A Maze of Glass, Chapter Eight, Pt. 2
every story ends the same way—
Jill plummeted through chaos and Zoe plummeted after. Zoe struggled to grab onto something, a memory or a thought or a place, something material that attached Jill back to the world outside the spell—but she’d mostly practiced this in a controlled setting and suddenly everything whipped passed them so quickly she couldn’t pull sense out of any of it.
—we’re sorry, but they do—
Threads of tar-like black criss-crossed the bottomless plummet. They dripped in oil and viscera rotted to liquescence. Shapes twitched and waited in the dark, million-eyed and hungry. Jill landed on a string of sticky sable and twisted around.
A spiderleg dropped from the darkness and speared her.
“Help!” Jill screamed.
Not a spiderleg, though. A mess of old syringes taped together, the needle tip of the last one eighteen inches long and circumferenced wrist-thick. It slammed through Jill’s shoulder as Jill screamed again. Zoe tried to maneuver the sticky-tacky web toward her. This wasn’t a memory. A nightmare? Jill kicked and thrashed, trying to pull her shoulder away from the syringe. The syringe-limb retracted.
Zoe leapt. Her hands found Jill’s ankles. The extra weight drew a throat-tearing shriek from Jill.
And then—
In a high school history class not long before Jonathan’s funeral and so not long before Jill’s first dose of heroin, Jill raised her hand. “Excuse me, but what kind of psycho piles rocks on a guy until he dies?”
“While now we understand that witches aren’t real,” the teacher said, sitting on a broad desk in front of the chalkboard, “back then, they were believed to exist. They were believed to be monstrous agents of Satan.”
“So?”
The teacher’s eyelids fluttered. “What?”
“Geraldo Rivera would probably think I’m an agent of Satan—are you gonna hang me?”
“Obviously not, but that’s largely because of our modern perspective.”
“I guess what I’m really asking is…what crimes did they commit? Like what did Margaret Jones do besides screw up at work and hang out with her cat too much?”
“Again, from our perspective, that’s probably what happened. But back then, she’d been accused of witchcraft, which means she could have done any number of things.”
Jill snorted. “Drain the life from her patients with her ‘withering touch?’”
“If you believe in witchcraft, maybe.”
“So they didn’t have any charges against her unless she was a witch?”
The teacher nodded. “Yes.”
“And their proof that she was a witch was that she did these things they couldn’t charge her with?”
“Essentially.”
“Okay. And was anyone ever accused of being a good witch?”
“A…what? I don’t think so.”
“So a witch was by necessity a sinister or evil thing to be?”
The teacher laughed. “Again, we’re still fundamentally talking about people who believed in witches. Although, Gillian, your point does bring me to today’s in-class activity…”
every story
every (never)
Tumbling again, Zoe caught a strand of slick gross and pulled herself back onto the web. A lacquered, voidglowing platform grew from the bundling web. She stepped up onto it. In the unclear distance, Jill stood facing a mirror, her back to Zoe. From the darkness overhead, four syringe-limbs jabbed into Jill’s upper back at regular intervals, taking turns.
“What you are is always more important than who you are,” Jill snarled at the mirror. “Ask anyone. It’s humankind. Remember Jonathan? Who was he? What. Was is gone, whoever lived in it corpsed over into nothing. Jonathan’s nothing.”
Zoe hesitated. She hardly remembered Jonathan. She hadn’t known him very well. Three years older than Jill, they’d rarely shared social circles, and Zoe had started training two years before Jill had. By the time Jonathan had been important to Jill, Zoe had long exited Jill’s regular social domain.
But she remembered Jill crying when he’d killed himself. If her investigative timelines proved correct, Jill’s first injection happened only weeks after Jonathan’s funeral.
Although, in fairness, Jill’s first time hadn’t been entirely consensual.
Depending on when chemical dependency first triggered, maybe her second time hadn’t been entirely consensual, either…
“You’ll never be free of this,” Jill growled. “Never. You’re a what, first. You thing. ‘Witch.’ And with hips and tits like those, you’re a what, second, too. Lustsuck cum-magnet. If nobody else looks for a ‘who’ or sees a ‘who’ then how do you know that you have one? Maybe you don’t. Maybe under the surface there’s nothing. Maybe, under the surface, there’s just me.”
“Jill?” Zoe’s voice cracked. She stood ten feet from her sister, hesitant.
“Fuckhole. Witchcunt. Cold as a hot pair of tits, look at you. Thou shalt not suffer a slut to love.”
Zoe kept walking. She wished for her satchel of tricks, her on-the-go cantrips, her gun.
“You’re a what-thing until you’re nothing, corpse. Just meat to verb.”
Only six feet behind Jill, Zoe started whispering an incantation.
“You want to change the world?” Jill pouted at her reflection. “Boo-hoo, Jill wants to change the world. Well, you can’t. Go ahead, try. But the world’s going to break your jaw and rape you. And when it’s finished beating and fucking you into the ground, it’ll leave you there, crushed, until the rats get hungry.”
Zoe imagined layers of magic folding in on themselves into a knife. Her parched throat lost a syllable in the incantation and she paused. Swallowed. Picked up again. She dropped into a sprinter’s stance, focusing her energy.
“The world wins,” Jill said. “The world always wins. Why hurt yourself so much trying to fight it? Don’t let them burn you. There’s such a better way to go.”
Jill pulled a syringe out of the mirror.
The four spider-syringe-limbs stopped jabbing her, their bloodied needletips hovering. Elsewhere in the darkness around them, more needles clattered their bits together giddily.
“Just rest for a little while,” Jill said. “Worst case scenario, you won’t have to feel it when the world does it rough.”
Zoe felt another memory bulb up from the ground beneath her. Shards of it cut through the black webbing. The mirror reformed into a vanity, the one Jill had used in high school. The web began unraveling, bit by bit becoming Gillian’s high school bedroom.
The first time she’d used? No, Zoe knew that grim tale.
The first time she’d used alone? Maybe.
She couldn’t risk things going deeper.
Zoe exploded from the sprinter’s stance, the last syllable of the spell leaving her lips in a pant. The energy focused, the spell hewn, Zoe rushed at Jill from behind. Syringe-in-hand, Jill turned with wide eyes—too slowly. Zoe crash-tackled into her, sprawling them both through the strange void transitioning memories.
Zoe triggered her spell. The nightmares, dreams, and memories clouding Jill’s mind split apart. Moonlight spilled through the broadening gaps. She pulled.
The air reeked of ozone and static-sizzle-burnt with energy. Zoe bucked back from Jill’s chair and slammed into the opposite wall. With a shout, Jill rocked onto her side, the chair legs snapping all at the same time. The table jumped a few inches in the air and landed again. The ozone stench clung dusty inside of Zoe’s nostrils as she pushed herself back up.
The First Confessional seemed charged.
“Jill?” Zoe asked.
Jill spat a gray chunk of meatlike goo onto the floor. Mostly the shade of wrecked cinder, veins of white and black marbled it. A viscous, similarly-shaded liquid followed, first in a sharp puke of vomitus and then in a drool.
“Jill?” Zoe repeated, standing now. “Jill?”
“Ugh…” Jill groaned, wiping at her spew-stained face with her bound hands. “Ugh, fuck…what was that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” Jill spat more. “Is the Confessional ready?”
“It’s ready.”
“Could you untie me?”
“Jill…we have to talk.”
“What?” Jill jerked in the broken chair, scraping it against the hardwood floor.
“Whatever that was…it’s in the spell, now. The whole ritual.”
“Zoe…”
“It felt dangerous.”
“We can’t stop.”
Zoe managed her way to Jill’s collapsed chair and starting working on the binds wrapping Jill’s waist. “We don’t know what that thing’s capable of. We don’t even know what it is.”
“Zo’.”
Working to unravel the knots tying Jill’s wrists, Zoe sighed. “What?”
“We know what it is.”
“You mean how it’s a whispering vomit-monster living in your…” she trailed off.
“In my head.” Jill confirmed.
Zoe stopped untying, the realization leaving her with nothing. “Oh.”
“You didn’t think it would go down without a fight, did you?”
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