The familiar raged. It was maddened. It thrashed in a yard that reeked of alien spoor, chewing tires and spitting out their rags. Eventually, it hunkered down to the intruder’s track. It licked it. It bristled throughout its body of witch flesh and patchwork trash. The new scent was sharper than its own, admixed with different blood. The familiar hunted.
The trail ran across back gardens, separated by fences that the familiar vaulted easily, trickled across toys and drying grass, over flowerbeds and rockeries. The prey was old and tough: it told in the piss. The familiar used the smell to track, and learned it, and understood that it was the newcomer here.
In the sprawl of the outer city the stench became narcotic. The familiar stalked silently on rocks like hooves. The night was warm and overcast. Behind empty civic halls, tags, and the detritus of vandalism. It ended there. The smell was so strong, it was a fight-drug. It blistered the familiar’s innards. Cavities opened in it, rudimentary lungs like bellows: it made itself breathe, so that it could pant to murder.
Corrugated iron and barbed wire surrounds. The witch’s familiar was the intruder. There were no stars, no lamplight. The familiar stood without motion. It breathed out a challenge. The breath drifted across the little arena. Something enormous stood. Debris moved. Debris rose and turned and opened its mouth and caught the exhalation. It sucked it in out of all the air, filled its belly. It learned it.
Dark expanded. The familiar blinked its eyelids of rain-wet leather offcuts. It watched its enemy unfold.
This was an old thing, an old familiar, the bull, the alpha. It had escaped or been banished or lost its witch long ago. It was broken bodies, wood and plastic, stone and ribbed metal, a constellation of clutter exploding from a mass of skinless muscle the size of a horse. Beside its wet bloody eyes were embedded cameras, extending their lenses, powered by organic current. The mammoth shape clapped some of its hand-things.
The young familiar had not known until then that it had thought itself alone. Without words, it wondered what else was in the city—how many other outcasts, familiars too foul to use. But it could not think for long as the monstrous old potentate came at it.
The thing ran on table legs and gripped with pincers that were human jaws. They clenched on the little challenger and tore at its accrued limbs.
Early in its life the familiar had learned pain, and this attack gave it agony. It felt itself lessen as the attacker ingested gulps of its flesh. The familiar understood in shock that it might cease.
Its cousin taught it that with its new mass it could bruise. The familiar could not retreat. Even bleeding and with arms, legs gone, with eyes crushed and leaking and something three times its size opening mouths and shears and raising flukes that were shovels, the intoxicant reek of a competitor’s musk forced it to fight.
More pain and the loss of more self. The little insurgent was diminishing. It was awash in rival stink. A notion came to it. It pissed up in its adversary’s eyes, spraying all the bloody muck left in it and rolling away from the liquid’s arc. The hulking thing clamoured silently. Briefly blinded, it put its mouth to the ground and followed its tongue.
Behind it, the familiar was motionless. It made tools of shadows and silence, keeping dark and quiet stitched to it as the giant tracked its false trail. The little familiar sent fibres into the ground, to pipework inches below. It connected to the plastic with tentacles quickly as thick as viscera, made the pipe a limb and organ, shoving and snapping it a foot below its crouching opponent. It drove the ragged end up out of the earth, its plastic jags spurs. It ground it into the controlling mass of the old familiar, into the dead centre of meat, and as the wounded thing tried to pull itself free, the guileful young familiar sucked through the broken tube.
It ballooned cavities in itself, gaping vacuums at the ends of its new pipe intestine. The suction pinioned its enemy, and tore chunks of bloody matter from it. The familiar drew them through the buried duct, up into its own body. Like a glutton it swigged them.
The trapped old one tried to raise itself but its wood and metal limbs had no purchase. It could not pull itself free, and the pipe was too braced in earth to tear away. It tried to thread its own veins into the tubing and vie for it, to make its own oesophagus and drink down its attacker, but the vessels of the young familiar riddled the plastic, and the dying thing could not push them aside, and with all the tissue it had lost to the usurper, they were now equal in mass, and now the newcomer was bigger, and now bigger still.
Tissue passed in fat pellets into the swelling young familiar sitting anchored by impromptu guts. Venting grave little breaths, the ancient one shrivelled and broke apart, sucked into a plughole. The cobweb of its veins dried up from all its borrowed limbs and members, and they disaggregated, nothing but hubcaps again, and butcher’s remnants, a dead television, tools, mechanical debris, all brittled and sucked clean of life. The limbs were arranged around clean ground, from which jagged a shard of piping.
All the next day, the familiar lay still. When it moved, after dark, it limped though it replaced its broken limbs: it was damaged internally, it ached with every step it took, or if it oozed or crawled. All but a few of its eyes were gone, and for nights it was too weak to catch and use any animals to fix that. It took none of its opponent’s tools, except one of the human jaws that had been pincers. It was not a trophy, but something to consider.
It metabolised much of the flesh-matter it had ingested, burnt it away (and the older familiar’s memories, of self-constitution on Victorian slag-heaps, troubled it like indigestion). But it was still severely bloated. It pierced its distended body with broken glass to let out pressure, but all that oozed out of it was its new self.
The familiar still grew. It had been enlarging ever since it emerged from the canal. With its painful victory came a sudden increase in its size, but it knew it would have reached that mass anyway.
Its enemy’s trails were drying up. The familiar felt interest at that, rather than triumph. It lay for days in a car-wrecking yard, using new tools, building itself a new shape, listening to the men and the clatter of machines, feeling its energy and attention grow, but slowly. That was where it was when the witch found it.
An old lady came before it. In the noon heat the familiar sat loose as a doll. Over the warehouse and office roofs, it could hear church bells. The old lady stepped into its view and it looked up at her.
She was glowing, with more, it seemed, than the light behind her. Her skin was burning. She looked incomplete. She was at the edge of something. The familiar did not recognise her but it remembered her. She caught its eye and nodded forcefully, moved out of sight. The familiar was tired.
“There you are.”
Wearily the familiar raised its head again. The witch stood before it.
“Wondered where you got to. Buggering off like that.”
In the long silence the familiar looked the man up and down. It remembered him, too.
“Need you to get back to things. Job to finish.”
The familiar’s interest wandered. It picked at a stone, looked down at it, sent out veins and made it a nail. It forgot the man was there, until his voice surprised it.
“Could feel you all the time, you know.” The witch laughed without pleasure. “How we found you, isn’t it?” Glanced back at the woman out of the familiar’s sight. “Like following me nose. Me gut.”
Sun baked them all.
“Looking well.”
The familiar watched him. It was inquisitive. It felt things. The witch moved back. There was a purr of summer insects. The woman was at the edge of the clearing of cars.
“Looking well,” the witch said again.
The familiar had made itself the shape of a man. Its flesh centre was several stone of spread-out muscle. Its feet were boulders again, its hands bones on bricks. It would stand eight feet tall. There was too much stuff in it and on it to itemise. On its head were books, grafted in spine-first, their pages constantly riffling as if in wind. Bl
ood vessels saturated their pages, and engorged to let out heat. The books sweated. The familiar’s dog eyes focused on the witch, then the gently cooking wrecks.
“Oh Jesus.”
The witch was staring at the bottom of the familiar’s face, half pointing.
“Oh Jesus what you do?”
The familiar opened and closed the man-jaw it had taken from its opponent and made its own mouth. It grinned with third-hand teeth.
“What you fucking do Jesus Christ. Oh shit man. Oh no.”
The familiar cooled itself with its page-hair.
“You got to come back. We need you again.” Pointing vaguely at the woman, who was motionless and still shining. “Ain’t done. She ain’t finished. You got to come back.
“I can’t do it on my own. Ain’t got it. She ain’t paying me no more. She’s fucking ruining me.” That last he screamed in anger directed backwards, but the woman did not flinch. She reached out her hand to the familiar, waved a clutch of mouldering dead snakes. “Come back,” said the witch.
The familiar noticed the man again and remembered him. It smiled.
The man waited. “Come back,” he said. “Got to come back, fucking back.” He was crying. The familiar was fascinated. “Come back.” The witch tore off his shirt. “You been growing. You been fucking growing you won’t stop, and I can’t do nothing without you now and you’re killing me.”
The woman with the snakes glowed. The familiar could see her through the witch’s chest. The man’s body was faded away in random holes. There was no blood. Two handspans of sternum, inches of belly, slivers of arm-meat all faded to nothing, as if the flesh had given up existing. Entropic wounds. The familiar looked in interest at the gaps. He saw into the witch’s stomach, where hoops of gut ended where they met the hole, where the spine became hard to notice and did not exist for a space of several vertebrae. The man took off his trousers. His thighs were punctuated by the voids, his scrotum gone.
“You got to come back,” he whispered. “I can’t do nothing without you, and you’re killing me. Bring me back.”
The familiar touched itself. It pointed at the man with a chicken-bone finger, and smiled again.
“Come back,” the witch said. “She wants you; I need you. You fucking have to come back. Have to help me.” He stood cruciform. The sun shone through the cavities in him, breaking up his shadow with light.
The familiar looked down at black ants labouring by a cigarette end, up at the man’s creased face, at the impassive old woman holding her dead snakes like a bouquet. It smiled without cruelty.
“Then finish,” the witch screamed at it. “If you ain’t going to come back then fucking finish.” He stamped and spat at the familiar, too afraid to touch but raging. “You fucker. I can’t stand this. Finish it for me you fucker.” The witch beat his fists against his naked holed sides. He reached into a space below his heart. He wailed with pain and his face spasmed, but he fingered the inside of his body. His wound did not bleed, but when he drew out his shaking hand it was wet and red where it had touched his innards. He cried out again and shook blood into the familiar’s face. “That what you want? That do you? You fucker. Come back or make it stop. Do something to finish.”
From the familiar’s neck darted a web of threads, which fanned out and into the corona of insects that surrounded it. Each fibre snaked into a tiny body and retracted. Flies and wasps and fat bees, a crawling handful of chitin was reeled in to the base of the familiar’s throat, below its human jaw. The hair-thin tendrils scored through the tumour of living insects and took them over, used them, made them a tool. They hummed their wings loudly in time, clamped to the familiar’s skin.
The vibrations resonated through its boccal cavity. It moved its mouth as it had seen others do. The insectile voice box echoed through it and made sound, which it shaped with lips.
“Sun,” it said. Its droning speech intrigued it. It pointed into the sky, over the nude and fading witch’s shoulder, up way beyond the old woman. It closed its eyes. It moved its mouth again and listened closely to its own quiet words. Rays bounced from car to battered car, and the familiar used them as tools to warm its skin.
ENTRY TAKEN FROM A MEDICAL ENCYCLOPAEDIA
NAME: Buscard’s Murrain, or Wormword
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: Slovenia (probably).
FIRST KNOWN CASE: Primoz Jansa, a reader for a blind priest in the town of Bled in what is now northern Slovenia. In 1771 at the age of thirty-six Jansa left Bled for London. The first record of his presence there (and the first description of Buscard’s Murrain) is in a letter from Ignatius Sancho to Margaret Cocksedge dated 4th February 1774.1
SYMPTOMS: The disease incubates for up to three years, during which time the infected patient suffers violent headaches. After this, full-blown Buscard’s Murrain is manifested in slowly failing mental faculties and severe mood swings between three conditions: near full lucidity; a feverish seeking out of the largest audience possible; and a state of loud, hysterical glossolalia. Samuel Buscard infamously denoted these states torpid, prefatory and grandiloquent respectively, thereby appearing to take the side of the disease.
After between three and twelve years, the patient enters the terminal phase of the disease. The so-far gradual mental collapse speeds up markedly, leaving him or her in a permanent vegetative state within months.
Those present during the nonsensical “grandiloquence” of a murrain sufferer report that one particular word—the wormword—is repeated often, followed by a pause as the sufferer waits for a response. If any of those listening repeats the word, the sufferer’s satisfaction is obvious.
Later, it is from among these mimics that the next batch of the infected will be found.
HISTORY: At the insistence of the respected Dr. William Haygarth, all murrain sufferers were released into the care of Dr. Samuel Buscard in 1775.2 During postmortem investigations on the brains of infected victims Buscard discovered what he thought were parasitic worms, which he named after himself. When a committee of aetiologists examined his evidence, they found that the vermiform specimens were made of cerebral matter itself. Buscard was denounced amid claims that he had made the “worms” himself by perforating the brains with a cheese-screw. The committee renamed the disease “gibbering fever,” and halfheartedly claimed it to be the result of “bad air.”
Samuel Buscard was ordered to surrender Jansa to the committee, but he produced papers showing that his patient had succumbed and been buried. The disgraced doctor then disappeared from public view and died in 1777.
His research was continued by his son Jacob, also a doctor. In 1782 Jacob Buscard astounded the medical establishment with the publication of his famous pamphlet proving that the brain-tissue “worms” were capable of independent motion in the head, and that the cerebrums of sufferers were riddled with convoluted tunnels. “The first Dr. Buscard was thus correct,” he wrote. “Not bad air but a voracious parasite—a murrain—afflicts the gibberers.”
There is a word, which when spoken inveigles its way into the mind of the speaker and manifests itself in his flesh. It forces its bearer to speak itself again and again, in the company of others, that they might be tempted to echo it. With each utterance another wormword is born, until the brain is tunnelled quite through: and when those listening repeat what they have heard, in curiosity or mockery, if their utterance is just so, a wormword is hatched in their heads. Not quite the parasite envisaged by my wronged father, but a parasite nonetheless.3
Jacob Buscard’s pamphlet dates his revelation to 1780, during one of his numerous interrogations of Jansa in his “torpid” state. Jansa told Buscard that his illness had started one day while he was reading to his master in Bled. Between the pages of the book he had found a slip of paper on which was written two words. Jansa read the first word aloud, and thus started the earliest known outbreak of wormword. His ensuing headache caused him to drop the paper, which was subsequently lost. “With the translation of those few letters into sound,�
� Jacob Buscard wrote, “the wretched Jansa became midwife and host to the wormword.”4
The younger Buscard’s breakthrough won him a tremendous reputation, marred by his admissions that he and his father had forged Jansa’s death certificate and kept him alive and imprisoned as an experimental subject for the past seven years. Jansa was found in the Buscard basement in the advanced stages of his disease and taken to a madhouse, where he died two months later. Jacob Buscard escaped prosecution for kidnapping, torture, and accessory to forgery by fleeing to Munich, where he disappeared.5
London suffered periodic outbreaks of Buscard’s murrain until the passage of the Gibbering Act of 1810 legalised the incarceration of the infected in soundproof sanatoria.6 The era of mass infection was over, and only occasional isolated cases have been recorded since.
It took the late twentieth century and the work of Jacob Buscard’s great-great-great-great-great granddaughter Dr. Mariella Buscard conclusively to dispel the superstitious notions about “evil words” that have clouded even scholarly discussions of the disease. In her seminal 1995 Lancet article “It’s the Synapses, Stupid!”, the latest Dr. Buscard proves the murrain to be simply an unpleasant (though admittedly unusual) biochemical reaction.
She points out that with every action of the human body, including speech, a unique configuration of thousands of minute chemical reactions occurs in the brain. Dr. Buscard shows that when the wormword is spoken with a precise inflection, the concomitant synaptic firing has the unfortunate property of reconfiguring nerve-fibres into discrete self-organising clusters. The tiny chemical reactions, in other words, turn nerves into parasites. Boring through the brain and using their own newly independent bodies to reroute neural messages, these marauding lengths of brain matter periodically take control of their host. They particularly affect his or her speech, in an attempt to fullfil their instincts to reproduce.
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