by Joe Hill
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 first, 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, a 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.
I remember, viscerally and immediately, the giddy terror that filled me when I was that boy, seventy years ago, summoned by a dream of a monster to a monster’s house. I’m surprised when I feel the tears in my own eyes. And I’m further surprised by Mr. Wormcake’s hand, hard and bony beneath its glove, coming over to squeeze my own.
“I’m glad it’s you,” he says. “Another instance of symmetry. Balance eases the heart.”
I’m gratified, of course.
But as Uncle Digby begins to speak, it’s hard to remember anything but the blood.
One hundred years ago, says Uncle Digby to the children, three little ghouls came out to play. They were Wormcake, Slipwicket, and Stubblegut: best friends since birth. They were often allowed to play in the cemetery, as long as the sun was down and the gate was closed. There were many more children playing among the gravestones that night, but we’re only going to concern ourselves with these three. The others were only regular children, and so they were not important.
Now, there were two things about this night that were already different from other nights they went aboveground to play. Does anybody know what they were?
No? Well, I’ll tell you. One was that they were let out a little bit earlier than normal. It was still twilight, and though sometimes ghouls were known to leave the warrens during that time, rarely were children permitted to come up so early. That night, however, the Maggot had sent word that there was to be a meeting in the charnel house—an emergency meeting, to arrange a ritual called an Extinction Rite, which the children did not understand but which seemed to put the adults in a dreadfully dull mood. The children had to be got out of the way. There might have been some discussion about the wisdom of this decision, but ghouls are by nature a calm and reclusive folk, so no one worried that anything untoward would happen.
The other unusual thing about that night, obviously, was the Cold Water Fair.
The Cold Water Fair had been held for years and years, and it was a way for Hob’s Landing to celebrate its relationship with the Chesapeake Bay, and to commemorate the time the Leviathan rose to devour the town but was turned away with some clever thinking and some good advice. This was the first time the fair was held on this side of Hob’s Landing. In previous years it had been held on the northern side of the town, out of sight of the cemetery. But someone had bought some land and got grumpy about the fair being on it, so now they were holding it right at the bottom of the hill instead.
The ghoul children had never seen anything so wonderful! Imagine living your life in the warrens, underground, where everything was stone and darkness and cold earth. Whenever you came up to play, you could see the stars, you could see the light on the water, and you could even see the lights from town, which looked like flakes of gold. But this! Never anything like this. The fair was like a smear of bright paint: candy-colored pastels in the blue wash of air. A great illuminated wheel turned slowly in the middle of it, holding swinging gondola cars full of people.
“A Ferris wheel!” shouts a buzz-cut boy who had been crying only a few minutes ago. His face is still ruddy, but his eyes shine with something else now: something better.
Yes, you’re exactly right. A Ferris wheel! They had never even seen one before. Can you imagine that?
There were gaudy tents arranged all around it, like a little village. It was full of amazing new smells: cotton candy, roasting peanuts, hot cider. The high screams of children blew up to the little ghouls like a wind from a beautiful tomb. They stood transfixed at the fence, those grubby little things, with their hands wrapped around the bars and their faces pressed between.
They wondered briefly if this had anything to do with the Extinction Rite the adults kept talking about.
“Do you think they scream like that all the time?” Slipwicket asked.
Wormcake said, “Of course they do. It’s a fair. It’s made just for screaming.”
In fact, children, he had no idea if this was true. But he liked to pretend he was smarter than everybody else, even way back then.
The children laugh. I glance at Mr. Wormcake, to gauge his reaction to what is probably a scripted joke, but his false mouth, blood pasted to his skull, reveals nothing.
Slipwicket released the longest, saddest sigh you have ever heard. It would have made you cry, it was so forlorn. He said, “Oh, how I would love to go to a place made only for screams.” Uncle Digby is laying it on thick here, his metal hands cupping the glass jar of his head, his voice warbling with barely contained sorrow. The kids eat it up.
“Well, we can’t,” said Stubblegut. “We have to stay inside the fence.”
Stubblegut was the most boring ghoul you ever saw. You could always depend on him to say something dull and dreadful. He was morose, always complaining, and he never wanted to try anything new. He was certain to grow up to be somebody’s father, that most tedious of creatures. Sometimes the others would talk about ditching him as a friend, but they could never bring themselves to do it. They were good boys, and they knew you were supposed to stay loyal to your friends—even the boring ones.
“Come along,” Stubblegut said. “Let’s play skullpocket.”
At this, a transformation overtakes the children, as though a current has been fed into them. They jostle in their seats, and cries of “Skullpocket!” arise from them like pheasants from a bramble. They seem both exalted and terrified. Each is a little volcano, barely contained.
Oh, my! Do you know what skullpocket is, children?
“Yes, yes!”
“I do!”
“Yes!”
Excellent! In case any of you aren’t sure, skullpocket is a favorite game of ghouls everywhere. In simple terms, you take a skull and kick it back and forth between your friends until it cracks to pieces. Whoever breaks it is the loser of the game, and has to eat what they find inside its pocket. And what is that, children?
“The brain!”
“Eeeww!”
That’s right! It’s the brain, which everyone knows is the worst bit. It’s full of all the gummy old sorrows and regrets gathered in life, and the older the brain is, the nastier it tastes. While the loser eats, other players will often dance in a circle around him and chant. And what do they chant?
“Empty your pockets! Empty your pockets!” the children shout.
Yes! You must play the game at a run, and respect is given to those who ricochet the skull off a gravestone to their intended target, increasing the risk of breaking it. Of course you don’t have to do that—you can play it safe and just bat it along nicely—but nobody likes a coward, do they, children? For a regular game, people use adult skulls which have been interred for less than a year. More adventurous players might use the skull of an infant, which offers a wonderful challenge.
Well, someone was sent to retrieve a skull from the charnel house in the warrens, which was kept up by the corpse gardeners. There was always one to be spared for children who wanted to play.
The game was robust, with the ghouls careening the skull off trees and rocks and headstones; the skull proved hardy and i
t went on for quite some time.
Our young Mr. Wormcake became bored. He couldn’t stop thinking about that fair, and the lights and the smells and—most of all—the screams. The screams filled his ears and distracted him from play. After a time, he left the game and returned to the fence, staring down at the fair. It had gotten darker by that time, so that it stood out in the night like a gorgeous burst of mushrooms.
Slipwicket and Stubblegut joined him.
“What are you doing?” said the latter. “The game isn’t over. People will think you’re afraid to play.”
“I’m not afraid,” said Wormcake. And in saying the words, a resolution took shape in his mind. “I’m not afraid of anything. I’m going down there.”
His friends were shocked into silence. It was an awed silence, a holy silence, like the kind you find in church. It was the most outrageous thing they had ever heard anyone say.
“That’s crazy,” Stubblegut said.
“Why?”
“Because it’s forbidden. Because the sunlight people live down there.”
“So what?”
“They’re gross!”
At this, some of the children become upset. Little faces crinkle in outrage.
Now, hold on, hold on. You have to understand how ghouls saw your people at the time. You were very strange to them. Hob’s Landing was as exotic to them as a city on the moon would be to you. People went about riding horses, and they walked around in sunlight. On purpose, for Pete’s sake! Who ever heard of such a thing?
The children start to giggle at this, won over again.
When they came to the cemetery they acted sad and shameful. They buried their dead the way a cat buries its own scat. They were soft and doughy, and they ate whatever came to hand, the way rats and cockroaches do.
“We’re not cockroaches!” cries one of the children.
Of course not! But the ghouls didn’t understand. They were afraid. So they made up wild ideas about you. And it kept their children from wandering, which was important, because they wanted the warrens to stay a secret. Ghouls had been living under the cities of the sunlight people for as long as there have been sunlight people, and for the most part they had kept their existence hidden. They were afraid of what would happen if they were discovered. Can you blame them for that?
But young Mr. Wormcake was not to be dissuaded by rumors or legends!
“I’m going down there. I want to see what it’s all about.”
Back then, the cemetery gate was not burdened with locks or chains; it simply had a latch, oiled and polished, which Wormcake lifted without trouble or fanfare. The gate swung open, and the wide, bright world spread out before them like a feast at the banquet table. He turned to look at his friends. Behind them, the other children had assembled in a small crowd, the game of skullpocket forgotten. The looks on their faces ranged from fear to excitement to open disgust.
“Well?” he said to his friends. “Are you cowards?”
Slipwicket would not be called a coward! He made a grand show of his exit, lifting each foot with great exaggeration over the threshold and stomping it into the earth with a flourish. He completed his transgression with a happy skip and turned to look at Stubblegut, who lingered on the grave side of the fence and gathered his face into a worried knot. He placed his hands over his wide belly and gave it gentle pats, which was his habit when he was nervous.
At that moment of hesitation, when he might have gone back and warned the adults of what was happening, some unseen event in the fair below them caused a fresh bouquet of screams to lift up and settle over the ghouls like blown leaves. Slipwicket’s whole body seemed to lean toward it, like he was being pulled by a great magnet. He looked at Stubblegut with such longing in his eyes, such a terrible ache, that his frightened friend’s resolve was breached at last, and Stubblegut crossed the threshold himself with a grave and awful reluctance.
He was received with joy.
And before anyone could say jackrabbit, Slipwicket bolted down the hill, a pale little gremlin in the dark green waves of grass. The others followed him in a cool breath of motion, the tall grass like a strange, rippling sea in the moonlight. Of course, they were silent in their elation: the magnitude of their crime was not lost upon them. Wormcake dared not release the cry of elation beating in his lungs.
But, children, they were in high rebellion. They were throwing off the rules of their parents and riding the wave of their own cresting excitement. Even Stubblegut felt it, like a blush of heat over his moss-grown soul.
Naturally, Uncle Digby’s story stirs up memories of my own first fair.
The dream of the Maggot came to me in 1944, when I was twelve years old. The tradition of the Cold Water Fair had ended thirty years before, on the bloody night Uncle Digby is speaking of, and Hob’s Landing had done without a festival of any sort since. But though we didn’t know it yet, this would be the year the Skullpocket Fair was begun.
I was the sixth kid to receive the dream that year. I had heard of a couple of the others, so I had known, in some disconnected way, that it might happen. I didn’t know what it meant, except that parents were terrified of it. They knew it had something to do with the Wormcake clan, and that was enough to make it suspect. Although this was in 1944 and they’d been living in the mansion for thirty years at that point—peacefully for the most part—there were still many in town who considered them to be the very incarnation of evil. Many of our parents were present at the night of the Cold Water Fair, and they were slow to forgive. The fact that the Orchid Girl came into town and patronized the same shops we did, attended the same shows we did, didn’t help matters at all, as far as they were concerned.
She’s putting on airs, they said. She thinks she’s one of us. At least her husband has the decency to keep himself hidden away in that horrible old mansion.
My friends and I were too young to be saddled with all of the old fears and prejudices of our parents, and anyway we thought the Orchid Girl was beautiful. We would watch her from across the street or through a window when she came to town, walking down Poplar Street as proud as you please, unattended by her servants or by any friends at all. She always wore a bright, lovely dress which swirled around her legs, kept her hair pinned just so, and held her head high—almost defiantly, I can say now, looking back. We would try to see the seams on her face, where it would open up, but we never got close enough. We never dared.
We believed that anyone married to the Orchid Girl couldn’t be all bad. And anyway, Mr. Wormcake always came to the school plays, brought his own children down to the ice-skating rink in the wintertime, and threw an amazing Halloween party. Admittedly, half the town never went, but most of us kids managed to make it over there.
We all knew about the Church of the Maggot. There were already neighborhoods converting, renouncing their own god for the one that burrowed through flesh. Some people our parents’ age, also veterans of that night at the fair, had even become priests. They walked around town in grubby white garb, talking on and on about the flesh as meat, the necessity of cleansing the bone, and other things that sounded strange and a little exciting to us. So when some of the children of Hob’s Landing started to dream of the Maggot, the kids worried about it a lot less than the parents or the grandparents did. At first we were even jealous. Christina Laudener, just one year younger than I was, had the first one, and the next night it was little Eddie Brach. They talked about it in school, and word spread. It terrified them, but we wanted it ourselves nonetheless. They were initiates into some new mystery centered around the Wormcakes, and those of us who were left out burned with a terrible envy.
I was probably the worst of them, turning my jealousy into a bullying contempt whenever I saw them at the school, telling them that the ghouls were going to come into their homes while they were sleeping and kidnap them, so they could feed them to their precious Maggot. I made Eddie cry, and I was glad. I hated him for being a part of something I wasn’t.
Until a
couple of nights later, when I had the dream myself.
I’m told that everyone experiences the dream of the Maggot differently. For me it was a waking dream. I climbed out of bed at some dismal hour of the morning, when both my parents were still asleep, and stumbled my way to the bathroom. I sat on the toilet for a long time, waiting for something to happen, but I couldn’t go, despite feeling that I needed to very badly. I remember this being a source of profound distress in the dream, way out of proportion to real life. It terrified me and I felt that it was a sign I was going to die.
I left the toilet and walked down the hallway to my parents’ room, to give them the news of my impending demise. In my dream I knew they would only laugh at me, and it made me hate them.
Then I felt a clutching pain in my abdomen. I dropped to my knees and began to vomit maggots. Copious amounts of them. They wouldn’t stop coming, just splashed out onto the ground with each painful heave, in wriggling piles, ropy with blood and saliva. It went on and on and on. When I stood up, my body was as wrinkled and crushed as an emptied sack. I fell to the floor and had to crawl back to my room.
The next morning I went down to breakfast as usual, and as my father bustled about the kitchen, looking for his keys and his hat, and my mother leaned against the countertop with a cigarette in her hand, I told them that I had received the dream everyone was talking about.
This stopped them both cold. My mother looked at me and said, “Are you sure? What happened? What does it mean?”
“They’re having a fair. I have to go.”
Of course this was absurd; there had been nothing about a fair in the dream at all. But the knowledge sat with all the incontrovertibility of a mountain. Such is the way of the Maggot.
“What fair?” Dad said. “There’s no fair.”
“The Wormcakes,” I said. “They’re having it at the mansion.”
My parents exchanged a look.
“And they invited you in a dream?” he said.
“It wasn’t really like an invitation. It’s more like the Maggot told me I have to come.”