“There’s nothing of cash value inside, but Dot would like to be interred with that silly cross. She didn’t say as much to me, but I often come to know people better than they know themselves. It’s a dipped trinket with an enamel rose setting. A sentimental item. Worthless, except to her. It should go from that cigar box into a larger one: cedar to mahogany. The coffin.”
“Oh sure, sure—I’ll let them know to… We’ll get it handled. You just want that in the coffin or around—?”
“—In her hand is fine. She won’t defend her property at the viewing. It may well disappear if she wears it openly.”
“You got it.” The orderly opened the box and poured the cross and chain into his meaty palm. “That’s all she wrote. It’s empty.”
“Of items, yes. It has a distinctive scent. I’ll take the box, if it’s all the same to you.”
“No skin off my back,” the orderly said, handing the cigar case to Maren clumsily, his clipboard slipping in his free hand. “Don’t worry; we’ll take good care of her. Get her to the… to the next steps.”
“Her arrangements are made. Can they be changed?”
“Oh, no, sorry. Not unless… I mean, maybe… you could talk to the vendors, I guess?”
“No need. I don’t want that idiot daughter of hers shorting Dottie what her carcass has coming. Songs and nonsense before they plant her deeper than a peace lily.”
“Lily?”
“I don’t want her wishes violated,” Maren clarified, standing straighter, which put her no more than a head shorter than the bushy orderly. He shrank from her as though he’d been slapped with a wet glove.
“No, yeah… you got it. Totally; I get you. They might exchange against market value, you know—but it’s set in stone if it—once it’s paid for, it’s good, you know? Good to go.”
“And you will remember the cross.”
“You betchya. I always try to… people think I’m a freak, you know? I take this part of the job real serious. Can’t help it. I just do. Maybe I’m delusional, but it doesn’t hurt anybody, you know? Even if there’s not… I mean, you have to do unto others, yeah?”
“Indeed. It’s good not to offend the dead, though they care about different things than one might assume. Folk wisdom is often as wrong as it seems like it should be.” Maren deposited the cedar box in her purse. “I have everything I wanted. Is there anything else?”
The orderly brushed crumbs from his shapeless two-piece and smiled with wooden deference. “No ma’am. I could use another slice of New York’s finest, but that wouldn’t be your department.”
“I leave pizza to Uriah Lee. Ask for feta cheese, artichoke hearts, and gyro slivers over an alfredo base. Hers will make a grown man cry.”
“Artichokes? Naw, this place just has the normal stuff. Your friend must be from Seattle or something.” The orderly looked down at his hands, and from his hands to the bed, and from the bed to the body. “It’s not my place, missus… ma’am… but bless you for being here. Must’ve meant an awful lot to Miss Dorothy.”
“It should have. It was a difference of life and death.”
“Right. Yeah. Anyway, if there’s anything else that goes missing—stuff gets lost all the time, you know? And with her moving rooms, and no other visitors… If she had anything valuable on her, it beats the government getting their paws on it, right?”
“Perish the thought,” Maren said primly, confirmed the contents of her three pockets had not slithered anywhere they should not be, reached for her substantial purse, and took her leave.
5
Maren walked carefully, for her body was old, her neon shoes were new, and the seeing stone she held did not compensate for the farsighted—an irony she recognized, but did not appreciate.
She stepped lightly over a series of tar-filled cracks in the concrete walkway, the slabs tilted in places like bad teeth. Her purse, the size and weight of a spare tire, jarred against her wide hips whenever she planted a sneaker unevenly.
When she was, at long last, sure of both her present location and her fated destination, Maren put the stone away. The prism grew uncomfortably hot with short bursts of use, and the pain had begun to slice through her neuralgia.
The stone might smolder for weeks, given how often she’d consulted it since first feeling its pull—but the stone was unlikely to burn through its designated pouch in her leather purse, Maren having prepared for just such an eventuality.
As a matter of fact, Maren spent a good portion of her life planning ahead. She felt it a wise policy, because the future—as the stone’s quirks and demands reinforced—was very difficult to see.
Spotting the outdoor structure the prism had shown her, Maren approached the gazebo, squinting at the shoddy construction and general lack of purpose. She found the center, toed the middle, and turned in a circle with her arms outstretched and soles squeaking.
Maren’s eyes, hawk-keen at any distance past her elbows, sought her victim. Seeing nothing, she admired her shoes as she circled again, counting the sedate pirouettes in the back of her thoughts.
Her compulsions momentarily satisfied, she looked at the uninviting bench, testing the weight of her purse on her shoulder. Maren sat with a plop that clattered spoons and bottlecaps.
She had arrived.
Now she had only to await the gift.
It had been years since the stone had pulled at her as it had today—it had pulled harder still when she left Dottie’s deathbed. Although the insistence was unusual, Maren trusted the prism because there was no reason she should not.
She had built it with her own hands—but that being said, there was no sign of the gift.
“Right place, wrong time,” Maren said, and, having forgotten to bring so commonplace an item as a toothbrush, she scrubbed her front teeth on a furry portion of her eclectic garb. The fur was much too soft for dental work, and Maren stopped, pinching fine hairs from her tongue as she calculated.
How long to wait?
“A drip or a drop,” Maren answered.
She was certain she had arrived within minutes of either direction. “An hour at the outside. That bothersome rock was pulling like a draft mule breaking new ground.”
Could she have already missed the window?
No. She would have known if the prism had shown her the past. There was a hard, candy sharpness to the present, to that which was—and, while grainy and begrimed—there was also a fundamental clarity to that which had been.
What would be, on the other hand, was nebulous and vague, pulsing and shifting; gaining hard edges only as its fulfillment reduced to bare seconds, certainty closing like a pride of lions.
The surroundings of the present environment meshed with what Maren had seen through the phantoms and haze… minus her intended guest, of course.
“Which leaves the future.”
Less than half an hour away, if she had to guess.
“Unless it has slipped again,” she added. The prism had demonstrated slippage on more than one occasion, but, if it had hopped a cog, it would not be more advanced than a handful of hours.
“No, not hours. Less.”
For one, the stone had presented the scene in the fullness of daylight, and Maren had already walked far into the afternoon. For another, portable stones—stones that became piping hot to the touch, filling one’s purse with the smell of burning hair and leaking suspicious wisps of yellow-gray smoke, for example—did not have the requisite juice to project distant events, however incorrectly. There were reasons the greater oracles sat where the earth itself provided fuel and power.
As far as her own small stone went, it had been ages since Maren had last investigated improvements to its efficiency. It would behoove her to revisit the idea at some point, technology and science having evolved.
However, unless she’d missed a breakthrough, or the hint of a leap secreted between the lines of the assorted science journals she skimmed at branch libraries wherever she might be, it remained that seeing
stones must confront the blunt, immutable reality of ever-branching time: exponential uncertainties and half-lives of potential must be accounted for, and the farther one looked, the faster entropy diluted a surefire prophesy to mere probability, probability to possibility, and possibility to hunches and guesswork (not to mention burned fingers).
“Might as well throw bones at that point,” Maren said, bobbing her head in agreement—she regularly agreed with her thoughts.
Finding her thread again, Maren breathed deeply. Time spiraled endlessly outward, its innumerable variables intermixing—the farther one looked, the more wobbly a given outcome became; the coordinate pair of place and hour uncertain.
The future, then, being frustrating to forecast, power-hungry to attempt, and prone to ruination at the last moment due to action or expectation on the part of the observer, was such that Maren liked to support predictions with a contingency plan.
Which was why she’d brought a small sack of carrots to tide her over.
Crunching loudly, Maren ran her palm over the three delicate watch chains that ran from a shared hasp at the breast pocket of her double-breasted waistcoat; the ripple calmed her.
Despite its eight buttons, the waistcoat’s front was operated by a distressed brass zipper of the joint-and-jaws design. Zippers were a favorite of Maren’s, the improved versions of which had her vote for first-year induction into the hall of fame, assuming there was such a thing.
Open, the jacket was heavy and liable to sag at the front corners, so Maren was zipped-up, as a rule. She felt unoppressed now, even after the brisk walk and unseasonably pleasant weather. Partly, this was in thanks to the lack of sleeves. Described by its vendor as vintage steampunk, the waistcoat amounted to a thin vest, though it was mink-trimmed in places and featured an ermine-lined hood.
Maren breathed deeply through her nose, settling her mind as bits of carrot rode her tongue. She did not slide her fingers down each chain again, nor did she open the three hand-pockets to which the chains connected.
She knew what writhed within the compartments of the waistcoat: night worms were hydrostatic of skeleton and powered by the souls of kind spirits—this batch was.
The recipe was among her highest accomplishments, for they’d been considered extinct. To her knowledge, outside of her pocket, night worms were—and more than extinct, they’d been lost. Forgotten. Deliberately, Maren had come to suspect.
If there were an alternative to explain the loss of literature and the wall of secrecy, she had not encountered it. The crawlers that had populated many a quaint fable or common dictum a thousand years ago had not survived in so much as a phrase, and certainly not as a jar specimen or fossil.
In a word, the night worms had been undiscovered.
“It was not by chance,” Maren said. “Someone was more determined than an activist… and more effective.”
She had not found a surviving record of night worms across several centuries. Not in the Redwood Library and Athenaeum (her first reading center subscription in the New World). Not in the Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress.
Nowhere so recently stocked nor commonly known.
Which was not entirely surprising, of course. The records of the mortal world came and went, were purged and lost, were burned and forgotten—rarely for sinister reasons specific to a single topic, barring religion.
What had been shocking was to find no recent depiction or description of night worms in the official documents curated by the elder sisters. Mentions, however glancing, popped-up only when Maren reached into the unordered records, or those considered to be illegible, or those unread for other reasons (traps and curses were popular, going by her experience).
Maren had toiled for months in the deepest storerooms, deciphering scrolls and puzzling through shards of clay, often to rage and screech at the realization she’d reassembled a prescription for an Akkadian pesticide, or had unraveled wildly inaccurate information on an unrelated organism, or found early spells for weight loss or other forms of torture—and, once, a recipe for covert murder involving intestinal flukes and the assumption of a cultural penchant for lampreys on the part of the target.
Had she not been in a controlled area, Maren was certain she would have thrown a proper rage, ridding the world of such artifacts forever—but, in the end, it had been the cold thoroughness of the purge that sustained Maren’s interest, cementing her stubborn streak.
“One can learn from an empty grave. The hole itself is a clue,” Maren advised, biting the hairy tip from a short, fat carrot. She spat the end to the ground as though prepping a dollar cigar.
When she had exhausted her patience and that of the elders, the barren tomb of the repository led her into unofficial sources, there being a world’s worth of those, many of them unguarded or easily accessed.
For good reason, too.
Maren had sifted through untold conspiracy theories, the ramblings of ghouls gone mad, rubbings of headstones with intagliated text unseen by the casual eye, unverified sightings of alien fauna; thumbed through countless diaries of inquisitive minds with a bent toward speculative science…
There had been much to go on, but the great majority of the information she’d found in the wild was inaccurate, invented, or willfully wrong.
There had been not much; there had been just enough.
“Enough to keep at it,” she said, a paste of well-chewed carrot mortared across her teeth like stucco.
Among the mountains of maddening trash, there were stimulating clues—located years and continents apart, often as not.
There had been the smoky parchment from Pergamon relating to figures seen in ceromancy, its indextrous transcription of a sketch-like character scratched into the scapula of an ox, the accompanying script contextually notable and indicating provenance dating to the Zhou dynasty; there was the discarded shaft of mammoth ivory with its graven images, curving and cut with scrimshandy care, a portion of the whittling tantalizingly lost where the piece had been snapped away at the socket’s base when a nameless looter correctly identified the sunken hillock and tumbled menhir as signs of a warlord’s tomb; there had been the eroded tablet referencing habitats of known helminths, with conjectures on reproduction—these being crumbling observations of a proto-taxonomist farming the Indus valley, a man whose crops were flooded, razed, and burned, not because of his knowledge, but rather due to the usual misfortunes of arable tenancy and the territorial conflicts of his brethren—and, finally, forgotten in a private library of the natural sciences, inaccessible to the unaccompanied, there had been the lone, desiccated, partially-decayed physical specimen of a night worm smashed between the pages of an anthology of medieval poetry, its shape a thick vertical slice, as of a softened cucumber—this grim bookmark, Maren’s thin-faced guide had sneered, was preserved and saved from the crude disturbances of early archaeology due to the body’s placement between leaves of unthinkably dreary octosyllabic couplets: irritated, Maren had taken the book, left a brief note of apology, a salve for the man’s contusion, and returned the volume by parcel post some years later, still identifiable by the telltale stains and specks of organic matter beginning from page 619, these marring a section devoted to the lesser-known works of Guillaume de Machaut.
Between these highlights, there had been tidbits.
She’d found a generic entry on the features of night worms in—of all places—the epigraph of a bland and derivative thesis on the nature of a (misidentified) fungal anomaly. A brief Latin treatise had surrendered several lines on historical encounters and orally-transmitted notes on atypical annelid morphologies: this had been turned to palimpsest by an oat bran wash and recycled as bookbinding material, was copied blindly in the creation of an artistic forgery, and was later restored as a point of interest.
There were mere scraps of lore and legend, gossamer shreds of fact and fantasy. Just enough.
Enough that, in exchange for half a human lifetime, Maren had resurrected—and quite poss
ibly augmented—beings last recorded at a period in which history and tale often threaded together.
Maren preferred to describe night worms as being a blend of species and spell. In fact, in the pamphlet-sized monograph she’d begun while Nixon was in office and one could still find typewriter ribbons in any self-respecting office supply store, she had written precisely that in the abstract (the only section she’d finished).
At a technical level, Maren had performed less of a resurrection as she had an educated recreation, but the genetic material used to bookmark—or deface—medieval poetry had taken her far.
Bringing the night worms to sustained life had required far more than a thunderstorm and a lightning rod: the first lots had rapid metabolisms and coursed rapidly through a deteriorating metamorphoses.
Maren had experimented with induced neoteny to the point of distraction, but the result of her dedication eventually widened the juvenile period many times over, the cost being a few daily drops of her blood, which was unworthy of concern.
So she had thought. As it turned out, supplying a night worm with a taste for her blood was not entirely safe. Still, it had been a happy accident; she’d found no substitutes in endless trials—Maren presumed old magic in her veins was to thank and blame.
Her red sacrifices slowed the night worm lifecycle noticeably—Maren carried a sewing needle for feedings, and she carried herself with absolute focus while working with the worms.
“Handle with care,” she said, chuckling as she wiped at the dirt sheathing a second carrot. “It’d serve me right to have one swallow my soul.”
Several of the early creatures had certainly tried. Once awake and aware, night worms sought the enlightenment and energy of an extant soul; soon thereafter, the much-strengthened worm would try to embed in a healthy host.
Learning and clearing such hurdles had seen casualties, but such was science. “Nine humans and seventeen worms. We won’t count the stillborn,” Maren said to herself, twisting the stem from the shriveled carrot in her hands. “That last batch about got this old girl.” Maren extended the carrot for inspection.
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