The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (36 page)

Jonathan Wormcake has not ventured into public view for twenty years, since the denuding of his skull, and it occurs to me that I am the first person not a part of this household to witness this procedure.

I am here because Mr. Wormcake is dying. We don't know how a ghoul dies. Not even he is sure, as he left the warrens as a boy and was never indoctrinated into the mysteries. The dreams given to us by the Maggot, replete with images of sloughing flesh and great black kites riding silently along the night's air currents, suggest that it's not an ending but a transformation. But we have no experience to measure these dreams against. What waits for him on the far side of this death remains an open question.

He stretches open his mouth and moves his tongue like a man testing the fit of a new article of clothing. Apparently satisfied, he looks at me at last. “It's good of you to come, especially on this night,” he says.

“I have to admit I was surprised you chose the opening night of Skullpocket Fair for this. It seems there might have been a more discreet time.”

He looks at the children gathered around Uncle Digby, who is guiding them gently toward the great bay window facing east, where the flat waters of the Chesapeake are painted gold by the late-afternoon sun. They are animated by excitement and fear, a tangle of emotions I remember from when I was in their place. “I have no intention of stealing their moment,” he says. “This night is about them. Not me.”

I'm not convinced this is entirely true. Though the children have been selected to participate in the opening ceremonies of Skullpocket Fair and will be the focus of the opening act, the pomp and circumstance is no more about them than it is about the Maggot, or the role of the church in this town. Really, it's all about Jonathan Wormcake. Never mind the failed mayoral campaign of the midseventies, never mind the fallout from the Sleepover Wars or the damning secrets made public by the infamous betrayal of his best friend, Wenceslas Slipwicket—Wormcake is the true patriarch of Hob's Landing; the Skullpocket Fair is held each year to celebrate that fact, and to fortify it.

That this one marks the one hundredth anniversary of his dramatic arrival in town, and his ritual surrendering of this particular life, makes his false modesty a little hard to take.

“Sit down,” he says, and extends a hand toward the most comfortable chair in the room: a high-backed, deeply cushioned piece of furniture of the sort one might expect to find in the drawing room of an English lord. It faces the large windows, through which we are afforded a view of the sun-flecked waters of the Chesapeake Bay. Mr. Wormcake maneuvers another, smaller chair away from the chess table in the corner and closer to me, so we can speak more easily. He eases himself slowly into it and sighs with a weary satisfaction as his body settles, at last, into stillness. If he had eyes, I believe he would close them now.

Meanwhile, Uncle Digby has corralled the children into double rows of folding chairs, also facing the bay windows. He is distributing soda and little containers of popcorn, which do not calm the children but do at least draw their focus.

“Did you speak to any of the children after they received the dream?” Wormcake asks me.

“No. Some of them were brought to the church by their parents, but I didn't speak to any of them personally. We have others who specialize in that kind of thing.”

“I understand it can be a traumatic experience for some of them.”

“Well, it's an honor to be selected by the Maggot, but it can also be pretty terrifying. The dream is very intense. Some people don't respond well.”

“That makes me sad.”

I glance over at the kids, seated now, the popcorn spilling from their hands, shoveled into their mouths. They bristle with a wild energy: a crackling, kinetic radiation that could spill into chaos and tears if not expertly handled. Uncle Digby, though, is nothing if not an expert. The kindliest member of the Frozen Parliament, he has long been the spokesman for the family, as well as a confidant to Mr. Wormcake himself. There are many who believe that without his steady influence, the relationship between the Wormcakes and the townspeople of Hob's Landing would have devolved into brutal violence long ago.

“The truth is, I don't want anyone to know why you're here. I don't want my death to be a spectacle. If you came up here any other night, someone would notice, and it wouldn't be hard for them to figure out why. This way, the town's attention is on the fair. And anyway, I like the symmetry of it.”

“Forgive me for asking, Mr. Wormcake, but my duty here demands it: are you doing this because of the Orchid Girl's death?”

He casts a dark little glance at me. It's not possible to read emotion in a naked skull, of course, and the prosthetic mouth does not permit him any range of expression; but the force of the look leaves me no doubt of his irritation. “The Orchid Girl was her name for the people in town. Her real name was Gretchen. Call her by that.”

“My apologies. But the question remains, I'm afraid. To leave the world purely, you must do it unstained by grief.”

“Don't presume to teach me about the faith I introduced to you.”

I accept his chastisement quietly.

He is silent for a long moment, and I allow myself to be distracted by the sound of the children gabbling excitedly to each other, and of Uncle Digby relating some well-worn anecdote about the time the Leviathan returned to the bay. Old news to me, but wonderful stuff to the kids. When Mr. Wormcake speaks again, it is to change course.

“You mentioned the dream which summons the children as being intense. This is not your first time to the house, is it?”

“No. I had the dream myself, when I was a kid. I was summoned to Skullpocket Fair. Seventy years ago. The very first one.”

“My, my. Now that is something. Interesting that it's you who will perform my death ritual. So that puts you in your eighties? You look young for your age.”

I smile at him. “Thanks, but I don't feel young.”

“Who does, anymore? I suppose I should say ‘welcome back.'”

The room seems host to a dizzying compression of history. There are three fairs represented tonight, at least for me: the Seventieth Annual Skullpocket Fair, which commences this evening; the first, which took place in 1944—seventy years ago, when I was a boy—and set my life on its course in the church; and the Cold Water Fair of 1914, a hundred years ago, which Uncle Digby would begin describing very shortly. That Mr. Wormcake has chosen this night to die, and that I will be his instrument, seems too poetic to be entirely coincidental.

As if on cue, Uncle Digby's voice rings out, filling the small room. “Children, quiet down now, quiet down. It's time to begin.” The kids settle at once, as though some spell has been spoken. They sit meekly in their seats, the gravity of the moment settling over them at last. The nervous energy is pulled in and contained, expressing itself now only in furtive glances and, in the case of one buzz-cut little boy, barely contained tears.

I remember, viscerally and immediately, the giddy terror that filled me when I was that boy, seventy years ago, summoned by a dream of a monster to a monster's house. I'm surprised when I feel the tears in my own eyes. And I'm further surprised by Mr. Wormcake's hand, hard and bony beneath its glove, coming over to squeeze my own.

“I'm glad it's you,” he says. “Another instance of symmetry. Balance eases the heart.”

I'm gratified, of course.

But as Uncle Digby begins to speak, it's hard to remember anything but the blood.

One hundred years ago,
says Uncle Digby to the children
, three little ghouls came out to play. They were Wormcake, Slipwicket, and Stubblegut: best friends since birth. They were often allowed to play in the cemetery, as long as the sun was down and the gate was closed. There were many more children playing among the gravestones that night, but we're only going to concern ourselves with these three. The others were only regular children, and so they were not important.

Now, there were two things about this night that were already different from other nights they went aboveground to play. Does anybody know what they were?

No? Well, I'll tell you. One was that they were let out a little bit earlier than normal. It was still twilight, and though sometimes ghouls were known to leave the warrens during that time, rarely were children permitted to come up so early. That night, however, the Maggot had sent word that there was to be a meeting in the charnel house—an emergency meeting, to arrange a ritual called an Extinction Rite, which the children did not understand but which seemed to put the adults in a dreadfully dull mood. The children had to be got out of the way. There might have been some discussion about the wisdom of this decision, but ghouls are by nature a calm and reclusive folk, so no one worried that anything untoward would happen.

The other unusual thing about that night, obviously, was the Cold Water Fair.

The Cold Water Fair had been held for years and years, and it was a way for Hob's Landing to celebrate its relationship with the Chesapeake Bay, and to commemorate the time the Leviathan rose to devour the town but was turned away with some clever thinking and some good advice. This was the first time the fair was held on this side of Hob's Landing. In previous years it had been held on the northern side of the town, out of sight of the cemetery. But someone had bought some land and got grumpy about the fair being on it, so now they were holding it right at the bottom of the hill instead.

The ghoul children had never seen anything so wonderful! Imagine living your life in the warrens, underground, where everything was stone and darkness and cold earth. Whenever you came up to play, you could see the stars, you could see the light on the water, and you could even see the lights from town, which looked like flakes of gold. But this! Never anything like this. The fair was like a smear of bright paint: candy-colored pastels in the blue wash of air. A great illuminated wheel turned slowly in the middle of it, holding swinging gondola cars full of people.

“A Ferris wheel!” shouts a buzz-cut boy who had been crying only a few minutes ago. His face is still ruddy, but his eyes shine with something else now: something better.

Yes, you're exactly right. A Ferris wheel! They had never even seen one before. Can you imagine that?

There were gaudy tents arranged all around it, like a little village. It was full of amazing new smells: cotton candy, roasting peanuts, hot cider. The high screams of children blew up to the little ghouls like a wind from a beautiful tomb. They stood transfixed at the fence, those grubby little things, with their hands wrapped around the bars and their faces pressed between.

They wondered briefly if this had anything to do with the Extinction Rite the adults kept talking about.

“Do you think they scream like that all the time?” Slipwicket asked.

Wormcake said, “Of course they do. It's a fair. It's made just for screaming.”

In fact, children, he had no idea if this was true. But he liked to pretend he was smarter than everybody else, even way back then.

The children laugh. I glance at Mr. Wormcake, to gauge his reaction to what is probably a scripted joke, but his false mouth, blood pasted to his skull, reveals nothing.

Slipwicket released the longest, saddest sigh you have ever heard. It would have made you cry, it was so forlorn. He said, “Oh, how I would love to go to a place made only for screams.”
Uncle Digby is laying it on thick here, his metal hands cupping the glass jar of his head, his voice warbling with barely contained sorrow. The kids eat it up.

“Well, we can't,” said Stubblegut. “We have to stay inside the fence.”

Stubblegut was the most boring ghoul you ever saw. You could always depend on him to say something dull and dreadful. He was morose, always complaining, and he never wanted to try anything new. He was certain to grow up to be somebody's father, that most tedious of creatures. Sometimes the others would talk about ditching him as a friend, but they could never bring themselves to do it. They were good boys, and they knew you were supposed to stay loyal to your friends—even the boring ones.

“Come along,” Stubblegut said. “Let's play skullpocket.”

At this, a transformation overtakes the children, as though a current has been fed into them. They jostle in their seats, and cries of “Skullpocket!” arise from them like pheasants from a bramble. They seem both exalted and terrified. Each is a little volcano, barely contained.

Oh, my! Do you know what skullpocket is, children?

“Yes, yes!”

“I do!”

“Yes!”

Excellent! In case any of you aren't sure, skullpocket is a favorite game of ghouls everywhere. In simple terms, you take a skull and kick it back and forth between your friends until it cracks to pieces. Whoever breaks it is the loser of the game, and has to eat what they find inside its pocket. And what is that, children?

“The brain!”

“Eeeww!”

That's right! It's the brain, which everyone knows is the worst bit. It's full of all the gummy old sorrows and regrets gathered in life, and the older the brain is, the nastier it tastes. While the loser eats, other players will often dance in a circle around him and chant. And what do they chant?

“Empty your pockets! Empty your pockets!” the children shout.

Yes! You must play the game at a run, and respect is given to those who ricochet the skull off a gravestone to their intended target, increasing the risk of breaking it. Of course you don't have to do that—you can play it safe and just bat it along nicely—but nobody likes a coward, do they, children? For a regular game, people use adult skulls which have been interred for less than a year. More adventurous players might use the skull of an infant, which offers a wonderful challenge.