Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  Lisa turned and got some mugs out of the cupboard. She gave me an apologetic half-smile. “Yeah. Something like that.”

  “So, what, she can’t read expressions, or tone?”

  “All the cues we give to others as a part of regular conversation? She doesn’t get them, she probably couldn’t learn them with a year of concerted effort. It’s not just that she doesn’t get it… the most basic interactions are messed up by the canine psychology that’s hardwired into her head. You smile at her and ask her how she’s doing, her first thought is that you’re baring your teeth at her in anger, and she has to remind herself you aren’t. But even after that, she’s probably wondering if you were being sarcastic, or condescending, or kind, or whatever. She knows you aren’t shouting at her from your tone of voice, but we don’t always raise our voices when we’re angry, you know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And she falls back on the one thing she does get, canine behavior, because it does work on a level. Bids for dominance, eye contact, pack heirarchies and establishing territory, all adjusted and adapted to her human life.”

  “So she’s not really a sociopath.”

  “No, not so much.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?” I realized belatedly, that I sounded accusatory. Maybe I was right to.

  “Because she’d leave if she heard about it, and for reasons I don’t know, the boss wants her to stick with us. She’s spent her whole life accepting the fact that she had a shitty childhood, and it made her into a screwed up person. Her dogs are the only thing that’s normal and right for her. If she found out that the reason she’s so messed up is the very same thing that makes her so close to her dogs?”

  She let the thought hang.

  “Got it,” I replied.

  “So not another word of this, please, unless it’s absolutely necessary and you’re absolutely, one-hundred percent positive she’s not going to overhear.”

  “Do the others know?”

  “I don’t think it would change much, and I don’t trust those two to keep a secret. Brian is… I don’t want to say too honest. But he’s transparent, and Bitch can read him. Alec would forget and let it slip as part of a joke. He doesn’t get the gravity of stuff, sometimes.”

  “Okay.”

  She poured a cup and stirred it, then handed me a mug of Ovaltine. She got the other mugs arranged on a tray, and carried it through to the living room. I stayed where I was, to think.

  I was reminded of a non-fiction book I’d read where a kid got halfway through high school before his teachers realized he was illiterate. He did it by being the class clown, by acting out. Was Bitch the same? The violence and hostility could be a cover to distract from her own inability to interact, at least partially. I guessed a fair bit of it was genuine, though. She had had a crappy childhood, she had lived on the streets and had fought tooth and nail to get by and avoid arrest.

  But at the end of the day? As awkward as I felt in day to day interactions? She was a hundred times worse off.

  5.x (Interlude; Gregor the Snail)

  “This what you wanted?” the teenager with scruff on his chin and his hood up handed over the paper bag.

  Broad hands with ruined, rotten brown fingernails pawed through the contents, “It is. Here.” The voice was slightly accented, the words and sounds very careful, as though he were not comfortable with English.

  The young man reached out and his eyes widened as a fold of bills was pressed into his hands.

  “This is… more than I thought it would be.”

  “Are you complaining?”

  The young man shook his head.

  Gregor the Snail put his hands in his pockets, as if to hide the fingernails and the growths that scabbed the backs of his hands. Each of the hard growths, which might have been shell or scale, none any larger than a silver dollar, had a prominent spiral shape to it. As much as he could tuck his hands into his pockets, he was unable to hide his face. He had no hair on his head, not even eyebrows or eyelashes, and the hard growths crusted his face like a terminal case of acne. Most strange and disconcerting of all was the fact that his pale skin was translucent enough that one could see shadows of his skeleton, his teeth and the tongue in his mouth.

  “As you can see,” Gregor said, without any affectation, “It would be hard for me to walk into a store and make simple purchases. I do not like to rely on my friends for this. Makes me feel indebted to them, and this is not good for friendships. If you are interested in repeating this sort of transaction, being on call to run errands for me for a time, it could be arranged.”

  “Really?” the guy rubbed his chin, “For how long?”

  “Until I called and you were unable or unwilling to run my errand. If this happened more than once, or if the reason was not good, I would find someone else, as I did with the last individual.”

  “You didn’t hurt him or anything?”

  “No. I did not. He decided he would rather spend the evening with his girlfriend. I have not called him again.”

  “This won’t be anything illegal?”

  “No. No drugs, no prostitutes, no weapons.”

  “So you call me, I run out and grab you groceries, or clothes, or take-out, or shampoo, or whatever, and you pay me three-”

  “That is four. And I do not have hair, so you would not need to concern yourself with shampoo.”

  “Right. Sorry. So, four hundred dollars each time? What’s the catch?”

  “No catch. I have money, I like things to be convenient. Only one small chance of trouble. My first assistant, she quit because she was concerned that my enemies would use her to get to me. I will not deny this is possible.”

  “You have enemies?”

  “Yes. But there has not been a case yet where any of my assistants ran into trouble with them.”

  “Have any of them run into trouble at all?”

  “The last assistant, the boy with the girlfriend. He thought he could get more money, because he could go to the police and tell them what he knew about me. He was lucky to try this when I was in a generous mood. I dissuaded him. He worked for me for two months after that with no complaint. We were not friendly, it was pure business. I would recommend, gently, that you not try the same thing.”

  “Hey. Live and let live, right?”

  “That is a good saying.”

  “Okay. I’m wanting to go to college this fall, and this is sounding a hell of a lot better than working minimum wage for fifty hours a week. Here, my cell phone number,” he handed over his phone.

  Gregor the Snail took a second to put the number in his own phone. “I have it. I will call.”

  They parted ways.

  Gregor walked down the side streets of downtown Brockton Bay with the hood of his sweatshirt casting his face in shadow. Anyone who happened to cross his path and look beneath his hood were quick to glance away. Embarrassed, spooked. Those that saw him from a distance knew him as monstrous as well, but in a different way. To them, he was simply one of the morbidly obese. A man in his late twenties or early thirties, nearly three times the weight he should be for his five feet and ten inches of height. His weight, he knew, was one of the rare things in this modern world that someone could use to mock him openly.

  It had taken him years to come to peace with this. With being one of the monsters.

  As he came to his destination, the throbbing pulse of music reached his ears. The club sat two blocks away from Lord Street, and there was a line extending around the side of the building. Glowing yellow letters in an almost intentionally plain script spelled out ‘Palanquin’.

  He skipped the line and headed straight for the front door. A burly Hispanic doorman with a beard tracing the edges of his jaw undid the chain fence to let him through.

  “What the hell?” one of the girls near the front of the line complained, “We’ve been waiting for forty five minutes and you let that fat fuck through like that?”

  “Out of the line,” the doorman said,
his voice bored.

  “The hell? Why?”

  “You just dissed the owner’s brother, fuckwit,” the doorman told her, “Out of the line. You and your friends are banned.”

  Gregor smiled and shook his head. The line the doorman had pulled was bullshit, of course, he wasn’t the owner’s brother. But it was nice to see one of the assholes getting what was coming to them.

  He had worked as a bouncer for clubs that wanted someone more exotic and attention-getting, way back when he was first getting on his feet, so he knew that the line you saw out the door was rarely an indication of how many people were inside. An empty club could have a line of people waiting to get in, to give the right image. Even though it was a Tuesday night, Palanquin had no such need for such deceptions. It bustled with people. Gregor carefully navigated the crowd of dancers and people holding drinks, until he reached a stairwell guarded by a bouncer. As with the front door, his admittance to the stairs was automatic, unquestioned.

  The upstairs balcony wasn’t filled with people, and those that were present, a dozen or so, were almost boneless in their lethargy. Mostly girls, they lay prone on couches and in booths throughout the balcony that overlooked the dance floor. Only three people were more or less alert as Gregor approached.

  “Gregor, my boy!” Newter grinned from ear to ear. Gregor caught the briefest flash of disgust on the face of one of the girls sitting with Newter, as she looked at him. She was a blonde with blue lipstick and pink highlights in her hair. Had Gregor been working as the doorman, he would have checked her ID, double checked it, then even if it did look real, he would have kicked her out anyways for being too young. She couldn’t have been older than sixteen.

  Still, that was roughly how old Newter was, and he could hardly fault the boy for being interested in someone his own age.

  The other girl, dark haired, had a European cast to her features. She showed no such distaste. When she smiled up at him, there was no sign the expression was forced. That was both rare and interesting.

  “I brought your dinner,” Gregor said.

  “Good man! Pull up a chair!”

  “The others will want their food as well.”

  “Pull up a chair, come on. I’ve got two stunning girls here, and they’re not believing me when I’m telling them about some of the cooler jobs we’ve pulled. I need backup here, bro.”

  “I do not think it is a good idea to be talking about these things,” Gregor said. He stayed standing.

  Newter reached for the bag and grabbed a sandwich from inside. “It’s cool. Faultline joined the conversation a while ago, so she’s obviously okay with it. You aren’t going to tell, right, Laura? Mary?”

  Each girl shook her head as Newter asked them by name. That let Gregor label the dark haired girl as Laura and the girl with the blue lipstick as Mary.

  “If Faultline said it was fine.” Gregor said. He took the bag back from Newter and found his own sandwich. “Laura and Mary, I am sorry, the other sandwiches I have here are spoken for. I could offer you some of my own, if you would like.”

  “That’s okay, I’m not hungry,” Laura replied, “I like your accent. Is it Norwegian?”

  Gregor finished his first bite, swallowed, and shook his head, “I am not sure. But I have spoken to an expert and he says the other language I speak is Icelandic.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No,” Gregor replied.

  His brusque answer only stalled the conversation for a moment before Newter got it going again, “Okay, bro, tell these girls who we went up against last month.”

  “The toybox job?” Gregor asked, “With the Tinker black market? There was nobody-”

  “The other one. The job in Philadelphia.”

  “Ah. Chevalier and Myrddin.”

  Newter clapped his hands together, rocking back in his seat, “Told you!”

  “And you beat them,” the dark haired girl said, disbelieving.

  “We didn’t lose!” Newter crowed.

  “It was a close call,” Gregor added his own two cents. “Chevalier is leader of Protectorate in Philadelphia. Myrddin leads Protectorate of Chicago. These are people whole world recognizes. They got positions protecting big cities in America because they are strong, because they are smart and talented. We got the job done, as we always do, and we walked away.”

  Newter laughed, “Pay up.”

  Neither Laura nor Mary looked bothered as they reached into their pocket and purse, respectively, and fished out some bills.

  “What was the bet?” Gregor asked.

  “I told them they didn’t have to pay if I was lying.”

  “And if you weren’t lying? They pay more?”

  “No penalty. I got company and conversation for a while,” Newter smiled. He reached up to the back of the booth, grabbed a bag that sat there, and fished out a pair of plastic spoons and a bottle of water. With a water dropper he retrieved from his pocket, he siphoned water from the bottle and placed a few drops in each spoon. The final step was dipping the tip of his tongue in each drop of water.

  “Lick it up,” he told the girls.

  “That’s all?” Laura asked him.

  “It’s enough. Any more and you might be out for an inconveniently long time. That right there,” Newter pointed to the spoon with the tip of his tail, “Is a little less than an hour of psychadelic tripping. No hangover, no side effects, it’s not addictive, and you can’t overdose on it. Trust me, I’ve tried to make someone overdose before, combat situation, and I couldn’t make it happen.”

  Mary was the first to take the spoon and pop it into her mouth. Moments later, her eyes went wide, and she fell limp against the back of the booth.

  “Hey,” Laura said, turning to Gregor. She reached into her pocket, found a receipt and a pen, and scribbled on the blank backside of the paper. She handed it to him. “My number. If you want to talk, or, you know, something else.”

  She winked at him, then popped the spoon into her mouth.

  Gregor blinked in a mild confusion as her head lolled back.

  “Looks like you made a good impression, Gregster,” Newter chuckled.

  “Maybe,” Gregor said. He put the half of his sandwich that remained back in the paper bag, then balled up the wrapper. After a moment’s hesitation, he crumpled the receipt with Laura’s number into the ball. He pitched it to a trash can halfway across the room.

  “Hey! What gives?”

  “I do not think she liked me because I am me,” Gregor said, “I think she liked me because I am a monster.”

  “I think you’re sabotaging yourself, man. She’s hot. Look at her.”

  Gregor did. She was attractive. He sighed.

  “Newter, do you know what a devotee is?”

  Newter shook his head.

  “It is a slang term for someone who is attracted to people with disabilities, because of the disability. I think it is about power, attraction to someone because they are weak somehow. I think it likely that this Laura sees me as weak because of the way I look, the way I may have trouble day to day, and this is compelling to her in a similar way to how a cripple or a blind man might be to a devotee. This does not appeal to me.”

  “No way. Maybe she likes you because of the person underneath.”

  “She did not see enough of me to know who that person might be,” Gregor replied.

  “I think you’re doing yourself a disservice. I’d jump on that opportunity.”

  “You are a stronger person than I in many ways, Newter. I should bring the others their dinner,” Gregor turned to leave.

  “Hey, signal Pierce downstairs to send another girl or two up, will ya?”

  Gregor did as he was asked, getting the attention of the bouncer at the foot of the stairs. The bouncer, in turn, got the attention of a set of girls on the dance floor.

  While the girls made their way up, Gregor turned to Newter, “Are you happy?”

  “Oh man. You’re not going into a philosophical phase again,
are you?”

  “I will spare you that. Are you?”

  “Dude. Look at me. I have money to burn, I’ve got the hottest girls in the city begging to get a taste of me. Literally wanting to taste me! What do you think?”

  “You are happy, then?”

  “Time of my life, bro.” Newter opened his arms wide to greet a trio of girls as they reached the top of the stairs.

  “I am glad.” Gregor turned and entered the hallway at the back of the balcony. As the door sealed shut behind him, the pounding of the music behind him dimmed.

  His next stop was the first door on his left. He knocked.

  “Come in.”

  The bedroom had a bed on each side, in opposite corners. One side of the room was cluttered with posters, pictures, a bookshelf overflowing with books, an Apple computer with two CD racks towering above it, and two speaker systems. The music from the computer speakers only barely managed to drown out the music from the club downstairs. The girl who was lying back on the bed had a dense covering of freckles on her face and hands, and curly brown hair. Magazines were piled in stacks around her on the bed, threatening to topple over at the slightest movement.

  The other side of the room was spartan. Nothing adorned the walls, there were no books, no computer or computer paraphernalia. There was a bed, a bedside table and a dresser. The only character whatsoever was a colorful bedspread and pillowcase. Gregor knew it had been a gift from Faultline. The owner wouldn’t have gone out to get it herself. The resident of that side of the room was seated in the corner, staring into the wall. She was blonde, the sort of platinum white-blond hair that rarely lasted through puberty. Her royal purple sweater was slightly too large for her, drooping over her hands, and her pale jeans were clearly intended to be more comfortable than fashionable.

  “I brought your dinner, Emily.”

  “Thanks,” the freckled girl answered him. She caught the sandwich he threw to her and began to peel open the package.