[garbage] takes the seat that Lucy offers, against the wall, bordered by the pristine books and genital sculptures. He watches her carefully as she comes to rest behind her desk, her thin hands folding and her eyes now eagerly predatory.
“We both know what you want: to find where Gus is now.” She turns to a sleek computer at the far corner of her desk. [garbage] idley flips the cool pages of the book sat on his lap. A few clicks later, Lucy turns back. “I have the information. And, conveniently, you have something I want. So a simple trade is in order.”
“What do I have?” [garbage] asks. His hands fall still and he glances at the mythical book contained within them. It hasn’t been kind to him, but up til now he hasn’t considered its value either. Currently, it represents the only firm connection he has to Gus. He covers it protectively. Lucy arches an eyebrow and utters a faint chirruping laugh.
“I don’t want your book, [garbage], I’ve already said they’re of no use to me.” [garbage] relaxes and lets his hand slip from its leather cover. “No, you have something I can use, and that’s your anonymity. I’m unfortunately very well known in my circles. But you.” She presses a key with a flourish and a laser printer hums below her desk. “You are a nobody here. And a nobody can see and hear the somebodies, and report back to me.” She flips a sheet of paper off the printer and holds it out. [garbage] takes it and reviews it quickly. In part it is a list of names, and in part a map of a large house, including a floor plan of each floor which are labelled with titles like ‘ballroom’ and ‘banquet hall.’
He flips it around but finds its other side blank. The rooms are large, but not so large that he’d call them ballrooms and halls. He puts the sheet down.
“That house, and the names above it, are all the information I have on Zachariah’s earthbound head of operations. I found, through extensive trial and error, that he has an insidious flair for turning the spies I send. I can’t go myself, as I already mentioned, and every person I’ve sent so far has stayed there, or ghosted me completely. If you can get in, and find me any name at all not on that list, I’ll give you Gus’s location.” She leans over her desk, her eyes again a dare to go against her, flashing with a look like she’s mated him in a game of chess.
“Fine” [garbage] says. “How do I get there?” Lucy leans back fully, her thick lips curled into a smile that makes [garbage]’s toes curl for its greed and animal lust. Before she answers his question, she briefly scurries her fingers across the keyboard. A clunk issues from behind the door.
“Just take the door and walk until you find another. It will open out of the house next to his. Then knock and play at being an addict. You‘ll need street clothes and cash.” She waves her hand at the wardrobe to her right. “Feel free to peruse.” Then she stands and pulls from the drawer of her desk a thick stack of bills, which [garbage] is not too surprised to see are hundreds. She flips one out and places it onto her desk, then waits. [garbage] stands and hefts the book again, watching her suspiciously. “Don’t go into the orrery room,” She says. “If Zachariah sees you he will recognize you. But he stays put there. I’ve only known him to leave it once, and that was to kill you.”
[garbage] finds blue jeans and a black pink floyd tee shirt in the wardrobe. He changes into them, then opens the black door, to what looks like the same hallway he came from.
“[garbage],” Lucy calls from her desk. [garbage] turns back to see her eyeing him from the computer. “Let's try not to get distracted by ourselves, shall we?” She says with a wicked smile.
[garbage] turns again to the doorway, and steps across its threshold.
______________________________________________________________________________
I’m comforted by the tug of the sword in its sheath looped at my waist. If I’m catching on to how this works I probably won’t have it when I go through the door at the end of this hallway, but it’s always nice to be armed, even temporarily. I speed along the warm stone hall, keeping my eyes fixed on the crest of its turn ahead, trying not to be taken in by the self injured flesh spots and the flickering sand beneath my feet. I watch blazing sconces as they appear on the far wall and pass me by. Each one is a red orange glowing hearth stuck up on the stone. The flames within are high and bright and I see their plasma forms dance above the oblong cut glass windows. It’s a mesmerizing shape. My walking slows. I can hear the roar of fire and feel the cold damp air.
I stop.
The grass between my toes is wet. The sliver moon is half obscured by clouds that scud across the starry sky. My face is sweating slightly from the heat of the fire. Its sound is one of power, and one of fear. From next to me I hear a loud high laughter. Jojo is dancing on the spot. I can’t share in his joy though. I can’t return his eager grin. The fear that’s welling up from in my chest won’t allow anything but the gripping portent of jai, or execution.
“Fucking amazing!” Jojo squeaks. But in the flames I only find a cold fixed future of pain and shame. “C’mon [garbage] look what we did! Look what we can do with just some matches and some gas!” He shakes my shoulders firmly, cackling still. I can’t think of anything but police, and firemen, and how they punish sixteen year olds for arson. Will I be tried as an adult? Maybe I can get off with just two years in juvy. “[garbage] what’s with you? Look!” Jojo is pointing one red finger up at the flames, as if I’ve only missed that they’re there, and if I look I’ll be as gleeful as he is.
I look instead at him. I watch his demonic grin and wide eyes. In each of their glassy surfaces I see a miniscule dancing flame and I’m at once gripped with the horrifying conviction that he’s some demon boy, who’s task all along has been tempting me down there, baiting me to commit this heinous crime. But I didn’t pour the gas, I reasoned, I didn’t swipe the match and toss it down to the abandoned house’s floor. I only watched. I only let it happen. I’m an accessory at worst. For the first time, I search myself for Garbage. Cold and reasoning, without my usual rage to hand him over to me, and to hand my body to him, I call out deep within my mind for him insead. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to watch my friend the demon dance and gloat before an ugly crime.
Garbage handles shit like this much better than I can . I raise my hands up to my head and press and screw my eyes shut, willing my captain, my playmate, protector, and guide to come forward. I feel myself fade, and my better steps in, but the grass between my toes remains, the fire before me is shrinking, the stone walls flickering around it.
I open my eyes again and remember. Jojo set that fire seven years ago. I’m not a teenager anymore. Garbage presses against my consciousness, a curiosity and concern in his presence
[Where are you?] He repeats. His frame is halfway into the door to my body. I feel my hand burning and start, the book drops from it, onto the floor. It’s crusted with ice. I work my frostbitten fingers to knead them back to life. Before I can realize what’s happening, the floor opens up beneath me, cracking and shattering below my feet.
I step back from the void, dancing away. The ragged hole grows larger as pieces fall into its dark recess. I fall backward and scrabble toward the wall, but even as I press my back against the stone I feel the cold spreading under me, branching up the wall I’m plastered to. I press against that wall with a desperate need. It crumbles away behind me. I fall flat to a cold earth floor. The ragged hole leading back to Lucy’s hallway is still there in front of me, within reach.
The packed dirt below me branches out with feathers of frost from the hole in the stone floor ahead, but the ice stops short of where I’m laying on my bruised ass and back. I look behind me. A tunnel snakes away to the left. I can see about fifty feet into it. It’s lit throughout with a gently pulsing red glow that seems to come from nowhere. It’s seven feet in diameter and it's lined with ridges running along its walls, as if something has scraped along it, passing through.
I turn back to where the T of Lucy’s hall branches, where the frost ridged hole yawns and threatens to pull me from my mission. I take a cursory inventory of myself. My hands and legs are smeared with mud. I still have my sword, I’m pleased to find. But the book is lost, as is the way to Zachariah’s house. It’s clear that if I tried to hop across the gaping hole, I’d likely fall into it. I feel a rumble in the walls. An ominous miniature quake that sets my teeth at edge. I don’t see any way forward but one, so I set off down the rough earth tunnel.
As I walk, the cold from the book fades quickly to a damp warmth that has my clothes clinging to me. The curve of the floor trips me up occasionally as I bear forward. I walk for a short time before I come to a junction with another tunnel, running at a sharp diagonal to the one I’m in. Both directions merely lead to more eerie red-lit tunnels. By virtue of it bringing my sharply back toward Lucy’s hallway, and my mission, I take the tube that turns left, and walk along it for a while.
Again I feel a distant rumble, stronger this time, and it rumbles in my memory as well. I feel a familiarity tied up with a ghastly dread. Garbage moves against my mind, a question in his turning presence.
[I can walk] He states, but I dismiss him.
“You can wait,” I order the empty air.
For a while I simply wander, every few minutes the walls and floors of the tunnel rumble faintly, sometimes earth, in clods and sprinkles, showers down from the ceiling and walls. I keep careful track of which turns I take and in which direction. Left Right Right Left Left. I keep a string of options in my mind that will lead me back. But I’m beginning to feel a ragged anxiety lay over me. My traveling seems fruitless. Every turn and branch is much like the one before. Just as despair is settling over me in thick sifling layers, another rumble shakes the tunnel around me.
Suddenly, I place the ridges in the walls. I realize just what made this network. The worm that Don spoke of, in the tent. A beast I might meet, around any one of the corners that I turn.
A rain of earth descends in front of me, pebbles, dirt, and mud fall like a landslide from above. I press myself against the wall to feel smaller, no safe place to hide and no resolve in my legs. I fully expect the worm to burst down from the ceiling, but it doesn’t. Instead, the very last thing I expect falls through a hole crushed into the ceiling, which I now see is crusted with frost and ragged edges.
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Through this hole, landing on his feet and bathed in sterile fluorescent light, which pours down liberally from the space above, is me. He lands competently on his feet and surveys the tunnel around him. It is unmistakably me. The same face I see in a mirror, but reversed. He has my heavy brows, my rounded eyes, my chin that’s just a touch too small. He has my dark thick hair and my red lips and my one tooth pushing out to the side a bit. I reach up to feel my own face, suddenly concerned that I may actually be someone else.
The steaming icy hole above him seems to lead to a hospital room. I see a bed with an IV stand propped up right next to it. A few chairs along the side of the room. One of them is occupied by someone I can’t quite see, but the edges of a curtain of matte pink hair remind me of Coral. I take a hesitant step toward myself, trying to get a better angle to see who it is, but the man before me, by all indications myself, holds up a hand.
“You must give me the sword,” He says. His voice is familiar to me, and not just for the clear fact that it is my own. I'm sure I've heard the quality and power of his command before as well. I feel the awareness within me twist as Garbage turns his keen eye out to inspect a clone of his own, as surely as the stranger’s body is a clone of me.
“Garbage?” I ask. I place my hand protectively down onto the pommel of my blade.
“Yes.” He answers. “And I need that blade. I don’t have time to explain everything, but look: by boring in a bore with that book you brought through Lucy’s door, you bored through time. I know this because I watched you do it from within your head, about a year ago. I need the sword you have, the sword that Gus designed to slay the worm.”
His hand remains extended, waiting for me to offer it up. For a moment, I feel a petulant reluctance. Though the sword had never done me any good, it had been a talisman to me. But with Garbage encouraging me from within, and with no better option, I unbuckle the blade from around my hips and hand it over to myself.
Briefly, our fingers touch. I feel a nauseous ripple wash over me, the hair on my arms and neck stands straight. By instinct, I turn to regard the voice within my mind, but I find with reeling vertigo that Garbage is missing. I briefly rummage for the will and personality that had been standing firmly autonomous in my mind a moment before, but discover only a slipshod cardboard cutout in my mind, like the standee self I had erected as a child to play my games with when I was my only friend. The me from the ceiling straps the blade onto his body and regards me, calm and firm.
“I’m not sure what happens with you next,” He says. “I assume you had good reason to keep it from me.” The rumble of the walls breaks his gaze. “Good luck.” He says, and strides away from me, heading vaguely toward the distant rumbling sound. The bright bore in the ceiling above still shimmers, open and leading to a hospital room in what I guess is my own future, or else a past that I’ve forgotten. Either way, past or future, as soon as my other self is out of earshot, the hole begins to shrink.
“Coral!” I shout, my hands cupped around my mouth. But she doesn't hear. Before I can even consider trying to jump and grab for the edge, I’m once again alone in a warm dirt tunnel, only this time I’m unarmed. I consider the hole I left back at Lucy’s hallway, wondering whether it too has knit itself closed. The directions I memorized to lead me back are the only comfort I have, they were the only thing besides the sword that kept the suffocative hallways from feeling like an early grave around me.
Again I try to writhe within my mind and catch a comforting admonishment or command from my childhood ghost companion, but again I come to nothing but a ransacked framework of a character, like a puppet with abandoned strings. The walls vibrate, sending yet more crumbs of earth tumbling down. The beat is closer yet. I hope my other self can best it. I turn from the place I met him and set back to begin the twists and turns I’ve memorized.
It seems that every step I take I feel a rumbling now. I weave myself around dirt corners, Left Left Right. There are no breaks now in the tumbling earth, only one continuous vibration. Right Left. It’s growing stronger as I desperately plod my way forward, then: Then, nothing. I’ve reached the bore. I see the cold ragged hole again before me. I check furtively behind me, and I see it. Glistening and pulsating, a thousand teeth in its wretched mouth. Its eyes are glowing yellow and its reptile nostrils flare. It’s approaching me, fast as a train. The whole earth cavern shakes and rains dirt with its movement. The hole ahead of me is just as I left it, the stone hall branches off in a T with a frozen hole on the floor beneath it.
I can feel the hot rank breath of the beast behind me and feel the flecks of saliva spattering my arms as I run. The junction fast approaches. I have no option but to jump and try to clear the hole, to make it back into Lucy’s hall and the relative safety of my espionage mission. I leap. For a moment it seems I’ve stuck my landing. I’m teetering on the edge, the cold of the bore is billowing up around me. But there’s nothing to grab to keep my footing firm. I frantically try to lean forward, but the earth is cracking beneath me, falling away into the black. Just as the monster reaches the bore, I fall backward, into the hole, into the dark and cold.
I stare above as I tumble down. The black worm is there in the ragged steaming hole. It stares down for a moment. Its eyes flash yellow, its jaw hangs half open. It dives down after me. When I land, I find I’m still in a red earth tunnel. I’ve landed back in the domain of the worm. It’s rushing toward me with all the speed of gravity. I roll awkwardly to the side before it slams with mighty force into the earth, shaking the walls of the cavern. From the looks of the thing, it’s somewhat injured, but as its massing serpentine body coils around it in the earth of this new tunnel, it rolls its face away from the mud below and fixes me again with its yellow white eyes.
A few of its sharp fangs are broken off, some hang from a grisly nerve. Immediately it’s apon me once more. I hold out my hands, trying to protect myself feebly. I feel the beast’s jaws, slimy non-lips and rotten breath across my face. I grip with all the force I can to the beat’s upper and lover teeth, but all the force I have isn’t enough to match it. I’m sandwiched between the packed dirt and the aien teeth and rack skin of the beast. I can’t breath for all the slimy tongue, hot and powerful, filling my face and pressing me deep into the mud of the wall.
I try to let go of the teeth and find some purchase elsewhere, but it is as if my hands have been melted into the jaws they hold. I cannot lift them any more than I can lift my head. I feel the panic of suffocation grip my chest. The seal of the worm’s tongue against my mouth and nose is complete. I retch. Bile fills my throat. The feeling in my hands is lost, but I feel a new sensation, where hands once were. I feel my face extend, as if it were swelling outward. I’m able to take a gasp of breath, but I can’t comprehend how, with my face still firmly stuck to the writhing tongue.
With a distant, cold realization, I retch again, the bile and acid hot in my closed off throat. One of my throats. I take another ripping breath and confirm my numb suspicion. I’m breathing not with my own lungs and mouth, but with those of the beast. And further, the beast’s broken teeth ache in my one head. I’m becoming the worm. My own body is melting into its gaping mouth and tongue. But even as I reach this conclusion I realize it’s wrong. The pressure of the worm’s body against mine is beginning to life. It’s tongue and teeth, now my face and hands, are shrinking. The worm is becoming me.
With another rancid breath taken through the beasts own mouth, I begin again to push back against it. This time I find some purchase. With all my strength and leverage, attached as I am to the bloodied jaws, I stagger forward. I realize the beast has shrunk drastically. I slip forward and fall onto my face, onto my hands, onto the worm. It’s no larger than an anaconda now. I can feel it writhe beneath me. It continues to shrivel.
With a grotesque slurping sound, it detaches from my face. Its tooth falls away from my hand. I choke out the bile that still fills my throat onto the packed dirt below me, where it splashes to join the rank beast’s blood already pooled there. The worm has quickly reduced to nothing more than a ragged slimy black tendril, still locked on place to my left palm. I feel it whip and coil in the air and realize it’s burrowing now into my arm. The skin up past my hand is bulging out as it slithers itself into my body. Panic grips me. Garbage screams within my mind to grab it before it’s all the way in. I seize it and wrap its powerful body in a coil around my writs for leverage, ther wring it as hard as I can.
I feel it jerking back against my arm. With a grisly crunching sensation, it finally goes limp. The moment it does, two things take place almost simultaneously. First, the victorious shout I hear from Garbage in my mind leaps forward to my teeth and tongue. Second, the edges of the personality that I call Garbage burst. It’s like a balloon that’s filled with water and immersed in a pool being pricked with a pin. The barrier simply ceases to be. The water that was Garbage now intermingles with the water that is me.
An influx of memories comes to light. For instance, I suddenly remember a group of people, and the adventures we’ve had together. Hundreds of memories pour in all at once. But the memories recovered include things I cant possible know. A year into the future, I can see the camping trip we take, and Gus’s relapse. I can see myself breaking through the book on the hospital floor, with Coral waiting on the side and Gus sullen and afraid in his bed. I see this just as clearly as I see myself walking away from Jojo, when I was just fifteen years old.
I have little time to absorb the memories, to explore a side of me I’ve kept separate for all these years, because another change has occurred with the death of the worm, now fallen limp from my arm like a fleshy thread. It has suddenly become very cold. Fog rises tremulously from the floor and a web of frost creaks outward from below me. Before I have time to roll aside, a sharp edged hole is broken through the dirt. I tumble once again through the darkness and cold. The floor rushes up to meet me. The bright fluorescent light batters my eyes. I’m laying on pristine cream tiles. Gus lays on a bed above me, watching me with wide eyes. Coral has stood up, and covers her mouth with one hand
“That was fast” Gus says.
______________________________________________________________________________
[When I break through the hospital floor, I’m pleased to find again that my aim has served me well. I land on the packed and ominously glowing dirt of the beast’s tunnels. A rumbling which I know must be the worm itself is fading in the distance. I turn to regard the tunnel’s length. [garbage] stands before me, gawking. Of course. I hadn’t realized it would come so soon. In my memory and through his senses I had seemed so much older. I always presumed the time for our meeting was some far off day. But no, I begin to recall more clearly, here is the place, there is the sword, and now is my need.
“You must give me the sword.” I say. The memory of just the same thing occurring through his eyes reverberates in the weather of my mind.
“Garbage?” My past self asks. He places one hand over the pommel of the sword
“Yes, and I need that blade. I don’t have time to explain everything.” But I see in his eyes, or do I remember from his head, that he needs more. “But look: by boring in a bore with that book you brought through Lucy’s door, you bored through time.” His doubt is still complete. Patiently, I sort through what I remember of the event. What did I say to me, back then? “I know this because I watched you do it from within your head, about a year ago.” He still seems unconvinced. I try impressing him with the need of my quest here and now. “I need the sword you have, the sword that Gus designed to slay the worm.” For a moment I’m not sure that’s enough either. But I keep my hand out, waiting nonetheless.
At last he gives the weapon over, and I buckle it to myself with an eye kept fixed to him. If memory serves, this is the point at which my recall dead ends completely. The point after which, though I’ve pressed and questioned, nothing comes to mind. I fight the urge to follow him away, to see what took place between now and what I remember next, which was reawakening in the hospital psych ward. But I can’t. I have a purpose here today, and that’s to find the worm and slay it. To kill it completely this time, which the self I now watch failed to do back then. As is often the case, it all falls to me.
“I’m not sure what happens with you next.” I say. I try, half successfully, to keep the burn of curiosity from my voice. “I assume you had good reason to keep it from me." The worm's vibrations start up again, down the tunnel and away from [garbage]. “Good luck.” I tell him, though I know he’ll fail his task.
The dank tubes of earth around me are much as I remember seeing them through [garbage]’s eyes, though relieved from his lack of fear that his chattering anxiety painted through it. I find it non too complicated to feel the disparate vibrations and triangulate the evil thing’s general location. I simply stand at crossroads, waiting for the beast to move, and subsequently follow whichever tunnel rains more earth, then repeat.
In short order, its quakes are powerful enough to warrant the drawing of my blade. The sword’s emerald gleams a sickly color there in the red light of the beast’s domain. But I know that Gus has designed it with purpose, with the will imbued into it as Zachariah taught. I left it in my hand to impress its weight on my muscles’ memory, and press forward.
At a T shaped junction in the tunnels, I finally find the ugly thing. It careens past me and a sickly black wall glistens, filling the tunnel. I dive forward immediately, driving the point of my blade as deeply as I can. By virtue of its movement it slices itself on one gaping gash along its length. I press the sword as firmly in as my strength allows until the worm’s breadth tapers and I stumble forward, colliding with its passing narrow tail.
My instinct is to chase after its receding form and down the tunnel to my right, but I know I’m slower than the thing, and reason dictates it will burrow back around to seek what caused it such pain. I resolve to wait, sword brandished, for its return. As I thought, a rumbling, stronger than all the rest, begins to grow. It's powerful enough to set my stance askew, and I kneel down to be sure I’m facing it with a bare blade when it arrives.
An explosion to my left throws me against the wall. The damned thing snuck around me. I feel its jaws tear through my flesh but I’m able to rip myself away from it and crawl toward the tunnel stretching out before me. The wound it tore into my thigh pulses with agonizing pain. I feel the blood begin to pool beneath me even as I pull myself along the dirt floor. I grip my sword and bend myself back up into a seat, then reach out as the beast’s length runs along the hallway spattered with my blood. I drive the blade again into its side, but the awkward angle of my grip is such that the force of the worm’s body wrenches the weapon from my hand. I dive to retrieve it, issuing a beastly bellow while I do, half in pain, half in desperate effort, but a second explosion rends the tunnel’s wall, the worm has burst through, its rank and vomitous jaws spread wide. I feel the sharp fangs closing firmly around my shoulder and skull, then the crunch of its snapping grasp and once again the black of death.