The Worm and His Kings

by Hailey Piper

  When Bouchard swung his hands down, the choir opened their mouths as one and began a droning, insect-like hum. It rang inside Monique’s head, her skull turning glassy and vibrating to the note’s frequency. The song stirred inside her. Holding it in was harder than letting it out.

  Her jaw snapped open wetly, and she belted out a high-pitched aria. She forced it a few octaves lower to match the choir. Their hum synchronized, and then began to sway and flow, notes climbing and falling like the tide. Monique’s voice drifted on those waves.

  Phoebe doubled over and hugged her middle. She reminded Monique of the nights she’d cry outside Freedom Tunnel, unwilling to move in case the empty place might steal her sobs. “Please, don’t.” Phoebe sounded in pain.

  “Harmonize with the universe,” Bouchard said. His arms swung in motions that probably meant something to the practiced members of the choir, but nothing to Monique. She tried to follow their hum. “Fold the notes into purity.”

  Phoebe’s eyes squeezed shut as all sound died in her mouth. She had to be making noise, her lips still moved, but the choir’s song drowned her anguish. Her shadow stretched behind her, crossed the floor toward the empty wall, and climbed across midnight blue paint until it stood as tall as the Gray Maiden.

  Monique guessed someone was manipulating the ceiling lights. Shadows didn’t move on their own.

  “Stronger!” Bouchard bellowed. Veins mapped city blocks across his bald head. “This is only one side of the song. If you can’t master this, how will you master its completion? Impress me, singers. Impress the Worm.”

  The choir obeyed. Their hum rang in Monique’s ears; she had to sing louder to fight it.

  Phoebe’s spine arched backward. Ceiling light poured over her face and slipped down her open throat. She looked to the empty wall now, upside-down, head lolling over her shoulders. One arm hugged tight against her chest. The other reached for the entrance, the choir, anything, anyone who might help. An earthquake tore through her, every limb shaking.

  The song was doing it, Monique realized. The harsher its hum, the harder Phoebe quaked. One singer’s warping the wall paint earlier had been a forgettable parlor trick compared to the full choir’s cruel magic.

  The song was causing pain, and Monique was part of it. She tried to shut her mouth and swallow the song, but to resist made her teeth rattle, her skull clinging too tight. One foot slid toward the empty wall. Maybe she couldn’t stop singing, but she could try to leave the ceremony room.

  Phoebe seemed to move, too. Like her shadow, her body stretched across the floor. Her red coat echoed toward the empty wall in transparent afterimages, the same optical effect of waving a hand in front of someone’s eyes too fast, but it was happening to her entire body. Her lips moved where she sat solid at the floor’s center, and the change echoed down each Phoebe-shaped fragment, a ripple of patterns across a dozen blurring faces.

  Monique couldn’t hear a word—the hum was too loud, inside and out—but somehow she could tell that Phoebe was praying.

  Monique’s foot slid off the platform. She had to get out. No one would stop her from creeping along the empty wall to the far side of the room, sneaking behind the chairs, and out the entrance.

  All eyes were on Phoebe, being stretched through time, narrowing. Dying.

  Monique took two steps along the wall and rebounded off the air as if she’d hit a hard surface. Her mind grasped at Lady’s comment about whoever was under the music hall. They haven’t been dismissed. Monique tried again, but the air between Phoebe and the midnight blue wall repelled her. She tried again, and her legs swiveled, almost dropping her to the floor.

  Cold seeped across her skin, the deepest she’d ever known. The kind of cold shape that clawed at her dreams. The song quit rattling in her head, as if likewise repelled. “No, that can’t be,” she whispered under her breath.

  The empty place was here. She had crossed blocks of Manhattan from Freedom Tunnel and yet it had wormed through the city’s underbelly to chase her.

  “What do you want?” she snapped. “What are you?” There was no answer. No one else seemed to notice it, same as in Freedom Tunnel. It was sucking up the choir’s song, Phoebe’s prayers, Monique’s questions, filling itself with their sound. Not even dust would touch the empty place, but it was taking their music.

  It was eating Phoebe.

  Any remnants of the hum in Monique’s throat shattered into a scream. She didn’t care about sneaking anymore. She darted past poor Phoebe, whose form was losing focus and fading into thin air, and through the ceremony room’s doorway.

  The room was not quiet behind Monique. Without the hum ringing in her skull, even clamping her hands over her ears couldn’t stop the sound of Phoebe being pulled apart between the empty place and time itself. She was screaming, but the sound synchronized with the choir.

  And then it was gone. Monique didn’t need to look back to tell that Phoebe was gone, too.

  Bouchard bellowed once again. “Even in death, we still serve the Worm. Our souls are tethered to him, for he is the fountain from which we spring. She is with him now. None will be dismissed until the Third Coming of the Worm, a world where we are kings.”

  The choir’s hum broke into cheers.

  6

  CARVERS

  MONIQUE FELT ONE LEG GIVE out beneath her. This past winter when she’d slogged through snowbanks, hardly able to walk, Donna had held her up, but there was no Donna here. The choir might have murdered her already. Monique would have no one to save. She stumbled, falling.

  Lady caught her arm. “It’s okay,” she said. “The Worm asks a lot, I know, but you can’t just leave. Someday we’ll sing the real thing and pierce the universe. There’ll be no running then.”

  “They killed her,” Monique rasped. She wanted Lady to stop touching but couldn’t pull away. Every muscle felt limp. “They killed her, we killed her.”

  “No.”

  “She’s part of its nothing now.” Hot tears flooded Monique’s cheeks. She tried to swallow the burning lump in her throat. “We fed her to the empty place.”

  “No, no.” Lady smiled wide and shook her head. “Most of the universe is empty. We feel stretches of the Worm, and she’s with him now, and he’s full and infinitellsetsafreee—” Her words smashed together and thinned like Phoebe across time, becoming nothing.

  Monique’s stomach turned. She covered her mouth, tried to swallow again, but hot bile surged. She turned desperate eyes to Lady, who pointed at a door to the right. Monique banged through it into a tan bathroom full of stalls and sinks. She smelled cleaning product and it only made her more nauseous. She rushed into a stall, fell to her knees, and vomited into the toilet bowl.

  Lady stomped into the stall from behind. “There, now. You’ll be fine.” She grasped Monique’s hair and began pulling it back. Fingers crossed the beanie’s rim.

  “Don’t touch it!” Monique coughed until her throat was clear. “Just go.”

  “Oh.” Lady slipped out of the stall. She hovered near the sinks for a moment and then left the restroom.

  Monique faced the toilet and waited, but nothing else surged up her throat. Corene’s candy bar had been her only food in two days, and now it was gone to waste. For all the clawing in her gut, she couldn’t stomach seeing Phoebe being torn apart.

  Limb from limb, as Corene had warned. What had she already known before she led the way into this hellhole? What had happened to Phoebe could happen to anyone. One wrong night in Freedom Tunnel and the empty place might’ve chewed Monique the same way. What was wrong with this city?

  She reached up and flushed. She wished the toilet could drag Empire Music Hall down its pipes too, one little hole draining all this merry evil. If only it were that simple.

  She crawled off the floor and realized she had to pee, too. It might’ve been out of fear more than any other reason, but the need came sudden and without question. She hadn’t been through enough pain tonight, it seemed. Before Doctor Sam, this
never used to hurt, but urinating had become a dice roll in agony ever since. Sometimes she rolled high and felt mild discomfort at worst. Other times, she rolled low.

  Tonight she rolled burning snake eyes. She bit her lip not to scream, but her teeth could only muffle so much. A shriek rattled up her already stinging throat. She clasped her hands tight over open lips and screamed hard into her palms. The scream didn’t finish until she did. She collapsed against the back of the toilet and gasped in and out, forcing her heart to settle.

  It was over. She staggered out of the stall and washed her hands.

  The good doctor had seemed like a miracle, offering out-of-hospital surgery on the cheap. “I’m Samuel Reinhart,” he’d said, “but everyone calls me Doctor Sam.” His smile could light the world, Monique had thought. She wondered how many storage unit surgeries he’d botched, first carving up a patient in the area of their body that was agreed upon, quicker and sloppier than they wanted, and then helping himself to a kidney, damn the consequences. If any surgeries ended in blood-spattered disasters, no skin off his back. Pack up, move, rinse the blood off his hands, repeat.

  Monique had been a unique disaster. Donna had laid her on that freezing table, surrounded by concrete walls and stolen medical equipment that beeped and churned. “A couple hours,” she said, her hand on Monique’s cheek being the only warmth in that dim room. “I’ll see you then, Mon Amour.”

  When Monique finally woke up, two days had passed in feverish nightmare. All she remembered from that time was sweat and pain. Donna later explained about Doctor Sam’s side practice of selling kidneys on the black market, how she’d taken his own scalpel and turned it against him to save Monique. She’d had to call an ambulance they couldn’t afford, which rushed Monique to an expensive emergency room, where they only treated her botched surgery and infection until she was stable. Once she could walk, she had to go.

  She had hobbled alongside Donna into a New York winter midnight, icy flakes hitting her skin and melting down her hospital gown. The Salvation Army was a no-go as always for people like them. They ended up in the Fujianese Church of the Transfiguration in Chinatown, stepping in during midnight mass and lying along the back pews. The kind pastor invited them deeper inside to escape the cold and never asked who they were or what they were running from, but beyond that, he couldn’t help them. Donna only found a homeless shelter by luck the next day.

  A week passed before Monique could bear to eat solid food. Her insides burned every time she relieved herself. While she could guess the damage by touch, yet another week passed before she dared look at what Doctor Sam had hacked between her thighs or the stitches that ran along her left side and back. He’d been an inch from taking her kidney. The emergency room medical personnel had patched her up soundly, but they weren’t plastic surgeons and it wasn’t their job to make her pretty.

  Donna had stayed through it all, right until the shelter closed down and she disappeared. Monique had moved into Freedom Tunnel after that, discovered the empty place, and spent long days searching for Donna.

  And now these people had her. They were carvers, like Doctor Sam, all greedy fingers and knives in their smiles. Monique couldn’t let them do to Donna what they’d done to Phoebe, and God knew how many other people, if they hadn’t already.

  They weren’t entirely delusional. The empty place was real; so was Gray Hill. Every old ghost story might be real, too. Monique could believe there was an almighty Worm god who crawled through time, smashed continents, and slithered in starlight. These people were killing for that starlight, and they loved every drop of blood.

  At least now Monique knew what she was dealing with. She could be ready for it or try to be. There was no mouthwash here; she gargled sink water to clear the taste of vomit, but nothing could wash the death song out of her throat. She would always taste the piercing of the universe. Best not to show it. She needed to work these people a little more for now. She took a breath and then stepped out of the restroom.

  Lady was waiting, her lips pursed in concern, her wrists crossed below the waist of her bleached jeans. “All better?” she asked.

  Monique forced her most pleasant smile. “Where’s the grand elevator?”

  7

  THE GRAND ELEVATOR

  “WE SHOULD REALLY BE GETTING back,” Lady said, but she led them toward the dorms anyway. She kept looking over her shoulder as if expecting someone to come chasing her down. “I told Mr. Bouchard I’d just be a minute to check on you.”

  “I feel like the Worm wants me to see the elevator,” Monique said. “The ceremony was so full of love.” She would’ve vomited again had there been anything left in her stomach. “I’m meant to see it. We’re meant to go there right now. Don’t you feel it?”

  Lady’s eyes sparkled. “I think I feel it too.” Her pace quickened.

  She had cheered along with the rest of the choir at Phoebe’s death, but no one could enjoy killing this much. She, Israel, and others had to have been brainwashed into complacence and changed by the Worm. Helping them was beyond Monique’s power. The song that pierced the universe would impale them on the empty place if their kings saw fit.

  She eyed the linoleum for her switchblade, but it was nowhere to be seen. Someone must have grabbed it when the Gray Maiden took Corene away, maybe even the Gray Maiden herself.

  Lady led them back through the carpeted dorm hall, where she’d told the story of the seer and the Worm—Monique didn’t look in case the paint began to writhe—and into the white staircase room. Their footsteps echoed off every wall. Monique glanced at the ceiling vent for whatever Corene had seen earlier, but its slats remained dark and empty. She hurried next to Lady in case that was about to change. Their footsteps went quiet in the next carpeted hallway.

  “Was she your friend?” Lady asked.

  Who did she mean, Corene or Phoebe? Monique shook her head.

  “My first ceremony scared me, too.” Lady sighed as if recalling from eons ago. “No one’s fed to whatever you called it. The empty place. That woman back there—”

  “Phoebe,” Monique said.

  “Right. The Worm is pure, untainted by flesh. The only way we’ll join him is to shed the flesh and become pure ourselves. You wouldn’t drink a glass of water if it had a drop of blood in it, right?” Lady had clearly never been so thirsty. “It’s the same. He needs purity. It only seems empty because the universe is making room to accommodate him. The song wipes our flesh away and welcomes our pure selves to the Worm. We’ll all join him someday.”

  Monique licked her lips and thought of Freedom Tunnel. Just what had she slept beside?

  Lady nudged her elbow into Monique’s arm. “Don’t be so glum. We’re all pieces of a greater world in the making. History belongs to us.”

  Monique didn’t think so. The Worm empowered kings, not queens. The authority that crackled off Bouchard and his side of the ceremony room didn’t spark the same in the choir. Some of the Worm’s servants sat in chariots, while others were horses. No meek would inherit this world.

  The carpeted hallway opened into a narrow white passage, where glaring walls made seeing turns and corners difficult. Nothing seemed distinct, and without a guide, it would’ve been easy to get lost beneath Empire Music Hall. Worse, white paint pretended to hold patterns like before. Monique focused on the safe, boring grout lines between linoleum squares.

  “It won’t always be like this,” Lady said. “Into the Sunless Palace we’ll go. The wounds of this world will be unmade, so says the king.”

  “Scars never go away,” Monique said.

  “They will when the Worm remakes the world. The Worm changes you.”

  “How does he do that?”

  “Same as he’s changing you now.” Lady’s face looked almost lovesick. “His will is gravity, and we can’t help falling for him. He wants, and we think. That’s how we know who’s meant to be a king, how you know you need to see the elevator.”

  Monique guessed that was true. Kin
gs were liars, too.

  “Nothing really holds still; even the world is always spinning, like clay on a pottery wheel. Earth will be unmade, remade, and we’ll be changed into new things.” Lady clapped her hands, and their echo became thunderous applause. “The Worm has a special shape for me.”

  It was hard not to envy her enthusiasm. “You’re so lucky,” Monique said.

  “And you, too.” Lady turned and smiled. “The Worm changes everyone. I wonder what you’ll become.”

  Monique felt suddenly transparent and glanced down at herself. Beneath her clothes, she was scarred from Doctor Sam’s touch. She tried to quell the quivering curiosity inside her.

  She couldn’t. “When’s the Worm supposed to do all this?”

  “At his Third Coming.” Lady’s next sigh was almost a song. “We’ll ready the bride, gather in the Sunless Palace, and sing the song that pierces the universe. The Worm knows when he’ll be back, even if we don’t.”

  Down in the Sunless Palace. Donna was below, if she was here at all, every road leading to her and the Worm. A god and his bride. They were going to do to Donna what they had done to Phoebe, but to some grander magnitude. The Worm’s ultimate ceremony.

  Monique could somewhat relate. She would’ve married Donna, too, if possible. They would’ve made wonderful wives together.

  The narrow hall ended in another high-ceilinged room. Sparse furniture and plastic ferns lined the walls, where messy paint cast the cosmos in white. Another vent watched from above. Monique thought she saw something move inside, but after she blinked, it looked empty.

  “Can we hurry?” she asked. If the ceiling hid sliding shadows and watchful eyes, she wanted to get far away from them.

  “I hope it’s okay to show you the elevator so soon,” Lady said, but she picked up her pace. “I’m a little nervous.”