Ward of the White Worm

Into the hallway, Olli felt a blast of icy wind rattle through her body as somewhere further down the dark hall the sound of a heavy door slammed with the rattling force of thunder which cut down the cold wind. Theodore continued walking unperturbed by the cold and pulling her down to the entry hall again where the gloomy walls seemed to expand slowly around them. Looming portraits of people in fancy old costumes or holding squash-faced dogs hung along with paintings of grey courtyards with delicate women or lonely fields with singular riders atop things that looked like horses but that Olli found herself too unnerved to look at for long. A few paintings were of pallid men and women holding what looked, to all intents and purposes, to be weird slimy leech things wrapped in lace.

In the entry hall was a set of stairs covered in a long scuffed looking rug that she could now see more clearly since a few more lights had been lit up where the walls closed around the stairs. The walls themselves had dark green wallpaper on them that gave a strange tint to the stairs like there was some sort of faint slime on them.

Tromping up the stairs quickly, Olli thought she could hear the steps groan in irritation beneath the rug as they reached the landing above to another wide corridor, extending to the left and right. There were a few windows, but no light was allowed in due to the darkness outside. Down the hall on the left, Motzy was waiting beside an open door. She held a few folded stiff blankets in one hand and as they approached, she moved aside to allow them through. “I gots it all set up, sir,” she said, gesturing into the room. “The bed. The desk. The wardrobe I need Mister Potts to help me with, and the table too, but it’s all set up now, it is.”

“Thank you Motzy, I hope you will not being going to Watshire tonight, it’s too dark.”

“Oh, you and your gracious concern! I had already told Mister Howard I would likely not return until this saturday! Which is very fine, y’see. That’s when my Charlotte will be coming up…”

As the two spoke, Olli leaned forward to peer into the room. The walls were a very dull green color and thick heavy curtains only a shade lighter were pulled over a window. The light in the room was provided by three lamps set on the walls and a small set of candles on a round table which held two small plates with slices of bread and a few round things she could not recognize, accompanied by two porcelain cups and a teapot. A hip-height metal screen was strangely pressed against some sort of structure that stuck out from the wall and extended up into the ceiling.

“Mister Button comes tomorrow, right?”

“Oh yes, 9 o’clock sharp hopefully,” Motzy replied.

“Excellent. Prepare some extra bread and perhaps a meat pie for him then, I will have two more letters for him to take…”

The bed itself drew her eye even more. It reminded Olli of the ‘princess beds’ she would see in movies, with four posters and thick if somewhat moldering looking curtains around it.

She was suddenly being pushed into the room and the door was closed behind her, with the soft ‘click’ of a lock going into place. Then a hand gently pushed her forward to one of the chairs that she was quickly sitting in so that she was not entirely pushed over it.

On the table before the chair was the plate, with its bread and what she now realized were two little round cups containing some sort of thick substances. One was a white color with a reddish swirl in it, while the other was as far as she could tell just red jam.

Theodore sat quietly across from her and steepled his fingers together on the table. “Well, you have me at liberty now.”

“Huh?”

“You can ask me questions,” he clarified.

“Where am I!?” Was the first one that spilled from her mouth. “W-”

“In a bedroom.” He answered.

The next question she had originally wanted to ask was swallowed up with, “I know that! But where is here?”

“Ah,” Theodore said, picking up the teapot to pour some of its contents into their cups. “That is what you meant? We’re in my home, in the Scatherbone Forest, that resides within the Brynebourne. To the east is the Brynesea, and to the south is the Brynemoor.” He set the teapot back down and smiled at her. The combination of dull orange lighting from the lamps, the flickering candlelight, and his natural paleness made him look both eerie and ill, and Olli stared a little at her own reflection in his tiny glasses. She tried to pick apart his words but besides the word ‘Bryne’ being repeated several times, there was nothing she could figure out in them. Theodore sipped the tea in his cup for a moment and then said, “none of that made any sense to you, did it?”

“No,” she huffed. “No! Is this a joke?”

“I assure you, it is not.”

“Then where am I? Give me a real answer!”

“I did,” he replied. “But without any context, you cannot understand it. Olli, you are far away from your home.”

“I know that,” she grumbled. Her stomach growled lightly, and she looked down at the bread. It looked normal enough, like the slices she had earlier. So she tore a corner off from it and dipped it into the jam filled cup. Eating it, she felt a mix of tart and sweet and tore another bit of bread off to repeat the process. “But you aren’t telling me anything!”

“You are from a Godless World,” Theodore explained, “someone here saw you and reached out to pluck you from that place to here.”

“Why!?”

Theodore’s eyebrows raised slightly, but his expression otherwise remained unchanged. “Who am I to question the Distant Gods?”

“...Gods like… Jesus and God?” She asked, having never been a keen studier of theology herself. The last time she remembered stepping in a church was when she was five with her grandmother, when the day had been usually hot and the Easter Bunny had been sweating in his costume before passing out on one of the choir ladies. That was the last time she had ever gone to church.

“That name does not exist here,” Theodore muttered, “and you must never speak of it. This is not a world of merciful or silent deities, and you must do your best to never attract their attentions ever again.”

Olli very much felt that very few of her questions were actually being answered and instead she was only getting more confusing questions bubbling up in her brain. She finished eating her bread and jam while still watching Theodore and wondering where to take her questions next. She crossed her arms and settled backwards into the chair. “Who are you then? Why do you have a big house?” She glanced around before she spotted the cup of white stuff with its red swirl in the middle. “What is that?”

“I told you, my name is Theodore Graef, but if you mean ‘who’ as in my standing, then I’m the Earl of Brynebourne,” he explained with something of the patience of a schoolteacher. “I technically own the land of Brynebourne. The ‘big house’ is my family’s ancestral home,” he paused, as though to take stock of the room around them. “Mostly, at least. It was at the very least rebuilt on the same foundations with a few of the original rooms.”

“What about this?” She pointed at the cup.

“Oh, that’s a pudding.”

“What… kind?” Olli had never seen a pudding so… stiff.

“Ah, dead man’s arm,” Theodore replied as though it were the most normal name for a pudding.

Olli stared at it. Theodore, in turn, stared at her. Or at least made the appearance of doing so. Finally she picked up a spoon and took a very small bit off the ‘pudding’ and stuck it into her mouth.

Silence held between them.

“It tastes like grease!” She declared, nearly spitting the tiny piece she had eaten out onto the plate. Through some mighty act of will, however, she kept it in her mouth.

“It’s made from suet,” Theodore said.

Olli had never heard of suet before, but even if she knew it was the fat that comes from behind the kidneys of animals like cows or sheep it likely would not have changed her opinion on the pudding very much at all. Instead she put down her spoon and looked directly at Theodore. He had not touched his food even once, although he did sip his tea calmly as he looked back at her. The flickering light gave his face a ghastly touch with his eyes highlighted by the mobile shadows.

“What happens now?” Olli mumbled.

“You will get very sick.”

“Why!?”

Theodore gave her an apologetic shake of his head, “I do not know. I have read about this, and your kind always get sick shortly after arrival. I’ve seen it myself-”

“Seen it? My kind? WHAT?!”

He continued with only a slight flinch from the volume, “maybe it is from the different air? The natural miasma of cities might be part of it in some cases but we are far from any city. Maybe it’s the food, the water? I’m no doctor, unfortunately.”

“Then how do you know?” She demanded, a feeling of discomfort and desperation that was shot through with abrupt exhaustion filling her. Too much had happened in a short span of time, and now she was becoming exhausted.

“I have much time in between sessions of parliament, I have time to study this,” Theodore answered.

Olli moaned, covering her face. “Can I go?”

“Where?”

She did not answer because the question was one she realized she had no answer. Not even when she first asked herself many months ago.

Theodore seemed to take her silence as a sign of exhaustion, getting up from the table and walking over to her side to help her from the chair and over to the bed. He said something, but his words seemed garbled and muffled. She collapsed onto the bed and found it surprisingly soft, sinking a little into it as she instinctively buried her face into the pillow to blot out the world around her. For some reason the pillow smelled like pigeons, she thought somewhere in her mind.

As any child might, when faced with too much in a strange place, Olli had no way to grasp or deal with her situation except by closing her eyes and wishing it was all just a very bad dream.