“We will play.”
The voice became stern. Minerva could see it better now. She wished she couldn’t. She wished she were blind. It sat in the moonlit sand with its long legs crossed, knees flared out so as to resemble wings. Its pendulous stomach spread across its thighs.
“Come,” it said.
Minerva went to it. There was no option. Its voice was a summoning. She sat before it and crossed her legs in kind.
“Do you like games?”
She shook her head numbly.
It smiled. A repellent sight. “I thought all children enjoyed games.”
“I’m not a child,” she managed to say.
“You are all children of eggs,” it said.
She said, “What are the rules?”
It tittered. “My rules.”
“What are the stakes?”
“Everything you owe, my dear.”
A seed of terror planted itself in her stomach. “What do I owe?”
Another dry titter. “Everything. Nothing. The game decides.”
A cloud scudded over the moon. The landscape went dark. The creature’s eyes glimmered wetly.
“Let’s play, Minny! It will be ever so much fun!”
Its voice had changed. Gone were the breathy baby syllables. Now it spoke in the voice of Minerva’s dead brother. Little Cortland Atwater.
“AND THE NAME OF THE star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died in the waters, because they were made bitter…”
Revelation 8:11. Wormwood, Wormwood, the name of the star is called Wormwood… It was a favorite passage of the Reverend’s. The waters turned bitter; many people died. He had always liked the sound of that.
He was inside a burrow carved into the rock. He was the worm now. But not a worm in wood, oh no. A worm in its wormhole. No roots to get in his way. No birds pecking at him with their sharp beaks. He was hidden safely, deep within the rock. It was dark down here, though. So very dark. That scared him a little. But this was a quibble. The father would pay him what he had earned soon.
Laughter drifted through the rock, coming from everywhere and nowhere. Children’s laughter. He’d never cared for it. No matter how many shrieking infants he’d blessed or how many apple-cheeked little shits he’d kissed on the forehead, he couldn’t stomach kids. Their sticky hands and gap-toothed smiles and their stupidity—everything that people seemed to love about them, Amos loathed. All children were useless until they had grown old enough to contribute to his coffers.
But currently, that laughter sounded quite sweet to his ears. Angelic, even.
It was hard to say how much time had passed since he had climbed down the rope ladder to the secondary tunnel system. There was no natural light at all, but the rock held a strange glow. He had begun to crawl through the main tunnel, scraping his knees, inching toward the hum that emanated from someplace ahead. The tunnel walls were pocked with holes—burrows, it almost seemed. Big ones. They reminded him of termite boreholes, or honeycombs where bee larvae might pupate. But the bugs that would nest in holes of that size would be… no, they were not bug burrows.
He’d kept crawling toward the heart of that hum. Yet the closer he had gotten, the more scared he became. The fear pulsed in his brain, taking on terrible forms. He pictured an enormous chalice inside the rock—a bowl teeming with massive insects. Beetles the size of border collies. Bloated roaches with wings fanned out like garbage can lids. Millipedes with legs thick as a baby’s arm. Tens of thousands of them, blind from lack of sun, their bodies either transparent or foggy white so you could see the queer workings of their guts. Skittering madly inside the smooth rock basin, trundling over the corpses of their dead. The basin was studded with huge bean-shaped sacks that burst with wet pops, spewing forth flabby larvae with skin that sweated like gray sickly cheese, these revolting grubs that mewled like newborn babes. The bowl was too steep for any of them to escape; all they could do was squirm and shuck madly, waiting for an unassuming visitor to tumble down from above…
The image entombed itself in his head. He couldn’t shake it. Suddenly frightened by that hum, he had crawled into one of the burrows off the main tunnel. It was so tight that his shoulders brushed the sides. He couldn’t say how far or deep he pressed into the hole. At some point, it had swollen into a bubble. He curled up. The rock was warm as flesh. It felt like a womb. The darkness pressed against his eyeballs. He was careful where he set his hands—in some silly chamber of his mind, he thought he might touch the resting shape of… well, something. Whatever might slumber deep in this rock. He pictured a hairless rat with yellowed teeth like shards of broken crockery; he pictured his hand closing on its tail, thick as a garden hose, a whip of oily flesh…
The image spooked him. Still, at least a giant rat would be of this world—a common enough sight, even if blown up ten times its normal size. What he really feared was that he might encounter something not of this world. Something he wouldn’t find in his worst dreams, because, after all, those dreams were still culled from the sights and sensations he would have experienced while waking.
He let go of a jittery laugh. The rock sponged up the sound so quickly it was as if he’d never made a peep.
The breath whistled out of his lungs. He was safe here. He would wait and recite some scripture to calm down.
“The name of the star is called Wormwood… Wormwood… Wormwood…”
The laughter came again. Dancing and sprightly, tickling the hairs of his inner ear. Almost a song, holding lyrics that he couldn’t quite make out.
Distantly, he heard something or someone pass the mouth of his burrow—he already thought of it in that possessive way: his burrow. Was it one of the outsiders? Rage flooded through him; the air flared red before his eyes. They would not take his gift. The father owed him. He had given it what it wanted. But Amos was too terrified to move. It was as if he had crawled to the very bottom of the earth, down with the hiss of unseen voices and the punch and seethe of machines made from bone and teeth, machines whose purpose he could not understand. The father’s beautiful instruments.
“Wormwood,” he whispered hoarsely. “The name of the star…”
MICAH FORGED DOWN the tunnel. He wasn’t focused on the Reverend anymore; that bloodlust had sluiced out of him. His every muscle was tensed and screaming. A tiny voice inside his head yammered for him to stop, for God’s sake, go back.
The smell was stronger as he navigated toward its source. He gagged on the putrid stench, a smell like rotted offal marinating in mothballs—so powerful that it was more a taste. The rock seemed to throb—thu-thump, thu-thump—shuddering slightly like a thick artery.
His boot brushed something, making a metallic jangle. He shone the flashlight on a manacle, hand-forged and browned with rust. How old could it be? A hundred years? The sort of thing a slave would have worn… except it was too small to fit around a man’s wrist.
He continued on. He was scared, oh yes—terrified—but that rested easily within his mind. It was a perfectly natural reaction, so he did not try to fight it. He came across a shoe next. A child’s size, incredibly old. He picked it up, trembling. Faded but still legible on the bottom of the vulcanized rubber sole: Charles Goodyear, 1871.
He encountered other artifacts: tatters of clothing, a busted pocket watch. A wooden doll with the eyes scratched out.
The tunnel bent gently, the rock running smooth as alabaster. He shone the flashlight along its upper curvature, which was so low his head brushed it even as he crawled. It was carpeted with an odd fungoid growth, black and spiky. He raised the flashlight beam to it. The fungus broke apart. What he had mistaken for fungus was in fact a dozing ball of sightless spiders; they scuttled down the tunnel’s circumference, dancing lightly on the rock, vanishing into tiny holes in the floor. Micah noticed that the floor and walls were pocked with thousands of similar holes, tiny pits of darkness the flashlight beam could not penetrate. What else was hiding in there?