I’d expected The Nightcatcher to be an enormous beast, a ragged, dusty, and spitting thing. Only an ugly creature that leaked milk and spit could’ve taken my demon away from me.
The creature that sat on the crystal throne owned a cherub’s face and a child’s curveless body. She wore a silver cloak, and a headdress of amethyst and bone, with tasseled fringes that hung across her cheekbones. She resembled a devil preserved in porcelain, dressed in clothes woven from an old sky never torn with pollution. Her eyes were wild bright poison. Her nails were cat’s claws, gorged red. She lounged against the throne, her feet propped against the armrest.
I drew the hunter’s bow.
“Where is she?” I asked.
She snapped her fingers.
“Stay,” she said.
I drew an arrow and shot at The Nightcatcher’s throat.
She reached up to deflect the blow, but the arrow severed her wrist from her arm, and pinned her hand against the wall behind her.
A salad plate slipped from Aphrodite’s fingers and broke on the floor.
As if from a great distance, I saw the blood spurting from The Nightcatcher’s wax doll hand, staining her crystal throne and spraying against her silken finery. Yes, she could bleed.
Then, I was running across the room, stepping onto a chair, rolling across the feasting table. It didn’t matter I was weak, broken, and ready to break, or that my new horns weighed more than my body. I could be a monster, Francois taught me that, I could be The Nightcatcher’s monster. I’ll break a thousand salad plates, crush a thousand pieces of dessert silverware, break the wrists of a hundred god’s reaching out to try and stop me, to get to her.
I rolled to my feet and, before I stood, I drew another arrow. I ran to the end of the table, pulled the bow taut, and stared down the feathered tip at The Nightcatcher’s poison eye, ready to release.
My stomach burst and blood spread across my dead-thing dress.
The child queen laughed. The stars shattered. The table underneath me rattled. The cups rolled. Nameless gods, with faces made of sand, eyes like desert suns, bandaged her amputated arm. They pulled the arrow from her shoulder and her blood sprayed out, hissing with steam. They licked at the wound with soldering tongues.
She spoke in a voice made of dirt and boiling water.
“You’ll never see her again.”
“Why do you think I missed your throat?” I asked.
“Because you’re a poor shot,” she said. “Because you’re a disgusting, disease-riddled slut with bad manners.”
“No,” I said, “so that after I took my demon back, I could make you beg for your life.”
I buried my next arrow in her shoulder.
The force of it would’ve knocked a bear back, but she only jerked a little in her chair. Her nails dug into the arms of her crystal throne. Her eyes rolled back in her head.
I drew another arrow.
“I’m the disgusting, disease-riddled slut that you want,” I said.
A dark stain spread down from her shoulder. The smell of her blood was like sandalwood. Even with a severed hand and an arrow in her body, she retained her composure.
“Why would I want you?” she asked, as if the arrow striking her, hadn’t even made her lose a breath.
“You want me. You took my demon because you want me. You, with all your gods and playthings. And you barreled across the universe to find me.”
The Nightcatcher laughed again and I stumbled, trying to keep my footing, as the table rattled once more.
“You’re a very sick girl,” The Nightcatcher said.
“Don’t try to trick me,” I said. “My whole life they’ve told me I’m a child murderer, bitch, punk. I’m worth nothing. I’m an insect. They did it to my mother, and they did it to me.
“Because they knew how strong we could become, and they were afraid. So they tread on us. Spit on us. In return we tried to destroy ourselves. That way we’d never rise up and conquer them. We couldn’t even conquer ourselves.
“But that all changed when I met my demon. My shadow.”
I held my breath. I waited for the stars to hurl down and incinerate me. Stop this child’s game, Nightcatcher. Why do the gods not rise up to defend you? Why do you not transform into a smoking hydra to devour my head?
But she only sighed.
“Your demon is dead.” The Nightcatcher said. “Didn’t anyone tell you?”
Pain spread through my chest. It was the kind of pain that unravels from its center, like a spider web.
“That’s not true,” I said.
“I killed her.”
“Then I’ll kill you.”
She looked me up and down, like a freshman girl in high school, someone thinner than you, prettier than you. Every cruel girl could say with her eyes, “Why are you wearing that? Why don’t you lose some weight?” And you couldn’t help but wonder, for a moment, if her eyes transformed you into someone you didn’t recognize. All it took was up, down, and sneer.
And I looked down.
The bow was gone. All that was left were my shaking hands and emaciated arms, a hospital bracelet around one of my wrists. A hospital gown fluttered at my ankles. There were paper slippers on my feet. I stood not on a great feasting table, but on a thin, yellowed hospital mattress.
“You’re a very, very sick girl.”
I knew this would happen to me, having watched my mother go insane and my father fall apart. When my mother shuffled down that hallway from the psychiatric ward in her paper slippers, I shattered into pieces on the waiting room floor. I’m broken if you’re broken, Mommy, because you fed me rotting milk.
I want to be the fawn that jumped back into its mother’s womb, send you to lay down in a grove as I float and heal in your amniotic sac. We could forget together. I will heal you and you will heal me.
But I know we can’t. Time is reversible, but consequence is not.
Lily.
The Nightcatcher didn’t even have to speak to say my name.
Why did your mother name you Lily?
“My demon can’t be dead,” I whispered.
“You thought you were a great hunter? That you carried the black bow that slew a kraken? You had nothing but a child’s toy. Sick little girl. Dirty punk girl. You’ll die with rat poison injected into your veins.”
The throne room was disappearing, replaced by the whitewashed walls of the hospital. The gods were fading into nurses, their faces quivering, pained with red, and aged by childbirth. They grew nametags on white button-downs. Alice. Bertha. Name: I could kill every girl in this goddamn hospital.
The goddess I thought used to be Aphrodite shrunk down into Agnes, and held out a paper cup full of pills.
“Of course she’s dead,” The Nightcatcher said, even her and her throne fading into the wall. “She wasn’t even real.”
Agnes rattled the pills in their paper cup. I whimpered and took it from her.
“No,” I said. “No, I can’t be here.”
“You’ve never been anywhere else.”
The Nightcatcher’s voice became softer and softer. It shimmered like a wavering thought.
Why did she name you Lily?
The lily means birth. When Hercules sucked on the breast of Zeus, the milk flowed heavenward and created the Milky Way. The milk that dripped down to earth formed the lily.
The lily means death. Death camas, poison to any who would eat it. Lilies for a child’s grave, for innocence. As an infant you clung to a mother who dripped Schizophrenia onto your skin with each kiss. You couldn’t have known it would end in your own destruction.
The pills in the paper cup were black, soft liquid capsules. They would be pills easy to swallow, pills with soothing names. Never mind the drool. That could be wiped away by Agnes with her rough fingers.
I remembered the story my mother once told me.
“She hunted you in your own forest, like you hunted the stag. She was fast upon you. She twisted your dream world so that it no
longer belonged to you. It became a labyrinth of nightmares. She took the ground from underneath you. There was no escape.”
I picked up one of the pills. I brought it to my mouth. The stars fell out of the sky above. They’d never been stars, really, but flecks of stucco on a too-close hospital ceiling.
“Just as The Nightcatcher was upon you, you cut your shadow from your body. It grew into the shape of a girl, your dark-half with night for hair and eyes. The Nightcatcher seized the shadow, and you were free.”
The nurses surrounded me with crossed arms, stomping feet.
“Why are you babbling to yourself? There’s nobody there.”
“No,” I said quietly.
“Speak up,” they said. “Stand straight. Your weakness has brought you to this place.”
“No.”
I dropped the pill, and the paper cup. They fell to the ground without noise.
“No?” they asked, laughing and mocking.
They untied the strings of my hospital gown and tore it away from me. I threw my hands over my bare chest. They tugged at my hair. They pinched my nose until I had to open my mouth to breathe. They threw black pills in my mouth and pushed me backwards. I fell and coughed them up, choking.
“You can’t get better if you don’t want to get better.”
I closed my eyes and tried to remember the demon, her body soft in my bed. I tried to remember her heated kiss, the dark smile. The memories were fading, as if they’d been nothing but chalk outlines on the side of my brain. And yet:
Why did your mother name you Lily?
It was so difficult to think with dirty, calloused fingers trying to pry my mouth apart, slapping my face. A nurse emerged from the dim hallway and pushed a towel-covered cart into my room. She flung the towel aside, revealing a row of syringes.
I remembered the moment in that elementary school auditorium when stories stopped being real, the moment when my mother, haggard and cracked, was banished from her throne of storytelling.
They injected syringes into my back, into the shape of a new spine.
I had seen the poison in a dirty rat girl’s eyes. I ran from boiling waters and terror queens and family curses, thinking I was forging my own path, yet I only kept my mother’s story alive.
And yet:
Your mother named you Lily because flowers could grow as well as be crushed underneath your feet.
They couldn’t take those memories from you. They couldn’t wrap them up in a package of insanity. I had left this hospital before. I had walked on ceilings with the billowing black hair of a demon tied around my ankles. I kissed lips that slipped a spider into my mouth. I burned my fingers on the bottom of an ocean, reaching out for pale arms.
I shed my velvet, and the horns remained.
“She’s real,” I said.
“You’re deranged.”
I opened my eyes. I stood, naked and cold, jostled from all sides, and held my hands in front of my face.
“What are you doing?” they asked. “This abnormal behavior will be reported.”
“When you’re asleep, you never know where your hands will be,” I said.
In the spaces between my fingers, I saw what Charlie must’ve seen before he went under the water: a possibility of realities, swirling and crashing into each other. Between my fingers dripped gold and silver, the bleeding tongue of a nurse turning into a snake, the walls of the hospital tearing apart.
It was like bursting through a membrane.
“She’s real because I make her real,” I said. “Because I made her mine.”
I squeezed my hands, and the throne room came back into focus. The dead-thing dress curled back up on my shoulders. The nurses transformed back into goddesses, the dirty mattress into a feasting table.
In my hands I held my hunter’s bow, an arrow pointed at The Nightcatcher’s throat.
“I’m going to kill you,” I whispered.
I could have torn down the entire hush place. I felt it in my fingers, like a muscle I’d exercised only in dreams. I reached up and peeled the tops of the walls apart. Wet and rotting earth spilled through the folds. The gods cowered. A few disappeared. Yes, I’m a monster. I’ll be your monster. I grabbed a glass of wine and drank it, then crushed the glass in my fist. The legs of the feasting table came crashing down. Give me your throne, Nightcatcher, I’ll unhinge you. You can eat me, but I’ll become a rot that spreads across your face.
I stepped off the table and approached her throne. The gods attending her fled.
The empress bled quietly, a pool of blood rising up in her lap. I came before her enormous crystal throne, so big that her small feet were at my eye level. She leaned down, her curls grazing my forehead.
I could take her throne, if I wanted to. And maybe, lifetimes ago, I had. I might have sat there for a long time, wondering why it didn’t fit me, wondering why it did not satisfy me to have all the gods she’d captured serve me as I pleased. I probably killed myself out of boredom.
I saw The Nightcatcher was just a child. She held her bleeding stump to her chest, blood running down her golden dress. The fringes of her crown frayed. And she shrunk on her enormous throne, looking at me with a child’s eyes.
I let go of the hush place. The walls folded up once again. The table’s legs unbent. I placed the hunter’s bow at her feet.
“Let’s do things differently this time.” I said.
I held my hands out toward her. I led her out of the throne room and into the woods.
Chapter Thirty-Five
MY WOODS WERE quiet. The river that haunted me for years into a small stream that ran through the middle of the meadow. I no longer smelled the smell of machine oil, or of dead grass.
The Nightcatcher clung to me. She reached with her small child’s hands and tried to slice my dead-thing dress away with her sharp nails.
“Stop,” I said. “I remember how to do this.”
I peeled the dress away from my shoulders. It came apart in a shower of glittering spider legs and beetle’s wings. Crystalline insects with iridescent claws scurried into the grass.
Now naked, I bled gray from the wound in my stomach.
The Nightcatcher slipped off, into the trees.
I walked down the path, one halting step at a time, my newborn hooves shaking.
The trees coiled their leaves and retracted their branches. They brushed the weeds and hanging ivy to form a path for me. Their shadows played cool against my skin. Eyes watched me from the trees and the grass. Green eyes, trembling soft. Blue eyes like popped veins. Black eyes, scrying pools.
“Come out,” I said.
The grass and the brush trembled.
“I said come out.”
The deer came out of the woods first. The Witch’s black mastiffs followed. Their eyes changed colors, at once blue, and then gold. Together they followed me through the woods.
Big, black crows flew down from the treetops and landed on my naked shoulders. Their claws gripped my skin hard, leaving red marks. I coughed blood into my hands. The skin of my arms began to unravel. The birds weren’t trying to hurt me. They were keeping me from falling apart.
I wanted to laugh, because girls didn’t become goddesses every day. Because I’d never again be seduced by hospitals and pills that turned the body into a living gelatin cube. The river would never haunt me.
At the end of the path I came to a grove, and in the center of the grove, sat a stone dais. Blue flowers grew up from the earth around the dais.
The Nightcatcher walked out of the trees, no longer dressed in resplendent gold and headdress, but as naked as me. Unlike me, her skin was unmarred and smooth. In her one hand she clutched a broken piece of mirror. Flecks of cocaine were still smeared across its surface.
“I’ve been here before,” I said. “We’ve already done this.”
“No,” The Nightcatcher said. “Never quite like this.”
I knelt on the dais. The dogs and the deer encircled me. The birds flew up into the
trees and my skin fell apart. I coughed more blood on the dais and lay down in the sticky pool. I spit out the rest of my teeth. There were grooves carved in the dais for my head. My fingertips. I spread my legs and arms.
The dogs and deer tore me apart. They ripped my skin to get to my bones. They cracked my rib cage. They broke my knees.
It took seeing my heart torn out, pulsating on the stone dais in front of me, to realize this was a ritual embedded into my DNA. I sat on this dais before, my body flushed with warmth, my heartbeat in my head.
I was only a punk girl, a baby child living in the middle of suburbia, trying to survive ostracization at school and an absent mother. I didn’t have a chance to remember. A miracle I did at all, really.
Lifetimes ago I must’ve run away from this place. I remembered. I ran through the forest until the sky grew darker and darker, until I was blinded in the darkness, until the trees dissolved and I tumbled downwards.
I’d trapped my shadow and myself in a dark city. I’d trapped all of us.
But we could be free.
And even though it hurt to speak because my entire body quivered, broken and spilling out, no heart to pump the blood, I spoke.
“I’m ready.”
The dogs and the deer came to me carrying blue flowers in their mouths.
They pushed the flowers into my bones. They crushed the flowers in their teeth, into the shape of a new heart, and placed it into my chest. They created a new stomach for me and placed it through the hole in my waist. Wherever I still had nerves to feel pain, they burned.
Then they ran off, as if spooked. The trees rustled as the birds flew away. I sat up, gripping my stomach to keep myself from completely falling apart.
At the end of the path, a girl stood with her black hair squirming. She held a headless bird in one hand, and in the crook of her other arm, a black cat with wormwood eyes.
We are Wormwood Page 20