The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (37 page)

Well, someone was sent to retrieve a skull from the charnel house in the warrens, which was kept up by the corpse gardeners. There was always one to be spared for children who wanted to play.

The game was robust, with the ghouls careening the skull off trees and rocks and headstones; the skull proved hardy and it went on for quite some time.

Our young Mr. Wormcake became bored. He couldn't stop thinking about that fair, and the lights and the smells and—most of all—the screams. The screams filled his ears and distracted him from play. After a time, he left the game and returned to the fence, staring down at the fair. It had gotten darker by that time, so that it stood out in the night like a gorgeous burst of mushrooms.

Slipwicket and Stubblegut joined him.

“What are you doing?” said the latter. “The game isn't over. People will think you're afraid to play.”

“I'm not afraid,” said Wormcake. And in saying the words, a resolution took shape in his mind. “I'm not afraid of anything. I'm going down there.”

His friends were shocked into silence. It was an awed silence, a holy silence, like the kind you find in church. It was the most outrageous thing they had ever heard anyone say.

“That's crazy,” Stubblegut said.

“Why?”

“Because it's forbidden. Because the sunlight people live down there.”

“So what?”

“They're gross!”

At this, some of the children become upset. Little faces crinkle in outrage.

Now, hold on, hold on. You have to understand how ghouls saw your people at the time. You were very strange to them. Hob's Landing was as exotic to them as a city on the moon would be to you. People went about riding horses, and they walked around in sunlight. On purpose, for Pete's sake! Who ever heard of such a thing?

The children start to giggle at this, won over again.

When they came to the cemetery they acted sad and shameful. They buried their dead the way a cat buries its own scat. They were soft and doughy, and they ate whatever came to hand, the way rats and cockroaches do.

“We're not cockroaches!” cries one of the children.

Of course not! But the ghouls didn't understand. They were afraid. So they made up wild ideas about you. And it kept their children from wandering, which was important, because they wanted the warrens to stay a secret. Ghouls had been living under the cities of the sunlight people for as long as there have
been
sunlight people, and for the most part they had kept their existence hidden. They were afraid of what would happen if they were discovered. Can you blame them for that?

But young Mr. Wormcake was not to be dissuaded by rumors or legends!

“I'm going down there. I want to see what it's all about.”

Back then, the cemetery gate was not burdened with locks or chains; it simply had a latch, oiled and polished, which Wormcake lifted without trouble or fanfare. The gate swung open, and the wide, bright world spread out before them like a feast at the banquet table. He turned to look at his friends. Behind them, the other children had assembled in a small crowd, the game of skullpocket forgotten. The looks on their faces ranged from fear to excitement to open disgust.

“Well?” he said to his friends. “Are you cowards?”

Slipwicket would not be called a coward! He made a grand show of his exit, lifting each foot with great exaggeration over the threshold and stomping it into the earth with a flourish. He completed his transgression with a happy skip and turned to look at Stubblegut, who lingered on the grave side of the fence and gathered his face into a worried knot. He placed his hands over his wide belly and gave it gentle pats, which was his habit when he was nervous.

At that moment of hesitation, when he might have gone back and warned the adults of what was happening, some unseen event in the fair below them caused a fresh bouquet of screams to lift up and settle over the ghouls like blown leaves. Slipwicket's whole body seemed to lean toward it, like he was being pulled by a great magnet. He looked at Stubblegut with such longing in his eyes, such a terrible ache, that his frightened friend's resolve was breached at last, and Stubblegut crossed the threshold himself with a grave and awful reluctance.

He was received with joy.

And before anyone could say jackrabbit, Slipwicket bolted down the hill, a pale little gremlin in the dark green waves of grass. The others followed him in a cool breath of motion, the tall grass like a strange, rippling sea in the moonlight. Of course, they were silent in their elation: the magnitude of their crime was not lost upon them. Wormcake dared not release the cry of elation beating in his lungs.

But, children, they were in high rebellion. They were throwing off the rules of their parents and riding the wave of their own cresting excitement. Even Stubblegut felt it, like a blush of heat over his moss-grown soul.

Naturally, Uncle Digby's story stirs up memories of my own first fair.

The dream of the Maggot came to me in 1944, when I was twelve years old. The tradition of the Cold Water Fair had ended thirty years before, on the bloody night Uncle Digby is speaking of, and Hob's Landing had done without a festival of any sort since. But though we didn't know it yet, this would be the year the Skullpocket Fair was begun.

I was the sixth kid to receive the dream that year. I had heard of a couple of the others, so I had known, in some disconnected way, that it might happen. I didn't know what it meant, except that parents were terrified of it. They knew it had something to do with the Wormcake clan, and that was enough to make it suspect. Although this was in 1944 and they'd been living in the mansion for thirty years at that point—peacefully for the most part—there were still many in town who considered them to be the very incarnation of evil. Many of our parents were present at the night of the Cold Water Fair, and they were slow to forgive. The fact that the Orchid Girl came into town and patronized the same shops we did, attended the same shows we did, didn't help matters at all, as far as they were concerned.

She's putting on airs, they said. She thinks she's one of us. At least her husband has the decency to keep himself hidden away in that horrible old mansion.

My friends and I were too young to be saddled with all of the old fears and prejudices of our parents, and anyway we thought the Orchid Girl was beautiful. We would watch her from across the street or through a window when she came to town, walking down Poplar Street as proud as you please, unattended by her servants or by any friends at all. She always wore a bright, lovely dress which swirled around her legs, kept her hair pinned just so, and held her head high—almost defiantly, I can say now, looking back. We would try to see the seams on her face, where it would open up, but we never got close enough. We never dared.

We believed that anyone married to the Orchid Girl couldn't be all bad. And anyway, Mr. Wormcake always came to the school plays, brought his own children down to the ice-skating rink in the wintertime, and threw an amazing Halloween party. Admittedly, half the town never went, but most of us kids managed to make it over there.

We all knew about the Church of the Maggot. There were already neighborhoods converting, renouncing their own god for the one that burrowed through flesh. Some people our parents' age, also veterans of that night at the fair, had even become priests. They walked around town in grubby white garb, talking on and on about the flesh as meat, the necessity of cleansing the bone, and other things that sounded strange and a little exciting to us. So when some of the children of Hob's Landing started to dream of the Maggot, the kids worried about it a lot less than the parents or the grandparents did. At first we were even jealous. Christina Laudener, just one year younger than I was, had the first one, and the next night it was little Eddie Brach. They talked about it in school, and word spread. It terrified them, but we wanted it ourselves nonetheless. They were initiates into some new mystery centered around the Wormcakes, and those of us who were left out burned with a terrible envy.

I was probably the worst of them, turning my jealousy into a bullying contempt whenever I saw them at the school, telling them that the ghouls were going to come into their homes while they were sleeping and kidnap them, so they could feed them to their precious Maggot. I made Eddie cry, and I was glad. I hated him for being a part of something I wasn't.

Until a couple of nights later, when I had the dream myself.

I'm told that everyone experiences the dream of the Maggot differently. For me it was a waking dream. I climbed out of bed at some dismal hour of the morning, when both my parents were still asleep, and stumbled my way to the bathroom. I sat on the toilet for a long time, waiting for something to happen, but I couldn't go, despite feeling that I needed to very badly. I remember this being a source of profound distress in the dream, way out of proportion to real life. It terrified me and I felt that it was a sign I was going to die.

I left the toilet and walked down the hallway to my parents' room, to give them the news of my impending demise. In my dream I knew they would only laugh at me, and it made me hate them.

Then I felt a clutching pain in my abdomen. I dropped to my knees and began to vomit maggots. Copious amounts of them. They wouldn't stop coming, just splashed out onto the ground with each painful heave, in wriggling piles, ropy with blood and saliva. It went on and on and on. When I stood up, my body was as wrinkled and crushed as an emptied sack. I fell to the floor and had to crawl back to my room.

The next morning I went down to breakfast as usual, and as my father bustled about the kitchen, looking for his keys and his hat, and my mother leaned against the countertop with a cigarette in her hand, I told them that I had received the dream everyone was talking about.

This stopped them both cold. My mother looked at me and said, “Are you sure? What happened? What does it mean?”

“They're having a fair. I have to go.”

Of course this was absurd; there had been nothing about a fair in the dream at all. But the knowledge sat with all the incontrovertibility of a mountain. Such is the way of the Maggot.

“What fair?” Dad said. “There's no fair.”

“The Wormcakes,” I said. “They're having it at the mansion.”

My parents exchanged a look.

“And they invited you in a dream?” he said.

“It wasn't really like an invitation. It's more like the Maggot told me I have to come.”

“It's a summons,” Mom told him. “That's what Carol was saying. It's like a command.”

“Like hell,” Dad said. “Who do those freaks think they are?”

“I think I have to go, Dad.”

“You don't have to do a goddamned thing they tell you. None of us do.”

I started to cry. The thought of disregarding the dream was unthinkable. I felt that clenching in my gut and I feared the maggots were going to start pouring out of my mouth. I thought I could feel them inside me already, chewing away, as though I were already dead. I didn't know how to articulate what I know now: that the Maggot had emptied me out and was offering to fill me again. To ignore it would be to live the rest of my life as a husk.

It was a hard cry, as sudden as a monsoon, my cheeks hot and red, the tears painting my face, my breath coming in a thin hiss. Mom rushed to me and engulfed me in her arms, saying the things moms are supposed to say.

“I have to go,” I said. “I have to go, I have to. I have to go.”

I watch the children sitting there in profile, their little faces turned to Uncle Digby and his performance like flowers to the sun, and I try to see myself there all those years ago. The sun is setting outside, and in the eastern-facing window darkness is hoarding over the bay. The light in Uncle's glass dome illuminates the green solution from beneath, and his pale dead face is graced with a rosy pink halo of light.

I must have seen the same thing when I sat there with the other kids. But I don't remember it. I only remember the fear. I guess I must have laughed at the jokes, just like the others did.

Skullpocket is, of course, a culling game. It's not about singling out and celebrating a winner. It's about thinning the herd.

Jonathan Wormcake does not appear to be listening to the story anymore. His attention is outside, on the darkening waters. Although her name has not come up yet, the Orchid Girl haunts this story as truly as any ghost. I wonder if it causes him pain. Grieving, to a ghoul, is a sign of weakness. It's a trait to be disdained. The grieving are not fit for the world. I look at the hard, clean curve of his skull and I try to fathom what's inside.

They were clever little ghouls,
Uncle Digby said
, and they kept to the outskirts and the shadows. They didn't want to be discovered. A ghoul child looks a lot like a human child when seen from the corner of the eye. It's true that they're paler, more gaunt, and if you look at one straight on you'll see that their eyes are like little black holes with nothing inside, but you have to pay attention to notice any of that. At the fair, no one was paying attention. There was too much else to see. So Wormcake and his friends were able to slip into the crowd without notice, and there they took in everything they could.

They were amazed by the striped, colorful tents, by the little booths with the competitive games, by the pens with pigs and mules, by the smells of cotton candy, frying oil, animal manure, electricity—everything was new and astonishing. Most of all, though, they marveled at the humans in their excitable state: walking around, running, hugging, laughing, and clasping their hands on each other's shoulders. Some were even crushing their lips together in a grotesque human version of a kiss!

Here the children laugh. They are young enough still that all kissing is grotesque.