The Worm and His Kings

by Hailey Piper

  That wouldn’t do. If Lady was nervous, she might run them back to the choir and its leaders. Best to keep her focused. “What’s it like below?” Monique asked.

  “Well, there’s the elevator tunnel, and the channels that Gray uses.” Lady looked to be counting items of interest on her fingers. “The Sunless Palace, the Chamber of Old Time—Mr. Bouchard says the whole underground flows from there. Lots of cultures have found it, but we’re the last, and everyone along the way has respected its purity. Pretty neat, huh? It’s like the Worm wills us to understand him.” That sounded like a useful skill. Lady gave another hand clap. “We’re here!”

  Twin vertical shafts ran down the wall from ceiling to either side of steel double doors. No decorations marked the metalwork. The elevator didn’t look particularly grand, but symbols patterned the wall paint much clearer than anywhere else. Monique made out a crooked line connecting seven points, the constellation of a worm formed between stars.

  A service panel and two round buttons stuck out beside the doors. She pressed one, and unseen gears began to thrum.

  “We’re going down?” Lady asked. “I thought you just needed to see it.”

  Monique shrugged. “I’m following the Worm’s will.”

  Lady stared for a long moment as the clank of elevator gears counted the seconds. Then she smiled. “I’m so happy for you. Newcomers don’t usually catch wind of him so quickly, not even me. Okay then, no permission, we’re bold and ready and doing this.” She craned her neck toward one vertical shaft and took a deep breath. “Oooh-oooh!”

  Monique gaped. “What are you doing?”

  Lady’s neck settled over her shoulders. “I called the Gray Maiden to meet us at the bottom. Nobody goes into Old Time without her. It’s too dangerous in the realm of the old kings.”

  “What does that mean? Why do we need her?”

  “Because there are worse things than kings down there.”

  Monique reached up her sleeve on instinct, found no switchblade, and raked jagged nails down her arm. There was no telling what that monster would do. She had to know Monique didn’t belong here and had chosen Corene between a woman who could sing and another who couldn’t. Between Monique and Lady, the Gray Maiden would figure things out.

  The room offered no hiding places. The chairs were thin and useless, and the vent was too high up. A shadow swept across its black slats.

  “Are there other monsters like the Gray Maiden?” Monique asked.

  Lady scoffed. “She’s not a monster. She’s just a different kind of person, a refugee of Old Time. Lots of New Yorkers are refugees from somewhere or another. Why not another Earth?”

  Monique tried again. “Are there other people like her?”

  “Not that I know of.” Lady pressed her knuckles against her chin. “Do you think it’s fair they made Gray learn English, but we won’t learn her language? It’s like singing, but tougher. I’m trying to get better at it so we can talk, and maybe she won’t feel lonely. We don’t even know what she calls herself.” She turned to Monique, pivoting her chin across her knuckles. “Actually, I don’t know what you call yourself, either. What’s your name?”

  Monique almost said Phoebe, who had given her name—how else could Bouchard know it?—and now she was dead. That seemed a bad omen.

  Monique didn’t answer, wouldn’t even look at Lady, just watched the elevator light up and its double doors slide open. It seemed safer to hide every piece of herself that she could. Empire Music Hall was greedy. Give it an inch and it would take an island. Her name was worth more than an inch anyway. Even Donna rarely called her Monique; more often Mon Amour. She was silly like that.

  “Weird smell,” Monique said, stepping inside. “Kind of dewy.” It wasn’t true; the elevator had a copper smell, but she didn’t know what to say.

  Lady didn’t either. She pursed her lips and followed inside. The doors closed in an airy kiss. The elevator trembled around them, cleared its mechanical throat, and then sank into the earth.

  Lady stretched her arms high, pressing fingertips against the ceiling, and leaned over Monique. “Why won’t you tell me your name?” Her voice came melodic, but there was something coy in it, too.

  Monique focused hard on the elevator doors. The engine hummed through every wall, a metal choir of its own. “Why do you want to know so bad?” she asked.

  “Because we’re friends, and I told you mine.” Lady leaned a little deeper. “Or do you think mine’s a fake because I chose it?”

  “I’d never think that.” Monique willed the doors to open; she didn’t care which floor.

  Lady took a step closer, placing one boot toe between Monique’s sneakers. “You’re looking at the doors, but there aren’t any stops on the way. It’s all rock between the surface and Old Time. Express route to the Sunless Palace.”

  Monique retreated, and her back hit hard steel. The elevator seemed to shrink the deeper it went. She was stuck here, and Lady was a stranger, nothing like a friend at all. Monique couldn’t remember her last true friend.

  Lady shoved Monique flat against the elevator wall. She was taller and no longer seemed too frail to hurt a fly. “You have a secret, don’t you? I want to know.”

  The elevator slowed and shuddered. Its doors hissed, about to open.

  Lady thrust an arm between Monique and escape. “Tell me your name. It’ll be the best thing that happens tonight.” Hot breath mixed with cool air. Her eyes flashed starlight. “Are you Monique?”

  Monique’s eyes widened. “What?”

  “You are.” Lady slipped back and clapped excited hands. “You are!”

  Monique broke for the open doors. The world was dark outside the elevator, but she couldn’t stay here another minute.

  A fist struck between her shoulders and sent her sprawling onto a hard rock floor.

  “Don’t run from me!” Lady snapped. Pebbles scattered from her encroaching footsteps. “Where’s Gray? Ooh-ooh!”

  Monique reached ahead. They were in a tunnel only a little taller than Lady. However large the shafts the Gray Maiden used to climb between the underground and the surface, she would be slowed here.

  Lady planted a boot in the small of Monique’s back. “Stop moving. I’m sorry for hurting you, but you’re not making it easy. This is the Worm’s will. Ooh-ooh!”

  Despite the weight on her spine, Monique tried to crawl. She wouldn’t let these people feed her to the empty place. She’d die in the dark first.

  “Ooh?” The Gray Maiden’s call sounded higher-pitched than usual, but no less terrible.

  “She’s here!” Lady shouted. “And now she’s—” Her boasting snapped into a shriek.

  The weight sailed off Monique’s back. She scrabbled to her feet and took off into the dark tunnel. Her shoes banged hard against the ground, and every footstep echoed.

  So did Lady’s screams. Her calls to the Gray Maiden seemed to have summoned something else.

  Monique didn’t pause until she reached a curve in the tunnel. The elevator’s light looked distant behind her. Lady looked even farther away, and she was shrinking beneath a storm of gray-garbed figures, their hands and feet glistening with silvery talons. They reminded Monique of the Gray Maiden, but closer to Monique’s size and less stooped. Were there five? Six? They moved too quickly to count.

  Talons slashed and shoved. Lady fell screaming into a black crevice in the wall, and it swallowed her, body and screams and all. The Gray Maiden-like creatures dove after her. Their clamor cut short under the sudden clank of the elevator. Someone was calling it to the surface.

  A shrinking column of light gleamed off fresh blood on the rock floor. Strands of red hair floated down and clung to its wet surface. The elevator engine thrummed and the doors hissed shut, sealing the underground in total darkness.

  8

  SUNLESS

  MONIQUE PRESSED A HAND TO the wall’s rough slate and ambled deeper into the tunnel. The underground was quiet except for her gasping throat, e
ach desperate breath sucking in chilly air. The way ahead was unseen and unknown, but there was no going back. Lady couldn’t hurt her again—wonderful. Other things still could, especially where it was too dark to see.

  Monique’s scraping sneakers told her the path sloped downward. She almost felt used to descent. The world had been pushing Monique down for as long as she could remember, even before she left Flushing, and while at one time she’d thought Donna might pull her up, instead she’d only dragged Donna down.

  And here, in the deepest place, Monique found monsters.

  Maybe if her parents knew how far she’d fallen, they would at last regret having banished their only child.

  Unlikely. That was her imagination preying on her thoughts with something more painful than monsters in the dark—the illusion that her parents could ever accept her.

  Donna had tried to kill that particular dream. “Nothing we could ever change would’ve made a difference,” she’d said. “If one of us was a man, our hearts would be different, and neither of us would love the other. And then your parents will want to meet my family, there’s our age gap—even where we live in New York is different. Just as well we’re queer like nobody’s business and that they tossed the both of us aside in the first place. Get it done with that way.” She had tittered and then stared at her hands, her eyes solemn. “How did we ever come from them?”

  Monique couldn’t answer then. She wouldn’t have had an answer now had a phantom Donna stood beside her and promised to become real and leave this place if only Monique could solve that puzzle.

  Faint bluish-green light outlined a curve in the tunnel ahead. Whatever things had killed Lady might see Monique if she kept going, but better to be in the light where they, too, might be visible. The air nipped her skin, and she tugged her scarves tighter around her neck. Her breath puffed out in cold clouds where the tunnel opened into a vast cavern.

  Stalactites dripped from the ceiling with points coated in glowing fungus. City bus-sized mushrooms sprang from every wall. Their caps, bright with blue-white light, cast a black silhouette at the cavern’s center. A building grew there with a surface sleek and glassy. Pointed spires curved from all sides, and their shafts reflected points of fungal light like stars across a night sky. Between the spires, a massive round center climbed toward the ceiling. The stalactites could have kissed it had they dripped any lower. It was a flower of a building, blooming for daylight that would never come.

  The Sunless Palace.

  Monique’s path hugged the cavern wall a few paces before jutting into a narrow stone bridge that crossed the cavern. It stretched between two curling spires and ended at the palace’s core. Wooden beams patched up gaps in the stone path. The Worm’s people must not have trusted the Worm’s will to keep them from falling. Monique started to laugh and then covered her mouth. Too much noise might bring the creatures that killed Lady.

  Water dripped from the ceiling into an unseen pool, making frequent plinking sounds that echoed through the cavern. Monique imagined that rain or melting snow had to flood the palace’s base at times. She leaned over the side of the bridge to glimpse an underground lake and regretted it. The drop was far and, as with the spires, the water below reflected fungi-covered stalactite points to imitate bright stars in its surface. Falling here would feel like falling into the sky before the water’s surface smashed every bone in Monique’s body.

  She turned ahead and followed the bridge. One spire eased past her and then another. She didn’t stop to marvel at them. The palace beckoned.

  Where the bridge ended, a tall, black, and doorless opening welcomed her. One wooden plank squeaked underfoot to announce her arrival. Gooseflesh coated her arms. Without pause, she crossed into the palace.

  A dome stuck up from the center of the floor, as if the palace had been carved from dark, smooth stone around the top of another building. Slender windows glowed along the dome’s sides. The hallway around it formed a ring. Doorways breached the walls, but each opened onto stairways leading down, and Monique wasn’t ready to descend any deeper yet. She stuck her head through the nearest window.

  The dome formed the cap of a three-tiered room. Glowing fungi plastered its walls, giving light to the high windows at Monique’s level. At the middle tier, a stone balcony stuck out from the wall. Ornate stone railing decorated its lip, overlooking the lowest floor.

  Sudden raucous laughter bounded through the palace. The lowest level was stuffed with things to see, but Monique couldn’t discern floor from furniture yet. Shadows smeared the edge of her vision. White walls and glowing mushrooms must’ve scarred her sight; her eyes might never work right again. She was going blind, or just crying, or both.

  The only thing she could see below was Donna Ashton, the source of the laughter.

  Her dark lips parted in an expectant grin. “Mon Amour.”

  9

  THE SHAPE OF NOTHING

  MONIQUE CRANED HER NECK DEEPER through the window. Her shoulders would make a tight squeeze, but she could manage.

  The fall was something else. From the dome, it was a straight drop, and even if she were to catch the balcony first, it hung too high above the rest of the room to make the fall any friendlier. On a good landing, she would break her leg; on a bad one, her spine.

  And yet every muscle urged that she throw herself through the window and plummet into Donna’s arms.

  Donna wore a black business jacket, dress pants, white button-down shirt, and navy blue tie. Chin-length black hair circled a severe face and dark blue eyes, and silver hair ran from her temples and behind her ears. Her skin looked paler than usual, but she seemed clean and healthy, not turned skeletal by these past three months.

  Monique probably looked gaunt, and her clothes unwashed. She felt suddenly embarrassed.

  But Donna smiled like there wasn’t any difference between them. “I wondered when I’d see you again,” she said, leaning back in a crude stone seat. Lumpy pillows cushioned behind and beneath her. “You weren’t supposed to come that way. Who put you through there? How long has it been?”

  Monique almost couldn’t remember. The months between Donna’s springtime disappearance when the shelter closed and their reunion underground now were no longer worth chronicling. “Too long,” Monique said.

  Donna’s grin pushed narrow cheeks up against her eyes. Monique couldn’t help a same smile.

  If only they weren’t still so far apart.

  The shadows left the edge of Monique’s gaze; she could now make out Donna’s surroundings. Her stone seat sat between two others and faced three more on the opposite side of a long stone table. Tattered yellow books littered its surface, surrounded by silver cups, bowls, and utensils. One end of the table broke off into jagged stone. No seat remained there, not even debris.

  Across at the table’s head was the only empty seat, an ornate, brass-colored chair. Its back twisted into corkscrew spires and their tips merged in a point. It almost looked like a throne. Behind it, the wall shined midnight blue, same as in the ceremony room, only here someone had bored small holes into the surface and filled each with a glowing fungus to imitate a wall of shining stars.

  Every other place at the table held a body.

  Their heads lolled over the backs of their stone seats, faces hidden by featureless silver masks beneath their bare bony scalps. A fungus grew through their ribcages and glowed beneath their clothes. Nothing else seemed to hold their bones together. One wore suspenders and a white shirt; another wore a pinstripe suit, a bowler hat lying in its lap. Two skeletons wore blue uniforms that might have come from a Civil War reenactment, while the last wore dust-coated furs. A hefty axe jutted up beside this skeleton’s chair, the blade wedged into the stone floor and carved with runes that Monique couldn’t make out.

  Donna didn’t seem perturbed. She had been down here long enough to get used to these corpses. She looked to the wall of stars, the bodies around her, and at last tucked her grin away. “Go ahead,” she said. “You m
ust have a million questions.”

  Monique studied the room once more and grimaced. “Are you okay?”

  Donna threw her head back and cackled. Hers was life-giving laughter, more precious than water. “I’m fine. They keep me taken care of.”

  “How do I get down there? How do I get you out?”

  “Get me out?” Donna shook her head. “Didn’t anyone explain?”

  They had tried, but it was all a jumble of ghost histories and strange titles. At best, Corene had tried to give warning. Monique’s stomach quivered, but not in hunger. An uncomfortable yet familiar sense of wrong leaned over her back.

  “No one knows I’m down here,” she said.

  “You came alone. Of course you did.” Donna shook her head again. “I can’t leave yet. I haven’t been dismissed.” She waved one hand at the table of skeletons. “Why do you think my friends are still here?”

  “But if you tell me the way down, I can—”

  “I have not been dismissed!” Donna snapped.

  Monique jerked back from the window. “It’s okay,” she whispered to herself. Donna had been abducted by a great gray demon and stuffed into an ugly stone room full of corpses underground. She was understandably stressed. Monique doubted she could sit there composed were she in Donna’s place. More likely she’d have been clawing at every wall until her fingers fell off.

  She stuck her head through the window again. Donna now pressed her back into the pillows. Monique would’ve liked to nestle beside her. She needed rest.

  But they weren’t free yet. “How do I get you dismissed?” Monique asked.

  “That’s the part that makes it so absolute,” Donna said. “The Worm decides who is and isn’t dismissed. It’s not up to me.”

  Then they had already explained everything to her. The Worm, her marital part in their plan. She probably knew about the song and what it did to people.