The Worm and His Kings

by Hailey Piper

  “Dee, I won’t let them take you again,” Monique said.

  Donna lolled her head against the back of her chair, the same posture as her skeletal companions. Her grin returned. It was a mask of her usual humor, but it felt wrong here. “Silly me. I was projecting expectations on you, and that isn’t fair. You haven’t been down here; can’t have seen the things I’ve seen.”

  “I’ve seen things.” Monique just didn’t want to believe them.

  “Have you seen the illogical? The impossible? Then you might be at the beginning of knowing.”

  “I can understand things, Dee. I’m not a child.” But Monique couldn’t help feeling like one by having to say that. It was an old argument between them and too tired for this place.

  Donna closed her eyes. “Tell your skin to reach for the air. Do you feel the Worm’s absence?”

  Monique closed her eyes too and tried to visualize the palace floorplan. Finding the door to the balcony below would take time, let alone the bottom floor where Donna sat. For all Monique knew, there were stairways leading to lower places than the bottom floor, the Worm’s tunnels digging forever beneath the earth.

  Cold fingers slipped into her thoughts. Her eyes flashed open and flickered to the ringed hall that surrounded the dome, searching for shadows with silvery talons. There was no one she could see.

  “Have you seen the Gray Maiden?” Donna asked, eyes still shut. “Heard of the Broken King? When the Worm descended from the stars, he gave their people everything, but when he demanded a bride in return, they turned their backs on him. It was their last mistake. Their end gave the world an absence, and we filled it. And yet, pieces of them remain. Dead and alive, happened and never happened, the Worm sews contradictions, defies logic, and rebuilds reality into a stronger structure—his will. He willed us together, Monique. Imagine, all of time conspired so that you and I could fall in love. We won’t make the old history’s mistake. We’ll do right by him, and for that he’ll grant us the impossible. He’ll fashion a world without hate.”

  Monique leaned into the room with her knees hooked to the window ledge. There was something here that she couldn’t see. Or something not here. Every thought came too cold to make sense.

  “Do you understand?” Donna asked.

  Monique wanted to run. “Why would I understand?”

  Donna’s eyes flew open and glared at Monique. “He’ll give a world that won’t hate us for who we love and who we are. A world where we can transform and become, all time twisting so that it was always right, and you won’t have lived that pain we put you through.”

  Monique focused on Donna instead of the throne, easier on her thoughts, harder on her heart. “I made a choice.”

  Donna pounded the table, rattling bowls and bones. “You shouldn’t have had to! This shouldn’t be the kind of world that put you through that sicko’s hack job, all that agony, so you’d feel more like a woman. You were always, always my girl!”

  Monique crossed her legs over old scars on instinct. She could hardly think anymore. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  “It’s okay, Mon Amour.” Donna reached up as if her arm could stretch to the window and slide a gentle finger along Monique’s jaw. “I’ll make everything better, I promise.” She turned to the shining throne and its wall of stars. “Thanks to him.”

  The cold sensation crept down Monique’s spine. She recognized the feeling now, from Freedom Tunnel, from the ceremony room. The empty place had always been an ever-present nothingness to her, or else she’d have named it something else. It was a space that convinced her and everyone else to move around it.

  But here she saw it for the first time—the shape of a brass throne. It had sought her out and drained all joy from this reunion. Only its sinking cold fingers remained inside her. You knew it all along, the empty place seemed to say. This is why the likes of you cannot enter. Table for one, reserved by a monster.

  “You feel it,” Donna said. She stood from her seat and approached the throne. “The absence offers the Worm a place of purity in our world upon his return. He will fill this space, same as his children will fill his bride when she sits beside him.” She reached for the throne’s arm and then let her hand drop to her side. It was the empty place; no one could bring themselves to touch it. No one mortal, at least. “An echo of his will. This is the throne of the Worm.”

  Monique imagined Donna’s belly swollen with worms. “I want to leave!” she shouted. “You have to leave with me!”

  “How many times do I have to tell you? I haven’t been dismissed.” Donna passed between the throne and the wall of stars, circling the stone table. “The people above take care of me. I’m brought food, drink, books, buckets, pads, conversation, newspaper. I’m not a prisoner. I’m waiting for him. And even if I wasn’t—”

  She stepped away from the table and toward one fungal-lit wall. A crease broke through the stone, a possible exit from the throne room. She almost reached it, and then her legs buckled. Her whole body pivoted in place and returned to the table, shoulders cringing, breath gasping in and out as if exhausted by taking those few steps.

  As if she’d been repelled from entering the empty place. Gravity glued her to this room.

  “Even if I wasn’t, I can’t defy the Worm’s will,” she said. “Do you see?”

  Monique didn’t only see, but she felt seen. The throne was staring at her. She focused hard on Donna to avoid looking at it.

  But Donna wouldn’t look back. She collapsed into her seat, the effort at escape having taken a toll. “We’ve all tried. They’re still trying. We love the Worm, but sometimes we’d like to see the sunshine.”

  “We?” Monique asked.

  Something clinked below. A rattling sound began from one side of Donna and then echoed around the table. Bones clacked against stone. Teeth scraped the backs of silver masks, trying to chew them off their faces.

  Hell. That’s what this place was; no palace at all.

  Monique grasped the sides of the window, her nerves twisting through her limbs. “You have to get out.”

  Donna settled her head on the table. “We have not been dismissed.”

  “The door.” Monique swallowed an angry scream. “How do I get to the damn door, Donna?”

  Donna lazily aimed one finger at the wall of stars. “There’s a door, Mon Amour.” She no longer seemed composed. She was right about projecting expectations. Monique was just as guilty, seeing Donna as her assured, confident self. This throne room was breaking her, and she needed help.

  There were stairs to that level and a door that led inside the throne room. Once Monique found it and took Donna into her arms, she’d snap out of this reverence for the Worm, and they could figure a way out together. If Monique couldn’t find the door, she would find a rope, a ladder, anything to get Donna out.

  Heavy doors scraped stone below, and a finger of blue light scratched across the balcony. Footsteps echoed, the familiar click, click of talons on a hard floor. The Gray Maiden, arriving at last.

  “I have to go,” Monique said. “But I promise I’ll find you again.”

  Donna’s drowsy voice slurred. “Not been dismissed.”

  “Just give me time.”

  “Mon Amour?”

  Monique froze. She needed to run before the Gray Maiden stepped onto the balcony and looked up.

  An odd smile carved a wobbly line across Donna’s face. “There’s nothing to fear.”

  Monique ducked back as a massive shadow crossed the balcony’s edge. Direction didn’t matter right now. She had to get far away from the Gray Maiden. She darted along the ring-shaped hallway and fled down the nearest flight of stairs.

  She would come back as soon as possible, at the lowest level. All that mattered was getting Donna out of here before these people turned her into the bride of their god or another meal for the empty place, whichever was worse.

  Whether she liked it or not.

  “Ooh?”

  The Gray Maide
n’s song chased Monique to the bottom of the steps and into a lengthy hallway. The floor and walls were sleek stone that made scraping noises at her touch. Narrow windows opened on the mushroom-lit cavern outside while wide black doorways offered paths deeper within the palace. Dust settled around scarcely visible footprints. The Sunless Palace’s halls were traveled often but weren’t well-maintained.

  Monique took a left and hoped for the best. Her every step clacked against the hard floor and echoed through the hallway.

  “Ooh?” Louder now. Something in the Gray Maiden’s whale song said she knew there was an intruder. Click, click steps rang from all directions.

  Monique wasn’t sure whether to expect one enormous billowing shape or several closer to her size. Every blind corner threatened to throw her into the Gray Maiden’s path. The smaller creatures could come from anywhere. The talons that tore Lady apart could easily do the same to Monique.

  Donna must’ve talked up their relationship to Lady and others when they came to feed her, and that was why Lady knew the name Monique. Monique had been right to hide it. Donna was confused, brainwashed, and probably thought she was doing the right thing by telling the Gray Maiden that someone was here. She would recover once Monique brought her to the surface.

  What they would do after that was anyone’s guess.

  “Ooh,” the Gray Maiden called. No longer a question, and closer.

  Monique took softer steps, but those couldn’t get her anywhere fast. She ducked through one of the black doorways and into a corner, where she curled into a ball. There were crates in this room—she could tell by the scant light that brushed their wooden corners—but their contents were a mystery and she wasn’t going to check. She would become a statue, cold and lifeless as the palace itself. If she kept quiet and didn’t move, the Gray Maiden wouldn’t find her.

  “Oo-oooh!” The Gray Maiden howled, long and loud. Each cry jammed Monique tighter into her corner, as if hunted by the sound itself.

  After a few minutes, the cry called from farther away. The Gray Maiden was hunting, but not finding anything. There were too many footprints in the dust for her to track properly, and maybe she didn’t even know enough to follow them. Her footsteps echoed through the palace halls. Monique had no way to tell how close they might be. Even if the Gray Maiden had reached another floor, those channels beside the elevator suggested she might climb tight passages where she could use all four limbs to help her. She might scale the palace’s outer walls just as easily.

  “Ooh.”

  The song sounded far away, but Monique didn’t trust her ears. She’d been running and creeping and aching all night. Her sense of the world felt frail. She couldn’t tell how many hours had passed since she’d stepped into Freedom Tunnel. Was it dawn yet? Time did not exist in this place. Only Old Time.

  Her strained and malnourished muscles had no strength for searching this hall and however many more halls she’d have to wander to find the throne room. Her limbs took on ten-ton weights, and her unhappy stomach swallowed the palace itself. If she couldn’t have food, then she needed rest. She would wear out otherwise and be no good to Donna.

  Better to play smart and patient. Monique had spent three months hoping to see Donna again. She wasn’t going to screw this up now that she’d finally found her.

  Distant singing trickled into the cavern and filled the Sunless Palace. The choir was at work again. When their notes swelled, Monique glanced around the gloomy room, expecting faces to appear behind derelict crates and across the dimly lit doorway. Lady, Israel, Bouchard, others.

  There was no one here. Lady was dead, and the rest of the Worm’s people still gathered in the music hall above. Did their song descend from the practice room? Or was this the score to another murder?

  Music had better purpose than killing. Monique would’ve sung against them if not for the Gray Maiden’s prowling. Subway buskers, used to fighting train horns and railway clatter for listening ears, would’ve drowned out the choir, no trouble. They understood music. Its purpose was to fill the soul, with no purity in the Worm’s name, and instead littered with the taint of mortal desires. The choir’s pure reverence left Monique’s soul empty.

  10

  NIGHT

  HOURS PASSED. THE SONG EBBED and flowed while the palace remained unchanging, the choir showing incredible stamina. Now and then, the Gray Maiden called from a distance, her echo’s direction forever indiscernible, but eventually even she must’ve tired.

  When the choir’s song faded for the last time, a quiet settled into the room. It helped grow the darkness from every corner and invited Monique’s imagination to run wild. The Gray Maiden’s sickle claw cut at her thoughts. Old Time had grown a dead world underground where creeping monsters sliced people apart. Corpses jittered in a room not far away, where the Worm’s throne gave shape and purpose to the empty place. What other nightmares awaited beneath Empire Music Hall?

  Monique couldn’t guess. Everything she’d encountered since setting foot in Freedom Tunnel tonight—yesterday?—was beyond her. She barely understood human anatomy, let alone the dead history of a world that never was.

  And wouldn’t Donna call that a good thing? The empty place’s purity offered an entryway for her Worm. Empty minds might do the same. She was one of them.

  It was too much.

  Tears brimmed in Monique’s eyes. She shoved her jacket sleeve against her mouth not to sob. She wasn’t allowed to cry in this place or something might hear and come for her. It was like Freedom Tunnel again, keeping the sounds of her misery from the empty place.

  And the empty place was here, too. It would take sound just the same.

  Her stomach lurched. Corene’s candy bar was long gone down the music hall’s plumbing. Now Monique’s guts wanted every blueberry Pop-Tart that the surface had to offer. She would’ve liked not to wonder where her next meal was coming from for a change.

  A deep, rattling breath slipped in and forced out. Sleep would be best. Monique laid her head on one arm, where she bundled the tails of her tangled scarves. She tried to focus on the fungal glow of the doorway and not the thick darkness that owned most of the room.

  No good. She felt the empty place as if she still remained beside it in Freedom Tunnel. She might lie next door to the throne room, close enough to grab Donna if she only knew the way. At least now she had a shape for the cold unease. How far did the throne reach? Its emptiness might climb beyond Freedom Tunnel and reach a patch of Manhattan sidewalk that pedestrians dodged without knowing why. Planes likely set their courses around where its cold fingers reached into the sky. And how deep did it burrow? Through the Earth’s core? Did it reach the far side of the world, where ships met disaster avoiding it, an unexplainable blip on the map?

  A rumble ate through the walls and made Monique think of subway trains. She was too deep underground to feel the subway, but the sound reminded her that there was a world up there and she could return to it.

  With or without Donna.

  No, that was exhaustion talking. Monique couldn’t just quit. Donna had been at her side that last fateful day with Doctor Sam. She had tried to warn Monique that he wasn’t the way to go, that they’d get the money together again and do things right, but the surgery wasn’t for Donna. She could only understand so much.

  Monique had gone ahead with it for herself. It wasn’t only wanting love with another person who everyone said you couldn’t be with. It was wanting something deep in your heart, needing it, while everyone said you didn’t, and always for their own reasons.

  For all the love Donna poured into their relationship, she didn’t know the feel of those unwanted hunks of flesh hanging between Monique’s legs. Only Monique felt her intrusive penis stiffening and softening against her will, an invader between her thighs and yet part of her. She liked being short and round-faced, fine. But she still had to contend with pronounced brow, throat, shoulders, and a myriad of other details that she wanted to tear off her body. Donna once said th
at hating how she looked was a part of being a woman these days. That hadn’t made Monique feel any better over how she couldn’t sort out the chemicals in her blood. The operation was the best she could do. She’d just wanted to love this one thing about herself.

  But she couldn’t even have that.

  She hadn’t expected art from the good doctor. A pristine hospital and kindly staff who would care for her were the stuff of dreams. At the very least, the surgery could’ve turned out successful. Wealthier women got the bodies of their dreams. Why couldn’t Monique change one thing and have it go right?

  Calling Doctor Sam’s work a hack job would’ve been a compliment. He wasn’t terrible at cutting flesh, but reshaping it was beyond his power or concern. He’d expected to take a kidney as a bonus for a job poorly done; instead he got whatever injuries Donna had inflicted. Monique didn’t need to know more. She had her own scars to worry about and couldn’t waste concern on Doctor Sam’s.

  The genitalia she needed were not unfamiliar territory. She had kissed the sweet lips between Donna’s thighs on a hundred nights and knew what they should look and feel like. They were not what Doctor Sam had left to her. She didn’t know what remained inside, only the scars on the outside.

  Donna had cut the emergency room stitches out herself and held Monique’s hand each time she cried. She didn’t regret the lost tissue, only screamed at a world that had put her in this position.

  “You’re alive, Mon Amour,” Donna had said. “How many women meet a man like him and never scream again?”

  It made a sort of sense. Much as Monique hated Doctor Sam for turning her medical dream into a nightmare of blood and scars, she was grateful to have survived. Once the pain became occasional and she could mostly urinate without shrieking to wake the dead, she found at least that small pride in her brutal pelvic landscape. Her soft flesh had faced steel in battle and lived to fight another day. She could still hold Donna’s hand, feel warm fingers across her face, look into her dark eyes and smile.

  Donna had stayed through all of it.