The House of Worms

by Harvey Click

  He watched through his field glasses and saw four chicken-shits in each car. They were snorting coke, trying to sniff up a few minutes of courage before they rubbed their lucky amulets and pulled on their camouflage masks. In the bygone days when the Man wanted to kill one of his old friends, he at least sent someone sober to do the job.

  ***

  In Pueblo Jeremiah Ring AKA Buford Ransom cashed in one of his nuggets and bought supplies. From a tombstone he borrowed the name of a man who’d been born the same year he was. Now his name was Jack Cross.

  The Man told him to ride up to Denver and kill an old prospector who lived there. Jack Cross asked him why.

  “Because he used to work for me,” the Man said, “but now he has decided he doesn’t need to follow my orders.”

  “What happens if I don’t kill him?”

  “Then others will do the job after they kill you.”

  So he made his way up to Denver and found the prospector passed out drunk in his one-room shack. He looked about seventy years old and was snoring in his stinking sheets when Jack Cross slid a knife across his skinny throat. The Man told him which possessions were worth stealing, a wire bracelet around his wrist, a small bag of gold dust, and a little metal snuffbox with purple darkness beneath its lid.

  It was an easy job, but Jack Cross didn’t enjoy it very much. “How long do I have to do these chores for you?” he asked.

  “As long as you want to live,” the Man said.

  ***

  As long as I want to live, Ryver thought. How long is that?

  Longer.

  He crouched behind a boulder and watched twelve punks dart up the first slope ducking behind trees with their cell phones and AK-47s. When they got to the top, he started throwing some apparitions into the underbrush. The old optriloquist con plays off your enemies’ fears stretching twigs and shadows into whatever they’re afraid of seeing, and these clowns had enough fear to populate the whole county with Ryver’s twins. They blazed their guns every time a leaf fell, but nobody was going to call the cops because their rifles wore homemade silencers and the closest neighbors weren’t very close.

  His own Winchester wasn’t silenced, and whenever it cracked another fool rolled down a hill and some more fools ducked behind trees, traps snapping and yanking them screaming to the top.

  We’ll see who lives longer, he thought.

  ***

  One time the Man told him to go to Santa Fe and find a priest named Padre José. By then Jack Cross’s name was Bill Carver. By then he had three purple crystals, one inside the buffalo horn, one inside the prospector’s snuffbox, and one inside an old woman’s heart-shaped locket. The old woman had put up a good fight, and the sound of her neck snapping still awoke him some nights.

  “When you find this priest, don’t kill him,” the Man said. “You shall use him as a carrier.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “With your three spectreholes you shall make a doorway,” the Man said. “You shall use the doorway to send me Padre José’s spectrehole, and you will need a living human being to send it through. Without a human carrier, his spectrehole would be absorbed by the doorway.”

  “If you say so,” Bill Carver said, staring into the campfire.

  He went to Santa Fe and found Padre José in his little adobe house and tied him up, easy job, fat old priest stinking of whiskey and fear. He found the spectrehole inside a chalice lined with lead. He removed the cold crystal and shoved it into the priest’s mouth and made him swallow it. “Here, take your Communion, old man, and say your last prayer.”

  Bill Carver hung the priest upside-down from a ceiling beam and built the purple triangle beneath him the way the Man had said. Then he reached up and cut the rope holding the carrier to the ceiling and watched him plunge into the sizzling hellhole and disappear through the hard dirt floor.

  After that the ground never seemed solid under his feet, and he wondered what kind of hell lay beneath it.

  ***

  Ryver didn’t shoot often because he didn’t want muzzle-blast to give away his position, but he saw a fat tasty target trying to make a run from one tree to the next, and he got about halfway. His dying groans sounded like ghosts wailing in the hills.

  Priests and prospectors and old women and little kids, a hundred ghosts wailing in a hundred hills, “Little jobs that you’ll enjoy,” the Man had said.

  Another punk was running scared down the slope blazing his rifle and yelling Mayday on his phone.

  Maybe you’d shoot better with that cell phone shoved up your ass, Ryver thought. He squeezed his trigger and put some lead where the phone ought to be.

  Traps snapping legs breaking necks stretching guts bleeding ghosts wailing like wind sweeping down the long years saying, “This is your payday.”

  ***

  “This is your payday,” the Man said. “I’m going to give you the treatment.”

  Bill Carver was down in Mexico, and the carrier he sent through the doorway this time was a half-breed brujo.

  “The treatment will be painful beyond any pain you’ve ever known,” the Man said, “but it will allow you to live much longer.”

  “So I can work for you longer,” Carver said.

  “Yes, but being alive and working is better than being dead.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Because I’ve been dead for a very long time,” the Man said.

  “Where are you then?” Carver asked.

  “Let’s just say it isn’t heaven.”

  The Man told him how to use the powders and dried herbs in the brujo’s hut to give himself the treatment. Bill Carver had to cut seven deep incisions into his own flesh above his vital organs and rub seven different poisons into the wounds, and the seven poisons hurt worse than anything he’d ever felt. Day after day he lay on the straw mat in the sorcerer’s hut groaning and weeping and screaming for death to deliver him from pain that stretched far beyond the ends of his nerves. He shrank gaunt as a skeleton, and all of his hair fell out.

  A day came when he felt well enough to drink water. His appetite returned in sudden furious spurts, and he ate cockroaches, spiders, lizards, and a fat raw rat—whatever ventured within reach. New hair made his scalp itch, and his pecker burned with lust and ejaculated spontaneously into the filthy blankets. It was maybe a fortnight after the treatment before he was able to walk any distance. Old Paint had run away, but he didn’t need a horse right now because his legs felt stronger with every step and eager to keep moving.

  Some months later he realized how the treatment had changed him. One morning outside of Amarillo a bandit shot him through the chest. He fell and was scarcely able to breathe or keep awake, but he was awake enough to put a bullet through the bastard’s forehead. Bill Carver shut his eyes, and when he opened them again it was night. He could breathe just fine now, and he saw pink new skin where the bullet had entered his chest.

  He was still alive to work for the Man, and maybe being alive and working was better than being in that hell beneath the dirt.

  ***

  When there were just three punks still able to walk, Ryver stepped out from behind his boulder.

  “You gonna behave?” he asked.

  One of them didn’t. He shot that one and told the other two to drop their guns and take off their clothes, best way he knew of to check for weapons. When they got their clothes off he could see that one was a fat male and one was a skinny female, but the male had bigger breasts.

  “Okay, let’s get this place cleaned up,” Ryver said. “Drag all them bodies down to my truck.”

  He collected weapons while the Losters dragged bodies. He released a chain, and a dead punk plummeted from a tree top like a fat ripe fruit.

  “Drag that one extra careful ‘cause it’s coming apart at the seams,” he said.

  It was hard work, and the boy with fat tits was panting desperately before the last body was hauled down the slope. Not everyone in the corpse-mound was dead. S
ome of them were alive enough to groan whenever their wounds were jarred.

  Ryver got the three tripods from the back of his truck and set them up in a triangle beneath a tree. “Get their masks off,” he said. “I want to see their faces.”

  He looked at the faces, about one-third men, one-third women, and one-third he couldn’t tell which. Used to be he could tell men from women when he killed them and see something in their faces worth killing. These faces weren’t worth the ammo.

  He opened the tops of the tripods and adjusted their positions until the purple darkness hummed with the pitch of a perfect triangle.

  “Okay, ladies first, and that means you,” he told the boy with tits. “Get your blubber ass up that tree.”

  Blubber boy started climbing, his belly sweating and his pecker shriveled like a piece of white elbow macaroni in the cold moonlight.

  “Okay, that’s just about right,” Ryver said when the naked kid was shivering on the tree limb directly above the hell-mouth like a circus clown ready to dive into a little tub of water back when circuses still amounted to something.

  “You want to land on your feet in hell, you better dive in head-first,” he said. “Otherwise you’re gonna break your neck.” He cocked his revolver. “It’s up to you, boy.”

  The fat punk jumped feet-first, and the sizzling hole swallowed him. The skinny girl was running away, but he shot her in the leg and made her hop on the other one back to the hole. He tossed her in like a log in a fire.

  “Hey, Cypher, can you hear me down there in your world of shit?” he shouted into the blazing triangle. “Heads up, you bastard! I’m sending you a pile of pansies.”

  He picked up another body and threw it into the hole.

  “This one’s still alive,” he yelled. “Maybe you want to dress him up like a girl and have some fun.”

  All those years of working for another treatment so he could stare into the fire a little longer trying to make sense out of life that made less sense the longer he stared at it, and more than another year of life he wanted one minute of meaning.

  “Hell ain’t deep enough for you to hide in, Cypher,” he yelled. “I’m gonna send you a dozen pansies every day just like a flower shop. Can you hear me down there, you bastard?”

  He tossed some more mangled bodies into the purple fire, ghosts wailing like wind sweeping down the long years saying, “Little jobs that you’ll enjoy,” saying, “This is your payday,” saying “Who are you?” and Ryver didn’t know anymore, nothing left in his head now except the shit Cypher had put there.

  “I said, can you hear me down there?” he yelled, but hell didn’t answer.

  Part Three: The Lord of Worms

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Burne could no longer tell where his pain ended and the room began. It was all one huge stinging oozing gnawing burning aching itching piercing grinding stabbing convulsion of torment throbbing as large as the room, then pinching down as tiny as the point of a pin. The people who entered and left the room were pieces of his pain, ebbing and returning, shooting from his shoulder down his spine to what was left of his toes, then climbing back up the stairs to his neck. One of them had stopped hurting. Her name was Bert, and she was just two dripping pieces of meat now hanging like Burne from the ceiling. He envied her.

  A pinched nerve named Emily had set up a speaker phone so everyone in the room could hear the incoming messages, but the speaker phone had stopped speaking. “I can’t get no one to answer,” she said. “I think maybe they’re all dead.”

  Kat clenched her sharp face like a needle stuck in Burne’s gut. “Tell them if Ryver gets away, they better all be dead,” she said.

  Emily kept ringing up different numbers and shouting “Hello? Hello?” her forehead a scrunched-up knot of worry like a sciatic cramp in Burne’s hip. Many unfamiliar spots of pain had been arriving sporadically ever since Kat had issued an emergency order to all agents within a four-hour radius.

  Now a familiar spot of pain drifted up the stairs, bringing with it the smell of lightning and a flicker of spasms. It was Rebus. He stopped and stared at Bert’s headless body hanging upside-down from the ceiling. A bucket caught the last few slow thick drips of blood. Then he stared at the head dangling by its hair. The lips were cut off, and big teeth grinned below a cardboard sign taped to the forehead that read: “I MOUTHED OFF.”

  “You got a problem with that?” Kat asked him. “Don’t like the way I decorated the joint?”

  Rebus shrugged. “That’s for Cypher to decide,” he said. His voice was a fluttering twitch in the stomach, and Burne choked on a sour cud of bloody vomit.

  “From now on the name Cypher will not be used,” Kat said loudly to the whole room. “The name is Shakti. Is that perfectly clear?”

  The punks and dykes murmured. They were a stinking warm ooze dripping from Burne’s gut. “Yes, Great Mother,” they murmured and dripped.

  The speaker phone crackled to life, and a dry voice silenced the room: “Hey there, Cunny-Kat, got your ears on?”

  It was the old cowboy, a long, hard pain shooting straight up the rectum.

  “I sent all your punks to hell so they’ll be there to greet you when I cut your scrawny throat,” he said. “It’s gonna be tasty.”

  The phone chuckled and crackled and went dead. Kat’s thin white face reddened like a hernia. She clenched her fists, two tight charley horses in Burne’s legs.

  “I want some volunteers,” she said. No one stepped forward. “You’re all volunteers,” she said, “so listen up.”

  “If you’re planning to find Ryver, it’s a waste of time,” Rebus said. “The cowboy doesn’t leave tracks.”

  Kat ignored him. “Okay, you sorry asses, you’re going to pick up Dexter Radcliff,” she said. “I want him alive or you won’t be, catch my drift?”

  “Why do you want Radcliff?” Rebus asked.

  “Because I’m going to hang him up there next to Burne,” Kat said, “and between the two of them I’m going to find out where the hell Grimes is. Somebody should’ve done this already.”

  Rebus sneered a whole card-deck of sneers shuffled together. “Your nose is bleeding, sweetheart,” he said. “Are you having a difficult pregnancy?”

  Burne tried to vomit again. He wondered what it was going to be like to have company. Maybe he and Radcliff could whisper to each other like two kids who were supposed to be asleep, wrapped up in their blankets of pain and telling each other of their torments in the dark.

  ***

  Dexter’s neighborhood was good for walking, narrow streets so quiet and dark that the city seemed to lie far away. He and Mary had walked here almost every night since they met, with only a brief interruption when she vanished to contend with Joe Ryver, and now she was walking beside him again as if nothing unusual had happened. The chilly air smelled of leaves and fireplaces. A large car lumbered past them while something small and warm crawled in between Dexter’s fingers. It was Mary’s hand.

  “That’s what my daddy useta call a thirty-seven-cent moon,” she said, “just about smack dab between a quarter and a half.”

  Dexter glanced up at the white chunk hanging sharp in a clear sky. “I made a thousand drawings of that moon when I was a kid,” he said. “It was sacred because Mr. Grinchin lived there.”

  “Mr. who?” she asked.

  “You know, the sorcerer I used to dream about years ago,” Dexter said. “Mr. Grinchin taught me weird stuff that didn’t make any sense after I woke up, kind of like Grimes. You think maybe kids have some foretaste of their future?”

  “I didn’t have to be a fortune teller to see mine,” she said. “My father already had it all planned out.”

  It was past midnight, and most of the house lights were off. A TV set flickered on a window curtain. A tree grasped the moon and clutched it like a jewel while another car crept up behind them and turned. Strange, so much traffic at this hour—the neighborhood was usually tucked in bed by this time of night.

 
“Know what I’m thinking?” Mary said. “I’m planning what I’m going to do with you when we get back.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “I’m gonna make you scream for mercy three times,” she said.

  “Why three?”

  “Two just isn’t enough. Four might be excessive.”

  “I don’t know, four sounds pretty good,” he said. “Maybe we better head back and get started.”

  “Not just yet,” she said. “Let’s walk for a while.”

  They crossed a street and walked past a high school toward Whetstone Park. Some empty cars sat in the school lot, and Dexter wondered why they bothered him. Maybe he’d seen that blue Hyundai creeping past them a few minutes ago, but so what? He kept thinking about something he had just said: “the sorcerer I used to dream about years ago.” Somehow the words rang false.

  Because I still dream about him, he thought. No longer with a white beard and long robe, no longer living in a castle on the moon, maybe no longer even a man with a face or a body, but Grinchin still talks to me in my sleep. He told me how to kill the voider.

  “What’s a spectrehole?” Dexter asked.

  Mary made a disgusted sound and let go of his hand. “I was trying to think about something pleasant for a change,” she said. “All I know, the thing inside the Talking Horn is called a captured spectron, and a captured spectron is called a spectrehole.”

  “Yeah, but what is it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Grimes talked about particles that are just holes in space.”

  “He probably meant positrons,” Dexter said. “If I remember right, they’re electrons that spin in the wrong direction.”

  “Whatever they are, he said they’re doorways to other worlds.”