The Witches of Worm

by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  There was a loud sharp knock on the door, and Jessica jumped to her feet, startled and immediately apprehensive. “Something’s gone wrong,” she said.

  Glaring at Worm, she said, “You’d better help me. It’s all your fault.” But he only went on staring out of empty black holes, rimmed with gold.

  “All right!” Jessica hissed. “All right for you!” And she ran to unlock the door.

  It was Mrs. Post again, only redder in the face and puffing more than ever. But instead of making for her favorite chair, she only stood heaving and glaring, while Jessica felt herself getting more and more tense and frightened. At last, in an ominously quiet voice, Mrs. Post said, “Jessica. Why did you lie to me? Why did you lie about seeing someone in the yard?”

  Jessica tried not to let herself show the fright that made the skin of her face feel tight and crawly.

  “Lie?” she said. “I didn’t lie. What did I say that was a lie?”

  Mrs. Post shook her head slowly. “Jessica. I know you were lying about seeing someone in the back yard and about seeing him go into the building. No one came into the building.”

  “He did!” Jessica said. “He did, too. He must have run through the hall and out the front door before Mr. Post had time to look for him. There was plenty of time for him to run out the front door.”

  There was a long pause while Mrs. Post stared, her eyes hot and angry in her red face. The anger grew, stretching and swelling, until Jessica felt as if a gigantic balloon was about to explode in front of her.

  “No, Jessica,” Mrs. Post squeezed out through lips held tight against the explosion. “Mr. Post had been standing outside the door to Mrs. Fortune’s apartment for at least fifteen minutes before I called. He’d gone to check the doors, and he met Mrs. Fortune in the hall, they’d been standing there talking—just a few feet from the back door—right up until I called. That’s why it took him so long to answer the phone. I don’t know why you lied to me, Jessica, but I’m certainly going to tell your mother in the morning.”

  To be caught, so inescapably caught, was so shattering that for a moment Jessica felt terrified—lost and hopeless. She backed away, putting her hands up in front of her face, palms outward. She had done that for years, whenever she was badly frightened. When she was very small, she had often awakened with her hands before her eyes—to ward off the terror of the dream about the empty room. But it had been a long time since she had done it where anyone could see.

  At the moment she realized what she was doing, Jessica caught a glimpse of Mrs. Post’s face. It was only a fleeting impression, but it was enough to tell her that something was changing. The angry flush was fading from the wide face as it clouded over with curiosity and concern.

  “What is it, Jessica?” Mrs. Post asked.

  Jessica let her hands remain where they were and her face crumpled as if with pain. Through half-shut eyes she checked the effect on Mrs. Post, and the results were encouraging. Mrs. Post was obviously fascinated. Jessica’s hands came down very slowly while her face went blank and bewildered. She looked around in a dazed way and then rubbed her forehead.

  “I—I feel so funny,” she faltered. “Dizzy—I can’t seem to think straight. Is—is it late? Is my mother home?”

  “No, she’s not home,” Mrs. Post said. “But I think she should be. Do you know where to call her?”

  Jessica shook her head slowly. “No, I don’t. I think she told me, but I can’t remember. I can’t seem to remember—anything.”

  Mrs. Post was looking more and more concerned. She put her hand on Jessica’s forehead. “I think you may have a fever,” she said. “A fever can make a person’s mind do strange things sometimes. You really should be in bed, Jessica. Let me help you get into bed. You’re probably just coming down with the flu.”

  Without saying or doing anything more, except that she went on acting a little vague and confused, Jessica allowed herself to be put to bed. But even after she was tucked under the covers, Mrs. Post did not leave. She moved her favorite chair into the bedroom and sat there until Jessica finally pretended to be sound asleep. Then Mrs. Post got up, and Jessica heard her floppy slippers scuffling their way to the front door and creaking down the stairs. Immediately, Jessica jumped out of bed and went looking for Worm.

  Worm was hiding again, and as Jessica looked and looked, she got more and more angry. She finally found him in Joy’s room, where he seldom went. He was far back under the bed, and she reached under and pulled him out by one hind leg. He spit and yowled and dug his claws into the rug, but she jerked him loose and carried him roughly into the living room. When she dropped him in the middle of the floor, he struck at her as he fell, raking the air near her hand with a claw-fringed paw.

  Jessica laughed angrily. She squatted in front of Worm, ready to jump away if he moved toward her. For a long moment he poised, humpbacked and bristling—like a Halloween cat on the end of a flying broom. Then, slowly, he sank to his haunches, and Jessica sat, too, and waited.

  “Look what you’ve done now,” she said at last. “Look what you’ve gotten me into.”

  Worm stared back, owl-faced, shallow-eyed, and silent, until Jessica leaned forward sharply and hissed, “See! See what you did!”

  His ears flattened then and suddenly his eyes were flowing with brassy fire. Jessica felt the hot flare of excitement even before the howl began.

  “I see. I seee——” The voice rose and fell throbbingly. “I see that you frightened her and she deserved it, and you are not in trouble.”

  “Not in trouble?” Jessica said. “She’ll tell that I lied about seeing a man. And it was your idea. You told me to say there was a man in the yard. I was mad at her for barging in, but I wouldn’t have thought about saying I saw a man. It was your idea.”

  There was a silence that lasted until Jessica began to think there was no more to come; but at last the voice began again—distant and indistinct at first, then growing louder. “She is not angry. She is no longer angry. No one will be. They will think you are innocent.”

  “Innocent? But she knows I lied.”

  “Yes, she knows. But she thinks you could not help it—that you are innocent.”

  Through a long frozen silence, Jessica sat staring into the burning gold of Worm’s eyes, until a deepening cold made her shiver violently.

  “You’re evil,” she said. “You are——”

  “A witch’s cat.” The voice was fainter now, but what it said was unmistakable. In a hollow moan that rose almost to a wail and then throbbed away into silence, it said, “I am a witch’s cat.”

  Jessica hunched her shoulders against another shudder. For a long time, she sat very still, trying to untangle strange dark images from reasonable ideas and arguments.

  “A witch’s cat?” she whispered at last. “You can’t be a witch’s cat. What witch? When were you a witch’s cat?”

  No answer. Jessica waited and watched until she saw that Worm’s ears had cupped forward and his eyes were rounding into blank metallic disks. He stood then, stretched, and stalked away, glancing back only once at Jessica. As he turned away, he slashed the air with his long tail as if daring her to try to stop him.

  Jessica didn’t try. She sat stiffly instead, feeling the excitement burning lower and lower until it faded into something cold and gray and unpleasant. The cold went with her when she went back to bed.

  The extra blankets she piled on her bed were heavy, and she soon felt hot and smothery; but when she threw the blankets off, she found herself shivering in a chill cocoon of sheets. Time passed slowly, and at last she heard Joy arriving home, pausing briefly in the doorway of the room while Jessica, as always, pretended to be asleep. Long after Joy had gone to bed, Jessica was still awake.

  She lay stiffly with eyes as wide as broken windows—so open and empty that the darkness seemed to spill through into her mind. Thoughts and ideas that might have seemed impossible by daylight moved freely and tangibly in the darkness, growing and changing into ne
w and strange convictions.

  “A witch’s cat,” she thought. “Of course. That explains it. That explains the voice—and the things it tells me to do. But who is the witch? And why did she send him here—to me?”

  At breakfast the next morning, Joy was her usual self, too rushed and distracted to say more than a brief good-morning. Obviously Mrs. Post hadn’t had a chance to tell about what had happened the night before. But she would tell, as soon as she got the chance. There was no doubt about that.

  The moment Joy left the apartment, Jessica hurried to her room for her things and from there to the front door. She would be very early for school, but it couldn’t be helped. She could not stay alone in the apartment any longer.

  At the door she turned to look back. Worm would be emerging soon from wherever he’d hidden himself, and she didn’t want to see him. At least not right away. Before Worm had a chance to talk to her again, there were some things she had to know.

  Chapter Seven

  THAT DAY, THE DAY AFTER THE SCARING OF Mrs. Post, Jessica stopped at the library on the way home from school. There she discovered that the book she had lost the night she found Worm still had not been replaced. The librarian said that after they’d given up on Jessica’s book, they had ordered another copy, but it had never arrived. “I don’t understand why,” the librarian said. “There’s been plenty of time. Are you particularly interested in the Salem witch trials? Perhaps we have some other material on them.”

  “Well, I guess so,” Jessica said. “About witches. I just thought I’d like to read some stuff about witches.”

  The librarian smiled. “That seems to be a very popular subject lately,” she said. “Witches and ghosts and all kinds of magic. It seems to be a real fad. Nearly everything we have is out, but I’ll see what’s still on the shelves.”

  Jessica took the only two books she could get, old ones with faded frazzled covers and many pages of small dark print. She could hardly wait to start reading. Surely in all those pages there would be some answers—though she was not yet certain just what all the questions were.

  However, the questions and the answers, too, had to wait, because when Jessica got home she discovered that Mrs. Post had told on her. Mrs. Post had called Joy at work and asked her to come home early for a very important conference about Jessica. She had refused to go into it any further on the phone and had hung up, leaving Joy to imagine all sorts of horrible things all day. Then when Joy got home, Mrs. Post had told her everything that had happened. Apparently she had made a big thing out of the way Jessica had acted, and had kept insisting that Jessica showed “distinct signs of emotional disturbance.”

  So Jessica was almost in trouble. She would have been in trouble, for sure and certain, if it had not been for the way Joy felt about Mrs. Post. Joy had always said that Mrs. Post was a fat old busybody and a gloom merchant, who just loved to exaggerate anything the least bit unpleasant. Furthermore, Mrs. Post had never approved of Joy and had never lost an opportunity to lecture her, particularly about the way she was rearing Jessica.

  “She’s too old and fat to have a good time herself, so she just can’t stand to see somebody else enjoying life a little,” Joy always said. “That’s the only reason she insists on dragging herself up here to check on you every time I go out. I keep telling her it isn’t necessary, but she keeps doing it just to make me feel guilty. I always let her know when I’m going to be out, in case of an emergency, but you don’t really need for her to come clear up to the third floor to check on you, do you, Jessie?”

  “I hate it,” Jessica said. “She always snoops around and says things about how her kids were raised—as if nobody does it right anymore. And she always says things about how much you go out.”

  “See,” Joy said. “That’s exactly what I mean. She just loves to make people feel guilty. And I came close to telling her so, too. But I didn’t. I just told her that you undoubtedly thought you saw a man in the yard, and that every kid who is a little bit unusual and original isn’t necessarily emotionally disturbed. That’s exactly what I told her. And the next time I see her, I’m going to tell her that there’s no reason for her to come up here all the time, sticking her nose into our affairs. That’s exactly what I’m going to tell her.”

  So, as it turned out, Jessica actually wasn’t in very much trouble. However, the whole thing was very time-consuming. Joy talked for a long, long time. For the first hour or so she talked about how Mrs. Post had frightened her for no good reason and how unimportant and ridiculous the whole thing was. Then, in the next hour, she started changing her mind. After she had fixed herself a couple of strong drinks, because, she said, she really needed them after Mrs. Post, she began to wonder if Mrs. Post could have been right, after all.

  When Joy began to wipe her eyes and talk about how she hadn’t been a very good mother, Jessica went out into the kitchen to begin dinner; and that was the end of it. After dinner, they didn’t talk about it anymore.

  It wasn’t until she was in bed that night that Jessica got around to the books on magic and witchcraft. She found both of them extremely interesting, though neither seemed to be exactly what she was looking for—that is, they didn’t really seem to help her with Worm.

  They were not easy books to read. The print was very small, and the sentences were long and complicated with many unfamiliar words. The first one was a history of witchcraft—descriptions of the times and places where people believed in witches. It told how witches all over the world had been accused and tried and punished. The trials at Salem were mentioned, but there was no information given that Jessica did not already have. After skimming most of the book, Jessica decided to try the other one before settling down to read more carefully.

  The second book was even more difficult to read, but at the same time more fascinating. In strange stilted language it told about many weird and terrible events. There were several stories about famous haunted houses. There was one about a fog-enshrouded hollow on a country road where several people disappeared and were never seen again. And there was one about a young woman who was possessed by a demon.

  It was very late, past two o’clock in the morning, when Jessica began the chapter about the demon. The first pages told how a young girl had made an insulting remark to a strange old woman who lived in a deserted barn on the edge of town. On the next day, a large black dog had appeared on the doorstep of the young woman’s home and had refused to go away. Immediately afterward, the girl had begun to act strangely and to talk to people whom no one else could see.

  Jessica was reading rapidly, with a feeling of rising excitement, when a sudden sound broke the deep early-morning stillness. Dropping the book, she sank down beneath the covers until she could barely peer out. The only light in the room was the small reading lamp by the bed. Outside its narrow radius, mysterious shadows swarmed out and away from the dark side of every object. Jessica’s eyes darted from corner to corner until the noise came again, and the door, which had been slightly ajar, began to move slowly inward. Staring in breathless horror, Jessica watched while the door inched forward and then stopped, and near the floor a dark shape emerged from behind it.

  The breath she’d been holding escaped in an angry hiss as Jessica recognized the narrow head and sleek pointed face. “Get out,” she said. “Get out of my room and stay out.” But Worm stayed where he was until Jessica snatched up the book she had been reading and threw it at him as hard as she could.

  She’d never been able to throw straight when she was angry—rocks or clods or books never hit the right person—and this time was no exception. The book curved away from Worm and hit a metal wastepaper basket with a terrible clang. Worm leaped back and disappeared, and a moment later Joy rushed into the room.

  “What was that?” Joy asked. “What made that crashing noise?”

  “It was just Worm, I guess,” Jessica said. “He came in and knocked over my wastepaper basket.”

  Joy looked at the wastepaper basket—and th
e book lying beside it. Picking up the book, she glanced at the title, Strange Tales of the Supernatural, and began to leaf through it. She read a bit in several places, and as she read her frown darkened.

  “What is this thing?” she said at last.

  “Just a book,” Jessica said. “I got it at the library.”

  “Well, no wonder you’ve been acting funny if this is the kind of junk you’ve been reading,” Joy said. She noticed the other book on the bed table and picked it up, too. She put them both under her arm.

  “I’m taking these back to the library tomorrow,” she said. “And I’m going to have a talk with that librarian. She shouldn’t let you take out stuff like this. Why, these aren’t even from the children’s section.”

  So the books on witches went back to the library, and the librarians were told not to let Jessica check out any more books on witchcraft. Which left Jessica knowing only a little about some things that she needed desperately to know a lot about.

  The information she had gotten from the two books amounted only to parts and pieces—enough to shape some new questions, but not to reach answers. The only thing the books had made her sure of was that Worm had talked to her—and that he was certainly a demon, a witch’s cat. She only wondered, now, how she could have doubted it for so long.

  There had been so many clues, starting from that first night, when she had found him, and lost the book about the Salem witches. The most convincing clues were, of course, his strange uncatlike behavior: the way he never romped or played, the way he followed her, watching and waiting, when she was alone, and hid himself away when anyone else was around. And now there was something even more significant: the fact that he had crept into her room in the middle of the night and kept her from finishing the books that might have given her some answers.

  With the books gone, and no way to get more, there was no place to go for information. A year before she would have talked to Brandon about it. There weren’t many people she could talk to about such a strange problem, but Brandon would have been perfect. Not that he would have known all the answers, but at least he would have listened and believed. Remembering all the things that Brandon had believed in, Jessica was sure that he would have believed her about Worm.