We are Wormwood Read online

  WE ARE WORMWOOD

  Autumn Christian

  Original Photograph by Bailey Elizabeth of www.baileyelizabeth.com

  Cover Design by Janice Duke of www.janiceduke.com

  Copyright © 2013 by Autumn Christian ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Part One: Dry Rot

  Chapter One

  A TINY GOLDEN BEETLE wriggled through the window and into my eye as I slept. They'd been coming all week - the beetles, the roly-polies, the spiders - searching for the way into our house, shimmying, wriggling, and weaving nests. When I woke, I felt the beetle squirming underneath my eyelid, its filmy wings fluttering and scraping. It made a small noise, an almost non-noise. Sh. Sh. Momma must've opened the window when I fell asleep. The oversized curtains hung across my bed and, in the dark, they looked like limp birds with wings of red velvet. I rubbed my eye but the beetle wouldn’t come out. I turned on the lamp beside my bed. Moths rushed in the open window and fluttered around me, against my lips, crowning my head. The beetle wouldn’t come out.

  I ran to Momma’s bedroom, crossing the hallway shimmering with little slices of moonlight. She was awake, sitting up in her bed amidst her magic relics and candles, reading a book, plaiting her blonde Scandinavian hair. Momma never slept. Not when the moon was full. She saw me running down the hallway and held her arms out to me. She batted the moths away from my face. I pointed to my eye, tearing, blinking frantically.

  Momma held me on her lap, trying to extract the beetle, saying the bugs were thick because the Wormwood star was high in the sky. I couldn't see it, but it shimmered bright and bitter. Wormwood meant this would be a year of poison. The insects knew this as the eye of the mad star beat hot on their backs.

  Momma held me still. She said warriors like us knew how to endure pain better than anyone. She held my eyelids open. The golden beetle crawled onto my Momma's finger. I told her to kill it or it'd be back again; she released it on her windowsill where it flew away.

  I was six years old, spilling out of her lap, but she cradled me as she rocked back and forth. Warriors stayed close. We were once Vikings who rode dragon-headed boats across the ocean, across the ice. We replaced our flesh with metal to endure the cold and slew creatures others couldn’t even have nightmares about, but still we loved better than anyone else. Around campfires, many a story was told about us and the monsters that loomed in the dark, quivering in fear at the mention of our names. She said, “We will always kill dragons together.”

  Later we crept downstairs, Momma holding a votive candle and a gazelle skull.

  “Do you need that skull?” I asked Momma in a quiet voice.

  “Shh, baby,” she said. “I’m going to give you a treat.”

  On the staircase, a spider furiously wove a web. I wanted to tear the spider’s web down, because its fingers, thin, like the threads of a wicker chair, were in my bad dreams. It carried a mark on its back like a pirate’s skull. Momma told me it only needed a home. Give it this corner of the universe. I pressed my back against the banister so I wouldn’t have to touch the web. She laughed, shaking her blonde hair that could’ve been the ruin of the Vikings. If she’d been born a few centuries earlier, her likeness would have been a mermaid-figurehead for their ships.

  In the kitchen she opened the window above the sink, turned on the stove, and started to make us hot chocolate. I stood on my tiptoes and turned on the lights. Roaches with silver feelers skittered away. I swear I heard them shriek. Momma didn't notice. She was humming, weaving her fingers through her hair.

  “Turn the light off. We’ll dance by candlelight,” she said.

  I turned the light off. Her skin was split, honey in candlelight, powder in moonlight. I climbed up onto the countertop and curled my toes so the roaches wouldn't scurry across my bare feet; she laughed.

  “You've forgotten,” she said, “that you once slew a wolf pup of the great beast Fenrir. I know when you remember you won't be afraid of insects anymore.”

  I inhaled and I could smell the milk-breath and musky fur of a wolf. I saw myself in that den, with a silver axe, wrestling the pup. His paw trapped my hair on the floor. I slew him and wore his pelt as a cloak. There was a time when I believed that anything Momma said was true.

  We drank the hot chocolate together in candlelight and moonlight. She rested her head in my lap as if she was the child and I the parent. In order to be a sorceress you have to learn to not sleep. The full moon recharges you like a battery. You see the shimmer in everything, so you can pull the thin, magic threads that connected everything and change the world.

  “Drink your hot chocolate, baby, the milk will make you strong. One day I’ll bring a goat into our backyard. I’ll feed her warm hay and feed you her milk. You’ll be able to lift six hundred pounds. A thousand. You could lift a truck if you wanted; you’d be stronger than the strongest person in the world because you’re not of this world. Stronger than Thor. You should go to bed, baby, you're falling asleep.”

  "I'm not tired, I want a story," I said, nodding off, the drained cup of hot chocolate dangling in my uncurling fingers.

  She kissed my forehead, took the cup from my hands, and sent me upstairs. A story for another time.

  In my bedroom Fiddleback spun a web in my doorjamb. Its poisonous bite could eat a hole through skin. Ants scurried across the floor, carrying off droplets of honey. A scorpion clacked around my feet. I might've once killed a wolf pup, born in mythology, but I never had to deal with anything like this.

  I ran back to tell Momma that I wouldn't sleep until they were all dead. Halfway down the stairs, I heard the glass votive holder smash against the wall. I stopped and listened; silence. I leaned over the side of the railing to try and see Momma, but there was only an open kitchen door and candlelight piercing the entryway. I crept down the stairs, treading lightly so the steps wouldn’t creak. Holding my breath, I crossed the light and entered the kitchen.

  Momma wasn’t there. Someone else stood by the kitchen sink heaving, the gazelle skull tied around her head. Someone else with bleach and blood oozing from her chewed fingertips. Cockroaches smashed in the sink. She turned to me with Momma's body, but with the eyes of The Exorcist, eyes like scratches of lightning.

  The Exorcist didn't smell like Momma. She smelled like antiseptic, like the sour fake smell of lemons and bad magic. A rosary of powdered bleach ringed her neck. Her eyes were reddened by popped blood vessels. I wondered if she still had Momma's face underneath the mask, or a void where a human face once was.

  "She's here," Momma said.

  She pressed her lips to her mouth and in between grit and blood-smashed teeth whispered the name.

  Nightcatcher. The Nightcatcher's been here.

  I grabbed my cup of hot chocolate from the counter. It was sticky and covered in bleach. She grabbed it out of my hand and tossed it away in the trash bag at her feet.

  “There was poison in the food,” she said.

  There was poison in the tap water. Poison on the doorknobs. Poison in the teacups, on the window latch, in the sunlight, and in the pill bottles on the countertop. Invisible poison that could not be seen, touched, or smelled. Poison that would make tongues unravel, bones rot, arms fall off, and turn a face into a dog's face.

  Maybe I only imagined the walls throbbing, trying to squeeze in on us, but I still couldn’t breathe. The Exorcist flung bleach onto the ants on the windowsill. She grabbed a broom and rushed past me to the staircase where she broke the spider's web apart. When the spider tried to flee, she stomped on it, le
aving a black and red smear between her toes.

  The shadows were alive; the house was alive and it was squeezing in on me. A chill followed The Exorcist like a ghost spot. There was a monster that lived in her skin and wanted to poison us, a monster that not even Vikings could kill. The Exorcist turned toward me but I knew I couldn't look into her eyes. Even if she came to protect us from The Nightcatcher and the poison, those eyes would sear me, burn me, and even kill me. I turned toward the front door as she touched my shoulder; her hair was screaming, the air was screaming. I grabbed the doorknob, turned it, and ran onto the lawn then past the lawn. She called my name and told me to stay inside. Wormwood was out. I ignored her and ran towards the woods.

  It was almost winter. The grass tilted to one side, brown and withered. The trees were skinny and as cold as lightning rods. The moon hid behind clouds, casting everything into darkness. I did not see Wormwood in the sky. Momma said it was a small, green star, just above Mars. If you could drink it, it would taste like cedar.

  I reached the edge of the neighborhood where the small woods lived. I climbed over the barbed wire fence and the "Do Not Enter" sign protecting the woods, hiking my dress up over my hips so that the hem wouldn’t catch on the barbs. I thought I felt The Nightcatcher's shadow. She chilled the air and all stories could be real. I fell on the other side of the fence and stood up, my arms throbbing.

  I ran into the woods. The branches and leaves hid the stars away. I had been here several times before, but never at night, and never while shadows pursued me that I thought wanted to eat me alive. I delved further into the place where the dirt was dark and burnt. In the center of a grove, I found a hollowed out dead tree once struck by lightning. It had a mouth like a door. I knelt down and crawled inside.

  In the darkness she reached out and touched my shoulder.

  “This is my hiding place,” she whispered.

  Even then, when I first heard her speak, I thought that fangs and rattlers would want to borrow her voice.

  “I can’t leave,” I whispered. “Something’s out there. Please don't make me."

  I felt a stirring underneath me, like the earth had begun to crawl. Then a pungent smell like wet feathers. I pressed my head against the damp old wood. Her hand slid down my shoulder and touched my palm.

  “All right,” she said after a period of silence. “You can stay.”

  I looked up. Her eyes were dark and shiny. Like Wormwood, I thought. Poison. She sat cross-legged with her knees spread, and in the lap of her skirt lay hundreds of glittering and squirming roly-polies, spiders, and golden beetles.

  "You..."

  I tried to say more, but my tongue turned webbed and dry. I panted softly. She spoke my name.

  “Lily.”

  The bugs in her lap shone like living crystal. She smiled, her teeth full of feathers, and touched my cheek.

  Then she opened her mouth and made a vociferous noise, a clacking insect noise.

  “Ke-ke-ke-ke.”

  I ran.

  Chapter Two

  BEFORE THE EXORCIST came, Momma used to be a professional storyteller. She called herself Saga, the goddess of storytelling, she who drank from golden cups with Odin. She carried a magic staff, wore a robe sewn with stars, and told stories for children in libraries and huge sterile cafeterias. Sometimes I would go with her and watch with the other children as she read to them from her Wolf-Book, a tome bound with black fur.

  "...And the princess awoke when she heard the thud underneath her bed. She bolted upright and before the beast could flee, seized him by the tail. ‘Let me go, let me go,’ the beast pleaded. But the princess refused to release him until he danced with her.”

  Momma was not a writer. She wasn’t born to sit down because lightning coursed through her and kept her dancing. She made up stories on the spot - hunters, demons, beasts, and new gods who flew across frozen oceans – nobody but she and I knew the pages of the Wolf-Book were blank.

  As she performed, I watched those bored, wriggling children become still and listen with rapt attention. She had a different voice for each character, from the deep-throated growl for the troll’s wife, to a soft, dream-high voice for the ghost girl. Even Saga, her storytelling persona, spoke in a husky voice like an ancient codex buried within a queen’s tomb.

  "…She did not want to be a princess, she wanted to be a night girl. Wild girl. And when the priest married her, the new husband’s cloaks and garments were lifted to find, not the baron the princess’s father had promised, but the beast that hid underneath her bed. She fled with the beast to the underworld kingdom, where they lived out their lives in dark and beautiful wonder.”

  She finished her stories with a flourish, then bowed so low that her robe touched the floor. The children applauded. The teachers always wanted to ask her, “Where did you get your training?” “Where did you hear that story?” “Who are you really?”

  “A sorcerer never reveals her secrets,” my Momma said with her hand pressed against her nose, and the children laughed.

  Then she swept me up in the whirlwind of her starry robe and we fled. She often took me out afterwards to eat cheap Italian food, and sticky, thick caramel milkshakes. As I ate, she leaned over the table and pushed the hair out of my face. She spoke.

  "You don't know this, yet, but when you grow older, you'll dye your hair a bright red because it's the closest you'll ever feel to being on fire. You'll fall in love with the ocean because the boys won't be enough."

  "I'm never falling in love,” I said.

  "You'll be a beautiful woman," she said, continuing on as if I hadn't spoken, as if I was another character in her stories, "once your face grows into those spark-devil eyes. You'll topple cities."

  During that time it was easy to forget that she took pills to keep her from going insane — Risperdal, Haldol, antipsychotic drugs with names that sounded like those of old Southern gentlemen. One time, when I was still an infant, she'd been in a mental hospital. She laughed about it now, mimicking her Trichotillomania, how she pulled her hairs out one by one. She told me about the nurses with fat, frowning lips who injected her with sedatives when she started to scream.

  "You need to practice your coping mechanisms," she said, mocking their sweet-sick voices, "Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?"

  She told me about how they attached her to machines that she thought were singing her lullabies in the night, via tiny voices rattling through electrical nodes. How she told other patients she was their deliverance; a robot-god imbued with a divine message. One woman fell trembling in front of her, in dazed worship, and had to be carted away by frantic, chittering nurses.

  “I’m better now,” Momma said. “There was no way I’d stay for long in a place like that.”

  I should’ve seen the warning signs. Her pills disappeared from the kitchen counter. She started staying up at night, unable to sleep, even when the moon wasn’t full. Once, during a reading, her hands shook as she gripped the wolf book and a seizure passed across her face. For a moment, only a moment, she forgot her story. I was the only one who noticed, but on the ride back home, she sat listless, like her head was barren.

  “The best storytellers die young before they learn how to forget,” she said.

  Before, she used to let me roam everywhere by myself, telling me warriors learned to forge their own paths. If mother’s stayed too close, they created children that were chained and fearful. Yet now, she started to hover, pulling me into her robe.

  “Don’t stay out too late. Monsters eat the best children,” she said in a hushed, crackling voice.

  One night I awoke to find her sitting on the windowsill near my bed, with the window cracked open and the cool night air blowing through. It was quiet. She held her breath and stretched out her claw-cracked hands.

  “Momma?”

  I sat up and pulled my blankets around me. She let her star-sewn robe fall to the floor; underneath she wore a stained nightgown, exposing her scratched collar
bones. Her eyes reflected like animal eyes in the light, and when she spoke, her tongue bled.

  “Did you know, on the night you were born all my father’s horses died? Their necks caught in the barbed wire fence behind the barn. Their legs chewed by wolves.”

  I drew my legs up underneath the blanket. The room had grown small, too small, and the window bared at me like an angry wolf's mouth.

  "I want you to know where we came from, baby."

  I thought if I moved the window would chew me apart.

  "We were once great hunters, and we can be again. This world isn't meant for us. I've seen the place where your great-grandmother tread cloven-hoofed over the grass. She had eyes like wet diamonds and she sang in a language forgotten, so beautiful it would cause her prey to lay down, paralyzed, in the grass for her to kill. She killed a great snake, a python, who fed on virgin's blood and had terrorized a village for hundreds of years; its skin became her crown. They worshipped her as a goddess."

  Momma rose from the windowsill and moved toward me. I suddenly didn't want her to touch me, the way she rubbed her fingers together, violently, until her nails broke. She must've seen me seize up, and stopped at the foot of the bed.

  "Are you listening? Because this isn't a story."

  "I'm listening," I whispered.

  "When I was pregnant I knew you were a girl, because of how fiercely you kicked. You are my little huntress. When you were inside me, I was followed by fire. When I left the hospital after a sonogram, half of the building burned to the ground. I started to have dreams of you and the lives you lived before.

  "Would you like to know? Would you like to know who you once were?"

  "No," I said.

  I didn't dare raise my voice. Was this my Momma who stood before me, speaking in this dark language, in a voice like boiling water?

  She reached for me, as if to smooth the hair from my face, but then suddenly stopped. Her body shook as if electrified. She stood paralyzed for a second. Two.