Midnight’s Fables

Joseph’s Worm

You’ve spent some time sat alone in the dark after Midnight’s second story. The image of a skinless red skeleton burned into your mind. The way Midnight told the story, being there and hearing their voice... there was something powerful in that. You could almost see the events of the tale taking place, including the awful death of that poor little girl Mabel.

Midnight didn’t seem bothered. They were just interested in telling the story, nothing more. The awful image of Bloody Bones that you could never unsee? The stomach-turning dread you had felt as you learned of those children’s fates? The sight of little Miss Thatcher, Mabel’s doll, sat in a glass box in the museum like some sort of trophy?

None of that mattered to Midnight. These were just good stories, and they enjoyed having someone to tell them to.

So you’d run, and hidden. You’d found an old Catholic confessional, no doubt with a terrible backstory, and you had hidden inside of it, hidden from Midnight and their awful tales, hidden from the images that you now saw as waking nightmares, hidden from all that horror.

And now you can hear Midnight’s gentle footsteps approaching. Soft on the black tiles floor, but unrelenting as they march towards you.

“You do understand that this Museum is part of me, yes? I know where you are, I could see you when you hid in that confessional. You can’t hide from me in here,” Midnight scolds you as their footsteps come to a halt right in front of you, just beyond the confessional door.

You sigh heavily, breathing panicked and tight, and slowly you open the door.

“Why did you run?” Midnight asks, and you don’t know how to answer. You ran because this is a nightmare. You are trapped in a nightmare with a soulless monster. Because you enjoy stories for the characters, and spending the rest of your life being told tales of people suffering and dying without hope again and again is heartbreaking. You ran because you don’t want to be in this place anymore, and you don’t want to go back yet and die.

And if you told Midnight all that, they wouldn’t care. Because you’re just a character to them. Less than that, you’re an audience. You’re not even part of the story. So it doesn’t care about you. Midnight doesn’t care how scared or upset or traumatised you may be.

All it cares about is having someone to tell stories to.

“It doesn’t matter,” you lie, wiping away tears you hadn’t even realised you had shed.

Somehow, that appears to be enough of an answer for Midnight, because they now help you out of the confessional and begin to wander away, leading you on another gentle stroll though this infinite museum of nightmares.

You walk in silence for what feels like hours as you process what has happened.

“Anything catch your eye?” Midnight asks after a while, and you just nod and point randomly, resigned at this point to your fate.

“Ah, yes,” Midnight audibly grins. “Joseph Adams’ camera. That one is a delicious little cautionary tale and an ironic tragedy. It all started when he read ‘On The Trail of Ancient Man’ by Roy Chapman Andrews, and learned of the legendary Mongolian Death Worm...”

***

“You do not want to meet one of these,” the man at the shop said. “They say it is not real, I do not know about this. The desert is home to many things. It is an ancient place, and my ancestors have told tales of the Death Worm for many generations, I do not think they can have been so wrong about something so simple for so long. But if the researchers are right and it does not exist, then you will find another horror in the desert, I am sure. And if they are wrong and my ancestors were right... then you do not want to meet this thing. It will be the last thing you ever meet.”

Joseph remained unperturbed as he held out the sketch of the red worm he had made. “Yes, but if I wanted to anyway, where would be the best place to go?”

“The desert,” the shopkeeper replied flatly. “They are said to live in burrows under the sand, or under rocks. Now, please, I have other customers.”

Joseph nodded emphatically as he turned to leave, apparently oblivious to the mounting frustration of the two dozen people who had been queueing behind him.

“I’m going to be the first person to ever find a Death Worm!” Joseph announced to a disinterested crowd.

As he left, the old shopkeeper mumbled “many have seen the Death Worms before. How do you think we got the legend? Few survived, but those that did were fortunate. Very, very fortunate. I hope you find that same fortune. I do not think you will. But you will not be the first. My people were the first.”

Joseph remained oblivious to all of this as he climbed up into his truck and roared away from the town and into the endless expanse of the Gobi Desert, armed with nothing but a camera and pepper spray, and the determination to discover a worm that few had seen and fewer still had survived.

He drove for hours offroad through that great dusty expanse under the boundless pale blue dome of the sky, the hot sun far, far above beating down its rays upon him like a radiant drum.

When at last Joseph was satisfied that he had reached an appropriately empty region of the desert, he clambered down out of his truck and for the first time allowed the heat of that land to touch him, unfiltered by the conditioned air within his car.

He took from the back seat of his truck a duffel bag stuffed with so-called ‘equipment’, amongst which was his camera, a collection of snake handling hooks in several sizes, his pepper spray, and a device he called his ‘thumper’. Inspired by the devices used to summon similar sand worms, albeit of a far grander scale, in Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’ books. He had seen during his research that scientists who had gone looking for the worm before had used similar devices, and being determined to find the Death Worm, Joseph had resolved to building the device himself, inspired by both science and its fictional counterpart.

He walked a few yards from his truck and set the device on the ground. It used a small timer from a digital stopwatch and a solenoid valve to rhythmically beat the sand creating a regular vibration that would, in theory, make the Death Worm think that prey was near.

That was of course assuming the Death Worm considered Humans or other large animals as prey, that there were any nearby that might want to come to the noise, and that it even existed in the first place.

Had Joseph possessed a modicum of scientific rationale, even one of these thoughts might have occurred to him.

He did not.

He just sat back in the bed of his truck, pepper spray in one hand, camera in the other, and a cool white sheet draped over his body to keep the sun off – the one bit of forethought he had demonstrated – and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Soon the blazing afternoon sun became a cooler evening light as dusk approached and a wind came down through the desert, bringing cold night air with it to stir up the dust and sand.

The waning light darkened further as dusk became night, and soon the only light by which Joseph could see was that of the stars. He began then to watch through the lens of his camera, set to its night mode, as the rhythmic device continued to expel small plumes of sand at a regular beat.

Nothing continued to happen.

Soon enough, as the air turned cold and the night grew black, Joseph’s eyes began to droop, and eventually, after hours of careful vigilance, he finally nodded off.

And that was when the worm came.

There is only one living thing native to the planet Earth which is immune to the toxins of the Death Worm, and that is the Death Worm itself. They produce from their bodies three different chemicals which can, in short order, cause a slow and painful death.

The first is the poison that covers their bright red, bloodlike skin. Any animal that tries to eat the Death Worm will find that meal to be its last. Depending on the size and savagery of the animal, the Death Worm may even survive being eaten, and the predator may become the prey as its poisonous last meal begins to eat it from the inside out. Were it at all possible to gather or test the potency of that poison, one might find that a single drop of the chemical is capable of paralyzing even a Blue Whale.

The second toxin is an additional chemical agent excreted by the Death Worm’s skin. It mixes with the poison and allows it to dissolve through the cell membrane of living tissue, allowing the poison to move into the body. One touch can halt the body within seconds.

The third toxin is its venom, which carries a similar potency to the poison, and yet works in such a different way. For Death Worms enjoy their meat fresh. Decaying carrion is no meal for that creature. And in order to ensure their meals remain fresh, they prefer to eat their prey alive.

The venom does not kill the victim. Quite the opposite, the venom of the Death Worm makes your body extremely resilient to death. Cellular activity, organ function, and brain function are all maintained and accelerated by the Death Worm’s venom. One side effect of this is a paralysis of the body – no point wasting energy on movement, when that energy can be spent keeping tissues alive. One bite from a Death Worm and you fall still. Temporarily unable to die, and unable to move, trapped in a state that will last for hours. Oh, the venom will kill you eventually, but until it does so, you cannot move, cannot breathe, cannot even blink. Forced to remain alive in a body that will no longer obey your commands.

A second side effect is that since the brain cannot halt its functions, consciousness is maintained.

If a Death Worm bites you, you remain awake and alive as it begins its meal. It can be hours, or even days, before it finally eats its way through something too vital for you to lose, or for the venom to finally kill you. You feel every bite. Every tearing of flesh in the tiny mouth of that worm as it eats its way through your body, devouring skin, muscle, gristle, organ, and bone alike.

If you’re lucky, it will bring friends and together they will end your suffering quickly.

If you’re not so lucky...

Joseph was asleep when the worm crawled up and out of the sand by the thumper device.

Joseph didn’t see as it tasted the air and caught his scent.

He was unaware as the small animal, a red tendril of segmented meat about two feet long and as thick as a man’s wrist, burrowed back into the sand and began to swim through the dirt and dust and make its way towards the truck.

Joseph had no idea what was happening when the worm began to crawl up the side of the truck and into the bed, where it could taste upon the air the sweat of his sleeping form.

Joseph did feel the bite.

He felt a searing pain like molten lead flowing through his body as the venom got to work.

He felt as the worm crawled up his arm and made its way towards his stomach.

He tried to scream as it began once more to burrow, this time into the soft flesh of his abdomen.

He cried, still and silent, as the lone Death Worm began its feast.

He succeeded in his mission, I suppose. He found a Death Worm, as he wanted. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it found him.

Regardless, in his panic, he did manage to take a picture. As the venom coursed through his veins in the seconds before the paralytic took hold, he managed to take one single, blurry, unfocussed picture of the creature that had already spelled his doom.

The picture showed very little besides the back of a dark truck, his limp arm, and something very long and vibrantly red crawling across him.