Var of the Worm

by David McGillveray

Var of the Worm was not yet known by that name, for his people had no language. Those people had cast him out and banished him from the fertile valleys where they lived.

They were afraid of him and the way he jabbered wordlessly at things they could not see. He was pulled in and out of life and had become a stranger to them. They could not understand why he shouted and moaned at night and disturbed the children. He would rake his own skin with dirty nails and tear at his hair until bloody skin lay exposed. He rejected the advances of women and lay alone. He did not contribute to the tribe, so they had thrown him out.

Now he lived among the harsh rocks above the valleys, hidden cold and shivering in a shallow cave that gave little shelter. He scrambled warily on stony ground, sucking sustenance from bitter lichens and lapping at rainwater. He was alone and full of fear and tormented by strange visions.

I am confined. The earth pushes in on all sides, clawing at my hide as if hungry. I can taste it. It fills my mouth and my glands, it presses at my eyes. My mind tears at the walls of its cage and retreats bloodied. This is my home.

Time oozes stagnant in the earth but my mind races ahead of it. Frustration twists. When the weight is too much to bear, I thrash my body with fury in the dark. My person becomes a lash, battering uselessly at a master uncaring as a stone. These moments pass and when my anger is spent, I get to dreaming.

Somewhere there is more than the pressure of the earth, more than sucking goodness from dirt. There is more than the endless copulations of my brothers and sisters. I can extend my mind’s reach if I lie still and ferment their essence in my belly. It is in this state of clarity that I can see into the above, where the earth is not everything. New vision brings colours I have never seen. Air moves against my skin and delivers to me the smells of a real life. Such are the opportunities. I want to taste that life.

The lives of my brothers and sisters will open the connection. Already I can feel a vessel. It is frightened and naked and without purpose. It reverberates through the world, a mind touching mine. I push back.

I am impatient now. I open my jaws and let the earth in. I can taste decay and bone and the endless past. The dirt flows through me and passes behind. I wriggle into the space I have made, over and over, until the wall crumbles around me and I break into the great hall.

He woke to bitter cold lying in a thin nest of leaves and moss and twigs he had brought from outside. Disoriented, he grunted and slapped at the rocky walls, drove his palm repeatedly against his skull. The rock was damp with the water that trickled constantly from higher in the mountains. The hunger in his stomach made him nauseous but forced him up. He staggered shaking and naked from the narrow shelf where he slept and scrambled over stone slick with dew and algae until he faced the world at the mouth of the cave.

He stood framed in that wide mouth, glad the world was still there despite its unkindnesses. He would choose that over what he saw inside his head. He looked with regret down onto the hugeness of the lush valley floor, a patchwork of dense woodland broken by wide grass-covered plains. The arc of the sky was blue and clear and birds wheeled and called and circled. If he listened hard, he sometimes thought he could hear the cries of the grazing herds that moved about the open spaces and the predators that stalked them.

He still felt a kinship with the cycle of life and death down on the valley floor. It had a rightness to it. But he needed the body of the tribe to keep him alive, and they were gone. Now something unseen whispered to him, pulling at his frightened mind at night as he shivered in half sleep. He was aware of little beyond his instincts but a deeper part of him knew it was something monstrous. The strength of that alien hunger threatened to engulf him.

Even in the day he sometimes saw the world through different eyes.

Today, his own hunger drove him. He stepped tentatively across the harsh uplands ears pricked and eyes darting for the flicker of movement. Starvation was forcing him further from his retreat each day, down the slopes to where danger lurked among the trees.

The walls of the great hall are lit from within by streaks of luminescent minerals. They filter a poisonous molten light about the chamber that flows as if alive. The walls seem to burn. Vague shadows are cast by the stalagmites that march across the floor like a chthonic army. The far walls are lost in the distance and the dimness of my vision but the space lifts the pressure, picks at the locks that hold me.

I break through the earth and broken soil tumbles down the slope as I emerge. My great body, slick with oils, pulses through the gap with a graceful peristalsis and I crawl to the floor of the chamber. This is where I was birthed, child to a mindless animal. This is where my mind took hold.

But mind is a worthless tool in this place. So long have I cursed it.

I crawl across packed earth, sliding around and between the stones until I come to the circle. The ground takes on a glassy sheen within its perimeter. I rest curled at its centre. The stones rise around me, joining with their counterparts that drip from the roof somewhere above me. The surfaces of the stones are slick with the rusty blood of the earth, beautiful in the orange light. The light seems to collect and pool here and I sit in a bath of flickering colours.

I prepare my mind and body. I begin to call.

The tough grasses underfoot began to soften, their colours brightening as the soil became thicker. He made his way down following the thin tracks of animals and the trickle of water. The thin, gurgling streams that pattered down from the highlands began to merge. Soon, he followed the path of a shallow river. Tiny dark shapes swarmed in pools orphaned by the course of the water, forever slipping through his fingers. Tall mountain caribou with head decorations like the crowns of the trees stared arrogantly from their vantage points. He kept away from them. Up close they were twice his height. From a distance they still made his stomach clench.

Stubby trees grew now in the sheltered hollows of rocky outcrops. Soon they thickened out into forest. Needles matted the ground and pricked at the hard soles of his feet. He was taut as a gutstring and felt his nerves fraying.

His goal lay under the trees where the river tumbled over hard stone and formed a wide pool. Here, animals came to drink. The soil was fertile and nourishing tubers grew at the bases of plants he recognised from his days in the valley. Autumn berries hung from low branches.

He slipped through the undergrowth carefully, plucking at the little fruits that the trees offered. Sunlight percolated down through the leaves. Despite his hunger and his distraction, he was not totally unequipped for survival. He knew that beautiful places were haunted by death. He could hear movement among the vegetation as others came to drink and feed. He identified the soft snuffles of boar and deer, smelled the dung of bears and other predators.

The lure of the water’s edge became too much. Other drinkers watched him from along the shore. Some edged further away, others ignored completely the presence of man. He drank again and splashed his face. He was distracted by a glimpse of dark eyes under thick brows, eyes dulled by exhaustion and hunger. The hollows of his cheeks were covered with coarse beard, the skin beneath scratched and pocked with sores. The thick lips were cracked and swollen where he bit at them as he slept. He poked at the image with a finger and the man disappeared.

It was quiet by the water now. Hairs rose on his neck and arms. A bass growl came from behind and to his right, where the river fell across the rocks. Still in a crouch, he turned.

The cat stood on a large boulder that had won its independence from the hillside and stood massively by the falling water. The beast’s pelt was a deep brown and muscles rolled and flexed beneath it. Its sheen carried a grace marred only by the scars of battle. Pale grey-white stripes marked its neck and shoulders. Huge yellow-white incisors swept down and back past its lower jaw. It clung to the boulder with paws wide as both his hands, claws as long as his fingers. The cat drank him with golden eyes, its long tail flicking at the air with practiced disregard.

It made that throaty growl again. It sounded like harsh laughter.

His jaw worked soundlessly and the trickle of fear warmed his legs. He sagged and fell back into the water. The cat held his eyes with its stare. Those great golden orbs flickered and suddenly the cat was in the air.

He whimpered finally with the last of his breath, held for the occasion.

The cat landed in the soft sand next to his fallen body with a feline subtlety. Its musk filled the air as it passed. Gouts of blood spattered across the sand as the cat swatted at a young boar too slow in its escape.

I hear movement behind the walls: soft scratches and the liquid sounds of the progress of bodies through the earth.

Come to the dance, I call on the air.

The first of them slides into the chamber, entering by the dark throat of an old tunnel. More follow behind it, grey body after grey body dripping to the ground. Everywhere, from the walls and through holes in the floor they come. Still others break through the soil itself as I had done. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of my little brothers and sisters answer my call. I will have their strength.

My congregation cover the floor of the great hall beyond the perimeter of my circle. Some lie bloated, their long pale bodies pulsing in and out. Others crawl lethargically over their companions. More crowd outside the circle watching with idiot eyes, waiting.

The call goes on but now I begin to weave in front of them. I vary pitch and volume, forming patterns for them. There is a great wave that spreads from the centre of my circle across the lake of flesh. The masses begin to weave with me, every wave of their segmented bodies mirroring mine, heads raised towards my sky. I feed their desire and feel it build.

He ran, coughing up the barely digested remains of his breakfast. The undergrowth whipped new scars on to his body and he moaned as he went. He stumbled and slipped on the wet rocks by the river, feverishly turning his head for signs of pursuit. He pumped his legs up the hillside and ignored the fire in his chest, heading for the only safety he knew.

At last the cave mouth opened before him. He entered without his usual caution, terror still shouting inside his head. He climbed over the boulders that littered the floor of the cave, up and back to the place where he slept. He threw himself down painfully on the fetid mound that served as his bed and flung his arms around his head. Tears and blood streaked the dirt on his face.

Exhaustion sent tremors through his body. He was alone and weak and vulnerable. He did not understand why the world hurt so much. He rubbed at sores and cuts on his body and pulled at his hair. He could feel it happening again. A pressure was building in his head. There was nowhere to escape to. He dared not sleep, but sleep took him anyway, down into the dark where vile shapes slithered and glistened and then lay still.

Their mindless bodies cavort in endless copulation: oils glisten on their backs and mucous webs their jaws. The great wide floor of the chamber is alive, a frenzy of animal couplings. The orange light flickers over the pale skins of my hated brothers and sisters, their worthless lives burning away.

Still I call to them and still I lead the dance, faster and faster. I can taste their essence on the air now. When it is concentrated like this, it almost forms meaning, a wash of primitive motivations. It is almost enough, and I whip them on to greater efforts, to squeeze out the energy from their pathetic minds before they tire.

I can feel the one above, I can feel the connection forming. I dart forward into the seething mass of beasts to be close to their heat. I must have more. I must open up the earth to the sky.

He woke cold and sick. Blood and snot crusted his nostrils and the hair round his mouth. His eyes were bleary with mucous and shit smeared the top of his thighs. He vomited, spasms clutching at his stomach until a thin stream of acrid bile issued from his mouth. He coughed and wiped at his face, shook his head. He stood unsteadily, like a foal, his joints stiff from sleep and cold and then he made his way slowly to the mouth of his cave.

The valley below was laid out before him. The greens of the forest and grasslands matched the beauty of the sky above. Green and blue, green and blue. Life thronged in the light, and somewhere down there was his tribe.

He stood straighter. Still a little uncertain, he moved further from the cave. He saw great caribou and deer and antelope grazing on the slopes below. He heard the trickling of water over rock and followed it downstream as other flows joined it until it became a shallow river. He stopped to drink at a place by the bank where the current was slow, savoured the moisture on his lips. He drank for a long time. Suddenly, his hand darted out and into the water. When he opened the hand again, two tiny fish lay flapping and dying on his palm. He smiled.

Further down he entered the forest, though he stepped without fear. He stopped by a fallen branch the length of his body and width of his wrist. He stripped it of leaves and twigs and hefted it in his hand. He broke the end to make a sharp point.

He smiled again. He would build his strength. He would make a kill and eat and take the skin. He would rejoin the tribe and lead them.

“I am Var,” I said.