The Worm in Every Heart

by Gemma Files

  And this is good news for me, since the relative experiential gap between a man in his upper twenties and a woman in her upper thirties—especially compared to that between a boy of fourteen and a woman of twenty-eight—is almost insignificant.

  Looking back, I don’t know if I’ve ever loved anyone but Ellis—if I’m even capable of loving anyone else. But finally, after all these wasted years, I do know what I want. And who.

  And how to get them both.

  It’s a terrible thing I’m doing, and an even worse thing I’m going to do. But when it’s done, I’ll have what I want, and everything else—all doubts, all fears, all piddling, queasy little notions of goodness, and decency, and basic human kinship—all that useless lot can just go hang, and twist and rot in the wind while they’re at it. I’ve lived much too long with my own unsatisfied desire to simply hold my aching parts—whatever best applies, be it stomach or otherwise—and congratulate myself on my forbearance anymore. I’m not mad, or sick, or even yearning after a long-lost love that I can never regain, and never really had in the first place. I’m just hungry, and I want to eat.

  And morality . . . has nothing to do with it.

  Because if there’s one single thing you taught me, Ellis—one lesson I’ve retained throughout every twist and turn of this snaky thing I call my life—it’s that hunger has no moral structure.

  * * *

  Huang came back late this morning, limping and cursing, after a brief detour to the office of an understanding doctor who his father keeps on international retainer. I am obscurely pleased to discover that Ellis can still defend herself; even after Huang’s first roundhouse put her on the pavement, she still somehow managed to slip her razor open without him noticing, then slide it shallowly across the back of his Achilles tendon. More painful than debilitating, but rather well done nevertheless, for a woman who can no longer wear shoes which require her to tie her own laces.

  I am almost as pleased, however, to hear that nothing Ellis may have done actually succeeded in preventing Huang from completing his mission—and beating her, with methodical skill, to within an inch of her corrupt and dreadful old life.

  I have already told my publicist that I witnessed the whole awful scene, and asked her to find out which hospital poor Mrs. Munro has been taken to. I myself, meanwhile, will drive the boy to the kitchen of the Precious Dragon Shrine restaurant, where I am sure the master chef and his staff will do their best to keep him entertained until later tonight. Huang has lent him his pocket Gameboy, which should help.

  Ah. That must be the phone now, ringing.

  * * *

  The woman in bed 37 of the Morleigh Memorial Hospital’s charity wing, one of the few left operating in St. Louis—in America, possibly—opens her swollen left eye a crack, just far enough to reveal a slit of red-tinged white and a wandering, dilated pupil, barely rimmed in grey.

  “Hello, Ellis,” I say.

  I sit by her bedside, as I have done for the last six hours. The screens enshrouding us from the rest of the ward, with its rustlings and moans, reduce all movement outside this tiny area to a play of flickering shadows—much like the visions one might glimpse in passing through a double haze of fever and mosquito net, after suffering a violent shock to one’s fragile sense of physical and moral integrity.

  . . . and oh, how the ghost of you clings . . .

  She clears her throat, wetly. Tells me, without even a flicker of hesitation:

  “Nuh . . . Ellis. Muh num iss . . . Munro.”

  But: She peers up at me, straining to lift her bruise-stung lids. I wait, patiently.

  “Tuh—”

  “That’s a good start.”

  I see her bare broken teeth at my patronizing tone, perhaps reflexively. Pause. And then, after a long moment:

  “Tim.”

  “Good show, Ellis. Got it in one.”

  Movement at the bottom of the bed: Huang, stepping through the gap between the screens. Ellis sees him, and stiffens. I nod in his direction, without turning.

  “I believe you and Huang have already met,” I say. “Mr. Wao Huang, that is; you’ll remember his father, the former warlord Wao Ruyen. He certainly remembers you—and with some gratitude, or so he told me.”

  Huang takes his customary place at my elbow. Ellis’ eyes move with him, helplessly—and I recall how my own eyes used to follow her about in a similarly fascinated manner, breathless and attentive on her briefest word, her smallest motion.

  “I see you can still take quite a beating, Ellis,” I observe, lightly. “Unfortunately for you, however, it’s not going to be quite so easy to recover from this particular melee as it once was, is it? Old age, and all that.” To Hunag: “Have the doctors reached any conclusion yet? Regarding Mrs. Munro’s long-term prognosis?”

  “Wouldn’t say as ‘ow there was one, tai pan.”

  “Well, yes. Quite.”

  I glance back, only to find that Ellis’ eyes have turned to me at last. And I can read them so clearly, now—like clean, black text through grey rice-paper, lit from behind by a cold and colorless flame. No distance. No mystery at all.

  When her mouth opens again, I know exactly what word she’s struggling to shape.

  “Duh . . . deal?”

  Oh, yes.

  I rise, slowly, as Huang pulls the chair back for me. Some statements, I find, need room in which to be delivered properly—or perhaps I’m simply being facetious. My writer’s over-developed sense of the dramatic, working double-time.

  I wrote this speech out last night, and rehearsed it several times in front of the bathroom mirror. I wonder if it sounds rehearsed. Does calculated artifice fall into the same general category as outright deception? If so, Ellis ought to be able to hear it in my voice. But I don’t suppose she’s really apt to be listening for such fine distinctions, given the stress of this mutually culminative moment.

  “I won’t say you’ve nothing I want, Ellis, even now. But what I really want—what I’ve always wanted—is to be the seller, for once, and not the sold. To be the only one who has what you want desperately, and to set my price wherever I think it fair.”

  Adding, with the arch of a significant brow: “—or know it to be unfair.”

  I study her battered face. The bruises form a new mask, impenetrable as any of the others she’s worn. The irony is palpable: Just as Ellis’ nature abhors emotional accessibility, so nature—seemingly—reshapes itself at will to keep her motivations securely hidden.

  “I’ve arranged for a meal,” I tell her. “The menu consists of a single dish, one with which I believe we’re both equally familiar. The name of that dish is the Emperor’s Old Bones, and my staff will begin to cook it whenever I give the word. Now, you and I may share this meal, or we may not. We may regain our youth, and double our lives, and be together for at least as long as we’ve been apart—or we may not. But I promise you this, Ellis: No matter what I eventually end up doing, the extent of your participation in the matter will be exactly defined by how much you are willing to pay me for the privilege.”

  I gesture to Huang, who slips a pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket. I tap one out. I light it, take a drag. Savor the sensation.

  Ellis just watches.

  “So here’s the deal, then: If you promise to be very, very nice to me—and never, ever leave me again—for the rest of our extremely long partnership—”

  I pause. Blow out the smoke. Wait.

  And conclude, finally:

  “—then you can eat first.”

  I offer Ellis the cigarette, slowly. Slowly, she takes it from me, holding it delicately between two splinted fingers. She raises it to her torn and grimacing mouth. Inhales. Exhales those familiar twin plumes of smoke, expertly, through her crushed and broken nose. Is that a tear at the corner of her eye, or just an upwelling of rheum? Or neither?

  �
��Juss like . . . ahways,” she says.

  And gives me an awful parody of my own smile. Which I—return.

  With interest.

  * * *

  Later, as Huang helps Ellis out of bed and into the hospital’s service elevator, I sit in the car, waiting. I take out my cellular phone. The master chef of the Precious Dragon Shrine restaurant answers on the first ring.

  “How is . . . the boy?” I ask him.

  “Fine, tai pan.”

  There is a pause, during which I once more hear music filtering in from the other end of the line—the tinny little song of a video game in progress, intermittently punctuated by the clatter of kitchen implement. Laughter, both adult and child.

  “Do you wish to cancel your order, tai pan Darbersmere?” the master chef asks me, delicately.

  Through the hospital’s back doors, I can see the service elevator’s lights crawling steadily downward—the floors reeling themselves off, numeral by numeral. Fifth. Fourth. Third.

  “Tai pan?”

  Second. First.

  “No. I do not.”

  The elevator doors are opening. I can see Huang guiding Ellis out, puppeting her deftly along with her own crutches. Those miraculously-trained hands of his, able to open or salve wounds with equal expertise.

  “Then I may begin cooking,” the master chef says. Not really meaning it as a question.

  Huang holds the door open. Ellis steps through. I listen to the Gameboy’s idiot song, and know that I have spent every minute of every day of my life preparing to make this decision, ever since that last morning on the Yangtze. That I have made it so many times already, in fact, that nothing I do or say now can ever stop it from being made. Any more than I can bring back the child Brian Thompson-Greenaway was, before he went up the hill to Wao Ruyen’s fortress, hand in stupidly trusting hand with Ellis—or the child I was, before Ellis broke into my parents’ house and saved me from one particular fate worse than death, only to show me how many, many others there were to choose from.

  Or the child that Ellis must have been, once upon a very distant time, before whatever happened to make her as she now is—then set her loose to move at will through an unsuspecting world, preying on other lost children.

  . . . these foolish things . . . remind me of you.

  “Yes,” I say. “You may.”

  The Narrow World

  And then I did a strange thing, but what I did matters not.

  —Oscar Wilde

  IT’S ALWAYS THE SAME, always different. The moment you make that first cut, even before you open the—item—in question up, there’s this faint, red-tinged exhalation: Cotton-soft, indefinite, almost indefinable. Even more than the shudder or the jerk, the last stifled attempt at drawn breath, this is what marks a severance—what proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that something which once considered itself alive has been physically deleted from this tangle of contradictory image and sensation we choose to call “reality.”

  Cut away from, cut loose. Or maybe—cut free.

  And this is the first operating rule of magic, whether black, white or red all over: For every incision, an excision. No question without its answer. No action without its price.

  Some people fast before a ritual. I don’t. Some people wear all white. I wear all black, except for the purple fun-fur trim on my winter coat (which I took so long to find in the first place that I really just couldn’t bear to part with it.) Some people still say you have to be a psychopath to be able to draw a perfect circle—so I hedge my bets, and carry a surveyor’s compass. But I also don’t drink, don’t smoke, haven’t done any drugs but Tylenol since I was a Ryerson undergraduate, getting so bent out of shape I could barely talk straight and practicing Crowleyan “sex magick” with a similarly inclined posse of curricular acquaintances every other weekend.

  Effective hierarchical magicians like me are the Flauberts of the Narrow World—neat and orderly in our lives, comme un bourgeois, so that we may be violent and creative in our work. We’re not fanatics. There’s no particular principle involved, except maybe the principle of Free Enterprise. So we can afford to stay safe . . . and for what they’re paying us to do so, our customers kind of prefer it that way.

  $3,000 down, tax-free, for a simple supernatural Q & A session, from U of T Business pregrad Doug Whatever to me, Hark Chiu-Wai—Jude Hark, as I’m known down here in Toronto the Good-for-nothing. That’s what brought me where I was when all this began: Under the vaulted cathedral arch of the St Clair Ravine Bridge, shivering against the Indian Winter air of early September as I gutted a sedated German Shepherd, in preparation for invoking the obsolete Sumerian god of divination by entrails.

  The dog was a bit on the small side, but it was a definite improvement on Doug and his girlfriend’s first try—a week back, when they’d actually tried to fob me off with some store-bought puppy. Through long and clever argument, however, I’d finally gotten them to cave in: If you’re looking to evoke a deity who speaks through a face made of guts—one who goes by the slightly risible name of Humbaba, to be exact—you’d probably better make sure his mouth is big enough to tell you what you want to hear.

  Since I hate dogs anyway—tongue-wagging little affection junkies—treating one like a Christmas chicken was not exactly a traumatic prospect. So I completed the down-stroke, shearing straight through its breastbone, and pushed down hard on either side of its ribcage ‘til I heard something crack.

  Behind me, the no-doubt-soon-to-be-Mrs. Doug made a hacking noise, and shifted her attention to a patch of graffiti on the nearest wall. Doug just kept on staring, maintaining the kind of physical fixity that probably passed for thought in his circles.

  “So what, those the . . . innards?” He asked, delicately.

  “Those are they,” I said, not looking up. Flaying away the membrane between heart and lungs, lifting and separating the subsections of fat between abdomen and bowels . . .

  He nodded. “What’cha gonna do with ’em?”

  “Watch.”

  I twisted, cut, twisted again, cut again. Heart on one side, lungs (a riven grey tissue butterfly, torn wing from wing) on the other. Pulled forth the gall bladder and squeezed it empty, using it to smear binding sigils at my north, south, east, west. Shook out another cleansing handful of rock salt, and wrung the bile from my palms.

  Doug’s girlfriend, having exhausted the wall’s literary possibilities, had turned back toward the real action. Hand over mouth, she ventured:

  “Um—is that like a hat you can buy, or is that a religion?”

  “What?”

  “Your hat. Is it, like, religious?”

  (The headgear in question being a black brocade cap, close-fitting, topped with a round, greyish satin applique of a Chinese embroidery pattern: Bats and dragons entwined, signifying long life and good luck. The kind of thing my Ma might’ve picked out for me, were she inclined to do so.)

  “Oh, yes,” I replied, keeping my eyes firmly on the prize, as I started to unreel the dog’s intestines. “Very religious. Has its own church, actually. All hail Jude’s hat—bow down, bow down. Happy holiness to the headgear.”

  She sniffed, mildly aggrieved at my lack of interest in her respect for my fashion sense.

  Said: “Well, excuse me for trying to be polite.”

  I shot her a small, amused glance. Thinking: Oh, was that what you were trying to do?

  Ai-yaaa.

  The dog had more guts than I’d originally given him credit for. Scooping out the last of them, I started to shape them into a rough, pink face, its features equally blurred with blood and seeping digestive juices.

  “You ever hear the four great tenets of hierarchical magic?” I asked her, absently. “’To know, to dare, to will, to be silent.’“

  Then, pulling the mouth’s corners up into a derisive, toothless grin, and conjuring a big smil
e of my own: “So why don’t you just consider yourself Dr. Faustus for a day, and shut the fuck up?”

  She gasped. Doug caught himself starting to snicker, and toned that way down, way fast.

  “Hey, guy,” he said, slipping into Neanderthal “protective” mode. “Remember who’s footin’ the tab here.”

  “This is a ritual,” I pointed out. “Not a conversation.”

  “Long as I’m payin’, buddy, it’s whatever I say it is,” Doug snapped back.

  Thus proving himself exactly the type of typical three “c” client I’d already assumed him to be—callow, classist and cheap. Kind of loser wants McDonald’s-level asslicking along with his well-protected probe into the Abyss, plus an itemized list of everything his Daddy’s trust-fund money was paying for, and special instructions on how to make the whole venture look like a tax-deductible educational expense.

  “To Sumer’s carrion lord of the pit, He Who Holds The Sceptre Of Ereshkigal, one dog’s soul, for services rendered,“ I thought, shooting Doug a glance, as I finished laying the foundations of Humbaba’s features. And: Try writing that one off, you spoiled, Gapified snakefucker.

  Well, I wax virulent. But these rich boys do get my goat, especially when they want something for nothing, and it just happens to be my something. Though my contempt for them as a breed may well stem from a certain lingering sense-memory of what I used to be like, back when I was one.

  In the seven years since my rich old Baba Hark first paid my eventually prodigal way from downtown Hong Kong to RTA at Ryerson, I’ve dealt with elementals, demons, angels and ghosts, all of whom soon proved to be their own particular brand of pain in the ass. The angels I called on spoke a really obscure form of Hebrew; the demons decided my interest in them meant I was automatically laid open to twenty-four-hour-a-day Temptation, which didn’t slack off until I had a sigilic declaration of complete neutrality tattooed on either palm. Elementals are surly and uncooperative. Ghosts cling—literally, in some cases. I remember coming to see Carraclough Devize one time (in hospital, as increasingly ever), only to have her stare fixedly over my left shoulder where the spectre of a dead man I’d recently helped to report his own murder still drifted—hand on the gap between the base of my skull and the top of my spine, through which most possessive spirits first enter. And ask, dryly: “So who’s your new friend?”