We are Wormwood

by Christian, Autumn

  Instead she forces her saint away and her demon dies in the boiling water of the Hush Place. Carnivorous plants eat her childhood friends. Her friends waited for her to come and save them from The Nightcatcher, but instead, she collapsed and died on the floor of a warehouse, hiding from an overgrown robot.

  Didn't you remember you had schizophrenia, idiot?

  You don't get to have a happy ending.

  "Help," I whispered, my voice small. "Help me."

  I slept and dreamed the kind of dreams where I didn’t even remember being human. Time warped around me, and the warehouse ceiling exploded, propelling me beyond the grasp of gravity. These were the kind of dreams, I imagined, that you’d have when you knew you're going to die.

  In my dreams I searched for my demon. I'd forgotten myself, but I remembered her. I’d see her silhouette rushing past a window, her dark hair clogging up a still-wet shower drain, but I could never catch up to her.

  When I woke, I crawled to the window.

  In the wet and gray daylight, the machine still waited.

  I huddled at the bottom of the window, hoping for warmth from the sunlight, but there was none in that overcast sky. My blood labored, sluggish, veins clenched. Lack of food had me shaking from low blood sugar. I sucked on the lapels of my jacket, trying to get some moisture, but it didn’t seem to help. I’d never been thirstier.

  Night came again, colder than before. I slipped in and out of sleep. I felt my heart slowing. If the machine came crashing through the walls, I wouldn't be able to run. I could only hold my arms out, like a child, and let it devour me.

  "Help," I tried to whisper once more, but only rasped.

  A dirty, dim sound.

  Something scurried through the walls. Demon? Nightcatcher? No, something smaller, coming out of the walls.

  Spiders. Tiny baby spiders. They ran across my arms and my legs as I lay on the floor.

  There were thousands of them scurrying past me, trailing behind them little strands of webbing that dragged across my skin. I resisted my first impulse to pull my hands away and scream. The machine would hear me and come bursting through the warehouse walls.

  I closed my eyes and shuddered.

  Be somewhere else. Be somewhere else.

  No, try to remember that moment in the sunlight when the Daddy Long Legs crawled from the demon’s fingers to yours, and you laughed.

  “I used to be so afraid of spiders.”

  I sighed and turned my hands upwards. They rushed over the palms of my hands.

  Where were they going? Surely they knew a way out, a warm place I could hide. I grabbed the railing, pulled myself up, and followed them down the steps.

  Fatigue strained my limbs. I'd gone days without eating before, but never days without water, without drugs, without sunlight. My bones curled from a cold that might never go away.

  I reached the bottom of the steps.

  I followed them to a wall, and the wall turned around.

  It was not a wall, but an enormous creature, bigger than the walls could contain. She grew out of the architecture, rusted pipes sprouting out of her head, and broken wiring in her legs.

  She had the face of an older woman, pale skin, elegantly aged - the lips slack, eyes blue. Light radiated from her eyes. The Spider Mother.

  Her babies slipped underneath her.

  She was not looking at them, she was looking at me.

  I felt delirious. I couldn’t swallow. I knelt and pressed my head to the floor.

  “I’m sorry I killed Arachne. I’m so sorry. My mother was wrong. I am not a goddess. Please forgive me.”

  She paused for a long time.

  “Was that one of my children?” she asked.

  “I know it was.”

  In that moment, it seemed normal for a giant spider with a woman’s face to be growing in the walls. She had a gentle grandmother’s face. At least, how I imagined my grandmother would have been. I used to fantasize about running to her house when my mother became The Exorcist. My grandmother would live in a small cottage in the middle of a sweeping garden. She would always be waiting for me on the front porch when I arrived. My mother’s cloak was made of stars, but my grandmother’s was made from sunlight. She’d pull me into her sweeping embrace and bury me in her warmth. She’d tell me that I didn’t need to be afraid of stories and mythologies. She’d say, “Look how the flowers have grown.” She’d teach me the names of all the constellations in the sky, and Wormwood would not be among them.

  But, the truth: she was a schizophrenic just like my mother. I heard she died a savior of the world, choking on her own spit. She thought she could bend metal with her mind and stop global warming, but she couldn’t even crawl out of bed.

  The Spider Mother bent down and spoke

  “Tell me about my daughter,” she said. “I have so many children. I never get to see them grow.”

  The hair on her legs stirred like a meadow of black grass. I could have crawled on top of her and been lost for days.

  “I only ever saw her die,” I said.

  She pressed her face closer to me, and breathed cool air onto my face.

  “Then you know more than me,” she said.

  “She had a soft face, and huge blue eyes,” I said, swallowing. “She reached out for me, and I held her limb. She was only a baby. She was so soft.”

  I rested my face against the crag of her chin. She sighed, and the warehouse trembled.

  “She was so kind,” I said. “Even when I killed her, she didn’t hate me. I don’t think she knew how.”

  “Then she is my child,” the Spider Mother said.

  “You’re not angry with me? For what I did?”

  “A few survive,” she said. “But most don’t.”

  And as the spiders continued to run past me, they left bits of webbing behind, between my fingers. I realized that they were not only rushing toward the Spider Mother, but outward as well.

  “Where are they going?” I asked. “How long have you been down here?”

  A small smile spread across her face. Everything she did was slow, as if her thoughts rippled from the mountains of her legs to get to her brain.

  “I have been here so long that my body has grown into the wall. Behind me there is a web, and beyond that, is a doorway. Through the web I wove strands that extend past the universe. Some of my children go through the doorway, some go other ways.”

  “What’s behind the doorway?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then why would they go there?”

  “Because they don’t know what’s waiting for them outside either.”

  “Well, I do.” I said. “I know what’s out there.”

  Her response, minutes away, shuddered through her legs like an electrical storm. She hasn’t had to speak to a human in so long, I thought; she’s almost forgotten that we cannot communicate in vibrations.

  Then, she spoke.

  “Do you?”

  A baby spider crawled into my palm. Her body was small, but I could still see the sweeping eyelashes on her baby face, with tiny, molded cheeks. Her face was indistinguishable from the face of Arachne.

  She kissed me on the thumb before darting behind her mother, and into the doorway beyond.

  I looked into the Spider Mother’s huge pools of eyes. And as I did so, they ignited with light that seemed to emanate from the core of her being. I saw myself reflected in her eyes.

  My horns had never left me. I touched them. Yes, they were real. They were heavy and knobby, like horns a thousand years old.

  I was always the girl that the demon saw, even before I could see for myself.

  “You could crawl behind me,” the Spider Mother said. “You could leave and find what’s beyond the doorway.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “You are kind.”

  I climbed to my feet. As I climbed the stairs, I felt only the weight of my horns.

  I opened the garage door.

  It was nighttime, the stars wreathi
ng the head of the machine, the air still. I waited for the machine to scream, but it remained silent and inert as I approached. Its head stretched across the ground, its mouth wide open with its teeth of wire and blades exposed.

  I climbed inside.

  Chapter Thirty

  INSIDE THE MACHINE I found a glowing meadow.

  I came across my mother, feeding dead wrens to a giant red pitcher plant. She stood on dead and poisoned ground, a basket of dead wrens, ribbons tied at their necks, poised at her hips. She picked up the wrens one at a time, and fed them to the plant. At the bottom of the pitcher plant, through its sheer skin, I saw the wren's shadows as they slid down to be digested.

  "I've been here before."

  My mother turned toward me, the gazelle skull tied around her head.

  "You shouldn't feed that thing. It belongs to The Nightcatcher. I smell it." I said.

  "Don’t worry about that,” she said.

  "Do other people have to deal with things like this?"

  "No. But you're a warrior, baby."

  I stepped away from the shadow of the tree line. Sunlight suffused my skin. The red cuts on my arms and legs glittered.

  “Do I look like I’m up to fight anything?” I said. “I can barely stand.”

  She fed another wren to the pitcher plant. It reached for her arm, and its juices dripped onto her skin. My mother’s skin turned a darker shade of red.

  “Do you recognize where you are?” she asked.

  “No. I wish people would just be straight with me.”

  “Look around you,” my mother said. “Look at these trees, how they bend for you. Look at the grass, how it strains for you.”

  “The grass is dead.”

  “You could make it grow again. If you wanted to.”

  “If you hadn’t gone crazy none of this would’ve happened.”

  “Shh, baby. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that,” I said. “I’m not a kid anymore.”

  I laughed, clutching the horns on my head.

  “I just climbed into the mouth of a machine to find an ancient woods. I find you here, feeding dead birds to a giant living plant, and we’re still arguing like we’ve always argued.”

  She reached the bottom of the basket, and grabbed the last wren.

  “It’s different this time,” my mother said. “Look around.”

  I saw, for the first time, where I was.

  “On the night you were born all your grandfather’s horses died.”

  We were surrounded by woods that shimmered in the darkness, the light collapsing at the edges of the meadow. The trees were like dark jewels, glimmering in the places not covered in moss and ivy.

  “I’ve been here before,” I said.

  “You have been here many more times than you think. Can you remember?” she asked.

  The last time I’d seen my mother, she’d been melting into an ambulance stretcher. I stopped thinking of her as human. She was The Exorcist, eyes bugging out, arms whirring, bleach and bleeding gums.

  Here, her eyes were calm underneath the mask.

  “I’ll remember when I’m ready,” I said.

  My mother held the last wren out to me.

  “I won’t feed that plant,” I said. “I’m going to kill it one day.”

  “Maybe when you come back, you’ll find you don’t want to anymore.”

  My mother placed the wren back into the basket. She untied the gazelle skull. Underneath she was the way I remembered her as a child. She was Saga, goddess of storytelling, her blonde hair a crown of light. The mother I remembered who could tell prophecies I believed to be true. Yes, the mother who made stories real. Her robe spun outward and burst with stars.

  “She has my demon,” I said.

  She held the skull towards me.

  “It’s time to come home.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  I RETURNED TO The Witch’s house. When the machine upended itself from the lawn, it destroyed the roof and crushed the porch. Glass and scrap metal lay strewn about the grass and, as I approached the door, it swung off its hinges and fell.

  I found Pluto hiding underneath the collapsed porch. I held my hand out to her and she came to me. She rubbed her chin against my arm, her whiskers tickling my arm. She mewed, a wounded noise, a noise I'd only heard her make on the night she lost her eyes. She had aged over the years, her black fur mottled with gray. I tucked the gazelle skull in the crook of one arm. I picked up Pluto with the other arm, holding her tight against my sweater. Together we entered the house.

  The living room was like a murder scene; the couch split in two, the baseboards upended. I didn't see any signs of The Witch, or where she might have gone.

  I searched for blood, bits of hair, an arm sticking out from underneath the table. Nothing.

  I went into what was left of my room. The dresser drawer lay smashed on the floor; the drugs I’d never sold were torn from their hiding places and scattered. The hunter’s bow and the quiver of arrows lay underneath a collapsed board. I moved the board, then picked them up and carried them across my shoulder.

  Rays of light, cast through the broken ceiling, revealed something on the bed that I hadn’t seen in a long time.

  The dead-thing dress.

  It was the same one that the demon brought to me; the one I'd worn on my 16th birthday, I was sure of it. It was untouched by glass or debris, as if someone had tiptoed through the ruins and left it here for me to find.

  I brushed my hands against the hem of silvery-throated insects.

  I found my bag in the debris, the same one I’d packed so hurriedly to run here. I shook the debris off the bag, folded the dress, and placed it inside. Pluto kept making circles around the room, sniffing, scratching. Occasionally, she’d mewl as if in distress.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked her.

  I tried to pick her up, but she bolted into the hallway. I chased after her.

  “Pluto? What’s wrong?”

  I followed her into the ruined kitchen where the refrigerator had fallen and smashed the kitchen table, leaving spilled food rotting on the floor.

  Pluto jumped onto the ledge above the sink and looked out the window into the backyard. She cocked her head to one side, watching. Waiting. She let out another mewl of distress. Blood and bird feathers ringed her mouth. I never fed her anything but wet cat food, but with no one to take care of her, she must've been forced to hunt.

  “Pluto.”

  Finally she turned to look at me, and her wormwood eyes were losing their glow. I’d never seen such sadness in an animal before.

  “You’re waiting for her, aren’t you?”

  I picked her up. She was so thin I could feel each individual rib. I didn’t know how long she’d been here, waiting for the demon to come back. I couldn’t keep track of time anymore. Days were a facsimile of real time.

  I was afraid to look at a clock; maybe the arrows would start moving backwards.

  I kissed Pluto on the back of her neck.

  “We’ll find her. I promise.”

  ***

  It might’ve taken me a week to get to The Witch’s house in the dark city, but it took me much longer to get back home. I trekked homeward through endless, rolling hills that groaned in the night and shone like heated lamps in the day. The gravel beat my shoes into bloodied scraps. The string of the bow carved a red line across my back. Pluto mewled in my arms, crying for her, with her mottled nose pressed into the crook of my arm.

  When I couldn’t walk anymore, I hitchhiked with truckers, bad mothers, and businesspeople that wanted to tell a story.

  And the story would go something like this:

  On the top of a hill I saw a girl holding a ragged, black cat. And on her back, she carried a duffle bag and a composite bow the color of a black polished mirror, like nothing I’ve ever seen before. When I stopped on the side of the road she walked toward me. Up close, I saw how sick and thin she was, as if ready to collapse
underneath the weight of everything she carried.

  Yet still she walked.

  I opened the passenger seat of my car and, without a word she climbed inside and shut the door. I drove back onto the highway. She pressed her forehead against the air conditioning vent, breathing in small, little gasps. I pulled into a drive-through for food.

  “What do you want to eat?” was the first thing I said to her.

  She chewed on her knuckles and smiled, but she didn’t answer me. Even the devil couldn’t grin like that.

  I ordered her a cheeseburger and a milkshake. She gave half of the cheeseburger to her cat, and ate the rest, obviously starving. She drank the milkshake so fast I thought she’d vomit. I kept driving. The sun was going down and I had to turn the AC off. I know it was, because the sun was going down that the air got cold, but I couldn’t help but think it was because of her.

  She still hadn’t spoken.

  In the dark, her red hair didn’t lose its color. The rest of her was dull and beaten. Her skin was sunburnt and covered in scars. God knows where she got them. She had a slash on her throat leaking pus, infected scratches. Her clothes were held together with pins and her ribs protruded from slits in her shirt. But her hair was healthy and strong. Alive.

  I should’ve driven her to a hospital. I should’ve asked her where her parents lived and turned my car around. But my hands felt stuck to the wheel. My neck felt bolted to the chair. I’ve never felt so out of control before. I’m serious; you should’ve seen this bow. It had the curve of the moon inside it. In the shadow of the night her face could’ve been anything, a lion’s head, a flower’s center.

  But I knew she was grinning.

  “Stop,” she said, so quiet I almost didn’t hear her.

  I never noticed how dark it was out there, beyond the headlights of my car.

  “Stop,” she said again. “I’ll get out here.”

  I wanted to tell her there was nothing out there, that she needed medical attention, that a girl her age shouldn’t be carrying around a weapon that could take the head off a bear.