking, Mr. Wormcake, but my duty here demands it: Are you doing this because of the Orchid Girl’s death?”
He casts a dark little glance at me. It’s not possible to read emotion in a naked skull, of course, and the prosthetic mouth does not permit him any range of expression; but the force of the look leaves me no doubt of his irritation. “The Orchid Girl was her name for the people in town. Her real name was Gretchen. Call her that.”
“My apologies. But the question remains, I’m afraid. To leave the world purely, you must do it unstained by grief.”
“Don’t presume to teach me about the faith I introduced to you.”
I accept his chastisement quietly.
He is silent for a long moment, and I allow myself to be distracted by the sound of the children gabbling excitedly to one another, and of Uncle Digby relating some well-worn anecdote about the time the Kraken returned to the bay. Old news to me, but wonderful stuff to the kids. When Mr. Wormcake speaks again, it is to change course.
“You said the dream that summons the children is intense. You sounded as though you spoke from experience. This is not your first time to the house, is it?”
“No. I had the dream myself, when I was very young. I was summoned to Skullpocket Fair. Seventy years ago. The very first one.”
“My, my. Now that is something. Interesting that it’s you who will perform my death ritual. So that puts you, what. In your eighties? You look young for your age.”
I smile at him. “Thanks. I don’t feel young.”
“Who does, anymore? I suppose I should say welcome back.”
The room seems host to a dizzying compression of history. There are three fairs represented tonight, at least for me: the Seventieth Annual Skullpocket Fair, which commences this evening; the inaugural Skullpocket Fair, which took place in 1944—seventy years ago, when I was a boy—and set my life on its course in the Church; and the Cold Water Fair of 1914, one hundred years ago, which Uncle Digby would begin describing very shortly. That Mr. Wormcake has chosen this night to die, and that I will be his instrument, seems too poetic to be entirely coincidental.
As if on cue, Uncle Digby’s voice rings out, filling the small room. “Children, quiet down now, quiet down. It’s time to begin.” The kids settle at once, as though some spell has been spoken. They sit meekly in their seats, the gravity of the moment settling over them at last. The nervous energy is pulled in and contained, expressing itself now only in furtive glances and, in the case of one buzz-cut little boy, barely contained tears.
