The Worm in Every Heart

by Gemma Files

  “Well, anyway—gotta go. Things to do, rituals to research, shopping lists to compile. Exorcisms don’t come cheap, you know.”

  “ . . . don’t.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  Hesitant: “I mean, it’s just. Not. Not, uh . . . ”

  ( . . . safe.)

  Riiiiight.

  ‘Cause that was the big concern, these days: Staying safe, at all costs. Even when the best way to make sure I stayed safe, if it really concerned her so much, would be to sign herself out of this shithole—the way we all knew she could, at a moment’s fucking notice—and come help out. Instead of just sitting there all smug with dead people’s handwriting crawling up and down her arms like some legible rash and the air around her starting to thicken like a rind, to crackle like a badly-grounded electric fence . . .

  Bitch, I thought, before I could stop myself. And saw her flinch again, as the impact of my projected insult bruised her cortex from the inside-out; saw blood drip from one nostril, as she blinked away a film of tears.

  I shut my eyes to block it all out, feeling that ache squirm inside me, twisting in on itself. Knotting tight. Feeling it ripple with fine, poison-packed spines, all of them spewing a froth of negativity that threatened to send my few lingering deposits of tenderness, sorrow and affection flowing away at a touch, leaving nothing behind but emptiness, and rot, and rage.

  If I let it, that is. Which I wasn’t about to.

  Not when I still had even the faintest lingering chance of getting what I wanted.

  “Listen,” I began, carefully. “We both know the main reason you put the Posse together in the first place was because it was the only way you could blow off steam, stop devoting all your energy to just protecting yourself . . . ”

  Leave it open as sin and let the ghosts rush in at will: Babble and float, vomit ectoplasm and sprout word-bruises like hickey chains, laugh like a loon and know no one was actually going to treat you like one for doing it.

  Good times, baby. Good, good times.

  “But now the lid’s back on all the time, because you’re afraid to let it come off, under any circumstances. And the steam’s still building. And pretty soon it’s going to blow either way, and when it does it’ll hurt somebody, which’d be okay if it was just you. Except that it probably won’t be.”

  Carra cast her eyes at me, warily. There was an image lurking somewhere in her downcast gaze, half-veiled by lash and post-meds pupil dilation: Past, present, maybe even future. It took all my remaining self-restraint not to tweeze it forward with a secret gesture, catch it between my own lids, and blink it large enough to scry. But that would be impolite. We were friends, after all, me and her.

  And: Like that actually means anything, some ungrateful, traitor part of me whispered—right against the figurative drum of my mental inner ear.

  “You know,” she said, finally, “if you hadn’t caught me on an off-day . . . that probably would have worked.”

  Adding, a moment later—

  “And speaking of reading minds—you think I don’t know what you’re planning, by the way? An open medium, a vessel with no shields; couldn’t ask for a better demon-trap, not if you ordered it from Acme Better Homes & Banishments. I walk in, Fleer jumps me, you cast him out and toss him right back through the Rift again—and what the hell, huh? Because I’m used to having squatters in my head.”

  “So what—would you have agreed if I’d said it straight out?” I shot back, reasonably enough. “But c’mon, admit it: Be a fuck of a lot more interesting than just hiding in here, where you’re no use to anybody.”

  “I’m sick of being ‘of use’. I’ve been ‘of use’ since I was born. And now—now you want to use me; Jesus, Jude. Is that what ‘friends’ do to each other, these days?”

  I shrugged. Well, when you put it that way . . .

  Softly: “I’ll always be your friend, Carra.”

  She shook her head. “That other part of you, sure. But you . . . you’ve changed.”

  Shadow-coveting vibe just pumping off of me by now, no doubt—extruding at her through my pores, like Denis Leary-level cigarette smoke at a hyper-allergenic: Sloppy-drunk with wanting him, distracted with seeking him, enraged with not finding him. Forgotten emotions colliding like neurons, giving off heat and light and horror. Making me feel different to her, all complicated and intrusive, instead of the calming psychic dead-spot whose absence she’d gotten all too used to basking in. Making me feel just like . . .

  . . . everybody else.

  “I never change,” I said. Contradicting myself, almost immediately: “And anyway, should I have just stayed the way I was: That fool, that weak child? Too scared of everything, including himself, to do anything about anything?”

  “I liked him.”

  So simple, so plaintive. Her barely-audible voice like an echo of that dream I’d had the night before, the one where I’d seen her hanging between earth and air. Asking me: What did you do to yourself, Jude? What did you do?

  You know what I did, I started to say, but froze mid-word. Because just then—at the very same time—I finally caught a hint of something unnatural in the air around us: Some phantom stink skittering from corner to corner like a rancid pool-ball, drawing an explosive puff of dust from the centre of the prayer-plant’s calcified Cry To Heaven. Making the nurse look up, sniffing.

  Carra hacked, hands flying to her nose; her fingers came away wet, stained with equal parts coughed-out snot and thick, fresh blood.

  “Fuck,” she said, amazed. “That smell—”

  —it’s you.

  And she began to rise.

  The nurse’s eyes widened, fixing; she made a funny little “eeep”-y noise, and scuttled back against the wall. To her right, static ate the TV’s signal entirely, turning All My Children into Nothing But Snow. I took a hesitant half-step myself, fingers flashing purple: Wards, activate! Ghosts, disperse!

  Thinking—projecting—even as my flared nostrils stung in sympathy: Oh, baby, don’t. Please, do not. Do not do this to me . . .

  Carra’s heels hooked the seat of her chair, knocking it backwards with the force of their upswing; she gasped, blood-tinted mucus-drip already stretching into hair-fine tendrils that streamed out wide on either side, wreathing her like impromptu mummy-wrap. The chair fell, skipping once, like a badly-thrown beach-rock.

  Rising to stick and hang there in the centre of the room, her heels holding five steady inches above the floor. Head flung back. Ectoplasm pouring from her nose and mouth. While, all around, a psychically-charged dust devil scraped the walls like some cartoon tornado-in-a-can, its tightening funnel composed equally of frustrated alien willpower and whatever small, inanimate objects happened to be closest by: Plastic cutlery, scraps of paper. Hair and thread and crumbs. Garbage of every description.

  A babble of ghostly voices filling her throat, making her jaw’s underside bulge like a frog’s. Messages scrawling up and down her exposed limbs as the restless dead took fresh delight in making her their unwilling megaphone, their stiff and uncooperative human notepad.

  She looked down at me, cushioned behind my pad of defensive Power, and let the corners of her mouth give an awful rictus-twitch. And as her glasses lifted free—apparently unnoticed—to join the rest of the swirl, I saw ectoplasmic lenses slide across her eyes like cataracts, blindness taking hold in a milky, tidal, unstoppable ebb and flow.

  Forcing her lips further apart, as the tendons in her neck grated and popped. Wrenching a word here and there from the torrent inside her, and forcing herself to observe:

  “Not . . . ever . . . ything. Is . . . ab . . . out. you. Jude.”

  Believe it—

  —or not.

  * * *

  And I, as usual, chose to choose . . . not.

  * * *

  The primary aim of magicians is to gather knowledg
e, because knowledge—as everyone finds out fairly early, from Schoolhouse Rock on—is power. To that end, we often conjure demons, who we use and dismiss in the same offhand way most people grab the right implement from their kitchen drawer: Fork, cheese-knife, slotted spoon; salt, pepper, sulphur. Keep to the recipe, clean your plate, then walk away quickly once the meal is done.

  But even if we pursue this culinary analogy to its most pedantic conclusion, cooking with demons is a bit like trying to run a restaurant specializing in dishes as likely to kill you as they are to nourish you: Deathcap mushroom pasta with a side of ergot-infested rye bread, followed by the all-Fugu special. They’re cruel and unpredictable, mysterious and restless, icily malignant—far less potent than the actual Fallen who spawned them, yet far more fearful than simple elementals of fire, air, water, earth, or the mysterious realms which lie beneath it. Like the dead, demons come when called—or even when not—and envy us our flesh; like the dead, you must feed them blood before they consent to give their names or do your bidding.

  Psellus called them lucifugum, those who Fly The Light. I call them a pain in the ass, especially when you’re not entirely sure what *else* to call them.

  On the streetcar-ride from College/Yonge to Bathurst/College, I chewed my lip and flipped through my copy of the Grimoire Lemegeton, which lists the names and powers of seventy-two different demons, along with their various functions.

  Eleven lesser demons procure the love of women, or (if your time is tight) make lust-objects of either sex show themselves naked. Four can transport people safely from place to place, or change them into other shapes, or gift them with high worldly position, cunning, courage, wit and eloquence. Three produce illusions: Of running water, of musical instruments playing, of birds in flight. One can make you invisible, another turn base metals into gold. Two torment their victims with running sores. One, surprisingly, teaches ethics; I don’t get a whole lot of requests for that one, strangely enough.

  Glasyalabolas, who teaches all arts and sciences, yet incites to murder and bloodshed. Raum, who reconciles enemies, when he’s not destroying cities. Flauros, who can either burn your foes alive, or discourse on divinity. Or Fleer himself, indifferently good or bad, who “will do the work of the operator.”

  If it actually was Fleer inside Jen, that is. If, if, if.

  Practicing the usual injunctions under my breath, while simultaneously trying to decide between potential protective sigils: Verbum Caro Factorem Est, your basic Quadrangelic conjuration, maybe even the ultimate old-school reliability of Solomon’s Triangle—upper point to the north, Anexhexeton to the east, Tetragrammaton to the west, Primematum anchoring. Telling your nameless quarry, as you etch the lines around yourself:

  “I conjure and command thee, O spirit N., by Him who spake and it was done; Asar Un-Nefer, Myself Made Perfect, the Bornless One, Ineffable. Come peaceably, visibly, and without delay. Come, fulfil my desires and persist unto the end in accordance to my will. Zazas, Zazas, Nasatanada, Zazas: Exit this vessel as and when I command, or be thrown through the Gate from whence ye came.”

  The streetcar slid to a halt, Franz visible on the platform ahead—looking worried, as ever. A shopping bag in either hand testified to his having already filled out my list. Which was good; proved he wanted Jen “cured” enough to throw in from his own pocket, at least.

  And: I’ve done this, I thought. Lots of times. I can do it again, Carra or not—and what the fuck had I really thought I needed Carra for, anyway? As she’d (sort of) pointed out, herself.

  Easy. Peasy. Easy-peasy.

  But none of the above turned out to matter very much at all, really. In the end.

  * * *

  Stepped off the streetcar at six or so. By midnight I was back at Grandmother Yau’s, sucking back a plate of Glass Noodle Cashew Chicken and washing it back with lots and lots of tea, so much I could practically feel my bladder tensing yet another notch with each additional swig. Starting to itch, and twinge, and . . . ache.

  (Ache.)

  “So, Jude-ah,” came a soft, Mandarin-accented voice from just behind my shoulder. “Seeing you seem sad, I wonder: How does your liver feel? Is the general of your body’s army sickening, tonight?”

  And: Tonight, tonight, I found myself musing. What WAS tonight, at the Khyber? Oh, right . . . open bar. No bullshit restrictions. I could wear that tank-top I’d been saving, the really low-cut one.

  Wick-ed.

  Grandmother Yau reached in, touching her gilded middle claw to my ear, brief and deft; I jumped at its sting, collecting myself, as she reminded me—

  “I am not used to being ignored, little brother.”

  Automatically: “Ten thousand pardons, big sister.”

  She slit her green-tinged eyes, shrewdly. “One will do.” Then, waving the nearest ghost over to top up my teapot: “My spies tell me you had business, farther east. Is it completed?”

  And waaah, but there were so very many ways to answer that particular question, weren’t there? Though I, typically, chose the easiest.

  “Wei,” I said, nodding. “Very complete.”

  “The possessed girl, ah? Your friend.”

  That’s right.

  My friend Jen, laying there on the tatty green carpet of her basement apartment; my other friend Franz, leaning over her. Shaking her—a few times, gently at first, then harder. Slapping her face once. Doing it again.

  Watching her continue to lie there, impassively limp. Then looking back at me, a growing disbelief writ plain across his too-pale, freckled face—me, standing still inside my circle, with no expression at all on mine. Watching him watch.

  She’s not breathing, Jude.

  Well, no.

  Jude. I think . . . I think she’s dead.

  Well—yes.

  “Turns out,” I told Grandmother Yau, “she wasn’t actually possessed, after all.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  Ai-yaaah.

  Because: I’d taken Franz’s word, and Franz had taken Jen’s—but she’d lied to us both, obviously, or been so screwed up that even she hadn’t really known where those voices in her skull were coming from. So I’d come running, prepared to kick some non-corporeal butt, and funnelled the whole charge of my Power into her at once, cranked up to demon-expelling level.

  But if there’s no demon to be put to flight, that kind of full-bore metaphysical shock attack can’t help but turn out somewhat like sticking a fork in a light socket, or vice versa. If that’s even possible.

  Franz again, in Jen’s apartment, turning on me with his eyes all aburn. Reminding me, shakily: YOU said you could HELP.

  If she was possessed, yes.

  Then why is she dead, Jude?

  Because . . . she wasn’t.

  You—said—

  I shrugged. Whoopsie.

  He lunged for me. I let off a force-burst that threw him backwards five feet, cracking his spine like a whip.

  You don’t EVER lay hands on me, I said, quietly. Not ever. Unless I want you to.

  He sat there, hugging his beloved corpse with charred-white palms, crying in at least two kinds of pain. And snarled back: Like I’d want to touch you with some other guy’s dick and some third fucker pushing, you son of a fucking bitch.

  (Yeah, whatever.)

  Fact was, though, if Franz hadn’t been so cowardly and credulous in the first place—if he hadn’t wanted an instant black magic miracle, instead of having the guts to just take her to a mental hospital, the way most normal people do when their girlfriends start telling them they hear voices—then Jen might still be alive.

  Emphasis on the might.

  I can call demons. I can bind angels. I can raise the dead, for a while. But just like Franz himself had observed, more than once, I can’t actually cure anybody—can’t heal them of cancer, leprosy, M.S., old age, me
ntal illness or color-blindness to save my fucking life. Not unless they want me to. Not unless they let me.

  The other way? That’s called a miracle, and my last name ain’t Christ.

  Franz, crying out, tears thick as blood in his strangled voice: You PROMISED me, you fuck! You fucking PROMISED me!

  Followed, in my memory, by a quick mental hit of Carra, half the city away: Still floating, still wreathed. And think: If I could do something for people like that, you moron, don’t you think I WOULD?

  She wants to be nuts, though. Long and the short of it. Just like, on some level, Jen wanted to die.

  But hell, what was Franz going to do about it, one way or another? Shun me?

  I took a fresh bite of noodle while the ancient Chinese spectre I’d come to think of as Grandmother’s right-hand ghost flitted by, pausing to murmur in her ear for a moment before fading away through the nearest lacquer screen. And when she looked at me, she had something I’d never seen before lurking in the corners of her impenetrable gaze. If I’d had to hazard a guess, I might even have said it looked a lot like—well—

  —surprise.

  “Someone,” she said, at last, “is at the Maitre D’s station. Asking for you, Jude-ah.”

  Glancing sidelong, so I’d be forced to follow the path of her gaze over to where . . . he waited: He, it. Me.

  My shadow.

  My shadow, highlighted against the Empress’ Noodle’s thick, red velvet drapes like a sliver of lambent bronze—head down, shyly, with its hair in its eyes and its hands in its pockets. My shadow, come at last after all my fruitless seeking, just waiting for its better half to take control, wrap it tight, gather it in and make it—finally—whole again.

  Waiting, patiently. Quiet and acquiescent. Waiting, waiting . . .

  . . . for me.

  I met Grandmother Yau’s gaze again, and found her normally impassive face gone somehow far more rigid than usual: Green-veined porcelain, a funerary mask trimmed in milky jade.

  “The Yin mirror reflects only one way, Chiu-wai-ah,” she said, at last. “It is a dark path, always. And slippery.”