Read We are Wormwood Online

Authors: Autumn Christian

We are Wormwood (10 page)

“You’re scared too,” I said. “Aren’t you? I can feel it.”

He gathered my hair in between his fists.

“Take a deep breath.”

He pressed the gaping hole of me into the center of his
canvas.

He threw me backwards and I collapsed on the floor. He
painted with his thumbs in my yellowed blood. He cursed underneath his breath.
His hands drug-trembled. I crawled headfirst into the red curtains and waited
to die. They’d find me with cocaine in my mouth and heated gore underneath my
fingernails.

The artist shook me from unconsciousness.

“Open your eyes.”

He tilted my head toward the canvas.

I saw my eyes dripping toxic silver. He framed my head with
a yellow crown. Streaks of black gore rose from my forehead. Horns.

The Hunter, not the Hunted.

We’ve been here before.

I pressed my hands against my wound.

“I was right. You’re more scared than I am,” I said.

 
“Don’t talk
anymore. You’ll hurt yourself,” he said.

We’ve been here before.

He helped me into the hallway. I walked with him over broken
glass and cigarette butts into the living room. It was storming outside.
Someone had opened all the windows, and rain blew through the room. It pelted
my naked skin, my hair,
my
stomach. I turned into him
to escape the cold, but he stiffened and wouldn’t hold me.

He pushed me onto the couch and left. When he came back with
my clothes I was curled up with my face pressed down into the cushion and my
skin turning blue.

“I can’t breathe," I said.

“Stop panicking."

He pulled my sweater over my head and pushed my skirt up
over my knees as I sat with a storm dripping in my mouth.

“You won’t see me again,” he said. “Because I’ll be someone
else entirely.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

Later he’d carry me out to the car because I refused to
move. He’d drive me
home
as I lay huddled against the
car door. We’d be chased by a storm, lightning bursting on the side of the
road, dodging traffic accidents. I’d see a burnt black hand on the side of the
road, but say nothing. I wouldn’t feel the pain until hours later, after I
should’ve gone to the hospital, but I was scared of stitches, so I’d pour
iodine over the wound and tape several bandages over it. Instead of sleeping
I’d lay in bed, crying from the comedown, crying quietly so that Momma wouldn’t
hear me.

He took my hands into his own, those acid-burned hands, and
he spoke.

“I’m already gone.”

 
Chapter Fifteen

EVERY
NIGHT FOR
two weeks I woke to Mother’s crying. I found myself wrapped in
butcher paper with a red bow around my ankles and a red bow around my throat. I
tore myself out of the paper, gasping, and ran downstairs.

“I’m not dead.”

She sat at the kitchen table in her gazelle skull and wept.

“My baby girl, they’re going to truck you away for meat.”

I sat beside her at the kitchen table and lit a cigarette.

“Can the dead do this?” I asked, and I blew smoke in her
face.

Still, she wept.

I’d dropped out of high school years ago. I had no car and
no job. My reputation as a boy killer was fading fast and demons no longer
haunted me. I had nothing but a broken hymen and bad dreams. So my mother
thought I was dead. It was a mistake anyone could make, right?

“Tell me something before they take you away,” my mother
said.

She grabbed my wrists. Tears welled up underneath the
gazelle skull.

“What’s so goddamn important?” I asked.

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

She asked the same question the night I came back from
Cignus’ house, shaking from the cocaine, spit in my hair. I tried to sneak up
the stairs but she stood at the threshold of her bedroom with butcher paper in
her hands.

I knew she saw the dried blood on my thighs and on my
sweater, that she saw my knees shaking.

“Do I look like I want a boyfriend?” I asked, and jerked my
hand away.

I stubbed the cigarette out on the kitchen table, and left.

Pluto waited for me in the bedroom. I grabbed her and threw
myself into bed. Her purring lulled me into sleep.

The next night, I woke up in the same way.
The butcher paper wrapped around me, the color of dead scraped
skin.
My mother crying.

“I’m not dead.”

“Just you wait for the meat truck, baby.”

And the next night.

And the next.

During the day I smoked cigarettes on the back porch. I
stole my mother’s ID, bought some rum, and drank it with sugar and melted ice
cubes. I fell asleep, hanging halfway off the couch, watching the Cosmos
television series on DVD. I was useless incarnate. Momma suggested I go back to
school, get my GED, get a job, maybe give Birth to a savior from a fallen star.
I could do anything I wanted to.

“You’re a warrior, baby,” she said. “I’ve always told you
that.”

Only at night did she know the truth. I was dead meat,
something to cart away.

I thought of stealing Momma’s car and driving to the
artist’s house. I would walk past the blood portraits on the lawn, and the boys
on the porch howling like wolves. I’d tear down that mirror-crusted hallway to
get to him. I’d stick my hand through “The Hunter” and force him to paint
another one.

I’d tell him, “I’ll haunt you forever. I’ll never let you
go,”

I wanted him to kill me. I wanted him to blow glitter into
my blood.

Anything but sitting on the couch with ice melting into my
rum.

Then one night I tore the butcher paper away and found
Phaedra and Cignus in my room. Cignus sat in the rocking chair with sunglasses
on. He must’ve come from an art show, because he wore his stiff gray suit, his
crisp tie.

Phaedra stood at the foot of my bed, my coat in her hands.

“Do you usually sleep like that?” she asked.

It was several moments before I managed to speak.

“Do you usually break in and watch people sleep?”

She threw my coat at me.

“We’re going on an adventure,” she said.

“Where have you been?” I asked.

“What does it matter?” Phaedra asked.

While I dressed, Cignus got up and paced the room. He took
off his sunglasses; broken blood vessels filled his eyes.

Pluto wound around Phaedra’s legs but Phaedra pushed her
away.

“You still own that rat?” she asked.

“It’s just a cat, P,” I said. “I don’t know why it creeps
you out so much.”

“It’s not a cat,” she said. “See those eyes? It’s a
mountain.”

We snuck downstairs, past the kitchen where my mother sat at
the table, sobbing. I opened the front door.

“I called the meat truck!” shouted Momma.
 

“Thanks Mom!” Phaedra responded.

I slammed the door behind us as we ran out.

Cignus had parked his truck in the driveway. Phaedra rolled
down the window as we sped away from the neighborhood.

“You’re such a bitch,” I said to her.

Phaedra lit a cigarette. The wind sucked at the ends of her
dark princess hair.

“You know, if you don’t go to sleep, you’ll go mad,” Cignus
said.

“I’ve been mad for three days,” Phaedra said.

Cignus’ face was bruised a ferocious purple, his neck sick
and yellowing.

“Cignus. Something bad is happening to you,” I said.

“It’s this artist suit. I can barely breathe,” Cignus said.

He grabbed his tie and tore it away. It burst into moths.

“Get out of here!” he said, coughing, and batting at the
moths that filled the car.

Phaedra rolled down the window and swatted them out of the
car.

“Is this a dream?” I asked.

“If it’s a dream,” Phaedra said, “then why don’t you wake
up?”

She stuck her leg out the window of the truck. She bounced
it up and down so that her foot seemed to skid across the white lines in the
center of the road. I closed my eyes. Opened them up again.

The road did not melt away.

Cignus pulled up to his house and parked.

“We have to hurry,” Cignus said, “before the party.”

We got out of the car. I bent over, heaved, and coughed up
moths.

“What have you done to me?” I asked. “This has to be a
dream.”

Cignus grabbed me by the waist and spun me toward the
backyard.

“Don’t you see what’s out there?” he said.

Beyond the backyard were the woods. That night, a light
shone through the trees.

That crumbling house could’ve risen up to devour me.
Everything in the dark took on an extra dimension. I felt as if the street
stretched out to infinity and that I, in the middle, was shrinking.

Cignus and Phaedra dragged me into the backyard. I expected
Saint Peter to be there shooting arrows, but I only found the target on the
ground, torn to shreds. Propped up against the tree was the blood painting of
me with mad eyes, lightning hair, and horns of yellowed ichor.

Cignus took the painting to the edge of the woods where
Phaedra and he held it to the light. The light grew brighter and their faces
appeared grim and bruised in the glow.

“Do you see it?” Cignus asked.

The light reflected a red line off the painting and into the
woods.

It wasn’t an artist that pressed my blood into a canvas and
painted horns and eyes with his thumbs. It was a diviner. He hadn’t created a
painting for bored middle-class intellectuals to buy, but a guide to show the
way.

To where?
I didn’t know.

“You have to follow the light,” he said.

“Why me?” I asked. “And have you two been sleeping with each
other?”

“It’s been haunting me all my life, but it was made for
you.” Cignus said.

I couldn’t see anything in the woods except that red light,
rushing past the darkness, like a beam that could penetrate solid matter.

“Why is this so important?” I asked.

“You’ll know when you get there.”

“Lily, listen to me. If you go in, you might be someone else
when you come out,” Phaedra said.

“Don’t tell her that,” Cignus said.

“Somebody needs to.”

“What’s going to happen to me?” I asked.

“Child,” he said; and still holding up the painting, he spit
in the grass. “I knew you would be too scared. You’re a little girl trying on a
woman’s body, but it’ll never fit you right.”

“You’ve been wanting me to do this from the beginning,” I
said. “From the moment you met me. You set me up for this.”

“Now she’s mad because you called her a child,” Phaedra
said.

“Shut up,” Cignus said. “Neither of you know what you’re
dealing with.”

“Then explain to me.”

“There’s no time.” He said. “The blood only lasts so long,
then the light disappears, forever.”

“And after?”

“I’ll see you at the party,” he said. “I promise.”

I should’ve run. I probably could’ve fallen onto the ground
with my eyes closed and forced myself to wake up. Instead I looked at Cignus,
covered in bruises and blood, as he held up the painting. His eyes begged me,
with a look I’d never seen from him.

“You need me to do this,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Tell me then,” I said, and my cheeks flushed, my heart
beating like an insect. “Tell me you need me.”

“Oh please,” Phaedra said. “What are we, in grade school?”

He hesitated. His entire body shook with fatigue; his
muscles must’ve been burning from lack of sleep. When he spoke, he spoke
haltingly, slowly.

“I’ve always needed you,” he said.

I followed the red light into the woods.

I pushed through trees draped with low vines, misted and
wet. Stormwater, night water,
lay
in pools on the
ground and in those pools lay stars. I crushed them underneath my shoes.

I looked behind, but couldn’t see Phaedra or Cignus anymore,
only the red light that shot out from the painting.

Someone cut the low hanging branches from the trees,
recently it appeared. Their wounds were like wooden eyes. There was a
human-made path cleared through the woods. The weeds and grass were hacked
away, the stones cleared.

I saw no animal tracks. There were no birds in the trees, no
rustling of foxes, no deer in the grass.
Only the sounds of
my breath and my steps.

Little blue flowers grew on the ground, like the ones I’d
once seen crushed underneath a spider child.

The red light flickered in and out. Cignus was right. Soon
it would be gone, and if I didn’t hurry I’d be trapped, lost here.

I ran. The vines attacked my face and cut at my exposed
face. I fell several times, scraping my knees against the hard ground. I thought
I might be run until my heart gave out, or until I bled out. But as I ran
further, the darkness disintegrated. Warm sunlight emanated from deep within
the woods.

I entered a meadow where the sun hung high in the air.

The red light disappeared.

The meadow’s grass was dead and brown. The air was full of
oil, so thick I tasted it at the back of my throat – a childhood smell, a
reminder of cyanide and steel.

Machine oil.

In the middle of the clearing, in a patch of dirt, I found a
woven basket of freshly dead wrens. Someone had tied a red ribbon around each
of
their
necks.

“Who’s here?” I called out.

God, that cloying smell of oil could knock me unconscious if
I wasn’t careful. It was what I smelled the night the demon took me to her
dining table in the woods.

“Demon?” I whispered.

I crouched in front of the basket. Whoever had brought these
wrens, got them from somewhere else, as there were no birds left here.

Or it had killed everything in the forest.

“Nightcatcher?” I whispered again.

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