We are Wormwood Page 2

  “Momma?

  “Oh god, you hear that? She’s gotten into the refrigerator,” she said.

  She tore out of the room and down the stairs. I heard the refrigerator door as she slammed it against the wall. I heard the food hitting the floor as she threw it out, then the bottles, then the water purifier. She screamed, an inhuman wail that went on and on.

  The next morning I crept downstairs expecting to find a murder scene, the wolf Fenrir's fur in the window jam and my momma's severed hand on the kitchen tiles. But there was only Momma, humming and cooking French toast. She wore her robe of stars and her Wolf-Book sat on the counter beside her. There was no food on the floor, no broken glass. Everything had been cleared away.

  She tried to hand me a plate of French toast, but I didn't take it. I searched her for battle scars, missing fingers. Nothing. I started to tremble.

  "Are you not feeling well?" she asked, setting the plate on the counter.

  She pulled me to her, smoothing my hair, feeling my temple.

  "You feel fine. But it's been too long since we've had a sick day together. I'll cancel."

  She whisked her Wolf-Book away. We ate breakfast outside on the porch, in sunlight. Everything seemed so far away. My hands out of proportion to my body, the glass of orange juice a thousand years away. She told me it was a lovely morning, a fine morning, and the flowers were beginning to bloom. She and I would go to the fields, out in the woods, and pick them together. We could weave garlands for our heads.

  Maybe last night had been a dream.

  But the next night she was back at my windowsill with her eyes ringed red. She ripped out blank pages from her Wolf Book and scattered them across my bedroom floor.

  "The Nightcatcher knows we're here," she said. "The Wormwood star led her to us. I don't have much time."

  "Momma? Are you still taking your medicine?" I asked.

  She sat down on the edge of my bed, took both of my hands and clasped them between hers.

  "In my dreams, you were the daughter of a witch, and the two of you lived in a cottage out in the woods. She taught you to walk between reality and dreams. The village folk nearby called you deer-girl, because of how silent and quick you were. Nobody could catch you, or see you, if you didn't want them to. Every day you were becoming less and less human. You made your own hunting bow from a great black cedar. You could strike a deer in the heart and kill it instantly. You wore the blood and bones of a stag so the does would follow you, believing you to be one of them. Once a king came into the village, demanding your hand in marriage, your soul, because you were beautiful and powerful. With an arrow, you struck the crown from his head. You forced him to kneel before you and promise never to bother you again.

  "When you came of age, The Nightcatcher arrived in the village looking for you. She is made of night and eats the stars for nourishment."

  "She's evil," I said, despite my effort to ignore her, the story taking hold of me.

  "Not evil, but selfish and powerful. You would know her by the cities she ruined that sat upon her shoulders, and by the river that ushers from her mouth whenever she speaks. The Wormwood star belongs to her, her emissary, and it poisons the earth at her command. It took all the gods to drive her from the sky, so she made her home in the underground place, between hell and earth. In the hush place. The night sky used to be so much brighter in the old days. That is, until she took half of the stars and brought them down into the hush place with her to light the walls. She captured heroes and great hunters and made them slaves. To play with. To amuse her. That's why she came looking for you."

  "But she didn't get me," I said.

  Tell me she didn't get me.

  "You could best a king with your strength, but not The Nightcatcher. She collected rooms and rooms of heroes to enslave as her pets. She played with gods like they were children. She hunted you in your own forest, like you hunted the stag. She was fast upon you. She twisted your dream world so that it no longer belonged to you. It became a labyrinth of nightmares. She took the ground from underneath you. There was no escape."

  "That's it?" I said.

  "No, baby. Because you are clever, as well as strong. Just as The Nightcatcher was upon you, you cut your shadow from your body. It grew into the shape of a girl, your dark-half with night for hair and eyes. The Nightcatcher seized the shadow, and you were free."

  When Momma finished her story, a great and empty noise roared in my head. My momma's eyes were like swirling plates. I felt hot, a fever slamming into my skin.

  "It's taken a thousand years, baby, but she's back for us. And you've only got one shadow."

  I shivered in her stare and waited for the moon to collapse.

  ***

  She insisted that I go with her to her next storytelling. I sat in the front row of a sloped auditorium, next to the teachers. She crossed the brightly lit stage holding her Wolf-Book and magic staff.

  She wore the gazelle skull to hide her face.

  "Once there was a girl, the daughter of a gravedigger, who was known for her ability to talk to the dead. She used to sit in the piles of bones and whisper to them for long hours until they gave up all their secrets. It was even rumored that, in the nighttime, that special time when the sky was dark and the moon gone, she assembled the bones and, together, they danced in the graveyards. She fell in love with a boy with blue eyes like cloud light, with dancing sparks for fingertips. She taught him how to speak to the dead. “Be quiet,” she said, “and they will sit on gravestones. The trick is to be quiet."

  Momma lurched forward. She was trembling all over, and her eyes were red and raw underneath the mask.

  "Do you know why we tell stories?" she asked the children.

  She no longer spoke like Saga, the storyteller, wise and calm. No, this was a new voice. An older voice, that spoke from the bone, that shifted underneath the dirt with blisters on its tongue.

  The teacher sitting next to me squirmed in her seat. She had nails ready to chew away. She whispered to the man next to her. I wanted to run up to the stage, drag Momma away, and pull the mask off her face. I could scream at her, “You are not my mother. I want the voices back that I remember.”

  But I stayed where I was, and Momma continued speaking.

  "Plato once said that storytelling was a sin because it mocked true creation. Stories would lead people away from wisdom. But Plato was an old fool who spit on the backs of his slaves and called it philosophy. Stories are the essence of human experience. They teach us where we've come from and who we can be. Storytellers are not only here to entertain, but to give you a chance in the fight for reproduction. Through stories you learn to avoid eating the blue mushrooms. To pray to the right gods."

  The children’s silence was like a whip.

  "It's why you feel so cheated when a story ends badly. What was supposed to become a guide for you to successfully route through life, has become a dead-end. A husk. It isn't just the story that dies, but you who dies with it.

  “So what happened to the little girl and the boy who fell in love in the cemetery? They who danced with the dead? Should I give you a comfortable evil to fight? Perhaps a jealous suitor, with mined coal for a heart? A bitter grave-digging father, who buries the boy in a crypt so that the girl must free him?"

  No, I mouthed. No. I don't know what you're planning but nothing good could ever come from that deepening voice, that skull mask.

  "You shouldn't trust a comfortable story. You should know by now that only the heroes get to win, and even then, one day they will come across a force so great and so vast that they're consumed by it. I want you to know that the boy brought together the bones of a dead thing to dance with him in the moonlight. But it was not a dead thing at all; it was an old god with a mouth of crystals. With hands forged in the fires underneath the Great Mountain that burned anything they touched.

  “Every story you will ever be told will be a story of possession. Every story will be about a love that you throw a chain around to
keep, and the thing that can steal her away. The boy was not ready to confront the world of the dead, and he could do nothing to fight back. The old god touched him and burned him alive. The girl felt him die, and awoke with a start in her bed. She ran across the meadows and fields to the cemetery. She tried to bargain with the god. She was reduced to one long shivering scream. ‘I will do anything you want to bring him back.’ The god laughed. ‘I am older than the DNA that was formed at the beginning of the universe to sew together your fingers. You have nothing I want.’ Then the god threw her in an open grave and buried her alive."

  My mother finished her story with a flourished bow. The children stared with unblinking eyes, not daring to speak. Not even to cough. The teachers applauded with prim, quiet little claps as they herded the children out of the auditorium and back to their classes. My mother stepped off the stage.

  The principal touched her on the shoulder.

  “May I speak with you?” she said.

  The principal was an older woman with collapsing cheeks and a crisp floral dress, the kind of woman who’d never tear pages out of a Wolf-Book, who would, in fact, never own such a thing as a Wolf-Book.

  My momma’s eyes were dazed. She pressed her hands into the hollow of her throat. The principal ushered her aside and they stood at the corner of the hallway. The principal spoke in a hushed, racing voice. My mother nodded and smiled. When Momma came to get me, she grinned wide enough to split her head.

  “I’m not allowed back anymore,” she said.

  There was no caramel ice cream on the way back home, no fortunes shared over milkshakes. No prophecies on my hair color or forbidden loves. Only the long silence and her long smile.

  How quick, it seemed, that one moment she could be the bright storyteller in front of an audience of rapt children, possessed by the voices of her characters, and the next she was the dirty savior with the bedraggled hair, dripping water across the kitchen floor after she tried to drown herself in the pool.

  How quick that one moment Momma could be telling me my fortune, giving me dragons to fight, feeding me caramel ice-cream; and the next, scratching her face off as she perched, bird-like, on a wooden rocking chair. She could be stroking my hair telling me that blue looks best on me because blue matches the color of my eyes, then the next she’d speak in a hollow throated voice, “Do not call me mother, I am The Exorcist. Do not cry. You must be strong to survive this night.”

  Chapter Three

  DADDY TOOK HER TO the hospital where they bleached all the color out of her. They replaced her blood with antiseptic and took away her robe of stars, her magic staff, and Wolf-Book.

  "What happened to Momma?" I asked.

  "She stopped taking her medicine," Daddy said.

  What I meant was, where has Momma gone? They pumped her full of sedatives until her eyes were UFOs. They gave her paper slippers and told her they were glass, that when the medicine started working again, she would be a queen. The first time I was allowed to visit her in the hospital, I watched her shuffle down the hall toward me with her slippers crumpling. These delicate steps, as if the hospital walls were made of paper, as if she too was made of paper.

  She sat down beside me while the nurses watched from the doorway. She opened her mouth enough so that I could see the scar on her tongue, in the place where she'd try to sever it, giving herself a forked devil's tongue. We couldn’t speak. Words were fat and sluggish, too big to fit in our mouths. I wanted to hold her, but maybe she would collapse. Maybe I'd squeeze her shoulders and find that she'd transformed into a morphine drip.

  With Daddy, on the car-ride home, I curled up in the back seat and cried.

  "She's never coming back home," I said. “They took away the most important parts of her and she's never coming back home."

  I don't remember much about Daddy. He was a businessman, I think, someone important - because I never saw him except at the end of the day or during the emergency times when Momma went insane. He always seemed to be wearing a gray suit, crisp and uncomfortable, though his hair was always black and wild. He had a dark laugh. He told me once he was too young to be a father, told me to call him Lex instead of Daddy, though I never did. He refused to discipline me for staying up too late, for screaming, for being stubborn.

  “Little demon,” he called me, and laughed his dark laugh.

  Momma came back from the hospital listless and thin. Her skin was pale. Daddy fed her pills with a spoon and stroked her throat until she swallowed. He stayed up with her at night as she sat in the rocking chair in the corner of the room. He taped her hands when she tried to scratch her wrists.

  All of the color drained out of my Daddy’s face, just as it went out of Momma’s. One night he bleached his hair in the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror with his hands burning.

  “I’m bad!” I said, desperate for him to laugh or pinch me. “I’m a devil! I put black hair dye in the toothpaste!”

  He shook his head and leaned close to the mirror. He prodded the bottom of his eyes.

  “You see those? Crow’s feet.”

  “Daddy!”

  “Lex, baby. Lex.”

  He picked up his razor and shaved off all his hair. His fried, bleached locks fell in the sink. The humming of the razor ached in the back of my jaw. Momma appeared in the doorway beside me.

  “Daddy?” she said.

  "I'm not ready for this,” he said, and he set the razor down and walked out.

  I followed him outside into the garage as Momma cried in the bathtub. He pulled his car keys out of his pocket and unlocked the driver’s door.

  “You can’t! I’m bad! I’m bad!” I called after him.

  “Oh Lily,” he said, “I’m so sorry.”

  He wrote the number of the psychologist on the inside of my skirt. He picked me up as I cried and he kissed me.

  He said, "Schizophrenia made your mother into a rabid horse. Remember when she calls you a little monster that she still loves you."

  He left.

  I sat on the cold concrete floor of the garage for a long time after that, shivering, staring out down the driveway, across the street. Nobody ever told me this could happen. Phaedra’s parents divorced, but that happened across the street, not here. Nobody ever told me before, that I’d have to sit in moments like this without noise or distraction, waiting with a big yawn in my stomach. I didn’t know how.

  My teeth ached. My hands ached. I waited for him to return. I thought if he knew how cold I was, how I lay my bare legs on the concrete until I couldn’t feel them anymore, then he’d come back for me. I could summon him to me with my pain.

  But he didn’t come, and then I only wanted Momma to come. She would pick me up and tell me that my eyes were brushfire and that I needed to drink my milk to get strong. But then Momma didn’t get me; I got too cold so I went into the kitchen. I found cold macaroni in the refrigerator and I made myself a bowl. I set the bowl on the counter and the spoon beside it.

  I couldn’t eat it. There were needles in my stomach and if I ate I knew they’d all spill out of me.

  Chapter Four

  THE NEXT MORNING MOMMA came into my room to wake me. It wasn’t yet sunrise and gray spots of light lay across the bed. Her face was streaked and sad from crying.

  “Get up, baby,” she said, “I’ve found Arachne and she’s sick.”

  I held out my arms and Momma lifted me out of bed. She threw me my pink pullover, and whispered, “Hurry” when she handed me my shoes. They were the ones without laces, because I had yet to learn how to tie my shoes.

  Then she picked me up and we went out into the cold.

  The bald-headed sun sat above the train tracks. We entered the abandoned lot in front of the woods. This was back when its owners were still trying to sell it, so the grass was clean and trim, quivering with dew.

  She lifted me over the barbed wire, and then she climbed after me. She shook when she grasped the barbed wire, and her legs, so thin and splintered, quivered in her frost
-tipped boots. I thought she’d disappear inside of her parka.

  She took me into the woods. And though it was cold, little blue flowers, azaleas I think, grew underneath the trees forming a carpet. Such pretty little blue flowers.

  “There she is,” Momma said.

  I stopped.

  “I don’t see anything.”

  She took my hand in her own, pointed it toward the flowers, and said, “There. See her there?”

  Something in the flowers stirred.

  I saw her then, black and spindly limbed, as she emerged from the rustling flowers. Someone wounded her. A black arrow stuck out of her side, breaking the skin. And, though her body was that of a monstrous spider, she had the face of a young girl.

  Her expression was slack. A black viscous line of spit dribbled down her chin.

  “Momma,” I whispered.

  She lifted me up in her arms. I buried my face in her shoulder as she brought me toward the creature. I closed my eyes tight and promised myself I wouldn’t look.

  I wouldn’t look. I wouldn’t look. My heart squirmed. Oh God, don’t let me look.

  But I couldn’t stop myself. I lifted my head and looked as the monstrous spider with the human face coughed and sighed. She stirred in the grass and the downy ends of her legs squirmed. She had soft, black hair.

  “She’s hurt. Who did this to her?” I asked Momma. “She’s just a baby.”

  Momma set me down in the flowers. I took several steps back, tripped. I crushed the azaleas underneath me.

  “A god did this to her,” Momma said.

  Arachne opened her mouth to suck in air. In. Out. Her bloodless lips dripping black. When she moved she stained the flowers black. A sticky web wrapped around her hair and crystallized over her eyes.

  “Why?” was all I could think to say.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Momma tried to move Arachne, but the baby monster screamed with pain. She shook and trembled. I sat in the flowers feeling my eyes drop out. I couldn’t turn away again. I couldn’t close my eyes. Arachne quivered and gasped, her mouth opening as if to speak but she was unable to.