We are Wormwood (24 page)

The coins transformed into broken pieces of glass that
reflected my skull mask. My cracked, red eyes were veined with fear and lack of
sleep.

It was the face of The Exorcist.

“You look like your mother,” he said.

I reached up to tear the skull off my face, but I stopped.
Something to do with the reflection of myself, repeated over and over in
fractals at the bottom of the fountain. Something to do with the way my eyes,
swimming in red, could still smile.

“No,” I said, “I’m stronger than her.”

We left the atrium.

We walked through hallways so old and hot that the walls
turned to glass.

We walked through haunted tunnels that whispered my name.
And, oh my dear, they’d been waiting so long to call my name.

The tips of my fingers cracked and bled. The backs of my
hands burst with crystals. My teeth bulged until my mouth swelled with pain.

I couldn’t tell where the gazelle skull ended and my skin
began, if there still was a difference at all.

I came across a cracked part of the glass wall. Maybe the
demon dragged her nails across it while thrown across The Nightcatcher’s
shoulder. She must’ve carried my demon down here. I could imagine her hair,
like an ocean, filling the corridor behind her in frantic waves, her legs
kicking.

My aching hooves could barely sustain the weight of my body.
I wanted to
lay
down in the middle of the dark
tunnels, and rest until my feet stopped throbbing.

But I had to keep going. Nothing good ever happened in the
middle of a metamorphosis. Think of all the caterpillars that died mid-ecdysis,
their slick and slimy wings trapped in their own cocoon, until they died.

Think of the demon, and push forward.

We passed more claw-marked walls, the sigils that demanded
my presence. Through the water-grave ceiling and the walls, The Nightcatcher
continued to taunt me.

“Lily.

“Lily, your girlfriend is a bitch in heat. I’ve got her on
her knees; she’s fucking my fingers.”

If Charlie could hear her through the walls, he didn’t say.

“Go right. We’re almost there,” Charlie said.

We turned a corner into another hallway and, at the end of
the hallway, a golden door floated in the black, miles away.

Beneath me blew a desert. I stepped on bones that surfaced
up out of the sand.

Inside me, my organs were turning rotten, like the fleshy
pulp inside too-ripe fruit.

The skin on my legs split.

I had to focus on the door at the end of the hallway. Focus
on the door. You won’t be buried in sand with Charlie, waiting for another
girl-hero to trip over your head. You’ve got dirty blood but that blood is
stronger than this. Just get to the door.

“Lily.”

The Nightcatcher again.

“Lily.”

No, it was Charlie, speaking in a voice like a child’s
rattle.

“I want you to know what’s going to happen when you walk
through that door.”

I took another step. Another. Charlie coughed a dirty river
on the back of my hands. The next time he spoke it sounded as if his lungs were
filling with water.

“She’s going to destroy you. She’s going to eat you alive,
strip by strip
of flesh. She’ll break your bones for fun and
sit on your face as you scream. She’ll call out her monsters to pull what’s
left of you apart and reassemble you into what she wants.”

We were nearly at the door. Something alive stirred
underneath my hooves.
A snake, maybe, slithering through the
walls.
Jagged bones cut into the tender parts of my legs and snagged on
the lace of my dead-thing dress. Yet I was nearly there. The golden door grew
closer, with an entire mythology carved into its panels. A huntress and a deer,
a woman on a Viking’s ship, a laughing pantheon of gods.

“Maybe she’ll make you forget everything,” Charlie said,
“but if she doesn’t, I want you to remember this.”

“I’ll try,” I said, “as best as I can.”

“Remember that, if I were born of the underworld, you were
born of flowers. You are the blood the forest feeds upon and it is you who gave
the woods their dark magic. Time doesn’t exist and, in another world, I never
left you. I’ve transformed your wounds into a scepter for a queen. The Nightcatcher
may think that she’s had her victory - but your veins are buried in the map of
the earth and she can never have you. She thinks she can own the universe
because she’s enslaved gods and eaten stars, but she couldn’t even kill me,
living here in her tunnels, because you protected me with your love.

“Lily. I’ve seen the way out.”

I approached the golden door.

My fingers split apart. The bones inside curled. The gold
glittered, faintly incandescent, making the icons carved into it, move back and
forth.

Charlie withdrew his fingers and slipped backwards, into the
darkness.

“Why can’t you go with me?” I asked.

“You know why.”

Then the door opened.

I went inside where she waited for me.

THE
NIGHTCATCHER SAT
on a throne of crystal, underneath a domed ceiling that
swirled with birthing galaxies, stars dipped in god’s blood.
The
great destroyer, the terrible queen, surrounded by velvet curtains and glass
lamps.
Oh mighty one. Oh eater of gods. When Zeus tried to rape you, you
grew teeth between your legs. Jupiter couldn’t swallow you. Artemis couldn’t
best you. Kali tried to choke you to death with her noose, wrapped in tiger’s
skin, but you didn’t need to breathe.

The gods were there in her throne room, her slaves and pets,
naked except for golden chains around their wrists.

They’d been preparing a feast before her throne on an
enormous table. Aphrodite, eyes downcast as she carried silverware, her once
lush golden hair, shaved away. I saw Loki setting the chairs, great trickster,
the
blood leached from his fingers and acid stains on his
cheeks from the world serpent Jörmungandr. Ishtar, goddess of love and war, lay
at The Nightcatcher’s feet, licking wine off her fingers. Thor set out steaming
soups and enormous silver trays of vegetables and samosas. She’d cut his nose
off. Severed his right arm.

I’d expected The Nightcatcher to be an enormous beast, a
ragged, dusty, and spitting thing. Only an ugly creature that leaked milk and
spit could’ve taken my demon away from me.

The creature that sat on the crystal throne owned a cherub’s
face and a child’s curveless body. She wore a silver cloak, and a headdress of
amethyst and bone, with tasseled fringes that hung across her cheekbones. She
resembled a devil preserved in porcelain, dressed in clothes woven from an old
sky never torn with pollution. Her eyes were wild bright poison. Her nails were
cat’s claws, gorged red. She lounged against the throne, her feet propped
against the armrest.

I drew the hunter’s bow.

“Where is she?” I asked.

She snapped her fingers.

“Stay,” she said.

I drew an arrow and shot at The Nightcatcher’s throat.

She reached up to deflect the blow, but the arrow severed
her wrist from her arm, and pinned her hand against the wall behind her.

A salad plate slipped from Aphrodite’s fingers and broke on
the floor.

As if from a great distance, I saw the blood spurting from The
Nightcatcher’s wax doll hand, staining her crystal throne and spraying against
her silken finery. Yes, she could bleed.

Then, I was running across the room, stepping onto a chair,
rolling across the feasting table. It didn’t matter I was weak, broken, and
ready to break, or that my new horns weighed more than my body. I could be a
monster,
Francois taught me that, I could be The Nightcatcher’s
monster. I’ll break a thousand salad plates, crush a thousand pieces of dessert
silverware, break the wrists of a hundred god’s reaching out to try and stop
me, to get to her.

I rolled to my feet and, before I stood, I drew another
arrow. I ran to the end of the table, pulled the bow taut, and stared down the
feathered tip at The Nightcatcher’s poison eye, ready to release.

My stomach burst and blood spread across my dead-thing
dress.

The child queen laughed. The stars shattered. The table underneath
me rattled. The cups rolled. Nameless gods, with faces made of sand, eyes like
desert suns, bandaged her amputated arm. They pulled the arrow from her
shoulder and her blood sprayed out, hissing with steam. They licked at the
wound with soldering tongues.

She spoke in a voice made of dirt and boiling water.

“You’ll never see her again.”

“Why do you think I missed your throat?” I asked.

“Because you’re a poor shot,” she said. “Because you’re a
disgusting, disease-riddled slut with bad manners.”

“No,” I said, “so that after I took my demon back, I could
make you beg for your life.”

I buried my next arrow in her shoulder.

The force of it would’ve knocked a bear back, but she only
jerked a little in her chair. Her nails dug into the arms of her crystal throne.
Her eyes rolled back in her head.

I drew another arrow.

“I’m the disgusting, disease-riddled slut that you want,” I
said.

A dark stain spread down from her shoulder. The smell of her
blood was like sandalwood. Even with a severed hand and an arrow in her body,
she retained her composure.

“Why would I want you?” she asked, as if the arrow striking
her, hadn’t even made her lose a breath.

“You want me. You took my demon because you want me.
You, with all your gods and playthings.
And you barreled across
the universe to find me.”

The Nightcatcher laughed again and I stumbled, trying to
keep my footing, as the table rattled once more.

“You’re a very sick girl,” The Nightcatcher said.

“Don’t try to trick me,” I said. “My whole life they’ve told
me I’m a child murderer, bitch, punk. I’m worth nothing. I’m an insect. They
did it to my mother, and they did it to me.

“Because they knew how strong we could become, and they were
afraid. So they tread on us. Spit on us. In return we tried to destroy
ourselves. That way we’d never rise up and conquer them. We couldn’t even
conquer ourselves.

“But that all changed when I met my demon. My shadow.”

I held my breath. I waited for the stars to hurl down and
incinerate me. Stop this child’s game, Nightcatcher. Why do the gods not rise
up to defend you? Why do you not transform into a smoking hydra to devour my
head?

But she only sighed.

“Your demon is dead.” The Nightcatcher said. “Didn’t anyone
tell you?”

Pain spread through my chest. It was the kind of pain that
unravels from its center, like a spider web.

“That’s not true,” I said.

“I killed her.”

“Then I’ll kill you.”

She looked me up and down, like a freshman girl in high
school, someone thinner than you, prettier than you. Every cruel girl could say
with her eyes, “Why are you wearing that? Why don’t you lose some weight?” And
you couldn’t help but wonder, for a moment, if her eyes transformed you into
someone you didn’t recognize. All it took was up, down, and sneer.

And I looked down.

The bow was gone. All that was left were my shaking hands
and emaciated arms, a hospital bracelet around one of my wrists. A hospital
gown fluttered at my ankles. There were paper slippers on my feet. I stood not
on a great feasting table, but on a thin, yellowed hospital mattress.

“You’re a very, very sick girl.”

I knew this would happen to me, having watched my mother go
insane and my father fall apart. When my mother shuffled down that hallway from
the psychiatric ward in her paper slippers, I shattered into pieces on the
waiting room floor. I’m broken if you’re broken, Mommy, because you fed me
rotting milk.

I want to be the fawn that jumped back into its mother’s
womb, send you to lay down in a grove as I float and heal in your amniotic sac.
We could forget together. I will heal you and you will heal me.

But I know we can’t. Time is reversible, but consequence is
not.

Lily.

The Nightcatcher didn’t even have to speak to say my name.

Why did your mother name you Lily?

“My demon can’t be dead,” I whispered.

“You thought you were a great hunter?
That
you carried the black bow that slew a kraken?
You had nothing but a
child’s toy.
Sick little girl.
Dirty
punk girl.
You’ll die with rat poison injected into your veins.”

The throne room was disappearing, replaced by the
whitewashed walls of the hospital. The gods were fading into nurses, their
faces quivering, pained with red, and aged by childbirth. They grew nametags on
white button-downs. Alice. Bertha. Name: I could kill every girl in this
goddamn hospital.

The goddess I thought used to be Aphrodite shrunk down into
Agnes, and held out a paper cup full of pills.

“Of course she’s dead,” The
Nightcatcher
said, even her and her throne fading into the wall. “She wasn’t even real.”

Agnes rattled the pills in their paper cup. I whimpered and
took it from her.

“No,” I said. “No, I can’t be here.”

“You’ve never been anywhere else.”

The Nightcatcher’s voice became softer and softer. It
shimmered like a wavering thought.

Why did she name you Lily?

The lily means birth. When Hercules sucked on the breast of
Zeus, the milk flowed heavenward and created the Milky Way. The milk that
dripped down to earth formed the lily.

The lily means death.
Death camas, poison
to any who would eat it.
Lilies for a child’s grave,
for innocence.
As an infant you clung to a mother who dripped
Schizophrenia onto your skin with each kiss. You couldn’t have known it would
end in your own destruction.