Eric felt a sick dread growing in the pit of his stomach, an almost childlike terror creeping through him. The Conqueror Worm… It was a terrifying thought. The poem was Poe’s metaphor for the futility of life and the inevitability of death, centered on the haunting image of angels gathered to watch a play of mimes pointlessly chasing a phantom and ultimately being devoured by a great, blood-red worm, all while strange, shadowy figures controlled everything from behind the scenes.
He looked at Fettarsetter, with his creepy smile. “You’re telling me that the thing at the bottom of the triangle is a…a worm?”
“A terrible worm,” he affirmed.
Eric stared at him. He looked overjoyed at the idea of a giant worm terrorizing the planet.
“Try to imagine a crawling, writhing shape stretching the length of the horizon and more, crushing and devouring everything in its path.”
Eric shuddered. He didn’t have to try. His imagination was more than willing to cooperate with this madman, regardless of whether he wanted it to or not. “It won’t,” he said.
Fettarsetter blinked, surprised. “What?”
“It won’t crush or devour anything here. Once it tears through, our world will shatter. We’ll all be destroyed the very moment it reaches us.”
He looked impressed. “Maybe. It’s a theory.”
“It’s a fact. We have to stop it.”
“I’m not sure there’s much we can do about it, honestly. It’ll break through any day now.”
Eric rubbed at his eyes. He needed to focus. He couldn’t afford to be distracted now. It wasn’t any day now. It was now. It was tonight! The worm would come with the rain. It would rise from lake and the world would turn itself inside out.
He should’ve seen something like this coming. This was exactly the sort of thing an agent would be into. He was probably sent here to investigate the thing. His bosses in the nameless organization probably had any number of evil plans for a gargantuan, world-devouring worm.
And, of course, any details about how they might plan to control such a thing would not be given to Eric. Even Fettarsetter might not know. There was a high level of secrecy involved with these people.
“I’ve got to go,” he announced.
Fettarsetter didn’t stop him. “Sure,” he said. “Thanks for stopping by. We’ll talk again sometime.”
Not on your life, thought Eric as he turned and left the room. He made his way back down the hallway and across the book-littered living room to the front door. He kept expecting Fettarsetter to stop him, but he didn’t even rise from his chair.
Outside, he stopped on the porch and forced himself to take a breath.
The Conqueror Worm. The very idea was…well…honestly no harder to believe than half the stuff he’d already discovered to be true. And yet, the idea of a giant, inter-dimensional worm shredding the fabric of the universe and laying waste to the planet was utterly terrifying.
His phone buzzed against his thigh. He withdrew it from his pocket and answered it.
“That guy is seriously wrong!” declared Isabelle.
“Is he?” Eric asked, hopeful.
“Well… Maybe not about the worm.”
He stepped off the porch and started down the driveway. “What do you know about worms?”
“They’re slimy and gross.”
“Okay. What about conqueror worms?”
“I remember something called a ‘great worm’ once,” she recalled. “A guy trapped in an abandoned house in a remote town somewhere in Argentina was muttering about it. I thought it was just nonsense. An absurd myth. His mind was already mostly gone when I met him. But after hearing that Fettarsetter creep talk about it, I’m not so sure anymore… According to that guy, the end of the world would involve all of existence being devoured by a colossal worm.”
“That does sound similar,” agreed Eric.
“I don’t know what’s scarier, the idea of the world ripping open and obliterating us all in a flash, or the world holding together and that thing being set loose.”
“Neither option is on my bucket list.”
“Mine either.”
Eric reached the end of the driveway and turned left. The moon was illuminating the wide road, but the sky was quickly filling with clouds so that it kept slipping in and out of view. Before much longer, it would be completely lost.
Then the rain would come…
“How’re you holding up?” he asked. “Any better?”
“I still feel like my head’s going to explode.”
He shook his head. “I hate that. I feel like I should be getting you out of here.”
“Don’t worry about me. You should—”
Eric stopped walking. “Isabelle?”
“Eric… You remember that strange energy I felt around Fettarsetter and that hellhound?”
Eric felt a chill creep down his back. “Yes…”
“I feel it again.”
He said a very bad word and turned to scan his surroundings, but the moon slipped behind another cloud and everything went dark around him. “Where?”
“I don’t know. Near.”
He saw no glowing red eyes, no jack-o-lantern teeth silhouetted against hellfire breath.
“Get out of there, Eric!”
Get out? How? He didn’t even know which way to run! He turned in circles, sweeping the surrounding forest with his light, but there was nothing there.
Get ahold of yourself, he thought. Don’t panic. But it was easier said than done.
A rustling noise… Did that come from in front of him or behind him? It was so hard to tell. His heart was racing.
He was seriously getting too old for this nonsense.
The moon slid back out from behind its cloud, bathing the road in light once more. But still he saw nothing. He swept the trees in front of him with the flashlight. Then he turned around.
It came out of the forest. Not a hellhound, not a shallows walker, but something far stranger than both. It ran on two thin, hairy legs with a round, shaggy body, short, meaty arms and a long, flexible neck. Its head was small and birdlike, but with an enormous, cavernous mouth opened wide to reveal rows of gleaming fangs.
It kind of looked like an ostrich, except it was covered in long, matted hair, like a mammal. It was as if someone had pieced together a creature that sort of resembled an ostrich from parts of a goat, a potbellied pig and a gorilla.
Or maybe that was just how he perceived the thing. After all, he only actually saw it for a fraction of a second before he was moving as quickly as possible in the opposite direction, tearing through the woods and screaming for help.
The thing was quick, but awkward. It seemed to have a pronounced limp and didn’t navigate the underbrush well, allowing Eric to stay ahead of it for the moment. But he had no idea where he was supposed to go. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the thing stumble. Facing forward again, he pushed himself to run faster.
Another cloud passed over the moon, sinking him into a dreadful darkness, forcing him to concentrate hard on where he was going to keep from braining himself on a low branch.
The flashlight beam leapt from tree to tree and then the woman was there, blocking his path. She was neither the bloody woman nor the weeping woman. Her filthy hair was blonde. Her clothes were soaked and muddy. Her flesh was gray and pallid. And her eyes had been gouged out.
Yelping at the startling sight, Eric abruptly changed course, avoiding both the not-ostrich and the blind woman.
Fettarsetter said that the alleged serial killer, Jeremiah Bog, preyed on women. Was that one of his victims? Was that why he kept finding women out here? So far, only the burning man and the shadow man were male. (Of course, that was assuming that it had always been the same shadow man, and not multiple shadow men.)
In front of him, the blind woman materialized again, her mouth moving with silent words.
He didn’t mean to be rude, but he really couldn’t stop to talk. He changed course again and tried to concentrate on not tripping.
Behind him, he could still hear the ostrich-thing tearing after him.
God, he hated the woods.
The blind woman appeared again in front of him. This time, she was pointing to her left. His right. “Sure, lady!” he said. “Whatever!” He didn’t have any better idea, so he changed course again and ran in the direction she was pointing, hoping she wasn’t leading him to something even more terrifying than a mutant mammal-bird with a mouth full of fangs.
The spirits were human. They were merely people, victims of the violence and madness on which the triangle fed. They weren’t inherently evil. At least some of them, it reasoned, should still be capable of kindness. Hopefully this one was like that and not an embittered ghost filled with jealous, murderous spite for the living.
Eric, his mind always a mysterious thing, found himself wondering if the dead really envied the living, or if that was merely a thing invented by horror writers and Hollywood.
If these adventures had taught him only one thing, it was that his brain was a little on the odd side. He couldn’t count the insane things that’d crossed his mind while being chased by something terrifying.
But then again, how many people regularly found themselves being chased by monsters? Maybe that was just the way the brain worked. Maybe everyone was funny like that.
But it was probably that he really was strange.
He ran on. He seemed to be outpacing the Franken-ostrich. It sounded farther away. He risked a look back and saw that it had fallen back.
When he looked forward, the blind woman was there again, one gray finger thrust out to the side, pointing the way.
“Thank you!” he cried out as he rushed past her. “I think…” He hoped, at least. His mother taught him not to accept rides from strangers when he was a child, but she never said anything about taking directions from the dead. It seemed like something she should’ve brought up if it was an issue…
The moon peeked out again, illuminating the forest around him, and a small structure emerged from the gloom before him.
This is where the blind woman was leading him. This was his safe haven.
He ran around to the front of the little cabin and banged on the door.
No one answered.
He glanced over his shoulder in time to see the ostrich thing run into view, its strange head (not really a bird’s head, he realized, but not like anything else he’d ever seen before, either) scanning the area for a moment before spotting him again.
He checked the knob. It was locked, of course. Why wouldn’t it be locked? It only made sense that it would be. Who the hell left doors unlocked in this day and age?
The ostrich thing stalked toward him. It opened its wide mouth, revealing those countless fangs again, and hissed at him.
Not sure what else to do, Eric turned and ran around the side of the building.
The monster followed. It seemed to have a bad foot, so it wasn’t very fast, thankfully, but it made up for this lack of speed in sheer determination. It simply wasn’t giving up.
He checked the back door on his way past, but it, too, was locked. Not knowing what else to do, he circled around to the front again, simply trying to keep distance between himself and the hideous creature.
Maybe he could break a window. It wasn’t ideal. He didn’t want to damage anyone’s property. And he certainly didn’t want to risk cutting himself on broken glass in his haste. But there was only so long he could play ring-around-the-cabin with the mutant bird before it finally caught him.
But as he rounded the front of the cabin, the door swung open for him. The blind woman stood inside, gesturing for him to enter.
He had to admit, he’d found himself facing easier decisions than continuing his pointless Tom and Jerry chase around the building or accepting an invitation into a dark, creepy, cabin in the woods by a scary, eyeless specter, but he supposed the choice was fairly clear.
He ran inside and closed the door behind him just as the creature rounded the corner of the building.
He fumbled for the deadbolt, found it, latched it and then pressed his back against the door. Then he remembered all those horror movie scenes just like this one where, after a brief moment of relief, an axe or a machete or some monster’s weapon-like appendage tore through the door—sometimes missing impaling the hapless victim by a hair and sometimes not—and he quickly stepped away from the door and deeper into the darkness.
He switched off his flashlight and waited.
Through the open window, he saw the monster approach. Its strange head swiveled around, searching. It opened its mouth and hissed. Then it stopped and looked through the glass. He could see it there. It had only one eye, and barely that. The remaining one looked as if a cloudy, white scar ran down the middle of it. And yet the thing seemed to be staring right at him.
Eric held his breath and remained perfectly still.
The monster glared at him. Its strange mouth hung partially open, fangs gleaming in the moonlight. It let out its breath in a long, low hiss and a curtain of steam spread across the window pane, obscuring its hideous features.
His imagination took full advantage of the situation. It insisted that the creature could see him, that it was studying him, calculating its next move. Worse still, it suggested that while he stood there, watching the bird beast watch him, any number of even more horrible things were lurking there in the darkness with him, creeping silently toward him, fangs and claws bared, ready to spring at him at any moment.
At the very least, it reminded him that he was sharing this black room with the blind woman. Where had she gone? Was she standing right beside him? Right behind him? Was she even now reaching out for him? Did she happen to be holding a bloody axe?
He had to force back a hard shudder at the thought.
The moon vanished again. The outside grew dark. The monster faded to a mere shadow.
Eric waited.
The shadow shifted. The creature moved.
When the moon came back a moment later, it was gone.
He didn’t dare move. He stood there in the darkness, waiting, listening, expecting at any moment that the thing would burst through the window or kick down the door with a triumphant, mocking hiss.
He wanted to ask Isabelle if she could still feel the thing, but he didn’t dare risk exposing himself with the glow of the phone.
Seconds passed, and then whole minutes, without a sound. The moon slipped in and out beyond the window. Nothing else stirred.
Finally, he crept to the window and peered out. He was alone. He let himself relax.
Once he was convinced that nothing would come chasing after him, he turned on his flashlight and quickly scanned the room. His imagination had been teasing him with thoughts of things even more horrible than the Ostrich-stein lurking in the darkness, just waiting for him to turn on a light and look them in the eyes before leaping out and tearing out his throat. But there were no more monsters. Even the blind woman had vanished again. Instead, he quickly realized that there was something even more terrifying about the room in which he now stood.
He’d been here before.
The furniture was different. Everything had been thoroughly cleaned. The lampshade had been changed. There was not a trace of blood. But it was the same room. It was the same cabin.
This was where the bloody woman’s end began.