“Just thought I’d look in a minute, dear, to be sure you’re safe and well.”
“I’m fine,” Jessica said, turning her eyes reluctantly away from the TV toward Mrs. Post. She wasn’t at all interested in the program, but she wasn’t interested in one of Mrs. Post’s lectures, either.
“What are you watching, dear?”
“A play,” Jessica said. “An old play about some weird people.”
Mrs. Post glanced at the set for a moment. “Well,” she said, “I suppose it’s suitable for a twelve-year-old. I suppose your mother must have approved it. Of course, with her away so much these days, it must be hard for her to keep track of what you watch. I do think——”
“Excuse me, Mrs. Post,” Jessica said, getting up off the couch. “I have to go to the bathroom.” In the bathroom she locked the door and leaned on the basin, making faces at herself in the mirror. First she sucked in her cheeks and narrowed her long eyes. Joy, whose face was round and soft-looking around the edges, said that Jessica had a foxy face. Jessica bared her teeth, making herself look more foxlike, sly and angry—an angry fox face. Then she pulled her eyebrows together and puffed her cheeks way out. “I do think——” she said in a perfect imitation of Mrs. Post’s voice—not quite as loud as a power saw but just as whiny and annoying. “I do think that children are left to their own devices too much these days. Now when my children were small——”
Jessica was great at imitations. Even Brandon said so. In fact, Brandon had been the first one to mention it. He used to laugh at her imitations of people they knew, particularly Mrs. Post. But once he’d almost slugged her for imitating Mrs. Fortune’s shaky head.
After a few minutes, Jessica flushed the toilet and went back into the living room. Mrs. Post was still there, but at least she was on her feet again. As she went out the door, she reminded Jessica to keep the door locked when she was home alone.
“You really must keep the door locked, Jessica,” she said for the hundredth time. “To leave the door unlocked and just call ‘come in’ the way you do is terribly dangerous. You never know, these days, who might walk in.”
“I knew it was you,” Jessica said. She stared at Mrs. Post thinking, I knew it was you because no one else makes the stairs creak like that. She didn’t say it out loud, but Mrs. Post must have guessed what she was thinking because she frowned and her face got a little red.
When she was gone, Jessica got up and locked the door. Mrs. Post had been expecting a murderer at the Regency Apartment House for as long as Jessica could remember. He hadn’t appeared yet, but Jessica wasn’t at all sure he wouldn’t someday. It was just that she didn’t intend to lock the door before Mrs. Post made her inevitable appearance. She wasn’t about to get up and go to the door to let Mrs. Post in every single night, when she didn’t want her to come in the first place. So she just had to take her chances on the murderer until after Mrs. Post had come and gone.
With Mrs. Post out of the way, Jessica went to the kitchen and looked at the kitten. It had been almost two hours since Mrs. Fortune had fed and cleaned it. It was moving restlessly on the bottom of the box, a squirming hairless blob. There was a shapeless unborn look about it that made her shiver.
“Ugh,” she said. “You squirmy thing. Why should I waste my time keeping you alive? I don’t want you.”
At the sound of her voice, the wobbly weaving head steadied. The kitten lay still, listening and waiting.
“I don’t want you,” Jessica repeated loudly. Angrily, she jerked a pan out of the cupboard and slammed it onto the stove. When the milk was heated, she filled the bottle, and sitting down on the floor, she picked the kitten up with the tips of her fingers and put it in her lap. It drank fiercely, concentrating all the strength of its tiny body on food until the last drop of milk was gone.
Shortly afterward, when Jessica got into bed, she did a very unusual thing—she reached over and turned out the light. She never turned out the light or went to sleep when Joy was still out, no matter how late it got to be. Instead she sat up in bed, reading or only thinking, until she heard Joy’s key in the lock. Then she turned out the light quickly and flopped down under the covers. When Joy looked in a few minutes later, she would pretend to be fast asleep. By lying in a certain position with her head propped on the pillow, she could see the doorway through squinted eyes.
Joy would stand still a moment, usually, and the light from the hallway would turn her blond hair into a shining wreath, and her face would be shadowed and very beautiful. Once, when Jessica was about eight years old, Joy had come into the room and kissed her very softly on the forehead. But usually she only stood in the doorway and then tiptoed away. After that Jessica would go to sleep.
There was no longer any real reason why Jessica stayed awake until Joy got home, but there had been once. There had been a time when she was afraid to go to sleep because of a dream that came back again and again. It was a terrifying dream about waking up all alone in an empty room that grew bigger and emptier until it filled the whole universe. She had not had the dream for a long time, but waiting up for Joy had become a habit.
There was no reason to break the habit for the first time on that particular night. Of course, she had nothing to read, but that had happened before. The only thing different was the kitten and he was certainly not a very good reason to do anything, except that if she were asleep at the next feeding time, she wouldn’t have to decide what to do.
So Jessica turned out the lights and settled down to sleep, and she did not set the alarm, as Mrs. Fortune had suggested. Perhaps she would wake up and perhaps she wouldn’t. She didn’t much care either way. If the kitten was dead in the morning, the problem would be solved.
• • •
It was almost exactly two hours later that Jessica found herself suddenly wide awake and staring through the darkness at the luminous hands of her clock. At first she thought she had heard something, maybe Joy arriving home, but she waited and listened without hearing the familiar sounds of clicking high heels and doors opening and closing. But there had been something like a sound.
Closing her eyes and using all her energy to listen, Jessica began to hear it again—the same breath-soft sound of movement she had heard in the cave. She couldn’t possibly hear that cat moving, yet she was sure she did. She also obviously couldn’t see anything, but a kind of picture kept forming behind her tightly closed eyelids.
She saw a face, triangular and ashy gray, but instead of being blind and eyeless, it seemed to be mostly eyes. The top part of the face was filled with two huge glowing diamonds. Jessica blinked hard and the face disappeared, only to return with the diamond eyes glowing brighter than before. At last she turned on the lights and jumped out of bed.
When Jessica bent over the cardboard box in the corner of the kitchen, the kitten raised its head and sniffed the air. It turned its face toward her, wrinkled its flat nose, and sniffed again. It was, of course, as blind as ever. But when its weaving head faced Jessica directly, it stopped. It clearly knew that she was there, and it knew exactly where—but it did not call to her to feed it. It only went on watching her blindly, waiting for what she would do.
Chapter Three
JESSICA HADN’T MEANT TO FEED THE KITTEN AGAIN. She had gotten out of bed and gone into the kitchen just to look at it for a moment. Not that she wanted to see it. It was almost as if it seemed dangerous not to, in the same strange way that it sometimes seemed very dangerous to step on a crack or walk under a ladder, or follow some other silly superstition.
But once in the kitchen, faced with that strange blind watchfulness, Jessica found herself refilling the hot-water bottle and heating the milk. The kitten was still drinking when Joy finally returned from her date with Alan.
Jessica was sitting on the kitchen floor with the kitten in her lap, supporting its tiny body in an almost vertical position. The bottle was nearly empty when there was the sound of a key in the front door, whispered words, and then Joy appearing in the ki
tchen doorway.
Joy was wearing her velvet dress with the high waist that made her look like a medieval princess. Her golden hair was pulled up into a curly ponytail, and her cheeks were very red. She was humming a tune until she saw Jessica, and then she jumped and looked startled—almost guilty.
“Jessie,” she said. “What on earth? What are you doing awake at this hour?”
Jessica could have said, “I’m always awake at this hour on nights you’re away,” but she didn’t. Instead she only said, “I’m feeding a kitten. It has to eat every two hours.”
“A kitten!” Joy looked amazed and then pleased. “I thought you hated cats. Here, let’s have a look.” She crossed the kitchen unsteadily and bent over Jessica. “Let me see the itsy-bitsy——” She was going on in the crooning baby talk she always used when she spoke to cats, but she stopped in mid-croon. “Good Lord! Jessica, are you sure that’s a kitten? It doesn’t look like any kitten I’ve ever seen.”
“It’s very young,” Jessica said. “Maybe only a couple of days. That’s why it has to be fed so often. It’s not really old enough to leave its mother.”
“Well, let’s take it back to its mother then, and we’ll get you one of those darling Persians from the pet shop.”
“I don’t want a darling Persian,” Jessica said.
“That’s ridiculous,” Joy said. “If you want a kitten, let’s get you a good one, instead of that poor little monster. It hardly looks like a kitten at all.”
“It’s a kitten,” Jessica said.
“Well, I suppose it must be, but look how bare and squirmy it is.” Joy drew up her shoulders in a delicate shudder. “It reminds me of some kind of worm. A poor little blind worm.”
“I like worms,” Jessica said. “I like worms a lot better than kittens.”
• • •
So its name was Worm, and Jessica continued to take care of it, although she didn’t know why. Fortunately, for Worm at least, summer vacation wasn’t over or she wouldn’t have been able to do it even if she’d wanted to. And she didn’t want to, not really, but something—a strange unwilling kind of fascination—kept her coming back to peer into the box in the kitchen. And once there, the kitten’s inescapable blind watchfulness held her like a charm until it was fed and cared for.
Sometimes, dragging herself out of bed in the middle of the night, Jessica would decide that the very next day she would take the kitten to the animal shelter and leave it. Of course they would put it to sleep. No one would want to raise such a useless ugly kitten. But somehow Jessica never got around to going to the animal shelter.
It was during those night feedings that Jessica began to talk to Worm. Staggering out of her warm bed, blinking in the sudden glare of the kitchen lights, she would grab him out of his box and hold him in both hands.
“Yes,” she would say. “Here I am, you awful pest. I suppose you think I like having to get up at all hours to take care of a disgusting thing like you. I suppose you think I enjoy having to hold you while you drool milk all over me and having to clean your bottom like a dirty baby. If I start getting sick or something, it’s going to be your fault. It’s not good for somebody my age to miss so much sleep. Just like it’s your fault I lost that brand-new library book and now I’m going to have to pay for it out of my own allowance, and I never even got to finish reading it. I should have just let you die, even if it is your ninth life, like Mrs. Fortune said.”
Other times, Jessica would come into the kitchen and sit down beside the box and talk to Worm without touching him at all. “Why don’t you cry?” she’d ask him. “It’s past your eating time. Why don’t you meow like an ordinary kitten and ask me for your food?”
Always, when Jessica talked to him, Worm would push himself up waveringly to a sitting position and turn his face toward hers. He would sit waiting, listening, moving with her every move, until she was sure that, in some weird way, he could see her from behind his blind eyes.
“Why don’t you cry?” Jessica would ask, and then she would answer for him.
“Why should I cry like an ordinary cat?” she’d imagine him saying. “I am Worm, and I am different.”
“Ugh,” Jessica would answer. “You’re different, all right—uglier and weirder.”
“I am different,” Worm would say. “Mrs. Fortune knows. She told you I was wise.”
“All I know is that you’re a disgusting little monster. Come here and drink your milk so I can get back to bed.”
It took a long time for Worm to get his eyes. Mrs. Fortune had said that kittens’ eyes open slowly, a little bit at a time; but more than a week passed, and there was still not the slightest crack in the tight gray creases that slanted upward from each side of the flat nose. Jessica was beginning to think she’d been right in the first place—that there was something abnormal about that strange unfinished face.
But then, one morning, she slept through a feeding and hurried into the kitchen just after daybreak to find Worm sitting up in the corner of his box, watching her through slits that widened into blue-black diamonds.
“Well,” she said, snatching him up and giving him a shake. “So you did have real eyes all the time.”
Worm opened his tiny red cavern of a mouth and hissed at her like an angry snake. Jessica had not seen him do that before, and for a moment she felt almost frightened, but then she shrugged. “I don’t like your looks either,” she said. “So I guess we’re even.”
By the time school started, Worm had graduated to being fed only every four hours. By coming home at lunch time, Jessica was able to maintain his feeding schedule. The school was only four blocks away, and though she had never bothered to come home for lunch before, this year, eating lunch at home actually worked out rather well. It worked out well because there was no one at school with whom Jessica could eat. Not right at the moment, anyway, since she’d lost two of her best friends during the summer. Or, to be more exact, she had lost the only two friends she had—the only ones since Brandon.
Brandon had never been a school friend because he had always gone to a private school. Not having anyone at school then hadn’t mattered much as long as there were afternoons and weekends with Brandon to think about and plan for. But when Brandon wasn’t a friend anymore, Jessica had decided to work at finding somebody at school. It had taken a long time and a lot of effort to discover Diane and Alise; and now since the middle of summer, they were gone, too.
Alise, who had been stubborn and bossy anyway, and who had only been friendly between fights, had moved away in the middle of June. Then, early in August, Diane, who was not too exciting but very easy to get along with, had deserted Jessica for a new red-haired girl named Brenda, who lived on the Heights and who had a private swimming pool. So Jessica had been left with no one and nothing—except a whole lot of free time.
There was another reason for the recent increase in Jessica’s spare time—Alan, Joy’s newest boyfriend. Joy had had quite a few boyfriends, but most of them had come and gone. Alan, however, seemed to be different. He had been around for several months, and Joy had been seeing more and more of him. Joy had told Jessica that she felt Alan was serious, which meant that he might be considering marriage.
Jessica supposed she couldn’t blame Joy for being interested in a man who was thinking of marriage. As she was always pointing out, she had never really had a husband to help her with all the difficulties of mak-a living and raising a child. She had gotten married when she was “ridiculously young,” and when she was still only eighteen and the mother of a newborn baby, Jessica’s father had run away and deserted them both. Jessica had heard all about Joy’s problems so many times that she couldn’t help seeing how great it was that Alan was the marrying type—except that nothing had ever happened to make Jessica think he was the least bit the father type. Alan looked very young, and it was easy to guess that if he ever did get interested in being a father, it wouldn’t be of someone who was already twelve years old.
So that was the
way things had been lately. First, cross out Brandon, and then Alise and Diane, and finally Joy, too, which left only—Worm. Jessica had to admit that if Worm had to happen to her, he couldn’t have picked a better time. In any other year, she would never have had the time to spend on keeping him alive. But she did have time now, a great deal of it, and as the days went by, she went on spending it on Worm.
Chapter Four
AS THE WEEKS PASSED, WORM GREW RAPIDLY. JESSICA watched him, waiting for him to arrive at the round and cuddly stage—the toy-faced cute stage that all kittens go through. But although his eyes widened and grew into enormous slanted diamonds and he learned to slither or spring on his lengthening legs, his cuddly kitten stage did not arrive. He grew larger and larger, but he remained slick and silent, worm-thin and worm-gray.
Joy, who had always claimed to love cats, didn’t seem to like Worm any better as he started looking more like a cat and less like a “blind gray worm.” She went on mentioning to Jessica all the things that were wrong with him and how much better it would have been to get a Persian from the pet shop.
“I’m sure that losing his mother at such an early age must have damaged him in some way,” Joy said. “He doesn’t seem like a normal kitten at all. He’s so ugly and unfriendly, and he doesn’t romp around the way a normal kitten does.”
“He plays,” Jessica said. “He just doesn’t do it when you’re around. No wonder he hides when you’re here. He probably thinks you’re a stranger—you’re gone so much.”
Jessica didn’t mention that Worm seldom played when she herself was around, either. She knew he played only because she heard him. At least she thought that was what he was doing—running madly around the apartment at night after she was in bed. A few times she had caught him springing or running when she entered a room, but as soon as he saw her, he stopped and sat still, watching and waiting, as always. Often as she moved from room to room, he followed, but only to sit again when she stopped—a sleek statue of a cat with his long tail coiled around his feet, watching every move she made with his bronze-green eyes.
The Witches of Worm Page 3
