The Worm and His Kings

  Manuscript copyright 2020 Hailey Piper

  Logo copyright 2020 Off Limits Press

  Cover photo copyright 2020 by Filip Dinev

  Cover design by Squidbar Designs

  Interior design by Squidbar Designs

  Edited by Karmen Wells

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher or author.

  “The space circumvented by wormholes can only be a worm.”

  – Corene Valencia, professor in physics at Queens College,

  City University of New York

  1

  THE EMPTY PLACE

  MONIQUE LANE HAD PROMISED HERSELF she would never return to Freedom Tunnel. Yet here she was, two weeks later, promise broken.

  Freedom Tunnel had been a line for freight trains until its shutdown in 1980, and in 1990 it remained in official disuse. No trains passed through anymore; only people, and some of them built homes here. If there were any justice in Manhattan, the tunnel would stay this way and leave all its residents be, but Monique knew better than to expect justice in this town. At a distance, it might have seemed little different from any other underground railroad. Tracks slipped inside, inviting ghost trains into premature dusk.

  But closer to the entrance, she hesitated, same as she had every evening when she lived here. Was there nowhere else to go? The city’s alleys were unkind, but at least there she feared things that she could touch and see.

  Freedom Tunnel’s floor was level, like much of Manhattan, and yet looking into the concrete mouth, its throat always seemed to dip toward the bowels of the Earth. No one but Monique seemed to know about the empty place inside, or if others did, they never talked about it. No grown adult would out themselves as fearing a dreadful nothing in the dark.

  Often she hugged her empty stomach and cried outside the tunnel, among beer bottles and scattered plastic bags. No heading inside until she was done. She never wanted the empty place to hear. No one could touch that emptiness, but noises had to travel through it. Sometimes people sang to themselves in the dark, Broadway tunes or Dolly Parton songs, and Monique would’ve sung along but for fear that the empty place might catch those notes in its nothingness.

  The same went for crying. Better not to have her misery’s echoes trapped and wriggling in its web.

  Long-buried phantoms seemed to wander the subterranean twilight. Only when Monique’s eyes adjusted did scant light reveal those phantoms to be ordinary people. ConEd sometimes powered the lights here, sometimes didn’t, though residents often pirated electricity off the main line either way.

  Some chose to be here; others had nowhere else. There was space to spare and yet most, especially those who had built firm structures of wood or piled cinder blocks, chose the same places to rest every time they returned. Freedom Tunnel was home.

  No one had touched Monique’s makeshift tent of weathered blankets fastened to rusty wall rivets. Though everyday residents likely knew she hadn’t been back in several nights, they must have heard she was still out in the city, spending half of each day begging for change and the other half asking after Donna Ashton. She hadn’t gone missing like Donna and a few dozen other homeless people. Freedom Tunnel had been waiting and remained unchanged.

  The empty place hadn’t changed either.

  Beside Monique’s tent lay a stretch of floor where no one slept. She had almost set her things there when she first arrived but thought better of it and set up along the wall to its left instead. Some days, she watched others do the same. They approached with sleeping bags, old coats, or nothing at all, looking for a place to belong in this steel and concrete neighborhood. Then without warning, they changed their minds and found another spot in the dark. The empty place was cleaner than the rest of Freedom Tunnel, too. Not even dust would settle there.

  It made Monique’s skin crawl and put a chill in her bones. Each time she reached out to touch that bare stretch of floor, thinking to dispel the mystique, she withdrew her hand within an inch. “You’re just being silly,” she would mutter to herself.

  But then a minute would pass, or an evening, and the empty sense of it would creep back across her mind. Sometimes a face formed in the gloom, both new and yet seen in a thousand glances. He’d have nothing to say, but he would grin at her and start for the empty place as if to sit beside her. Within a few steps, his expression would slacken, and he’d decide there were better places to rest. Even creeps feared the empty place.

  At least creeps were a tangible threat, reason for Monique to fasten belt leather around her bicep, which held a switchblade up her sleeve while she slept. No knife would threaten the empty place. She felt its nothingness in the dark some nights when the electricity faltered and kerosene lamps and burn barrels cast dancing shadows across graffiti-coated walls. And in her sleep, it sent cold shapes clawing at her dreams.

  Tonight, she wouldn’t sleep. She’d chosen to come back here not because of the troubles in alleys or to torture herself with the empty place beside her tent. She’d come back for Donna.

  The empty place made Monique feel like she was losing her mind, but rumor had it there was a genuine flesh-and-blood nightmare stalking the city. Street folk were going missing, all of them women, without a word to neighbors and friends, and they left their things behind. At least one vanished each night, going back three months from what anyone knew.

  There was nothing in the newspapers far as Monique ever noticed, the rumors passing person to person. This city liked to forget people. No surprise that some of those stories had taken on a mythic tone. Some liked to joke about the Jersey Devil or that Cropsey had wandered over from Staten Island. Others didn’t joke when they said a monster they’d dubbed Gray Hill had been frequenting Freedom Tunnel of late. There were only ever a couple hundred people living here, most too stubborn to leave. It might’ve been no more than a street-spawned boogeyman, but like alligators in the sewers, there was no telling just how real anything might be in New York City. Women living rough were disappearing and something was taking them.

  The same might have happened to Donna. She had been missing for three months; who was to say she hadn’t been the first? That would explain why she hadn’t left a trace.

  Only her hope of finding Donna could drag Monique back to Freedom Tunnel. She had to see Gray Hill for herself.

  She hadn’t left any clothes in the tent, already wearing most of what she owned. Tufts of black hair spilled past her cherry red beanie, down round cheeks, and over the scarves that encircled her neck. An oversized black T-shirt hung loose across her ribs. Her denim jacket covered the scratches down her arms, while jeans hid the scars that ran along one side of her abdomen and between her thighs.

  The thin blanket she’d left behind smelled of herself and others who might’ve squatted in her tent during her absence. She wished it smelled like Donna. A scent undefinable and yet uniquely hers, it made Monique think of their old apartment, the walks they used to take, the shelter where they’d stayed after this past winter’s ordeal, and Donna tending to Monique’s bandages there.

  Donna smelled like home. Of course her scent wasn’t here. She’d vanished before Monique had found Freedom Tunnel, and any sense of home here was an illusion. Railways were transitory. At some point, passengers had to reach journey’s end.

  Maybe it was at last time to return to Flushing. Monique had spent the last year and a half dodging her parents’ neighborho
od. She half-expected that if she were to visit, she would find an empty lot where she once lived, her mother and father having fled to Brooklyn or maybe northern Jersey with their house impossibly in tow.

  Really, if she showed up begging for a place to sleep, they might take her. But she would have to live the life they wanted for her and promise to never again humiliate them with peculiarities, like having thoughts and opinions of her own. Their self-assuredness wouldn’t have shriveled. If she turned up on their doorstep with Doctor Sam’s scars running down her body and her bones pressing from beneath starving skin, that would only feed their pride.

  There was no going back. Between her parents’ house and the street, it was only a matter of lasting as long as she could in a place that would slowly kill her.

  She ran her hand down her face and hesitated, palm clutching mouth and nose shut. She could hold it there until her air ran out. That would be life every day if she went back to her parents, dying alone at the ripe old age of twenty.

  Her hand dropped to her chest. “Not a quitter,” she whispered. Pride might have been hereditary. She curled one hand into a loose fist and rapped her knuckles against her sternum.

  Donna used to do that to her. “I like your chest this way,” she’d said while they laid on the couch in their old apartment, after Monique had complained about her shape. Donna had then tapped out a rhythm. “Shave and a haircut—” Monique had pushed her gently, pretending to be annoyed, but Donna wouldn’t let up. “Great for telling knock-knock jokes, silly Mon Amour.” Not that she’d known any good ones, but she never let that stop her. “Knock, knock.”

  Monique tapped her chest again, but it wasn’t the same when alone in Freedom Tunnel. The empty place clawed at her thoughts and tore them from sweet reminiscence. Its touch would taint those memories if she gave it the chance, turn love into resentment.

  But she couldn’t help that. Donna had promised to keep the two of them from places like Freedom Tunnel. And if she couldn’t keep that promise, they should’ve slept together in this ragged tent. Being alone in this place was not what love felt like. Donna was older, more worldly, and should’ve been here to hold Monique’s hand, stroke her hair, and guard her from the empty place. On the nights when Monique woke up panicked by ugly nightmares—desperate people drowning in concrete beneath the blankets, grasping at her, pulling her down—Donna should’ve said, That’s just the tunnel haunting your dreams, Mon Amour. It’s okay to sleep.

  Deep down, Monique didn’t need Donna to tell her they were only nightmares. Same as there was no one beside her, there was no one beneath Freedom Tunnel. This was rock bottom; nowhere deeper to go. But still, she would’ve slept easier with Donna’s precious whispers in her ear.

  As lights dimmed down the tracks, Monique reached past the edge of her makeshift tent’s flap, fingers searching for Donna. Maybe the darkness would spit her up and back into Monique’s life.

  Only the empty place lay beside her. There was no hand to hold.

  Rough, heavy cloth scraped the tunnel’s throat. Freedom Tunnel ran three miles long, and something now walked its central tracks, the footsteps going click, click against hard concrete. For all Monique knew, albino reptilian jaws swam the darkness, ready to bring sharp white death.

  The empty place dragged cold fingers across her spine. She reached into her sleeve and fingered her switchblade’s trigger, but there was nothing to fight. The empty place was just restless. This is why the likes of you can’t set foot here, it might have said. I’m a table for one, reserved by a monster. And now a monster was coming.

  The air turned static, every tunnel resident rousing to a collective awareness. Some of them shuffled in the dark to leave, but most stayed put. Either they didn’t believe in Gray Hill or, like Monique, they wanted to see.

  She poked her head out of the tent. Few lights dotted the tunnel this late at night and none spread their luminance far, leaving the walls and floor painted black between secluded camps. No light at all touched Freedom Tunnel’s throat. Whatever walked there walked unseen.

  Monique pressed flat to the ground, her eyes fixed open. If she even blinked, she might wake up. Much as she would’ve liked to pretend this wasn’t real, she needed to see.

  The shape filled the night. Bulky hips suggested a woman, but her overall shape was hard to discern, the way heavy cloth draped her arms, legs, and back. The suggestion of a hooded head climbed ten feet off the ground. Her spine hunched forward, suggesting that her head could rise higher if Gray Hill ever stood up straight.

  “Ooh?” she called. A deep, throaty question, like a whale’s song trapped underground.

  There was more shuffling in the tunnel now of frightened onlookers regretting that they’d stayed.

  Gray Hill took another step and sank into a pool of darkness. Her footsteps thudded closer, her body veiled in shadow. She emerged a few feet from Monique, a nearby kerosene lamp painting the outline of a billowing cloak. Firelight reflected in silvery talons on Gray Hill’s hands and feet. Her legs bent backward, birdlike, and one toe of each foot curled upward into a vicious sickle claw.

  Monique clamped a hand back over her nose and mouth. Maybe this thing had taken Donna and would lead the way to her, but Monique didn’t mean to be taken herself. Returning here was a mistake. Freedom Tunnel invited impossible things.

  Gray Hill waded through night’s black river, disappearing from all of Freedom Tunnel’s light. Where was she? Click, click, the sound of talons against concrete stepped past Monique and toward islands of light.

  “Ooh!” A foghorn blasted up the tunnel. Shadowy arms tore into one tent and knocked away its burn barrel. Embers spit along the tunnel tracks, dousing all sight of Gray Hill just as she grabbed a woman off the ground. Someone was shrieking, but Monique couldn’t tell if that was the woman in the monster’s hand or a neighbor who just wanted this nightmare to end.

  Talons scraped closer, closer, and then past Monique. Heavy cloth brushed the tent’s edge and tumbled across her head. Its fabric felt rough, like burlap. Her breath ran hard against her hand.

  Gray Hill’s clicking footsteps paused just past the tent. A distant kerosene lamp cast a silhouette of her bent spine. She aimed her head at Monique. No one screamed now. Whoever Gray Hill held didn’t even whimper, as if all her air had been squeezed out. Firelight reflected in a puffy red coat. Monique’s red beanie might’ve been just as easy to see.

  She wanted to close her eyes, but now they wouldn’t blink. If she blinked, those talons would take her.

  Thick breath whipped the makeshift tent around her. One stiff blow from those enormous arms would sweep the blankets away, but Gray Hill didn’t move. Did she do this each night when she came to Freedom Tunnel? No, because Monique hadn’t been here the other nights. Someone would’ve risked a photo had Gray Hill lingered this long every time.

  Monique felt a chill then, as if someone her size had slipped inside the tent and now pressed against her, their body cold as ice, but there was no one with her. She eyed the monster again and realized she’d misunderstood.

  Gray Hill wasn’t looking at the tent. She was looking at the empty place.

  It couldn’t be coincidence. For all the people Monique had seen sidestep that bare stretch of Freedom Tunnel, this monster was the only creature besides herself to pay unwavering attention to it. Gray Hill felt the empty place’s nothingness, and one nightmare acknowledged another, kin calling kin. A faint cry crawled up from Monique’s guts. She clenched her mouth shut. Which nightmare would notice her first and tear her apart?

  One sickle-clawed foot slid toward Freedom Tunnel’s throat, and then the click, click resumed. The empty place had stalled Gray Hill long enough. She had what she needed and was headed back the way she’d come. Darkness took her completely. Her heavy footsteps faded, and for a moment the tunnel was silent.

  Monique exhaled hard. At first she held still like that, forgetting how to inhale. Then whispers filled the tunnel. She couldn’t make out t
heir words, but their presence told her it was okay to breathe, so she took a deep breath. Eventually she would stop thinking about breathing and it would become natural again.

  She clambered to her feet, stepped toward the rails, and faced Freedom Tunnel’s pitch-black throat. There was nothing to see. The quiet tunnel acted as if there had been no creature, that the darkness itself had snatched that poor woman. She might be dead already. Monique hoped not, both for the woman’s sake, and because there was a good chance that one of these nights, that darkness had snatched Donna.

  No one stood outside her tent now that Gray Hill was gone. There never would be anyone so long as Monique stayed here. These past three months had brought nothing but empty hands and an empty stomach.

  What were her choices now? Give up, accept nothing? She had fought too long to quit. If she followed Gray Hill, there was at least a chance to find Donna. She was out there somewhere. Even if this thing had killed her, Monique needed to know.

  There was nothing to pack. If she couldn’t find Donna at the end of this, either that thing would kill her, or she’d finally starve to death on the streets. A nothing life with a nothing end.

  Her gaze drifted again to the empty place. Nothing was all she would leave behind.

  2

  DOWN FREEDOM’S THROAT

  GRAY HILL DID NOT TAKE her time. Though the tunnel went pitch-black at points, she seemed to find her way down tracks and around steel columns with ease. Now and then, her head crested beneath a ceiling grate, where ghostly light trickled from Manhattan’s busy nightlife.

  Monique hadn’t eaten in two days, but she’d scrounged enough change for a quart of milk yesterday, which had tricked her stomach into thinking it was full, and she’d kept herself hydrated today. She could manage the tunnel’s three miles.

  Pace was another story. Gray Hill had long limbs that let her sweep briskly down the tracks. Monique bounded with each step, trying to time her footfalls with Gray Hill’s, but it took more effort to keep human legs in stride. Soon their underground world would join the city’s cacophony of traffic, music, and rumbling subway, and then Monique would have no excuse not to run.