The Worm in Every Heart (18 page)

“You can't seriously think Grendel—and I—”

Ivan laughed, a wet half-snarl—and I realized he was weeping, silent and slow, eyes all but unfocussed with angry tears.

“Surely, I can think nothing else.” Then, to me: “And I will thank you,
sir,
to stand away from my wife.”

I lowered Rebecca to the ground, stroking her eyes respectfully closed, and rose to meet his hateful stare.

Quickly, you said: “Grendel is my creation, Ivan—the artificial man I once told you of, dead flesh raised from the dead once more imbrued with life, do you remember?” A thin smile, to match his own grimace. “He is what you invested in.”

“Some paramour of yours,” Ivan replied, tonelessly. “A whore for a whore—and a precious ugly one, at that.”

But the pistol—now less sure of its immediate target—had begun to shift, restlessly, between us. And in his indecision, you saw our chance.

“Better a whore than a fool,” you said.

Ivan convulsed, as if slapped, and put the pistol's muzzle to your temple.

“Cousin,” he whispered, “I have played the fool for you too long.”

But even as his finger tightened, I slipped behind him, and twisted his head from his shoulders with a single, cartilaginous crack.

* * *

One thing I have always prided myself on, and not immodestly, is the knowledge that no living man can make me tremble. But violent death can still instantly reduce me to that half-Irish child who once tried to vomit his own mortality out upon the grass of some old Celtic tomb. And the sight of Grendel, his hands gloved with Ivan's blood, offering me that dripping thing which had once housed Ivan‘s (grantedly, rather limited) intelligence, was certainly traumatic enough to produce this same effect.

I fell back, mouth full of bile, and raised my crossed arms like a beaten beggar. “Please,” I begged. “Please, take it away.”

Grendel considered me, and I thought I saw a hint of pity in those patchwork eyes.

“The great doctor Mikela Kosowan,” he said. “Brilliant surgeon, pioneer of a new, deathless age. Count Ivan's homme fatal. One question for you—only one: Why did you make me?”

And for a humiliatingly long moment, pinned under the gaze of my greatest achievement, I could think of no good answer.

“ . . . to see if I could,” I blurted, at last.

Grendel nodded.

“He loved you,” he said, hefting Ivan's skull at me, while I shrank back, panting—practically stumbling over Rebecca's forgotten body, as I tried to shove myself even further into the laboratory's farthest corner. “Did you deserve it?”

“I don't KNOW. Oh, Grendel, please take that thing away, you can't comprehend how it terrifies me—”

“I can, and I do. But it doesn't matter.”

Discarding the head, he stepped forward. And I shut my eyes, sure that the inevitable end of all my hubris was as sure as my next breath.

* * *

When I touched you, you spun in my grasp, sweat dulling your hair, eyes grey as the gleam of a blade. “I was wrong,” you babbled. “I was wrong, I admit it.”

“Wrong,” I echoed.

“Yes, wrong. You didn't want or expect to be created. My ambition drove me on, as it always has, and I thought of no one's comfort but my own. I cheated you, cheated Ivan, cheated myself. I was wrong.”

“No,” I said. “
I
was.”

You stopped, met my eyes for the first time in—how long? You frowned, uncertain.

“I don't understand.”

“I was wrong, I admit it,” I replied. “I should never have asked you for Rebecca. I didn't want her at all.”

Your mouth came open, then—small teeth, very even. Pale lips over a warm, red heart.

“I never understood the hunger she gave me. I didn't know. I found the answer in no book you said I should read. All the knowledge in the world, you gave me, but not this one truth. I didn't want her, I never did.”

“No,” you said, almost a question, edging toward a statement.

“No,” I said. “I wanted you.”

And smiled. Your mouth stayed open.

“Always,” I said, “right from the start. God, Father, Mikela. Your face was the first thing I ever saw, the only thing I've ever seen, and I had forgotten.” I almost laughed at the ridiculousness of it. “Forgotten!”

And what I had forgotten had festered in me like an open wound, a mouth I could never feed, a void I could never fill. Until now—until that idiot, your cousin, showed me what neither of us had ever been able to see before.

“Oh no,” I said, so softly. “I wanted Rebecca, once. But she was only your shadow.”

I could drown in your eyes.

“Only your shadow,” I breathed, and held your head still as my mouth came down.

And then, of course, you ran—not getting very far. And of course you fought, though you—of all people—must have known the futility of it. And after I caught you, I did have to hurt you a bit. But only a bit.

So when I finally came walking through the keep toward your room, holding you as I had held her in the laboratory, I was happier than I had ever been since those bright days before I knew there were really any others in this world I thought created by you for me alone.

For me and you alone.

4.

“Let me love you, Mikela. Let yourself be loved. We're both monsters, after all—and even though you made me for yourself, God made you for ME.”

And at those words I recover my senses, only to find us already converging upon our inevitable coupling with all the voluptuous paralysis of a nightmare. Whispering lie back, lie quiet, let me do what I was born for. Over which I can hear my own voice, moaning: No, Grendel, please—remember whatever I was to you, not what you'd have me be. But I hold you down with ease for all your struggle, shirt ripping open under my claws, nuzzling chest and throat alike in passion's swirl. With each black tongue-flicker a quick electric jolt clear to the root of me, I'm harder than I've ever been before, pierced with silver skewers of twisted delight. Free to swallow you whole at last, delighted by your gasp of unexpected joy. No one makes me do anything, cousin, you may have bought me but you do not own me . . . No, Grendel alone holds that title. And revels in it. Knowing me better than I know myself, he's big enough to hold me down and do everything I MUST want done to me, in my hearts of hearts—slowly, and with exquisite relish. Expressly for your pleasure, which is to say my own. To turn me over, gently, and—

—ease myself in, connecting up and Oh! All the way through in one smooth rush Oh, ah To clip something deep inside And I Twist and hiss, jerking Laid utterly open Right to the tight silk heart of you, oh yes Hot breath between my shoulder blades, pinning me flat Right on through The pain, prone and panting against my cousin's sheets, satin knotting like a kiss along the length of me Pounding My God, I'm so SMALL to him My claws on your hips, teeth at your nape And I'll die, my Christ, I'll die Of pleasure Grendel howling as I
clamp
down
on him now While from your own throat comes a sound no angel knows Our mutual arc pulling taut at last Fit to spasm and Jet—

—together.

* * *

At last, he slept. I waited until he was deep enough to shift in his sleep and slipped from my commandeered bed to the cold stone floor, where I sat, head in my hands, for what seemed a very long time. Then I bit my lips, and rose.

The keep seemed different to me now. Emptier. And as I passed through the study with its shattered window a light rain splattered against my naked skin, reminding me that there had been no time for clothing. But what did that matter, after all?

Nowhere I could run from Grendel would be far enough. Nothing I could do would dissuade him. I had built him well, entirely TOO well, and it had brought me down from the height of a Creator to the depths of the Pit.

But I knew what must be done.

I turned a corner and limped down the hall towards the forbidden door—once barred, then reopened. The rain fell through the laboratory's pierced roof, soaking me to the bone.

I took my notebooks and all the instruments I could find, wrapped them in cloth and paper, doused them with volatile chemicals, and set them alight with a single spark. Then, spreading the detritus of my short career around me in a ring, oblivious to the pain of my burnt fingers, I lay back on the floor looking up at the watery sky.

Nemesis, I thought, who punishes the proud. I have made my own Nemesis.

As a bolt of lightning cracked the sky to show the glow behind, I drew my last remaining souvenir of Godhood towards me.

“Poor Ivan,” I heard myself whisper. “Je suis desole, mon gentil cousin, parcequ'il est ma faut vous etes mort.”

I raised the scalpel. Calmly, with that deft touch so admired amongst my peers at the Medical School, I brought it down. Calmly, I slit my wrists, one after another.

After which I lay back again, gratefully, and let my life seep away.

* * *

I see your face before me now, as always. Ever since the moment of my birth. Ever since the moment I lifted away the overturned surgical table, after waiting for the ring of fire to burn itself out, and saw you lying there.

So pale.

But you were wrong, my creator—and your plan, as is often the case when one must think fast under pressure, was poorly laid.

I got there before the notebooks could fully burn. A little charred, yes. But legible.

Hear me now, wherever you are: I cannot let you go. I will not.

And I am a good pupil, also. Surely, you must give me that.

Sleep well, Mikela.

* * *


I sleep, just as Mother said I would. I dream I lie packed in ice while years pass, years upon years. I dream I am disinterred and wrapped in bandages, raised toward a shining globe, the charge surging through me as I writhe and scream—blind, but hardly senseless. Then I dream silence, cut only by the sound of the scalpel tracing my jaw. I open my eyes, and the first thing I see . . .

. . . is your face.

CAROLA WOKE COUGHING BLOOD.

The moon was already up. New frost had settled at dusk, lending the rotting leaves around her a leprous sheen. Her teeth ached. As she raised her hand to block the light, she saw that insects had laid their eggs beneath her nails as she slept.

Die
, she told them, and felt their tentative hum dim slowly to silence.

Carola stumbled to her feet. Rain had left her shroud stiff with mud, her joints swollen. To her left, a lark cried out. She turned, clumsily, her train tearing loose with a sound like burnt bones popping.

As she paused there in the moonlight, a brief thought touched the back of her neck once, and was gone:

There is something, something . . . I have forgotten.

But it slipped away before she could quite catch hold.

The lark cried again, and was silent.

Carola had been out of the black earth since late summer and all through the autumn, stumbling after a slippery rope of moonlight which fell, every so often, between the faded curtains of the leaves. But now the trees began to look like ice-slicked skeletons again, and the air was chill. She would have shivered, had she felt it.

Carola sniffed the wind.

It had an unfamiliar scent tonight. Something fleet, almost barren, which yet refused to dissipate on further consideration. Like candle-wax, left to drip in a dark place for longer than was really wise. Or a rust-pitted blade, unsheathed at last. Like old blood.

It stank of foxes run to earth.

It stank like rebirth.

And once more, the pull:

. . . something . . .

The gaunt moon broke over the highest leaves and hung there, half-eaten by its own topography. It cast a finger to the north.

Carola followed it, and found a city crouching there against the ridge. It was a sign, of sorts.

Well, then.

Gathering her shroud about her, she set her feet toward it, and let them have their will.

* * *

The city was in fact a town, and that only loosely: More like an inhabited boil, allowed to flourish—by the surgeon's disinterest—under the shadow of the knife. It lay heaped haphazardly together, a mess of gables, chimneys and uneven stoops. Stone, wood, shingles, slate and mud. Fear ate at every table.

The town was old. No one remembered its name. And no one could even dare to guess whether it predated the castle in whose shadow it squatted.

A long shadow. Very dark. And very cold.

* * *

Walking swiftly, Carola crossed the bridge without a backward glance. Stones slipped beneath her stride. Thorns, provoked by her presence, reached down to pluck at her hair. Her eyes were open, her thoughts absent.

Something.

In her mind, a door swung slowly open on a stone room, floor strewn with rushes. Its windows stood tall and narrow, empty against the wind. From the fireplace, a knot of driftwood spilled shifting light. And in front of it, an iron chair. A man, speaking:

We are noble, daughter. God's favored servants. Our acts are His will made flesh. A hard thing to serve, truly, but harder thing still to truly rule—to know, to will, to dare, and to keep silent.

His eyes were grey.

And you. To you, the hardest task of all . . .

She saw the cancer which was to kill him rising in his throat like a black tide.

. . . to marry well, or well as may be. And to rule, despite it.

The moon went out, like a lamp. And when Carola found she could see again, nothing remained but the blue-black road, the horizon, and a mouthful of salt.

* * *

Here under the mountain, the wolves were more than seasonal rumors. They ran two by two, remorseless, through ditch and over stile into the fallow farm beyond. A scarecrow watched them pass, withholding comment. Moments after, the first flakes of snow began to fall. The wolves killed quickly and fled, mouths full of meat, before the moon had time to blink at their efforts.

But they veered at the skirts of the forest, sensing something with whiter teeth than their own was already on its way.

* * *

As Carola reached the last tree, the hunger took her. It set her bones aflame and left her burning, jack-knifed into the dirt. She rolled and howled, scrabbling, beneath its weight. It ate her heart and mind in one gulp, then settled down to chew. She bit the loam and drooled earth, teeth black with rotten leaves. Her hair became knives, her eyes coals, and there was nothing to be done at all but suffer.

Then, as suddenly, it let her go.

She looked up from where she knelt, panting. Over the nearest fence, all grain had turned to mush, and webs obscured the farmhouse's open door.

She dragged herself upright, and went on.

Carola followed the farm's wall around to what had once been a garden. A few crab-apples still dangled, higher than it was worth the while to climb. Beneath the bark, a faint chitter of grubs. Beneath the earth, worms.

And under the trees, an old man.

He stood with his back to Carola, looking down at a raw little patch of earth. In one hand, he held flowers. And the sight of him made Carola pause in mid-step, confused, because—

—he was haloed. Head, arms, legs, and spine all ran with a light the dull folds of his clothes could muffle but not contain. It spilled over his collar, blazed against the sky. It set the tree's bark shimmering with his hair's heat. The wind licked his bouquet apart, petal by petal, and the man stared on, oblivious.

He smelled of ecstasy.

Carola's empty stomach clenched, and growled. She shifted from one foot to another. Something broke beneath her heel.

The old man turned, and saw her. Her face—or his recognition of it, rather—made him sway back a pace, knees buckling slightly. The flowers fell from his hand, scattering.

Carola's eyes met his, and held.

“You,” he said. “Oh, yes. Oh, you.”

She watched, too detached to be wary, as he fumbled with the neck of his shirt, ripping the ties apart. Beneath, a curve of throat exposed itself, sweet and slightly pulsing. She felt a note run through her at the sight, needle-sharp and thrumming; the first phrase of an old tune, once learned under duress, but never forgotten.

Carola felt her lips curl back, ready to sing.

The old man smiled up at her, bleary eyes half-frantic.

“You remember me,” he said. “Remember?”

And a flush lit the skin over his jugular, drawing her close, warming her like a flame's stir under the screen of a quick-lit lantern.

She approached him on tip-toe—he was so much taller than she, after all, though drooping now toward her like a sapling in a high, cold wind. One hand went to his cheek, the other slipping to cup the base of his skull, and she felt her nails resharpen themselves at the touch of him. His warmth. His smell. The beat and tick of his breath. All of that. All. Until—

“Ah yes, my Lady, yes,” he hissed as she bore him back, as she fastened on him without mercy (though none was asked for)—as fresh blood washed the old cud from her back teeth, and the moon irised shut in that one hot jet like a burning rose.

* * *

Slowly, then, her eyes cleared. She was full again, quite stuffed sane. And it came to her that she knew this corpse, this ruined, elderly thing; that he had once been captain of her wedding guard—back when he was young and fine, that was, before prolonged submersion in the night had left him too crazed to do anything but cry aloud for his own death, and hug it close enough to kiss when it finally deigned to answer his call.

Carola glanced down at the patch of earth he'd wept by—the
grave
, word coming easy to her tongue—and saw with utter clarity a small, black stone, hidden in a covey of rotten bracken laced with dead moss, twisted by the cold into a spiky crown stiff with old spiderwebs. Where its shadow fell, the grass withered. And on it, in deeply-cut letters etched with rain—was her name.

CAROLA DE GUILDHADE.

She crouched there in her shroud, atop the ex-captain, frozen by the sight of it.

TAKEN TOO SOON.

Abruptly, something blocked her throat, curdling as she tried to swallow. It took her a long moment to realize—

No, not death. Never death. Never again.

—it was a laugh.

Because it was all coming back now. Like a jet of bile. Hot and scalding and virulent. And it was everywhere, burning her right down to the core. If she scrubbed for a thousand years it would still cling to the bone, marrow-deep, just out of reach. No shred of peace left to ease the passage, only the squall and the tearing. Christ Jesus yes, it was all coming back now, everything.

And how could she have ever thought it worse to have forgotten?

Whereupon she let herself arch back, feeling all her vertebrae wrench together at once, as the howl twisted up from her cold guts through her still, still heart, and further.

Out in one rush, to scald the stars.

* * *

Most of the castle had fallen away with neglect and disuse over the years, until only the tower still remained stable, unhindered by any sense of its own mortality. From its peak, blue fire lit the walls of a five-walled room.

At length, a hand drew the drapes aside, and thrust a dagger through the frame to keep them open.

Then the room's sole occupant gathered up his cards, and sat down next to it. To wait.

* * *

Carola de Guildhade, Lady of Raum.

The land was hers, to rule and serve. And she was the land's. So it had been for every eldest child to bear her family's name, time and beyond—since Bastard William had first breached England's coast, with iron and fire and God's holy Word.

A cold place, this inheritance of hers: Distant and small, but subject only to God and king. Raum stayed strong, always, as its lord was strong. To rule as child was one thing. It was necessity, made custom by constant threat. Threat of war, or quick successions. Of witchcraft, plague and poison.

But to rule as woman—required a husband.

“You are the land,” old Bede reminded her. The threshing fires cast a bloody shadow on his face, turning—for a flicker—his cataracts yellow.

“I know what I am,” she said. Softly.

“The land is yours, and you are the land's. If it wither, you pine and die. This all men know.” He put one hand to his chest, rummaging in his robes, as if in search of his heart. “But if you be fruitful—”

“Say then that I marry, priest,” she said. “Say I bear children. To who, their fathering?”

So Bede brought out the letter of courtship, still warm from his skin, on clean parchment in a firm, red pen. From a knight of great name and little purse, with a hunger for speedy marriage. And three months later, mounted and jewelled, she had taken the flowery crown from Bede's hands and turned it a long moment in her own, as if she'd never seen one so close.

“Shrive me, priest,” she said. “I go now to battle.”

“Only to woman's true work, my daughter, as God deems both right and pleasant.”

Behind her, a young castrato scuffed the earth nervously with the toe of his shoe. The clouds hung waiting, air sweet with bees.

“Priest,” she said, at length. “I pray you, keep well.”

And put on the crown.

And rode away.

Carola shook her head, sharply. The world fell back into place with a sigh.

But the land is dead, she thought. My people fear me as damnation. And I—do not recall—my marriage night.

To her right, from town, came a distant music. The moon was waning. Above the trees, the castle's battlements stood suddenly plain against the lightening sky. But the tower room shone brighter and the road ran to an open gate, agape and lockless in the gloom.

Carola, unaware of her own movements, took up her train.

Someone keeps a lamp for me, she thought. Someone knows I am woken.

And her smile unsheathed again, unbidden. Teeth white as salt.

He shall not go unanswered.

* * *

It was almost dawn. A flush grew in the sky's far corner. Purple, then plum. Then red.

Far below, golden thread began to rim the ragged crenellations.

* * *

Footsteps in the great hall. Skirts in hand, Carola passed the cracked and silent fireplace, leaving a trail of dust. Tapestries flapped in the wind. Behind the great chair, two ravens perched on a slain knight's skull still fought over his remaining eye. Owls rose, shrieking, from the rafters. Carola ignored them, setting foot instead to the tower steps.

One, then another, and so on—up, higher and higher, into the coming dawn. Until the clouds were level with her knees. Until her chest rasped and burnt. Until—

—a door sprang up before her.

She paused for a moment, pressing her throat.

No lock left to open with a touch. It merely hung, rust-slicked ring poised for pulling. Between jamb and wall lolled a strip of room, widening with each new breeze. And—inside that room—a light, pale as a lit tuber, flickering at the table's head. Five grey candles, of uneven size, bases melted together?

Behind her, a voice:

“No. Look closer, Lady.”

And the candles shrivelled, twisted. Grew nails. Became, at last, a grisly trophy shivering at the light's core—a mummified hand, bleak with flame.

The Hand of Glory.

“It makes the living sleep,” said the voice, amused by its own expertise. Nearer now. “And, as I long suspected—the dead wake.”

Almost within reach.

But Carola stood still, thinking: Let him come to me, if he dares.

“Oh, but I do.”

And Carola spun—

—to find him, smiling, at her elbow.

* * *

Down in the valley, dawn broke now in earnest, chasing crows from the frozen shreds of the wolves' kill. Townspeople began, tentatively, to unbar their doors.

* * *

But Carola and her husband stood—still as only the dead can stand—at either end of the five-sided room, and watched each other closely. The room was hung with purple from roof to floor, windows lost under a weight of velvet soft enough to muffle the world's scream to a dull hum, thick enough to shut out even the sun. Against this backdrop, Carola's husband shone like leprosy, toying with his dagger. His eyes were green, like cut church glass; his teeth, porcelain.