The Worm in Every Heart: Stories by Gemma Files

Author:Gemma Files [Files, Gemma]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Fantasy, Horror, Short Stories, Dark Fantasy, Fiction
ISBN: 9781504063708
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2020-10-12T23:00:00+00:00

I sleep, just as Mother said I would. I dream I lie packed in ice while years pass, years upon years. I dream I am disinterred and wrapped in bandages, raised toward a shining globe, the charge surging through me as I writhe and scream—blind, but hardly senseless. Then I dream silence, cut only by the sound of the scalpel tracing my jaw. I open my eyes, and the first thing I see . . .

. . . is your face.

Beyond the Forest

CAROLA WOKE COUGHING BLOOD.

The moon was already up. New frost had settled at dusk, lending the rotting leaves around her a leprous sheen. Her teeth ached. As she raised her hand to block the light, she saw that insects had laid their eggs beneath her nails as she slept.

Die, she told them, and felt their tentative hum dim slowly to silence.

Carola stumbled to her feet. Rain had left her shroud stiff with mud, her joints swollen. To her left, a lark cried out. She turned, clumsily, her train tearing loose with a sound like burnt bones popping.

As she paused there in the moonlight, a brief thought touched the back of her neck once, and was gone:

There is something, something . . . I have forgotten.

But it slipped away before she could quite catch hold.

The lark cried again, and was silent.

Carola had been out of the black earth since late summer and all through the autumn, stumbling after a slippery rope of moonlight which fell, every so often, between the faded curtains of the leaves. But now the trees began to look like ice-slicked skeletons again, and the air was chill. She would have shivered, had she felt it.

Carola sniffed the wind.

It had an unfamiliar scent tonight. Something fleet, almost barren, which yet refused to dissipate on further consideration. Like candle-wax, left to drip in a dark place for longer than was really wise. Or a rust-pitted blade, unsheathed at last. Like old blood.

It stank of foxes run to earth.

It stank like rebirth.

And once more, the pull:

. . . something . . .

The gaunt moon broke over the highest leaves and hung there, half-eaten by its own topography. It cast a finger to the north.

Carola followed it, and found a city crouching there against the ridge. It was a sign, of sorts.

Well, then.

Gathering her shroud about her, she set her feet toward it, and let them have their will.

* * *

The city was in fact a town, and that only loosely: More like an inhabited boil, allowed to flourish—by the surgeon’s disinterest—under the shadow of the knife. It lay heaped haphazardly together, a mess of gables, chimneys and uneven stoops. Stone, wood, shingles, slate and mud. Fear ate at every table.

The town was old. No one remembered its name. And no one could even dare to guess whether it predated the castle in whose shadow it squatted.

A long shadow. Very dark. And very cold.

* * *

Walking swiftly, Carola crossed the bridge without a backward glance. Stones slipped beneath her stride.

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