The Worm in Every Heart

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.