By Jen Cornick
They’d slithered through the building in the small hours of the morning, smearing the renoviction notices across the doors. It wasn’t a surprise, but it still made Mae’s heart stutter as she peeled one away from the cut-rate paneling. As the building’s superintendent, they’d told her about their plans yesterday as they handed over her termination letter. The notice was thin and cheap; it felt like nothing in her hands despite the weight it added to her shoulders. Mae sighed and rubbed between her eyebrows, wondering what would happen to them all now.
“Oh, fuck me sideways with a saw,” Sarah said as she opened her door, ripping her notice from it. “The case law was on our side. From Montreal all the way to Vancouver. All of it.”
Mr. Park peeked out his door at the end of the hall then opened it all the way. He rested his palm against the wall and followed it forward with shuffling steps until he stood next to Mae. “We lost?” He looked up at her with his cataract-coated eyes.
Chrissie walked down three steps from the floor above and sat in the middle of the stairs, a heaving heap of sobs in a cost-effective skirt suit. “I can’t afford anywhere else.”
Mae wanted to say that they would think of something. That there would be some resolution. That there was still a fight left to have. But there wasn’t. Mae couldn’t afford another round of lawyers and court filings and injunctions, which they would inevitably lose. The notice was still in her hand, damp and wrinkled, as she slid down the wall and looked up at her neighbors. The people who lived in this building were low-income retirees, store clerks with three jobs, divorced moms, and cleaners. Their building owner had condemned them to nursing homes, hostels, shelters– or worse– all for a few million dollars. They were relegated to the spaces people refused to see. It would be as if they never existed at all.
***
Mae pushed open Mr. Park’s door. The building had been empty for a week, but it felt like the people who had lived here still echoed through the halls. Trip’s spectacular toddler tantrum from last year was still reverberating in the stairwell. She could hear Chrissie’s laughter as she tried to fit her keys into the lock, all the while seeing double after coming back from her friend’s bachelor party. She could even hear Sarah’s creative array of swearing rolling down the halls. It was odd, not quite loneliness, but approaching it. She walked through Mr. Park’s apartment, making sure there was nothing left behind. There were no small mementos, nothing that had fallen from a box or been forgotten in the back of a kitchen drawer, which meant there was no reason for her to be here any longer.
The wreckers said it didn’t matter whether the doors were closed and locked. But Mae had spent so long concerned for this building–repairing every small nick in the walls, sanitizing the railings, hanging the holiday lights–that she couldn’t leave without locking every window and door. Maybe it was force of habit, or maybe it was a last act of care. She didn’t know. She stepped through the main door, closing it softly behind her as she walked out into the street, leaving her building for the last time. The space between her heart and throat stung and ached. The trees in the park had started to turn, that saccharine scarlet of sugar maples which made her smile every year. Even this one. The hardest one yet.
She walked away and tried not to look back.
The neighborhood smelled different. There remained the scents of a thousand meals wafting between the buildings, but it was stale, like spices left too long in the cupboard. A few shop windows were shattered because it simply didn’t matter. Buildings had been crudely tagged as burgeoning street artists attempted to hone their craft, or at least their signature, taking advantage of the laissez-faire lethargy that permeated this near-abandoned neighborhood. There was nothing here of value to protect. Now, the only thing police did here was ticket cars parked where construction equipment was wanted.
Mae parked her car near a building that had already been demolished. The hatchback was loaded with all her clothes, blankets, a battery lantern, and a paperback or two, all meant to make sleeping there more bearable while she found someplace else.
“It’s only temporary,” she said, her voice soft, as she walked past her car and started around the block again. It was too early to sleep.
***
Mae was tired of walking. But there was nowhere else to go. And nothing else to do– she’d already been to the job center today. So, she walked. Another two blocks of affordable housing had been swallowed whole by developers and investors this week. She stopped for a moment, at the edge of one of the yawning voids. She pulled the collar of her coat tight to keep the frigid November rain off her neck as she looked into the pit.
She saw a writhing wad of earthworms in the mud, all of them swarming out of their burrows, tangling in their tailings at the bottom of the pit. She’d heard once that earthworms were an invasive species, brought over with the European settlers in their crop starters. That while they might do some good, they did more harm. They killed saplings and seedlings, changing the soil so they couldn’t grow. Their segmented bodies seemed to pulse as one and then split, each slithering side seemingly larger than the whole before. There was a flash of cream, then gold that slipped from their center before they pulsed and swelled over each other again in the mucky mire.
Her fingers tightened at the collar of her coat, making it hard to swallow. Her shiver was reflexive, the cold and disgust roiled together. She forced herself to walk on, away from the worms, gnarled and knotted, bursting from the mud.
That night, her phone freshly charged from the fast food restaurant, she decided not to apply for the few jobs she could find, but rather to read about worms. About those from the depths of the earth, the depths of the sea, and the depths of human bodies. About how they floated along on ships, in containers of crops or on hulls, and invaded other spaces. About how they built structures to house and protect themselves. About how they devoured everything around them.
She slouched low in the back seat of her car as she read, pulling the layers of her coat and sweaters tighter around her under the blanket. Her revulsion had turned to fascination as she clicked through link upon link upon link. Her lantern blinked out, the batteries eaten away over the last few weeks, leaving her alone in the dark with the worms.
In the distance, between the fringes of the old neighborhood and the pits that would become the new, she heard it. A giggle. High-pitched, synthetic, tinny. Like those baby dolls from the sixties. She pulled the blanket up over her head and turned off her phone, not wanting to attract the attention of anyone who might be wandering the empty streets for fun.
***
Her finger hesitated over the phone’s call button. It just hovered there for a second before she jabbed at it, quick and strong, so that it forced the call. Then she waited as the phone rang.
“Cypress Hill Assisted Living Facility,” the woman on the other end answered.
“Can I speak to Mr. Park, in room 241; he’s not answering his calls?” Mae asked, exhaling the question and pushing it out beyond the worry that had frayed the edges of her mind for the last couple weeks.
“Oh, I’m sorry, hun, did you not know? He died a while ago. The family let everyone know about the funeral,” the receptionist said, her tone brusque and placating all at once.
Mae had no words. She didn’t even say anything as she disconnected the call. Mr. Park had been the only one she’d been able to find after they’d dispersed. Most of her other neighbors had disappeared, their social media accounts going quiet. She’d heard Tanya and Tripp ended up in a shelter. Chrissie had gone back to her parents. Sarah decided that her ex-husband was a better bet than homelessness. Mae couldn’t find any one of them, and she doubted they could find her. She got out of the car, slamming the door behind her, making herself walk rather than cry.
She knew the grid of these streets so well that she maneuvered them with her head down, hands tucked deep in her coat pockets. Mae never saw the construction workers, not once. She’d never even heard them working–not at night through her thin car windows or during the day when she walked these streets. Instead, it was the crackling flutter of the larger-and-better-than-life advertisements, the snap and groan of the frozen metal scaffolding, and, sometimes, that synthetic giggle.
It had started to haunt Mae. Familiarity should have bred contempt–or at the very least annoyance. It should have had her clenching her jaw and grinding her teeth. Instead, she shivered each time it started, so hard her teeth chattered. She pulled her coat tight around her waist and crossed her arms over her chest to prevent the shudder.
Scaffolding rose high around the pits that used to be homes, hiding them and what filled them. The banners that fluttered around the creaking metal skeletons featured pictures of a perfected life. A sleek kitchen where a couple shared a single plate of designer aperitifs. A woman standing at a window looking out at a skyline that did not yet exist as her partner brought over wine–the furniture in the living room too white. A man sat in a bed that had not been slept in. All of it, a sterile rendering of perfection by someone who didn’t understand. Didn’t get that there should be stacks of life scattered throughout, softening harsh lines and rigid faultlessness– bills and keys, books and charging cables, blankets and bathrobes. Anything to prove that people lived there.
Mae’s worn hems dragged in the slush as she walked. Around the other side of the would-be-building, there was a display of how the developers hoped the neighborhood would look. Endless empty rivers of sculpted concrete. Sleek, modern, and artistic. But there were no cars, no sidewalk stalls, no people. The architects and designers having forgotten the comfortable chaos of community– a coffee shop stuffed full with people in a morning, a grocery store where customers met over bok choy and chard, a busy sandwich shop with wind-dried sausages hanging above the counter.
That giggle rippled through the pitted streets again. Shivering, Mae tucked her chin down into her collar and kept moving, her stride longer, her steps faster. Most days, she managed to outwalk its echoes. Today, it seemed closer; stumbling and crackling along just behind her even as she picked up her pace. She had started to dread each trilled, metallic note because it meant that the laugh would start all over again. Hunched forward, she tried to melt into shadows which no longer existed.
Another laugh started, this one deeper.
They were loud. She tried to be quieter. They shouldn’t be here. She shouldn’t be here. They were close.
Mae pressed herself behind the woven plastic that covered the scaffolding. Her heart jumped, a frantic flicker, as she saw them walk past her. The man was tall, his arms and legs jutted out, alternating with his gait, his body growing thinner with every step he took. His pale fingers and feet extended even further, more than should have been possible, from a shining, slicked-over suit. He barked his laugh again. There was no smirking smile, no flicker of humor in his eyes, no charming dimple in his cheek. Just a wide-open mouth and that synthetic, staticky laugh. The woman giggled, her cheeks stretched over cheekbones and her teeth showing in a rictus grin. She walked on her toes, her flat shoes slipping from her heels and dragging along the ground. She kept herself from toppling over every few frenzied steps by stopping and swishing around the fringe that covered her dress.
They didn’t see Mae as they walked, but she held her breath anyway, waiting until they neared the street corner before she stepped away from the advertisements for an impossible life.
***
The warmth of spring was slow to arrive. It was impossible to lose her body heat overnight. Mae’s car was a poor substitute for brick and mortar, insulation and drywall, paint and carpeting. She needed a job and a better place to live. She needed more than ramen made in take-out coffee cups. She needed to stand under her own shower for a solid five minutes to thaw out the top layers of her skin.
Leaning against her car door, she stared up at the building in front of her. It had seemed to rise before her very eyes over the last several days with very little human effort. She had to shield her eyes as she tipped her head back to see the very top of it. A part of her hoped that these new buildings would need maintenance workers. That there would be jobs enough so she could choose between them. That the wait here, in these streets, in this city, had been worth it.
There were other cities. But they were so far flung they might as well be from a fantasy novel– Regina, Winnipeg, Thunder Bay. Their names even sounded exotic at this point. She couldn’t afford the parking tickets in another area of this city, let alone travelling for days only to find the exact same situation somewhere else. No jobs, no places to live anywhere in the country. It seemed better to stay here, even with the giggling in the night.
She shivered, even in the reflected spring sunshine.
The thought of an eventual job in these new buildings kept her right where she was—looking up at these chitinous concrete tube towers. The collection of them, nearly a dozen on this block, sprang up in the warmest part of the neighbourhood, where the sun sat over the streets the longest. A few weeks ago, it was her park—filled with sugar maples and daylilies—the one that had always made her smile. Now, this. The curved concrete was meant to mimic natural shapes, like the way sand rippled beneath shallow water on the shore. She was mesmerized, following each wrinkled rivulet around the building. They were nearly beautiful. But empty.
No one had moved into these buildings that she could see. She hadn’t spotted a real estate agent. There had been no young couple looking for their first property investment. There were no older couples looking to downsize as they retired. She’d already dismissed the idea that the buildings were meant to be offices.
For a moment, she wondered if she could just walk into one of them, find office staff she’d never seen heading inside to work, and demand that they hire her.
Pushing herself up off her car, she walked away with her hands stuffed into her coat pockets.
“How does anyone find out about jobs anyways now?” she whispered to herself as she passed another new tower.
They probably only posted jobs through exclusive social media groups, to which she would never have access. Shaking her head, she sighed, heavy and gusty.
The laughter lurched through the air again, that trilling, tinny giggle undercut by a forced bark. It bounced off the new buildings. She couldn’t tell where it was. Where they were. Her heart stuttered, and she held her breath as she looked for them. She’d seen them all over the neighborhood since that day but hadn’t wanted to get close, despite the fact they seemed to be the only other people here.
“We’ve got something for you,” the young woman yelled. The sing-song cadence of her voice was jarring.
Mae shook her head and sped up, half-running through the concrete canyon.
“We need you,” the man called out. The last syllable carried like an operatic note.
The landmarks weren’t the same anymore. The streets didn’t make sense. Her heart sped, and her stride lengthened. She didn’t pay attention to where she was, couldn’t pay attention, as her eyes darted around the new buildings. Everything was wrong. Nothing, not even roads, were where they should be.
“Don’t make us chase you,” the man said. It was a cross between a schoolyard taunt and a clapping song.
That made Mae break into a run.
Her breath rasped out as a barrier, a new white cliff face, soared up from the sidewalk where a shortcut between buildings used to be. There was no way forward. No way to avoid them. No way out.
“We found you,” the woman said, clapping just behind Mae’s shoulder. She was twirling her cream and gold fringed dress around herself as Mae turned to face them. The woman opened her mouth wide and out fell that trilling, tinny giggle.
The man in the petroleum jelly slicked suit reached both pale hands out, his fingers spread so wide they looked like gelatine. He stepped forward. Mae stepped back. He lurched forward again, his body thinning until he stood still once more. The vertical cream and gold stripes on his suit made him look taller than he should be.
“Eully has a job,” he said. He lifted his arms, overextending his fingers and palms, to applaud. It was a wet, smacking sound, so unlike the sound of skin that it made Mae watch his hands.
“You need a job, right?” the woman asked, nodding her head, the curls gathered in her space bun hairstyle bobbing in echo.
“Apartment included,” the man said, it sounded like he had a mouth full of gel.
It had been so long, too long, since Mae had spoken to anyone. Not since that awful call to Mr. Park’s nursing home, that still made loneliness and that ache of melancholy tie her vocal cords in a knot. She needed this, not only a job and a place to live, but the chance to be with people again. Even these ones. Mae couldn’t help but look at her and nod back.
“Oh good,” the woman said, clasping her hands together, her skin pulled tight over her knuckles as she held them next to her cheek and bounced on the balls of her feet. “Come along then.”
The woman turned, tottering on her toes, and sped down the now-unfamiliar block. Each step had her tilted impossibly forward, like she was about to fall. Her forward movement inexorable and drawing Mae after her. There was a globular guttural note to the man’s laugh as he followed them.
***
The three of them stopped in front of another brand-new building in the neighborhood. This one was the largest of them all. An icy cliff of an edifice rising from the ocean of asphalt that surrounded it. It was an odd structure, its frosted windows at different heights and thicknesses, making it seem as though it had been cleaved from an Antarctic glacier shelf. It was nearly silent here, aside from the rasping sound of Mae’s breathing and the rush of blood in her ears. She looked around, expecting the two who’d brought her here to still be there. To hear their laughter. But they were gone.
Mae shook her head. A job was a job at this point. Money was still money. She glanced up at the building once more. This used to be a tumble-down block of flats from the seventies, brutalist architecture softened by laundry lines, overgrown herb gardens, and sun-bleached patio furniture. Now, it was this: Cool luxury in what someone hoped would be a gentrified neighborhood.
The change in the shadows and the breeze around the building made it chillier than it should be. Mae shivered. She didn’t want to be here. Not even a little. But the job came with a free apartment. It might be in a dark basement, yet it was still better than no place to live. There was nothing to do except hope that the grip of ice along her vertebrae loosened once she stepped inside.
It did not. It was even more frigid here than outside, the air temperature at near-glacial levels. Mae forced her hands from her pockets and rubbed them in front of her, the calluses on her palms rasping. Hands in pockets was a sign of insecurity, and she needed to project ease. She pulled her spine from its cold curve and looked around at the sterile tiles and windows that diffused what little sunlight made it to street level now. As Mae waited, the confident strike of heels against the hard floor started up and seemed to last forever.
Out of the tenebrous depths of the lobby, a woman appeared. The gold silk panels on her ivory dress caught the light as she approached. She was moneyed perfection as she circled around Mae, from the burnished blond chignon and arctic glint in her smile to the smooth skin of her calves and the golden heels of her pointed Mary Janes.
“You don’t look like much. Do you have any experience? Worked as a building superintendent before? References?” she asked from behind Mae, making her want to curl into her coat once more. The woman didn’t wait for an answer.
“Never mind. I don’t really need you to have any, so I suppose you’ll do.” Mae looked up from the floor and flinched, but the other woman had already turned away.
“Come along. I have things that need to be done.” Her voice rose as she disappeared back into the depths of the lobby.
***
The air conditioning was on all the time. It was Mae’s main task to make sure the building was comfortable, “habitable,” according to Eully. Mae lifted the white plastic air-conditioning panel, checked that it still read 12 degrees Celsius, and shivered in her hoody, standard issue work coveralls, and long-sleeved shirt. She closed the cover, then the clear plastic one with the lock. She turned the key and let it retract on its cord back to the cluster of jangling metal at her hip. She looked at the plant she’d brought in and put here, in this little alcove behind the elevators, next to her apartment. She wondered if anyone had noticed she’d brought it here. Or its failure to thrive. Mae wondered, for just a second, whether it would grow better if it were warmer.
“What would happen if I turned it up a single degree?” she asked, brushing a finger along one of the dying leaves of the dieffenbachia.
She shook her head as she got into the elevator, pulling her mop bucket with her. There was no way she was going to adjust the air conditioning to find out. She needed this job, which meant she needed to do exactly as Eully asked. That woman owned everything here now, and it wouldn’t do to upset her, even a little.
Mae stepped out of the elevator, mop bucket in tow, just like she had done every day for the last several weeks, hoping to find a scuff, a spill, a sign of human occupation. There was nothing. Not even dust. Just silence. She’d looked in every apartment, all of them unlocked on the lower floors, hoping to find some sign of people: a purchase order taped to a door, samples of dishwasher tabs, a pamphlet from a real estate agent. She never thought she would miss that tinny giggle and the odd couple who wandered the neighbourhood, but she did. At least they recognized her: When they were there, she was real and here. She was tempted to yell down the corridor, to scream at the top of her lungs, just to hear the echo of sound. But she didn’t.
Instead, she tried to listen to the worm tanks bubbling in the walls.
The wheels of her mop bucket quieted their clattering and squeaking as she stopped in front of one of the tanks. They were meant to be decorative, Eully had said when she’d shown her around the building that first day. Like aquariums but for a single species at varying pressures. She’d spent so long researching worms over the last few months that she knew the polychaetes in these tanks on sight. The gold and cream frilled radials of the Christmas tree worm swayed with the forced water current. Mae had no idea what these worms ate, let alone who fed them. It wasn’t on her list of duties, and she never saw who did it. She was tempted to tap the glass, to see if a worm would retract itself into its burrow. But she didn’t. Instead, she turned, gripping the mop handle, dragging it behind her as she got back onto the elevator, going to the next floor to repeat everything all over again.
Wheels clattered as the doors opened. She stepped out and looked at this worm tank. It held a ribbon worm. Its cream-and-gold-striped body deflated as a veinous and webbed jelly proboscis jutted out. The compressed worm pulled itself across the sand in its tank. It always made her quiver with fascination and revulsion as she watched it. When the worm stopped moving, she forced herself to walk on towards the elevator, mop bucket rolling behind her.
The cycle repeated all over again. A bearded fire worm forced itself into the fine gravel in the next tank. Its white, red, and gold bristles flicking at the sand. She didn’t like to watch this one. It was too alien. She swallowed her shiver. Up the elevator, the doors slid open, the wheels clattered.
All the way to the top floor. Where it was different.
Large empty tanks and wide windows alternated around the room. In the center was a rectangular pool. It was still, so still it reflected the room like a mirror. So deep, she’d never found the bottom of it, not on any basement floor. So dark, it looked abyssal. Mae stood at the edge of it, like she did every day. She closed her eyes rather than look at herself. Every day, she wanted to kick at the water, to disrupt that reflection. To make a mess. To prove that someone existed in this building. But she didn’t. Instead, she stepped away, wheels clattering beside her as she got back into the elevator.
***
There was a puddle of water on the floor, next to the abyssal pool. Mae hadn’t made it. She stood over it, mop in hand, mesmerized by the way it reflected the light, the way it seeped away along the grouting, the way it existed at all. She didn’t want to touch it. It was a small sign she wasn’t alone. That there might be someone else, here, in this vast, cold building.
Mae looked up and around the room. Eully stood by one of the tanks, her hand pressed to the thick glass, her expression almost tender.
Mae took a step forward. The mop bucket squeaked. Eully didn’t so much as jump at the unexpected sound, not even a shiver, the gold side panels of her ivory silk dress seeming to unravel into thousands of filaments. It was a flash. Nothing more, like it hadn’t happened. As Eully turned to face Mae, one hand flattened to the glass and her other hand pressed just above where her heart should be.
“You’re here,” Eully said, her surprise making her tone more strident, her consonants crisper.
Mae ducked her head, her cheeks warming. She wasn’t sure if she was embarrassed to have been caught here by Eully or for her to witness Eully in that unguarded, loving moment between her and whatever lived in the tank.
“I didn’t realize you were here. In the building, I mean,” Mae said, taking a step back in line with her mop bucket.
“You never do,” Eully said, her hand lingering against the glass, before she walked across the room to leave.
Mae tried to say something—to apologise, to mention that maybe their routines were different, or to accuse Eully of hiding within the innards of the building—but nothing came out as the elevator doors closed. She pulled her mouth shut and puffed out her cheeks as she exhaled. She looked at the mop handle, as though it might have advice or a witty quip to alleviate tense silence. Shaking her head, she stepped away from it.
Mae’s attention went to a nearby tank. A glint of gold curled around ivory, sinuous movements causing the sides of the segmented marine worm to unravel into thousands of tasseled filaments. One side, first, moved through each of its articulated sections, then the other, as it pushed to the bottom of the tank. The only way to tell the head from the tail was the direction in which it swam. She walked closer. Each time it coiled over itself was mesmerizing. She leaned in, looking at it. At them. There were so many in the tank. Her nose was nearly pressed to the glass by the time she recoiled, flinching so much that she took a step backwards.
They were as horrifying as they were hypnotic. All of them a collection of golden tassels framing a body that was a ladder of human-looking teeth.
She couldn’t stop watching the worms. Even as she shuddered, she stepped forward again. She was so close her breath fogged the side of the tank. The tips of her fingers grazed the glass as she followed the swoop and the curve of those filamented sides. The glass was biting cold, chilling her through the pads of her fingers right down to her distal phalanges. Her bones ached with it, but she didn’t care. Too long spent in the cold of this building.
One worm broke from the hypnotic loop, swimming through the circulating current. The perfect symmetry of its form was broken as the tassels and teeth of its body peeled away, revealing a head extending from that orifice and a gaping wide mouth with needle-like incisors. It undulated through the water, its jowls jagged as it latched onto the tassels of a smaller one. It sank its teeth in and tugged as the other worm tried to thrash away, breaking the endless loop as the others scattered through the tank.
The little one flailed, the other snapped and pulled, more of the smaller one disappearing into the larger. Its entire being subsumed. It would take days for the evidence of it to appear in a segment at its tail. And still the dying one fought, trying to drag itself to the bottom of the tank, to the safety of solid sand, as the other one swallowed.
As soon as it started, it stopped, its head hanging from the jaws of the larger worm. Mae and the worms floated there, in that endless second. With one final snap and a flash of needle teeth, it was all over, the smaller worm pulled entirely within the larger as it started to circulate in the current once more.
Mae covered her mouth with her hands and took a step backwards, away from the tank. “It is just nature,” she whispered to herself as she shivered. “They have to eat something.” It was a paltry attempt to explain a species, an event she didn’t understand.
She wrapped her arms around herself as she waited for the elevator, looking over her shoulder every so often at the tank. The chime made her flinch. The doors slid open, and she jammed her fingers against the button for the main floor over and over again, as though it would make the doors close and the ride go down faster.
***
Mae waited for Eully in the lobby. She wasn’t going to quit, and she wasn’t going to apologise for not realizing that Eully was in the building. She wasn’t sure what she was going to say, just that she felt the need to forge a connection with the woman, rather than just working in the building for her.
It was a strange longing that had her flicking her fingers and fidgeting as she paced the length of the main doors. They slid open each time she crossed the sensor, letting in a waft of warm summer air. She’d spent months in this building with nothing but the worms in their tanks for company, and they’d started to feel far too familiar to her. The thought of even a modicum of human contact, even a nod in the lobby, would be nearly enough.
Enough to feel human again.
“I need to get out more,” she said with a shake of her head as the doors opened again. Her car visible on the road. No one seemed to care if she was even here, if the work was done, what little there was of it. She could leave and go someplace where there were people. But those places didn’t exist anymore—the malls of her childhood were abandoned and falling down, libraries had been defunded and closed, waterfront piers gone to ruin and devoured by shipworms. So, she didn’t leave. She never left, not even for groceries, the nearest shop seemed so far away. She got them delivered here instead.
She just paced and waited.
But no one walked through the doors after hours.
Mae was tired of waiting. And walking back and forth. She left the lobby and took the elevator up, visiting her favorite worms. She spent a few minutes watching the sway and swirl of the Christmas tree worm before moving to the next floor where she watched the ribbon worm pull itself forward with its branching, gelatinous proboscis. The fire worm bristled in its tank, seeming to take exception to her presence. It wasn’t long before she found herself in front of the tank with the gold-tasseled worms. It was like yesterday hadn’t happened. They floated and coiled in their continual circuit.
The elevator doors slid open, and Mae expected to hear Eully’s gold-heeled Mary Janes and confident stride. Instead, someone was humming, the tune jaunty. Mae turned, her fingers lingering against the glass, as a man stepped from the elevator. He looked at her. His smile too bright, too white, against his red beard. He strolled forward, his clothing from another decade, white-and-gold-and red-striped pants with a crisp white shirt, tucked in too tight. He was as familiar as his song.
And yet, Mae couldn’t place either as she watched him walk the long way around the room. She turned from the tank to match his progress, her back pressed against the cold glass. He stopped at one of the wide windows. His hands were on his hips, his chin tipped high. Satisfaction permeated from him as he surveyed his new domain.
“It truly is amazing, isn’t it?” he asked without looking at her. “We did this.” His tone supercilious, smugness slithering through his voice.
Mae didn’t think he wanted a response even though words welled up within her. She wanted to let them all spill out–how housing was more than unaffordable. How her neighbors had suffered in the aftermath. How solitary Mae had become. So lonely that she swallowed down all her words, gulped them back into that sickening blend of fascination and revulsion that still roiled in her stomach. Instead, she took a few steps forward to join him at the window and hoped she might have an actual conversation with another person.
“Truly glorious, don’t you think?” he asked, a new spurring note slipping in, as if he was spoiling for a fight.
“In its own way, maybe,” she said, by way of concession to her own conflict between the anger that burbled in her stomach and the desperate loneliness that tangled around everything else within her. The neighbourhood outside was empty and unfamiliar. The tall towers reminded her of the worm colonies around hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor. She’d wanted to close her eyes, to turn away, to not see this alien landscape.
His shoulders rose. If he had the rigid tuft-like setae of the gold and ivory worms in the tank, Mae would have said he bristled. His mouth curled upwards, his smile changing from satisfied with all he surveyed to cruel.
“You can’t see it,” he said, turning to face the room. He put his hand on her shoulder. It scorched through all her layers, through her hoodie, coveralls, and T-shirt. His hand gripped harder, his finger curling under her clavicle as Mae bent and tried to pull away. She squeezed her eyes tight against the bone-deep burn. He bent and leaned close to her ear. “And I doubt you ever will.” His breath was hot against her ear.
He started to hum as he walked away, that familiar song.
“The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out.” His voice was deep and mellifluous. Mae held her breath as she tried to stand against pain she couldn’t understand. A wave of nausea washed through her as she struggled to stay upright. He laughed as she fell to the floor. Dizziness made her vision swim as she watched him walk to the elevator.
“They go in thin, and they come out stout,” he sang as the doors closed.
***
Mae’s whole shoulder felt seared as she stumbled into her apartment. Her little space tucked behind the elevators in the lobby. She should quit. She should find Eully tomorrow and leave this place. No job, no matter how well it paid, was worth risking that every time she saw the man with the red beard.
Her skin was burning up and yet she wrapped her hoodie tighter around her as she shivered. A fever. The straight lines of the floor and ceiling started to tilt at alarming angles, like she was a sailor only just arrived on shore. Her stomach sloshed in the opposite direction, forcing Mae to her hands and knees on the cold tiles.
“If I’m going to be sick, I don’t want to clean it off of here,” she said, swallowing back the gurgling bile.
She slid one hand as far as she could along the stretch of floor and forced the rest of her body to follow. It was slow, each pull forward made her stomach bubble and the room spin. She’d been feeling fine earlier, at least she’d had none of the signs that warned illness was there—no general malaise, no need to nap at odd hours, no odd taste to her food that morning.
The bathroom was dark, but she didn’t care. She sat back on her heels and braced herself against the toilet. Her shoulder was on fire now, every single shiver radiating from that point. She folded her arms across the toilet seat and put her head down, determined to wait out the nausea.
That tinny, doll-voiced laugh started, muffled and disjointed through the thin drywall of her apartment. For the space of a single shaking breath, it was familiar, nearly comfortable. That desire, that need, for contact ignited once more, as fiery as that blazing point on her shoulder. She braced her arms against the toilet seat, her shoulders tensing as she pushed back.
Groaning, she rubbed at the welt on her shoulder. She felt its raised edges through all the layers she wore. Razor-edged bristles that scraped against her skin. Still, they were ineffective catalyst for change against the memory of all her cold, dark nights alone. She rubbed her forehead against her arm and closed her eyes. She’d have to start looking as soon as she could focus on a screen again.
“But looking for what?” she whispered into the bowl of the toilet. There were just as few jobs now as there were then. She was lucky to have this one. That realization churned in her guts, and Mae swallowed back the surging bile that burnt its way up her esophagus.
The laugh outside changed. It was louder now. Panic edged its final notes, making its warble more discordant than metallic. Mae pressed her hand to the center of her chest as she breathed in, barbed and fast. For all the times she’d heard that laugh, it had never sounded like this. Shrill and sharp, it rose, louder than before, filling then spilling from the space between the walls. She pushed up from the floor and stumbled to the bathroom door frame, gripping hard as the axis of her vision met the reality of the walls. Weaving and staggering through her living room, she pitched herself against the corner nearest her door.
That woman had saved Mae, found her when she’d been lost in the nothingness of the neighborhood, and now she needed help. Mae was sure of it. She pressed herself hard against the wall, away from the couch, as those harsh notes tumbled all around her, out of order. Mae wanted to curl up on the sofa and pull a blanket over herself, just like she used to, rather than face that laughing woman and whatever might be hurting her. Instead, she swung her door open and took the few, shuffling and shaking, steps forward into the small passageway behind the elevators.
The low notes of a melody filled the whole lobby, a counterpoint to the screaming laughter. The red-bearded man was singing.
“The worms crawl in, and the worms crawl out.”
Mae shivered as his voice grew louder, more sonorous. It echoed through the atrium as Mae stumbled, her hand catching on the elevator buttons as she passed. The floor tilted up to the left, sending Mae toppling to the right, her hand pressed to her burbling stomach, as the room twirled around her.
There was a flash of gold fringe swirling on the balcony as the woman screamed. Mae lurched forward, trying to find a support in the minimalist lobby.
“The ones that go in are lean and thin, the ones that go out are fat and stout,” the bearded man continued as he spun her in a macabre waltz, their limbs completely misaligned, their movements at odds with each other, and yet they danced. All the while, the woman laughed and screamed, like a gleefully terrified toddler.
Mae lurched to the side. It made her dizzy to gaze up at the balcony. But she couldn’t look away as he whirled them at high-speed toward the glass railing.
“Your eyes fall in and teeth fall out. Your brains come tumbling down your snout,” he belted as he rammed the young woman into the balcony, cracking her back over the metal railing.
She hung there for a moment, folded in half, her arms dangling beneath her head, her smile wild, her giggling shriek overpowering Mae’s scream. Mae collapsed, tripping and falling backwards, her palms smashing into the floor.
“Be merry, my friends, be merry,” the bearded man sang, arms extended wide, as he stood over the back-bent body. His hair and beard stood out at wild angles as he surveyed the atrium.
Mae started to crawl forward, a slow skitter across the freezing tile. There was a squelching rip as skin and subcutaneous fat tore, leaving the young woman hanging by bodily threads of sinew and venous tissue. What held the torso snapped, the cartilage cracking with the weight of her. She laughed as she fell, her head hitting the floor. Hard. She rolled for a moment, flipped to her stomach, then started to pull herself forward on her elbows, still laughing as her flapper fringed dress dragged behind her.
Mae flinched back before she could think to scream. She opened her mouth. As she took a breath, she felt the gelatinous lick of some appendage wrap around her ankle. Another tendril wrapped around her head, muffling the sound of her scream and blocking the sight of the woman’s legs sliding down the glass partition of the balcony. As her airways were covered and white spots danced at the edge of her vision, she couldn’t understand why there was no blood.
***
Mae woke with a jolt and a yell. Her throat raw. Her eyes were still squeezed tight against the woman crawling toward her, her gold-fringed dress trailing behind her. Every part of her was wound taut and screaming. It took more than a few seconds to register the quiet around her and the softness of the sofa beneath her.
She opened her eyes and unfurled her fists. She was in her apartment. Maybe she’d followed that impulse to curl up on the sofa. Maybe last night didn’t happen—a clichéd dream. Maybe the fever affected her more than she thought. Maybe she hadn’t seen a woman murdered. She shuddered and curled her knees to her chest, holding them there against the burn of that welt on her shoulder. The pain, that bright burning, kept her there.
It still felt like she was in a dream as she left the apartment, there but not there. A haze of dissociation. The elevator lobby was still the same, no streak of gelatinous fluid on the tile. The atrium was perfect. Quiet and still.
Nothing was there.
No crawling torso. No dismembered legs sliding down the glass. Not even the smear of oil from someone’s touch. There wasn’t even the echo of that horrifying song that might have been a school yard skipping rhyme.
She walked back to the elevators, going up in her usual routine. There were four radials instead of two in the Christmas tree worm tank, which meant there were now two of them. It made sense to Mae, viscerally. She didn’t want to stay and watch the sway of them this morning. Her fists clenched at her sides, she raised her chin and walked away. On the next floor, the lace of the ribbon worm’s proboscis smacked against the glass, and Mae flinched. She held herself still against the shiver. In the fire worm tank, her stomach roiled and the floor pitched under her feet. Half the bristles on one side of the fire worm were thinned.
On the top floor, the abyssal pool beckoned in the middle of the room, dark and still. Mae stood at the very edge of it and flicked her foot through the water, watching the ripples as she waited. She’d done it. She existed, that disturbance in the water, the droplets from her shoe proved it.
She didn’t have to wait long. In a few minutes, Eully swam up from the depths, a coiling swirl of golden tassels and a ladder of incisors for a body. The filaments on her sides separated in the flow of the water. Each sinuous turn through those icy, black depths was perfect. Hers was a wondrous, terrifying beauty in every frond of those flowing golden tassels, in the perfect segmented symmetry of the dentata with every whorl of her body, in the way she skimmed the surface without breaking that barrier between herself and Mae. The only way to tell the difference between her head and her tail was the direction in which she swam.
There was an odd sense of satisfaction, of completeness that suffused Mae, a near-warmth. This was contact. Interaction. Eully had responded. For a moment, Eully stopped the mesmerizing fan of her setae and the rhythmic coil of her body, hovering in that abyssal space, letting Mae look. Mae stood there, transfixed, for several long minutes, until Eully’s head peeled back, revealing her teeth, each larger than Mae’s forearm. The instinct of a hungry predator, flashing teeth and demanding submission.
Mae looked behind her, to that tank of worms swimming in their own mesmerizing circuit. The largest one swam slowly, lingering at the top of the circle for longer than all the rest, as though it were still digesting the worm it had eaten. Mae crossed the room, standing on her toes, she stuck her hand in the frigid Antarctic water of the tank. The ladder of teeth bent against her hand and the tassels stung her palm, a welt already starting, but neither bothered Mae. She walked back to that abyssal pool and threw the writhing creature to the larger worm. It landed with a rippling splash and immediately tried to swim away. Eully swallowed it and swirled in her tank without breaking that glass-like surface between her and Mae. Then, she dove, leaving Mae alone.
Jen is a writer, journalist, and blogger. Her work has appeared in The Selkie, The Last Girls Club, Obscura: New Uncanny Tales, They Whispered, BFS Horizons, Marrow Magazine, and is forthcoming in Strip Mall Magazine, Penumbric Speculative Fiction Magazine, and Radon Journal.