WORM

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. Elghort Rasmuson fell to the dank, feces covered wide-beamed floor with such force that he was certain he'd broken his nose. He hadn’t.

Elghort stood, dusted himself off, and wondered why it had to be like this: why on every arrival did it seem like he was going to be ripped apart, impaled, crushed, or otherwise rendered totally incapacitated? Plus that smell. For heaven's sake, could that smell, just for once, go away. The air was redolent with the calamitous stench of burnt toast, orange marmalade, and the residue of a fetid, rotting koi pond; the kind of olfactory dinge that greeted Elghort wherever he landed. He didn't understand that little detail, nor did he have time to ruminate on the unexplainable. Here and now he had to get a move on, before... well, before it was too late.

First thing; kill the light. Elghort wondered, how on Earth could this tiny remote cabin in the middle of nowhere have electricity? He moved silently to the candle, which was illuminated not by an actual flame, but by a 5 watt lightbulb. Not that any of that mattered. He picked up the candle - a battery powered affair probably purchased online from the Vermont Country Store or some other lesser stand in.

Elghort removed the double A battery when no on/off switch became apparent. Ahhhh, finally. Darkness. It seemed like the hour was getting late, but there was no clock, no watch, no smartphone... no anything that could tell time. The sun was nowhere to be seen, but the moon was rising in the East.

Then, there was that sound. A low, muffled moaning. It came from outside the cabin. Outside. Elghort crept to the window and peered out. Forest. He was surrounded by trees. And there seemed to be a small stream wending its way neatly next to the cabin, through the woods and past where Elghort could see.

He opened the door just a tiny bit and saw a young girl (about twelve or thirteen) sitting on the lowest step of the cabin. She was leaning forward, scrunched on top of herself. Slowly she opened up and began rocking back and forth, clearly having a tough go of it. The worst part was the whimpering. This girl was moaning, and doing so incessantly. She made the sort of maudlin sound that any sane person would find pesky at best, loathsome at worst.

He pushed the door further, and the hinge cried out. The child was surprised by the door opening and stood with such unbalanced energy that she toppled forward like a drunken auntie at a Christmas party. She fell face first onto the dirt outside the cabin, then turned around, looked up, and snarled at Elghort with such practiced - or as he noted later - nuanced venom, that he was sure he’d never seen anyone look at him like that before.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Elghort extolled. “I did nothing whatsoever to deserve that look." He softened just a bit. “Who are you anyway, and why are you here at night by this loathsome cabin in the woods, all alone, and whimpering like a lost dog?”

The girl stood, then turned back so Elghort could see her plainly, if not clearly. She stammered just a bit, which made the understanding part all the more difficult. “I’m Marta. I’m twelve. I don’t know how I got here. I think I walked from the main house, just up there…” she pointed. “I don’t want to go back. It’s a terrible place. Please don't make me.”

The worst part hadn’t been the whimpering after all, Elghort realized, because the tears, snot, dirt, and supper had coalesced on the girl’s face to such an extant that one couldn’t tell where the good stuff ended and the bad began. It was mostly all bad, so no need for discernment he noted. Marta took in Elghort, and realized he was dressed unlike anyone she’d ever laid eyes on.

“Why do you look like that?”

“Like what?” He tried his best not to be offended. Elghort Rasmuson was unique in every way imaginable, starting with his wardrobe: white shirt with rolled up sleeves covered by a brown suede vest; leather sash with a wide brown embroidered shoulder cover; brown leather shoulder strap under the sash; a black leather wristband on his right arm, a black leather embroidered glove with finger cut outs on his left; brown and black striped leather pants; thigh high dark brown leather boots; a black belt with a brown leather strapped man-purse around his waist; an intricate dark brown walking stick with an ebony carved handle that looked like an owl totem of some sort. Finally, Elghort sported a brown and black striped top hat with large gold buttons, the striping perfectly matching his pants. He looked like a Steampunk version of Indiana Jones, with a two day-old beard to match.

Marta didn’t want to answer. “I don’t know like what.” She glanced over her shoulder, to the cabin in the woods. “Did you come from,” she lowered her voice, “in there?” Elghort looked at Marta.

“Yes. Why?”

“We’re not supposed to go in there. It’s off limits. Miss Avalon warned us time and again not to go anywhere near this cabin. Says it’s a bad place. Says it’s even…” Marta lowered her voice again… “haunted. Possessed by a demonic presence of some sort. At least, that’s what she said.”

“So, why are you here if this place is off limits? And who is Miss Avalon? And come to think of it, what is this place?” At this line of questioning, Marta perked up.

“I'm here because I wanted privacy. Miss Avalon is our teacher. One of them anyway. And this place… well, it’s the worst place ever.” Elghort sat down next to Marta.

“Why is that?” Marta looked like she wanted to cringe away, but didn’t. She held her breath, then finally came out with it.

“It’s a place where girls come when they do bad things to themselves. Or try to anyway.” Elghort was sure he needed clarification.

“Like what kind of bad things?” Marta took her time answering.

“Like, I was sent here after I tried to…” she rolled up her sleeve and showed Elghort a healing cut mark on her right wrist. He understood right away.

“I see,” he said quietly. Marta wanted to change the subject.

“So why are you here? Or I should say, who are you and what are you doing here?” Elghort stood and momentarily seemed less sure of himself.

“I don’t remember. I usually don’t at first. Comes to me in a hazy fugue. After a bit of time. It’s generally the same, always annoying, and I usually seem to forget that I forget.”

“And now? Have you still forgotten?”

“Actually it’s coming back to me in bits and pieces, thankfully.” Elghort licked his lips as he looked toward the woods, which now seemed menacing, and quite off-putting. “I suppose I'm searching for someone or something that shouldn't be here. A most loathsome creature, that could hurt a girl like you.” Elghort started walking from the cabin. “I want to look around. Join me? I could use a guide.”

“No. I’m on a time out, which is why I’m really here. Little miss perfect Emma Simpson had it out for me and I wasn't going to stand by and let her degrade. So, I bit her finger almost completely down to the bone.”

“Sounds extreme.”

“You weren’t there.” Elghort began walking the path to where he presumed was a main residence. “I’ll see you again?”

“Not if I see you first.” Marta cast him her most mischievous glance.

Elghort walked in darkness for a short while before he came to a field outside a stately looking brick manor house. Twelve girls, all dressed like Marta, in white summer dresses, were playing on the lawn. The moon was now up, and illuminated the lawn in a ghostly pale white light. He could see two grownups; women in darker, more drab attire who seemed in charge. One of them, he assumed, was Miss Avalon.

Not wanting to cause a commotion, and unclear what he was looking for exactly, Elghort observed for a minute more, then turned and headed back down the path toward the cabin. He couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow, all of the girls seemed off. Their movements were stiff, awkward - as if they were under the influence of medication (or something else) that caused them to run and play in slow motion.

Elghort approached the cabin. The light was back on. Strange, he thought. Marta must be playing games. He proceeded up the decaying steps, his boots making a particularly annoying clacking sound. He entered the cabin and noticed the smell had dissipated. The candle cast a gloomy pall over the one room. He hadn’t checked out the cabin before, and there was nothing remarkable. A rotting green fabric chair sat against one wall. A ripped, ancient leather couch against another. There was a broken fixture - perhaps at one time a chid’s overhead light adorned with faded stenciled balloons - which hung crookedly from the ceiling.

A creak behind him and Elghort whipped around. Nothing. Except there in the corner was a dim closet, its door half open. He walked to it and peered inside. Against the inner wall to his right was a mirror on a marble table in remarkably good shape. Opposite was another dark leather chair that matched the ripped couch in the bigger room. Elghort noticed an altar in front of the mirror with crystals laid haphazardly in front. He stared at the setup. It took him a moment but he remembered, because he’d seen this sort of thing before: the ancient Greeks called it a Necromanteion, or oracle of the dead. Here in this tiny, decrepit, cabin in the woods, with the sad 5 watt candle in the window sat a more modern version - a Psychomanteum. This was a means to see and communicate with the dead. Mirror gazing with a Psychomanteum was one way to observe those who had passed over, similar to when a psychic medium gazed into a crystal ball.

These bits and pieces were beginning to stir something in Elghort; he was remembering, and the thoughts coming back were unpleasant. His returning memory conjured imagines of death, eternal darkness, and light workers outmatched - even outclassed. Elghort returned to this cabin because there was a job to do. He knew that now. He just couldn’t remember exactly what that job was.

Suddenly the mirror closet became ice cold. He could see his breath as if standing on a frozen landscape, only he was still in the cabin. He sat in the chair opposite the mirror and looked up, startled by a loud knocking that came from behind the mirror. And there - her reflection clear as anything he’d ever seen - was Marta’s face in the mirror. Elghort jumped to his feet and looked around, sure that she was standing behind him. Impossible, because the chair was placed against the wall. Just then he heard a loud bang, like a door opening and crashing down in the main room.

Elghort crept hesitantly to the space, which now seemed even colder. In the middle of the floor a door had been opened and flipped over so that the top part was lying flush to the floorboards. It was a hidden door, something Elghort hadn’t noticed before. Now, there was a large and imposing hole in the floor. No one was in the cabin (as far as Elghort could see) so whoever or whatever had opened the door was at present a mystery. He couldn’t discern what was in the hole, but imagined there were steps leading to a basement or cellar.

In the distance Elghort heard voices approaching. He edged to the window, unsure what might ooze from that hole in the floor. A sharp knock on the cabin door broke the stillness. Elghort gripped his walking stick a bit firmer and opened the door. A concerned woman stood squinting at him in the moonlight.

“Yes,” Elghort said. “What is it?” The woman peered at him with more than a modicum of distress.

“You’re not what I expected,” the woman said. Elghort wasn’t at all sure what she meant.

“And you are?” He asked.

“Miss Avalon, the children’s…” she searched for an answer. “Minder. I’m looking after the children. You would know that, if you were supposed to be here.”

“Why don’t you explain it to me then?” Miss Avalon stopped smiling and leaned in.

“The children are here. To be saved. Collected. They’ve all done bad things, and now is their opportunity for… well… for salvation."

Elghort was confused. “Saved how? By the church?” Miss Avalon gave a little chuckle.

“Not at all.” She looked behind her and spoke sharply at the children - young girls about the age of twelve or thirteen. All of them were dressed in white summer dresses, lined up neatly. “Girls stay right where you are. This won’t take but a minute or two.” Miss Avalon extended her right hand, placed it on Elghort’s chest and applied just enough pressure. “A word please… inside. So the girls can't hear.” She stepped forward and pushed Elghort into the cabin.

He maneuvered backwards, unsure what Miss Avalon had in mind. “What are you after?” Elghort asked, with little pretense or pleasantry behind the question. Miss Avalon’s eyes narrowed as she closed the door behind her.

“You really don’t know, do you?" she asked, an imperious look appearing on her face.

“Know what? That you’ve got a bunch of vulnerable girls lined up outside, at night? All here to be made well at a residential treatment facility? All here presumably because they’ve tried to self harm, or worse? Actually, I understand perfectly.” Miss Avalon put up her left hand.

“Shush. You don’t understand one… little… thing.”

At this, Miss Avalon held out both hands. She pushed into Elghort as hard as she could and began sliding him backwards toward the hole in the floor. Try as he might, Elghort couldn’t stop Miss Avalon. Finally, after digging his heals in as best he could (the floor was slippery and so were Elghort’s boots) he came to the exact spot in the cabin where the floor ended and that hole began. He teetered on the edge for what seemed an eternity, then Elghort snorted lightly and fell backwards into the hole.

He didn’t know what was a bigger miracle - that his hat didn’t fall from his head, or that he remembered, at the last second, to turn his walking stick sideways so it wedged into the opening in the floor. Elghort now hung into oblivion like one of the Flying Wallendas - those legendary daredevil performers who performed death defying high wire stunts without a safety net.

Miss Avalon walked to the edge of the hole. She leaned in and snarled. “No church is meant to save those girls now.” From the mirror closet, a cacophonous high-pitched cackle emanated, and morphed into a roiling, deafening screech. Elghort stared up as Miss Avalon was about to kick the walking stick from his hands.

He began pulling himself like he was on a chin up bar when the walking stick glowed a particularly beautiful shade of violet. The glow became a phosphorescent ember. He looked down into the abyss that went on forever as the glowing stick began rising up and conveyed him from the hole to the floor of the cabin, where he landed with a decidedly heavy thud. He stood, then clapped the walking stick three time onto the floor and the glow subsided. Next, Elghort stepped toward the woman, who seemed quite calm. She hissed at him.

“The girls will be going now. Their time here, in this place, wasn't meant to last a lifetime," she said. "But you already know that, don’t you?” Elghort sensed Miss Avalon was up to no good and he was right. He was also remembering.

“You’re their shepherd, aren’t you?”

“And you surf worm holes for the wrong side," she snarled. Elghort quietly unzipped his brown man purse and ferreted around inside.

“The girls won’t be going anywhere. Not for love or money,” he said.

“Love or money has no place here.” Miss Avalon leaned back, then her face contorted into a frightening, inhuman melange. What stared back at Elghort was now a horrible labyrinth of a hundred or more twisted faces, each one moving, snarling, and machinating in their own peculiar fashion.

She or they began shrieking at Elghort with such fury that he wished he could sit down and rest, but there was no time for that. While Miss Avalon moved on Elghort, he removed his hand from his bag and flung a large handful of metal filings in their direction. Upon making contact with this untamed monstrosity, the filings ignited and the faces began to burn with the ferocity of a thousands suns. They began shrieking at a decibel level that would rival any heavy metal concert worth its lineage. Elghort grabbed Miss Avalon’s arm, pivoted wisely to keep out of harm’s way, then guided her to the edge of the hole in the floor and flung her with all his might.

Miss Avalon’s burning faces glowed all the way down to the depths of God-knows-where until Elghort lost sight of the monstrosity. It was if she/they fell to a place beyond the edge of space and time. Elghort rushed to the door. He opened it a crack and saw, in the glowing moonlight, that the line of girls had extended. There were now so many of them waiting patiently that he couldn’t tell where the line ended. He closed the door and turned back.

Inside, the smell was an ungodly mix of burning flesh and indescribable rot. He heard laughter coming from the room with the Psychomanteum and slowly headed that way. More and more Elghort was remembering, but he wasn’t fully in a place where he could do anything but react. He entered the mirror room, sat in the chair, and saw Marta’s reflection in the mirror.

“It’s you, isn’t it?” he asked. Marta shot him a dirty look.

“Who else would it be?” She snarled, her tongue now a slithering black snake which caressed her lips from inside her mouth.

“And your name… Marta? Or is it something else?” The young girl in the mirror transformed into a hideous fiend, its face covered in boils, its forehead roiled with worms and maggots. Elghort held his breath as the stench overwhelmed him. The mirror began to shake, then exploded. Shards of glass flew everywhere. Elghort deployed a web of protection from his gloved hand, which kept the glass from harming him.

He stood and eased back to the main room when banging erupted all around. Next, everything in the cabin including the furniture, fixtures, books, even some of the floorboards were torn apart and began raining down. He crouched, and was protected from harm by his top hat, which extended an energy shield around his head to ward off the dangerous projectiles which fell harmlessly to the floor.

Elghort straightened up and watched as the creature with no name crawled from the hole in the floor and moved to an opposite corner. It seethed, licked its lips, and cast its now orange eyes upon Elghort. Except for the eyes, it once again looked like Marta. He moved sideways, away from the hole.

“So, who are you? Ornias? Lilith? Lamia?”

“Does it matter?” the demon replied. “What’s in a name, anyway?”

“A name is everything. You should know that. The girls… they are no longer living, are they?”

“You’re not as dumb as you look.”

“No need to get personal.”

“It’s always personal,” the demon said.

“And this place. It’s not exactly of the living, is it?”

“Bravo. You catch on.”

“I’m remembering.”

“They are coming with me. They’ve been promised,” the demon nodded its head. “It’s important to keep promises.” Elghort smiled.

“No. They most certainly are not going anywhere with you,” he said. Hideous small creatures began crawling from the hole. The demon started toward Elghort, who bent down and removed something from his right boot.

“I don’t take orders from you, of that I am certain,” it snarled.

The demon lunged at Elghort who tried moving out of the way, but he was too slow. Elghort was knocked onto his back, the wind taken from his lungs. He lay there as the demon crawled from his legs to his chest.

“Get off. Get off me, before it’s too late for you,” Elghort whispered into the demon’s ear. He was pinned and squrimed a while, but it was of no use. The demon reared back, but when it leaned in to finish Elghort off, he was able to fasten the bronze cord he’d removed from his boot onto the creature's left hand. In one motion, as the demon rocked back, Elghort wrapped the chord around the being's other hand and cinched it tight.

The creature began to howl and thrash. It transformed into a large winged thing - most closely resembling an oversized bat with jutting canines - and tried flying into the hole. Elghort held on with everything he had. He grabbed the cord and dragged the demon from the cabin to the outside steps so the girls could see. They were horrified as the creature screamed and flailed, but it had no leverage and was caught like a giant bird in a net.

The girls offered little to no reaction. Their other handler, Miss Benguiat, shouted for them to stay where they were. But, upon seeing the trouble the demon was in, the woman burst into flames and immolated in front of the children.

Elghort fastened the screaming demon to a tree with green twine he'd found in his left boot. He removed another object - a golden ring from his man bag - and thrust it into the demon's chest. As it burned through layers of leathery supernatural skin, the demon began to quiet down. Elghort stared into its glowing eyes.

“Release the hold you have on these girls so they can find peaceful resolution.” The demon was quiet and said nothing. Elghort persisted. "Do so, or I will take them away myself, and leave you here for all time.” The demon looked down, then jerked its head toward the girls and called out.

“Go, now. And hurry, before I change my mind. Find another way out of this place. What do I care? There will be more of you, I guarantee it.” The line of girls turned as one, and began heading toward the big house. When they were gone Elghort turned to the demon.

“You think you can do whatever you want?” Elghort asked.

“Who’s to stop us?” the demon shot back. Elghort was quiet for a long while.

“You know what bothers me the most? You and your kind believe there are no rules. No regulations. You think you can make it up as you go along and not be held accountable. That’s not right. Not the way.”

“There never were any rules. There never have been. You only believed there were,” the demon replied. Elghort picked up the ancient being with no name - who was still wrapped in the bronze cord - and carried him or her back inside the cabin. He closed the door behind.

“I’m curious, why the Psychomanteum?” Elghort asked as he stood just inside the doorway.

“It’s an effective way to begin the crossing. Dare I ask, what will become of you? This isn’t over… not by a long shot.”

“I don’t remember. But I do know I’m tired of smelling you.” Elghort lifted the demon higher, walked it to the edge of the abyss, then held it over the edge and let go. He could hear its laughter for far longer than he thought possible.

In moonlight now fully illuminating this place between life and death, Elghort walked up the hill to the main house, which was now deserted. Where only a short while ago it all seemed vibrant and full of activity, the facility was clearly abandoned and in a state of extreme disrepair.

He entered the main building and strolled the halls. There was nothing and nobody left. Whoever took the girls, and wherever they went, he hoped it was to a far better place.

Elghort sat against the wall opposite the dining room, his back happy for the support. He noticed the floor was filthy, as if the facility hadn’t been lived in for decades. He closed his eyes and thought about what was to come next.

But first he had to remember how to leave. He couldn’t remember, try as he might. But like most everything else that had taken place this day, it would only be a matter of time before he would.