The Worm and His Kings

by Hailey Piper

  Until the day she disappeared, when the Gray Maiden and Worm’s cult came along with giant hands and a celestial destiny.

  Monique scratched defiant nails down one arm. “Don’t quit, okay?” she whispered to herself. No, she wouldn’t quit on Donna after finally having found her, brainwashed or not.

  Then what about Donna’s promise? A world without hate. A world where time twisted so that everything was always the way it should be. Lady had spoken of transformation.

  Monique’s fingers slid to her side and prodded the scar where Doctor Sam had gone after one kidney. They traveled downward, beneath the rim of her jeans, to the edge of deeper scars. At the Third Coming of the Worm, what would she become?

  What Corene had said outside Empire Music Hall remained a shadow outside memory, but what she’d said while listening to Lady rang loud and clear—healing and harm could be a matter of perspective. Monique wondered what she’d harm for the sake of healing.

  She didn’t think she could harm anyone. That would be too much like Doctor Sam.

  And too much like that damn Worm. He’d messed with Donna’s head, and she’d accepted him as sovereign and god, supreme editor of the universe. Don’t like the supercontinent? Break it down into bite-size chunks. Don’t like the people who live there? Replace them. The Worm’s people painted his chaos in their walls and sang his legends, but they were tales of a murderer from the stars.

  And Donna was supposed to bear his cosmic children?

  Absolutely not. They would escape together instead. She might bear psychological scars to match Monique’s, her perspective distorted by emotional torture. Better that than withering into one more skeleton trapped in the throne room, her teeth scraping at the underside of a silver mask, never to leave the table.

  Never dismissed.

  Every wall blurred from sleek stone to dreamy fog to black tinted glass. Behind the glass, there walked shadow women, their legs bent backward and faces shrouded. They reminded Monique of the Gray Maiden-like creatures that had killed Lady. Monique couldn’t hear them, but their hooting calls rattled through her bones. Their song filled the air, at first in greeting each other and then to shatter the glass that held them back.

  They noticed Monique and turned to her. They quit groping at glass walls and somehow reached through them, grasping at her skin and clothes, eager to wear her instead of their shrouds and gowns. These faceless women craved faces.

  Monique couldn’t fight them off. She wasn’t sure she should try.

  She stirred awake. There was no glass here, only darkness, the smell of dust, and the sound of dripping water out in the cavern.

  And a hand that reached for her shoulder. Not the cold nothing grasp of the empty place, but solid and clammy, its digits curling into cruel talons.

  The shadow women were here. They had followed Monique through Empire Music Hall, down the channels past where they’d killed Lady, and out of Monique’s dreams.

  And they wanted her.

  11

  MIMIC

  MONIQUE JAMMED HER FINGERS UP one jacket sleeve—empty. Dream’s fog slipped back, and she remembered dropping her switchblade when the Gray Maiden had grabbed Corene. It was gone, but her hands couldn’t seem to accept that.

  Two of the creatures crawled down the walls, their thin gowns draped over backward-bent legs. Drooping hoods shrouded their faces. Unlike the Gray Maiden, their arms stretched bare from their trunks, the flesh dotted with feather-like bristles. They crept across stone in rigid, jerking movements, their talons scraping sparks in the air. At every flash, wild amber eyes shone in the dark.

  Monique darted from her sleeping corner and into the palace hallway. Another figure slinked in the shadows to the right, driving Monique to spin around and slam her shoulder against a corner. Static tingling replaced her skin. She couldn’t stop; the creatures’ hands were already reaching for her through the doorway, she knew it. There wasn’t time for gentleness.

  She hurried left of the door. Far down the hallway, another shadowy figure crept down the wall between two fungal-lit windows. This one meant to cut her off.

  A doorway opened in the wall opposite the windows, where a stairway drifted down. Monique took the steps two at a time and plowed into a larger hallway. The ceiling hung high overhead and indistinct symbols carved the walls. She didn’t have time to inspect them for clues on reaching the throne room. Talons scraped in the stairwell behind her, urging her onward.

  Yet another Monique-sized creature slipped through a window ahead. Her gown billowed around her feet, one slender sickle claw poking up from rumpled cloth. How many of them were there? The palace basement might have been full of sickle-clawed pests in place of New York’s usual rats and spiders.

  Monique didn’t slow. If these creatures caught her, they might do to her what they had done to Lady. Blood glistening in elevator light would not look so different from blood glistening beneath luminous mushrooms.

  A cool draft slipped through a tall glowing doorway beside the windows. Monique darted under its wide stone arch and out into the open underground cavern. A small patch of flat rock spread from the base of the palace and beneath the caps of enormous glowing mushrooms. It ended at the shore of a vast subterranean lake.

  There was nowhere to hide between the exit and the shoreline. The air was so chilly that it drew out Monique’s breath in wispy white puffs; the water had to be even colder.

  Behind her, six creatures crept through the immense palace doorway, their shadowy gowns seeping from the darkness itself. Outside those dimly lit halls, their jerky, deliberate movements seemed eerie and dreamlike. Some crawled on the ground. Others walked on two birdy legs with their backs hunched like the Gray Maiden’s.

  Monique stumbled, tripped, and sprawled forward. She hadn’t been watching where she was going and couldn’t have seen any jutting rocks, tricky as distended sidewalk squares. Her knee slammed into the ground beside a mushroom’s stiff stalk. Every joint screamed.

  “Ooh?” The hoot was higher and flatter than the Gray Maiden’s.

  A dark shape slinked alongside her on all fours. Monique could hardly make out the eyes anymore, only the vague movement of a head and limbs within the hooded gown. The creature pressed one knee hard against the ground, mimicking Monique’s position.

  “Ooh?”

  Monique reached ahead, trying to crawl away. The water had to be freezing, but maybe they would hate it more than she would.

  The creature reached the same arm ahead. “Ooh?” Another two creatures crept behind the first. The rest shuffled closer, their sickle claws prodding at hard earth and upturning small stones. Their talons closed in around Monique’s face and limbs.

  She froze mid-crawl. The creatures might as well have held her switchblade to her throat.

  A hand slid up the back of her jacket, cold and clammy. Another hand pawed at her neck, its talons tearing threads from one of her scarves. The creatures patted at her shoulders, legs, arms, hair. One drew damp fingers down her face, their talon tips teasing at the corners of her eyes, the edges of her nose, past her round cheeks and soft chin. Another creature’s talons snagged Monique’s beanie and tugged it off, exposing her hated brow. She almost snatched it back on instinct, but she remembered Lady’s shrieks and the quiet that came after they were cut short. One wrong move could turn these creatures from curious to lethal.

  Their pawing became desperate, insistent. “Ooh?” the first one cried, and the others echoed. “Ooh? Ooh?” As if they needed to ask a question but didn’t have the words.

  At last, one hand fell away. The others slid off, some reluctant. One set of talons dragged faint scratches down Monique’s jacket sleeve and pierced the denim, leaving crosshatches to the marks she’d made herself. She tried not to flinch. Their gowns slid past her, the creatures crawling and shuffling toward the lake. They became indistinct, a great mass of flowing garments and bristly limbs.

  The first one who’d mimicked her remained at her side, waiti
ng. “Ooh.”

  When Monique stood shakily, so did the creature. They came to about the same height. Monique tilted her head and watched the creature do the same, mimicking every movement.

  “Ooh?” Mimic asked.

  Monique nodded. “Ooh,” she said. She had to still be dreaming.

  At her first step, her knee cried out and began to sag. She tensed her thigh muscles and pressed the other leg hard into the ground for balance. If she fell, so would Mimic. Monique had a responsibility now.

  She swallowed a laugh. Given time, she would end up haunting this place too, another lost creature doomed to crawl through palace halls and call “Ooh” into the darkness. If she gave in and became part of this place, at least then she could sleep. Maybe her terrible hunger would subside.

  Her next step felt stronger than the first, and walking became easier after that, her knee no longer caring that it ached. Mimic stuck to her side, only stepping when she did. Mimic’s sickle claws breached the bottom of her gown, but they didn’t feel like weapons now, only parts of her body. Her sister-creatures led on.

  Monique wasn’t certain about following them, but they kept looking back. She was expected. She and Mimic followed toward the water.

  The lake was not empty. Its shoreline narrowed to a slick stone bridge rising scant inches from the water’s surface. Mimic’s sister-creatures grasped its sides as they crept out onto the still water. Their drooping gowns dragged at the surface, wetting the hems.

  At the bridge’s end, an indistinct structure climbed from the water. The cavern’s eerie light reflected across its surface, painting the illusion of a night sky. The water reflected the structure, and its black glass surface reflected that reflection, two warped mirrors held too close together and distorting all clear perception of the structure’s design. It was a pyramid. It was an inverted pyramid. It was something of a sphere, too. And yet it seemed to have no absolute shape, its curling arms reaching in all directions. For all Monique knew, in daylight it would have looked as square-shaped and mundane as her old apartment building.

  But this was the underground, where reality twisted to the Worm’s will.

  Monique stepped onto the bridge, Mimic at her side. Water dripped from the ceiling and into the lake; nothing else disturbed the surface.

  The other creatures slinked up to the black glass structure. Their reflections cast and multiplied a thousand times across its surface before a tall doorway swallowed them. An odd scent breathed from the opening in their place. Monique had never smelled anything like it before. Not unpleasant, but unnatural in ways she couldn’t understand, like bathing a newborn baby in embalming chemicals. The wrong mix of life and death.

  Mimic’s head craned toward the structure, eager to follow her sister-creatures yet unwilling to abandon Monique.

  Their footsteps fell muffled on the black glass. Monique’s face appeared briefly across every surface, and it was strange seeing herself without her red beanie. One of the creatures had to have stuffed it inside her gown. Monique had a feeling she’d never wear it again.

  Her reflections vanished as she and Mimic crossed the threshold of the black glass doorway. The structure was either built as a single room or split into a million, the insides more complex than any hall of mirrors. Mimic’s sister-creatures melted into their reflections, the five of them replicating across glass until gowns, limbs, and talons echoed over every surface. Gnarled pillars jutted ten feet off the floor, each a blend of black glass and stone.

  A throat cleared. It didn’t sound like the creatures’ shrunken hoots and didn’t come from where they crawled on the walls. The sound came from the room’s center. “Shouldn’t you be piercing the universe?” a dry voice asked.

  Someone sat up from the floor and lifted her head to meet Monique’s gaze.

  Corene.

  12

  THE CHAMBER OF OLD TIME

  MONIQUE STOMPED ACROSS THE BLACK glass floor, a stunned smile on her lips. Everyone who had been brought below was alive. Maybe she could get her hopes up for a change.

  “Not so loud,” Corene hissed. She clawed at her hair, her once-red nails now black and broken. She sat upright on the floor and yet couldn’t seem to stand. Black glass grasped up her clothes. “We’re not safe.”

  Shadows crossed her face as two of Mimic’s sister-creatures slinked across the entrance. Now that they had led Monique here, it seemed no one was allowed to leave. One creature stretched her arm, pointing to one side of the room. Mimic raised hers, too.

  Monique followed their fingers and noticed a large lump that rested against a broken stone pillar. Sickle claws poked from enormous curled feet.

  The Gray Maiden.

  “What’s she doing here?” Monique asked.

  “She sleeps here,” Corene said. She chuckled hoarsely, her throat rumbling with gravel. “Welcome to the Worm’s garbage can, the Chamber of Old Time.”

  Had someone mentioned that name before? Monique thought Lady might have. Too many titles and monikers now mixed into a dreamy syllable stew.

  Corene craned her neck. “Where’d your red cap go?”

  Monique brushed a hand over her forehead but couldn’t hold it there. She wanted her red beanie back, anything to hide her upper face and help her look more like herself. There was hardly anyone to see her, but that didn’t matter. She felt exposed as Corene’s gaze crawled over her from head to toe. Careful thoughts weighed so heavily in Corene’s expression that Monique could almost hear them. I thought you were a girl. You sound like a girl. How old are you really? You’re a what?

  But Corene didn’t say any of those things. She deflated into her clothes. “I wish I had time to know you better.”

  “You do. You will.” Monique stepped closer and then stopped.

  Mimic no longer walked by her side. She looked to Monique, and then Corene, and didn’t move. Something was wrong. All Monique wanted right now was to throw her arms around Corene’s neck and help pull her out of this hellhole, but she should’ve been able to leave on her own power then.

  Monique slipped back to Mimic and stared at Corene. “What’s wrong? Why can’t you run?”

  “Because the Worm’s people want me to transform. To transcend.” Corene rolled up one jacket sleeve. Chunks of her arm seemed missing, and in their place spread the same black glass sinew that ate through stone and formed the chamber’s walls. The same reflective infection spread over Corene’s feet, legs, and hips, forming stiff strands that chained her to the floor. “I know what you’re thinking, and yes, it’s contagious. Old Time is working its wonders on me. Spend a while here and the universe can’t be sure where you belong anymore.”

  “I thought you were dead.” It blurted out quicker than Monique could stop it.

  “You’ll think right, soon.” Corene scratched at the glass in her arm, making it squeak. Did her skin still itch underneath? She nodded toward the Gray Maiden, whose heavy breath chugged in and out. “If she catches you, she’ll keep you. Hell won’t suffer saints to reach for sinners.”

  Monique rubbed at her aching shoulder and watched Mimic do the same out of the corner of her eye. “Don’t quit on me.”

  “Quitting isn’t a crime.” Corene sank into her captive nest. “We quit things all the time for our own good. I quit smoking, remember?”

  Monique couldn’t help a half-giggle. Corene was pulling the same bright-side-of-life nonsense as Donna when moving out of Marigold & Cohen or while Monique was healing after Doctor Sam, and Monique was falling for it. Cursed with affection for older women, it seemed. She thought some Freud-type might analyze that to hell and back about her mother. She didn’t care.

  “You must’ve quit a bad relationship before, yes?” Corene asked. “Sometimes you can’t find the right thing unless you quit the wrong one. Isn’t that what you did? Whoever anyone thought you were before, you quit it. I don’t know your name, but I bet you don’t call yourself what they used to call you. You quit that, too, and now there’s light in yo
ur eyes that wasn’t there before, was it?”

  “I don’t want to talk about this,” Monique said, but she couldn’t help thinking about it. Leaving her parents’ home hadn’t been her choice, but she’d put her foot down and meant it. She was Monique, no matter who they thought she might be. But did quitting the past mean she should quit just anything? Donna? Her life? The universe?

  She nodded toward Mimic and then the sister-creatures on the walls. “Maybe they know how to get you out?”

  “Ooh,” Mimic said.

  “I don’t think they understand,” Corene said. “Our entire existence spawned from the afterbirth of their apocalypse. Why help us?” Dark tears formed in her eyes, dotted with black glass and blood. “Once there was a worm that dreamed it was a god. I wonder what kind of people they might’ve been if not for him. They gave up their own future, beautiful or horrific, and instead built the Great Pangaea Kingdoms to worship him. Then their kings refused to sacrifice a daughter as his bride, and doom came for them all. Old Time seeps through that stab wound in the universe. It hasn’t finished one death and now it’s started another.”

  “I think death is what happens when anyone meets a god.” Monique realized her feet were inching toward Corene’s nest. The room blurred in and out, its reflections dancing and fusing. “I found Donna. They’re going to make her the Bride of the Worm. Do you know the way to the throne room?”

  “Will it matter?” Corene asked. “No one below ground has been dismissed, so said our friend Lady.”

  Monique clenched her teeth not to scream. “Well, Lady’s dead, and I’m sick of hearing that word!” She glanced wide-eyed in the Gray Maiden’s direction, but the monster was still asleep. Monique softened her voice. “There has to be a way.”

  “The key is determinism. Que sera sera.”

  “I’m not quitting.”

  “That’s not what I mean, you lovesick, stubborn girl.” Corene sighed hard; breathing seemed a challenge. “It was around this equivalent year in Old Time that the old kings upset the Worm. For our world, it’s been a 175-million-year crawl since he reached back and smashed the supercontinent to get to this point again. But he doesn’t have to do that. He’s coming to a determined point in time and space, whenever he’s offered a bride and his people sing the song that pierces the universe. Is Donna the bride in that moment? If so, you’ll fail, and the Worm will take her. If she isn’t, maybe you’ll rescue her, and the Worm cult will carry on searching until they find the true bride. We can’t know the determined moment. It might be hundreds of years from now. Fate is a tapestry of impossible questions with unimaginable answers.”