by Harvey Click
The House of Worms
a novel by
Harvey Click
Text copyright © 2013 Harvey Click
All Rights Reserved
Original cover art by Keith Draws
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
To my wife, Rose
Table of Contents
Part One: The Talking Horn
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Part Two: The Lost Ones
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Part Three: The Lord of Worms
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
“The worms they crept in, and the worms they crept out,
And sported his eyes and his temples about.”
-M. G. Lewis, The Monk
“…the play is the tragedy ‘Man,’
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.”
-E. A. Poe, “The Conqueror Worm”
Part One: The Talking Horn
Chapter One
Some things even suckers won’t buy, and Stephen Briggs was afraid this locket was one of them. It was large and round and made of heavy gray metal with an ugly scorpion crudely sculpted on its face. He stuck his jeweler’s screwdriver in the seam and pried because he couldn’t see any other way to open it. It still didn’t open, but the soft metal bent slightly and something cold and purple trickled out of the seam into the palm of his hand.
The little puddle squirmed like mercury but looked more like thick dark fog, and it was so cold that his arm began to shudder. A tingling paralysis swept through his body, and he couldn’t make his hand drop the locket. The floor of his second-hand shop started to tremble, and he saw the walls tilting and closing in on him like a collapsing stage set.
Terrorist attack, he thought—maybe a suitcase nuke—and he waited for the deafening boom but there wasn’t one. He wanted to run out of the building but his muscles had forgotten how to move. The air smelled toxic and his brain felt poisoned all the way down to the root of his spine.
While he stood there frozen, the little pool of icy purple darkness spoke. He heard the voice in the tingling nerves of his hand.
“Who are you?” it asked.
Stephen Briggs’ lips moved without his help, and his larynx said his name.
“Where are you?” the voice asked, and his lips and larynx answered with the shop’s address.
“Very well,” the voice said. “You shall keep me safe until someone comes to pick me up. This I say, and my word gives shape and form. You may put me down now, very gently.”
Briggs gently placed the locket on the jewelry counter, and the glass top darkened to a dull purple hue and rang like a distant chime. He backed away from the thing, his legs weak and awkward as a toddler’s. The walls tilted back to their proper place and the earthquake-trembling ceased, but the floor still felt soft and strange.
“What the hell are you?” he asked.
The countertop vibrated and made the cheap earring assortment shake like a peacock’s eyespots.
“I am God,” the voice said.
Briggs staggered to the bathroom in back and vomited, but he still felt dizzy and sick. He sat on the toilet lid for a long time and thought. He didn’t want to believe he was losing his mind, so he tried to find a better explanation.
He had purchased the locket an hour ago from a junkie with prison tattoos, so it was probably stolen like many of the other pieces in his shop. He’d heard on the radio that a man had been found this morning with his throat slit, so maybe the junkie had murdered him. If the locket belonged to a murdered man, then that explained everything. He’d heard on TV that sometimes a dead person’s memories clung to a favorite object like spiritual residue, and they could be perceived by sensitive people.
That was his problem: he was too sensitive. He felt better now that everything was rationally explained and he knew he wasn’t losing his mind. Better just throw the Goddamn thing away before it caused any more trouble.
He got up from the toilet lid and rinsed his face, but when he returned to the front of the store he couldn’t pick up the locket because his arms seized up with charley horses whenever he tried. He got a broom, intending to sweep the thing off the counter into a bag and carry it out to the dumpster, but he couldn’t do that either. The broom fell from his hands, and his nerves jangled like guitar strings.
He sat down on an overpriced second-hand chair and tried to ignore the cold purple voice still whirling in his head. “My word gives shape and form,” it said. “You shall keep me safe until someone comes to pick me up.”
Briggs hoped whoever was coming would come soon, but half an hour passed slow and sick and no one came. When he couldn’t stand the dizziness any longer, he made his rubbery legs stand up and carry him to the back room. He found a piece of cardboard and a marker, and he made a sign with big shaky letters.
CUSTOMER APPRECIATION PRIZE TODAY
$100 LOCKET FREE TO NEXT LUCKY CUSTOMER
He wanted to put the sign on the front door, but his legs were so weak that he propped it against the cash register and sat back down. The little bell above his door tinkled a minute later, and a young woman came in, slim attractive brunette about thirty with a delicate, nervous face. She went straight to the jewelry counter and stared at the locket.
Briggs didn’t have much experience with prayer, but he mumbled a few words of thanks. He managed to stand up and say, “You’re my lucky winner today,” but the words came out smelling like vomit.
The woman ignored him and peered through the glass at some necklaces.
“The locket is my special lucky prize today,” Briggs said.
“It’s not very pretty,” she said.
“Pick it up,” he said. “Feel the weight in your hand.”
She did, and Briggs saw her arm begin to twitch. The dry air hissed like a storm of radiation, and her hair crackled with electricity and stretched toward the locket as she lifted it to her ear.
Now that someone had come and picked it up, Briggs felt its spell slipping away from his limbs. They still felt strange, but they seemed to belong to him again.
The woman very gently put the locket in her purse. She got out her checkbook and asked, “How much is it?”
She apparently hadn’t noticed the sign, and it occurred to him that he could name any price and she would probably pay it, but this was no time to screw things up.
“I’ll let you have it for ten bucks, and that’s a bona fide steal,” he said.
She wrote a check, laid it on the counter and picked up her purse, but an eternity seemed to tick by before her slow slim legs moved her out the door.
He felt better as soon as she was gone. He got up and looked at the check. She had signed it with an illegible scrawl, but her name and address were
printed in the upper left corner.
Linda Hall.
Briggs put the check in his jacket pocket and decided to keep it as a souvenir of the weirdest day of his life. If his theory about the murdered man was wrong, then maybe God really was inside the locket and Linda Hall was an angel sent to restore balance to the universe. He felt flattered that an angel would stoop to visit him, especially one with such a nice sexy ass. He hurried to the door and watched her get in her car.
After it vanished around the corner, he stepped out and filled his lungs with fresh air. First day of October, and already the leaves were starting to turn. There was a chilly breeze from the north, and pretty soon it would blow away what was left of summer. His mood stirred cold and lonely like the leaves, no wife, no girlfriend, no prospects, and he wondered if celestial powers had sent an angel to tell him to put his life in order.
Probably not. Heaven had never given a damn about him before.
He took another deep breath and stepped inside. A little bit of God went a long way, and he decided to close early. He locked the front door, pulled down the blind with the CLOSED sign, and opened his cash register. Not much cash to count, five sales the whole day, but he was grateful for the last one. He was putting the money in his wallet when someone knocked on the door.
He felt sick again, afraid it was Linda Hall wanting to return the locket. Tough shit, lady, I’m closed. But the shadow on the blind was too tall to be hers, and it kept pounding. He went to the door and lifted the blind.
It was a tall old man wearing a black Stetson and a long black coat. Strange face, narrow and gaunt with thin lips. A scar stretched from his left eye almost to his chin, and whatever caused the scar must have damaged the eye because it stared off to the side and looked dead.
“Closed,” Briggs said, pointing at the sign. “Come back tomorrow.”
The good eye gazed at him gray and steady for a few seconds, then the eyelid flicked shut and Briggs felt that his photograph had been taken.
He dropped the blind, shut off the shop lights, and hurried to the bathroom because his bladder was raging with too much excitement for one day. He stared into the dirty mirror above the toilet and told his reflection that tonight his life would begin. Not good to waste the hours you’re given, he thought. Better live while you’re alive because there’s something worse waiting beyond the grave. Something cold and dark like thick purple fog.
He stepped out of the bathroom and stopped. The rear door was ajar.
He kept a pistol beneath the cash register, but it was too far away to be any help. Better sprint out the back door, call the cops, and let the insurance company eat the damage. He was about to make his dash when a tall shadow emerged from the cluttered darkness.
It was the skinny man with the scarred face and the dead eye.
“You have something I’m supposed to pick up,” he said, and his voice was quiet and toneless as if his vocal cords were dead too. “Where is it?”
“Where’s what?”
The thin man’s lips tightened into a grim smile. “I’ve had a long day,” he said. “But if you want to play kid games, I’ve got some toys.”
He pulled a coil of silver wire off his wrist and wrapped one end of it around his black-gloved hand. The other end suddenly shot through the air and whipped around Briggs’ neck like a noose tight enough to hurt.
The man tugged the wire and made it hurt worse. He pulled Briggs up close to his scarred face and said, “Want to play some more games?”
Briggs clawed desperately but couldn’t get his fingers beneath the wire. He felt something trickling down the front of his throat, and he didn’t think it was sweat.
“I sold it,” he gasped. “Few minutes ago. To a woman.”
“Who is she?”
“I don’t know.”
The noose tightened. “My day’s got more hours left in it than yours does,” the man said. “But let’s not waste ‘em.”
Briggs dug his fingernails into his bleeding neck but couldn’t get them beneath the ring of pain burning deeper. “I’ve got her check in my pocket,” he said. “It has her address on it.”
The man shoved him to the floor and knelt beside him, dead eye staring. “You’re gonna lay there real quiet ‘cause you can’t move even if you try,” he said.
Briggs couldn’t. He wanted to rub his throbbing throat, but his muscles had once again forgotten how to move. The man explored his pockets till he found the check.
“Linda Hall,” he said. “What can you tell me about her?”
“Brown hair, kind of pretty,” Briggs said. “I think she heard it talking. That’s all I know.”
“Maybe it is, maybe it ain’t,” the man said. “People lie, but wire tells the truth.”
The wire slipped off Brigg’s neck and floated in the air in front of his face with a life of its own. Then the tip drifted down and touched his lips and started crawling up his cheek.
“This is gonna hurt,” the man said.
The sharp tip found the corner of Briggs’ left eye and slid in past the eyeball. A shrill noise shrieked in his head, and he felt his limbs quivering while the wire snaked around inside his cranium tasting the convolutions of his brain and boring into his memories like a needle. It knew his shoe size and his pornography collection and his sad letters to women who didn’t write back. It knew his mother’s maiden name and the name of the inflatable rubber doll he enjoyed some nights when his hand didn’t feel good enough.
At last the wire slipped out of his eye socket, but Briggs couldn’t move his eyelid or any other part of his body to wipe away the pain. He watched the man stand up tall and grim as a gallows and clean his bloody wire with a bandanna. He wrapped it around his left wrist like a bracelet and spit a brown stream of tobacco juice on the floor. Then he pulled a knife from his boot and cut Briggs’ throat.
There was a bright burst of sharp red light that roared like a thousand cathedral bells talking in loud clanging tongues telling the story of Briggs’ life, but it wasn’t much of a story and the ending wasn’t good, sharp red light fading into silence, scuffed black cowboy boots walking away and the little room shrinking into cold darkness.
Chapter Two
A year had passed since Dexter Radcliff had last driven up the Hudson Valley, and as always he was enchanted by the beauty. A few leaves were already tinted gold, and a husky breath of early autumn rushed through the car window and stirred his hair. But this year he was thinking more about the woman sitting beside him than the scenery. He wasn’t sure what to make of her.
“There’s Hyde Park,” he said.
Mary Ash barely glanced at it. “F.D.R., fearless champion of the buggered poor,” she said. “Maybe I could be some kind of big-shot saint too if I lived in a shack like that.”
Dexter smiled and said, “Take more than a nice house to turn you into a saint.”
“I don’t know,” Mary said. “My shack burned down, so I am what I am.”
Dexter wondered what that was supposed to mean. She was acting even stranger than usual today, probably worried about meeting Aunt Naomi, and he didn’t blame her. Each year he looked forward to October the first, when he and his cousins gathered for the Talking Ceremony, but now he wished he could just keep driving. Strangers weren’t welcome at Heathenhead during the Ceremony, and his aunt wasn’t going to be happy.
After staying there tonight, he and Mary would continue on a month-long journey up to Montreal and west to Saskatchewan, then down to Idaho and east through Wyoming and Colorado on their long drive back to Ohio. He’d been planning this research sabbatical for more than a year, making arrangements to interview storytellers, medicine men, and historians from ten different tribes. He had planned to do it alone, but his plans changed along with everything else after this woman walked into his life.
“Maybe you’re right, maybe houses really do mold us into what we are,” he said. “My earliest memory is visiting Heathenhead, and it seems like every interest I’ve had ever s
ince came from that weird place. Other boys were interested in cowboys and Indians, but for me it was always magic and Indians. Every mangy pigeon feather was a sacred talisman.”
Mary didn’t say anything, and Dexter thought about the crayon drawings of the moon that he had taped on the walls of his bedroom when he was a boy. Childhood always seemed just around the next bend whenever he drove to Heathenhead, pentagrams and Tarot cards and signs of the zodiac, and the moon was a sacred temple because Mr. Grinchin lived there. He saw a secret language in the bright autumn leaves and almost remembered what it used to mean.
“Heathenhead, childhood, and magic, they’re all mixed together,” he said. “I used to dream about a wizard named Mr. Grinchin who lived in a castle on the dark side of the moon. He taught me a secret alphabet before I learned how to write the real one. I can still remember the flasks bubbling in his laboratory.”
“Maybe your dreams were trying to tell you something,” Mary said.
“Like what?”
“Like maybe there really are wizards and maybe they’re not real nice people,” she said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you shouldn’t have published that paper.”
“So that’s what’s eating you,” he said. “You’ve been acting weird all day.”
Mary didn’t say anything. They entered the little town of Rhinebeck, and she stared at the quaint homes with a simmering silence. If she kept acting like this, it was going to be a very long month.
“Look, you read my article a dozen times,” he said. “You know perfectly well it doesn’t give any hint who owns the Talking Horn.”
“Maybe not, but your name’s on it and people can find you.”
“Okay, so now I’m going to be pestered by wizards from the moon,” he said. “What do you want me to do, hang out some garlic and crucifixes?”
She stared out the window some more, and he tried to think of one good reason for bringing her along. He liked her solemn lips and the smell of her skin and the sounds she made in her sleep, but these didn’t seem like very good reasons. Aunt Naomi certainly wasn’t going to think so. He had mailed his great-aunt a greeting card a few days ago saying he was bringing a colleague with him. It was a dirty trick, and he didn’t like to pull dirty tricks on her. Aunt Naomi had kept him for four years after his parents were murdered, and he owed her some honesty if nothing else.